What was the political impact of the Great Awakening?

Question

What was the political impact of the Great Awakening? --the First Great Awakening (c. 1730–1760) ?

I can't seem to understand it/find it from my textbook except the social impacts. Please help me. I greatly appreciate it.

Please don't give me answers from website like copying the WHOLE excerpt...I would like quick simple easy to understand answers. =D

Thanks.

Answer 1

There was an old song that came out shortly after WWI called "How you gonna keep em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?"  The song, I believe,  was about a rural bumpkin who was drafted, sent to Europe and before returning home got to see Paris.  Needless to say, the hick would be forever changed and would not be content to return to a life of slopping hogs in rural West Virginia.

Apply this analogy to say a colonialist in one of the 13 colonies in the decades before the revolutionary war.  Some historians argue that the Great Awakening is like Bigfoot.  It never existed.  Others say that in Europe and particularly in the New England colonies, a great religious fervor occurred.  People studied their bibles at home and became totally drawn up in religion like many evangelicals today.

The religious ferver was tied in to the Protestant breakaway from the Catholic church, and some historians make the argument that it created a "breakaway" mindset that also influenced the colonists desire to "break away" from the mother country, England.

I find this theory questionable.  But if you buy into this theory, you can see the "social impact" of such an event.  Rather than being submissive and passive in their religious practices, a person with a great awakening has a feeling of power.  Calvanism comes into play here.  If you believe God favors you, then you have the power to look down on your mother country and you believe that you are capable of breaking away and be independent.

I don't buy into this theory.  I believe that the American revolution was caused by economics, not religious fervor.  England was taxing the heck out of the colonists to try to pay the debt back from the seven years war in Europe which was fought as the French & Indian war in North America