As Christian denominations spread throughout the colonies, sans the support or protection of any central government, they each found a way to gain a foothold while learning to tolerate one another. Within this new environment, and surrounded by unbelievers as they were, a series of revivals took place that led to two Great Awakenings. This in turn led to the birth of several new harlot daughters of Mystery Babylon.

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Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

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Part 31: Awakenings and Disappointment

Christianity flourished in Europe for hundreds of years, becoming the de facto religion of peasant and noble alike, with the state itself maintaining Christian laws. Church and state were fused in an age-old union that saw corrupt popes steering moral affairs (and sometimes political ones) while Christian emperors handled secular business (and at times interfered in ecclesiastical matters). This often happy arrangement was disrupted by the Protestant Reformation, which was a great upheaval to longstanding Christian traditions as well as affairs of state. In the place of Catholic order, princes rose up in various regions and attempted to fuse the state of their given nation to new Protestant churches. New laws supported and empowered these churches, some of which became oppressive by foisting new religious obligations on their members.

When the way was opened to the new world, the prospect of new opportunities drew Protestants there in their thousands. A new Christian mode was developed in these new lands, but in time, attempts at establishing a central church on the order of the old model failed. Too many varying beliefs and distinct nationalities were present in the colonies to justify one established church. A case in point of this disparity would be New York, particularly the banks of the Hudson River, which, in 1646 was home to a host of people speaking no less than 18 different languages. All that these varying Christian groups had in common was their innate desire to obtain religious liberty and be allowed to freely proclaim their personal Christian viewpoint. But each Christian group was shoulder to shoulder with another that held a different belief. This meant that each had to learn to cooperate with and tolerate the other.

What is also crucial about this time is that Christianity on a whole existed without the support of any established state. No king or prince with their army of knights, warriors, or hired mercenaries were there to protect Christians in America. The various denominations, which had no states forcing their particular religious views on the public, were now on their own. This meant evangelists had to volunteer to go out and win converts to their church through sheer persuasion, and they had to foot their own bills since there was also no state budget allotted to the cause.

In this period, what is known as the first Great Awakening occurred.

“What historians call ‘the first Great Awakening’ can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s.”

Writes Professor Christine Leigh Heyrman for the National Humanities Center.

“That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, most notably in England, Scotland, and Germany. In all these Protestant cultures during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a new Age of Faith rose to counter the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, to reaffirm the view that being truly religious meant trusting the heart rather than the head, prizing feeling more than thinking, and relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason.”

While Christianity permeated the colonies in various forms, and only church members could hold any office, which wasn’t subject to elections derived from voting, many remained unconverted to the religion and were considered destitute of faith. All such persons were deemed worthy of the fires of hell—hell itself being another misinterpretation of the Messianic Writings by Christians of the day.

The Great Awakening had its beginnings in America among Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It was among them—and in those colonies—that early religious revivals were initiated in the 1730s, chiefly in the form of fiery sermons given by clergymen of the Tennent family, who were Scots-Irish immigrants. Much like wildfire, the religious fervor spread to the Puritans—or Congregationalists—and Baptists of New England.

“By the 1740s, the clergymen of these churches were conducting revivals throughout that region, using the same strategy that had contributed to the success of the Tennents.”

Writes Professor Heyrman.

“In emotionally charged sermons, all the more powerful because they were delivered extemporaneously, preachers like Jonathan Edwards evoked vivid, terrifying images of the utter corruption of human nature and the terrors awaiting the unrepentant in hell.”

This was, let’s say, the first foray into fire and brimstone preaching, which would become wildly popular in future revivals. The first Great Awakening in America, meanwhile, continued to pick up steam with the entrance of George Whitefield, an ordained minister in the Church of England. Molly Worthen, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says of Whitefield:

“He had a charisma that electrified his listeners and he capitalized on that. He relied on public opinion, not the church hierarchy to make him a celebrity. He developed a sophisticated ad campaign, and when he planned to preach in a town, his advance men wo...