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How Did The First Great Awakening Influence The Role Of Secularism In The Colonies?

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During the early eighteenth century between 1730 and 1750, a resurgence in religious fervor known as the First Great Awakening developed throughout the thirteen British Colonies. As the European Enlightenment ideas of reason and logic in all things began to grow in Europe and the colonies, the First Great Awakening derived from an attempt to restore the predominance of emotion and spiritual piety in religion. Likewise, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the Second Great Awakening again invigorated religious zeal in the United States in response to the growing secularism in America and complacency of religious believers. The First Great Awakening’s prominent figures, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, discredited the socially stratified religious ideology of established churches such as the Christ Church and popularized the religious ideology of fervent personal connections with God and the principles of spiritual guilt and Calvinist predestination, or the selective and predetermined salvation and damnation of people. From the First Great Awakening also arose the decrease in traditional church parish worship and the appearance of emotionally impassioned itinerant preachers in the thirteen colonies and the mass preaching to emotional crowds outside. The Second Great Awakening eroded Calvinist predestination, and instead religions such as Methodists and Baptists professed the equality of all before God and salvation for all who repent for their sins and

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