Chapter Eight A MATTER OF CHOICE DWHILE THE COLONIAL PROTESTANTS WERE GENERALLY FAILURES at carrying on Indian missions this did not mean that they lacked people to convert Among these were some of their neighbors people who had not practiced religion in Europe or who up rooted left it behind Other neighbors had first come on pilgrim ages of faith to found colonies for God and had then let the fires grow cold Colonial preachers never tired of referring to the good old days of the founders when people kept to their covenant with God in contrast to the lukewarm and lackadaisical people of their own day the early eighteenth century Someone had to rekin dle the fires There was a third set of prospective converts on the hither side of the Indian line the young F r centuries godliness was supposed to be passed on with the genes Christians were simply children of Christian parents But that process didn t work long in America for many chose to fall away Also since the fourth century churchliness had come with the territory Initially everyone On Christian soil except ghetto Jews was thought of as Christian No more The journey of so many religious groups and SI many seek ers to American shores meant that few could permanently claim any turf as their own alone Believers and nonbelievers had to share space while believers tried to win others to belief To effect conversion the American colonists needed new means 107 and instruments It is one thing to inspire a group of Christians but it is a vastly different thing to win them for the first time to the covenant or to get them to own the existing covenant with God and recognize it as their own On the Continent and in England there were stirrings of movements like Pietism which tried to fire up casual believers English Puritanism long had spoken of the heart prepared for God and had tried to reach it and heat it with love for the divine Yet something new arrived in both America and England in the 1730S an Awakening or Revival movement that took many shapes forms expressions and colors A new form of preaching pulled at the emotions and mass meet ings inspired crowd response and vibrant singing all conjuring an atmosphere conducive to conversion From our perspective of more than two centuries later we may consider such efforts as the Old Time religion Significantly though in the 1730S such prac tices were definitely innovations and the practitioners were called in various places New School New Light or New Side Colonists had never seen anything before like the revivalist outbreaks that swept the country in the early eighteenth century As with all such complex upheavals its causes expressions and outcomes are hard to explain There may be as many individual theories as there were individual observers But our own interest in the American pilgrimage leads us to examine the A wakening from this viewpoint how does this new movement show the col onists beginning to understand what it was to be religious in their time their place It is valid to note that thanks to the new styles of the Awakening period religion itself became more than ever before a matter of choice Some see this increase of choice as the essence of modern faith Faced with this new freedom most chose their parents faith or the majority faith of their community or that of their spouse But no longer did a particular faith simply come with the territory as it had back in Europe Now Ameri cans felt spiritually stirred to take up their own pilgrimages to be restless about the soul in their new environment Awakeners learned to exploit or promote this restlessness While most historians have come to call this religious revival the Great A wakening this name came a century after the event Some historians question whether people in the 1730S and 1740S would have considered the term appropriate Curiously in this case as in a number of later revivals it is hard to prove that religious partici pation was very low before the stirrings and greatly increased thereafter It is possible to see the period of revival as a series of 108 generally unconnected outbreaks each of which took on the color of its local milieu No central person or religious organization planned or coordinated it no single plot unfolded Yet something happened whether or not the perpetrators and participants were aware of its historical significance The Great Awakening can be seen as a move toward the deVeloping of mod ern religion in the West At its heart was the notion of choice you must choose Jesus Christ must decide to let the Spirit of God work in your heart and note well you may and must choose this version of Christianity against that version Where once a single steeple towered above the town there soon would be a steeple and a chapel Old First Church and competitive Separatist Second Church or Third Baptist Chapel all vying for souls Most of the mainline Protestant churches of two centuries later exist because once upon a time these competitive evangelists so named because they warmly preached the Evangel the Good News ofJesus had converted people to their Congregationalist Pres byterian Methodist and Baptist beliefs Those who like the Epis copaliaps shunned the movement were left behind So influential was the Great Awakening style of getting religion that when Catholics reappeared in numbers in the nineteenth century their priests and missipners had to learn the techniques of the old Prot estant evangelists to win the new migrants as they got off the boats to participate in the Catholic scheme of salvation and church But to get the revival off the ground the pioneers in the 1730S had to demonstrate a need in the colonies Never trust a revivalist preacher for a fully accurate picture of how bad the times were spiritually when he or she began work It is too important for such prophets to show how evil were the times and the people before the rescue began Still there were good reasons for revivalists to look out and flOd falling away from the covenant desertion of the churches and halfheartedness among the populace Cotton Mather publishing in 1701 provided a gloomy vision of need among his own fallen away people among the Indians who were never the subject of English missions as they had been of Spanish and French and among the blacks who eventually would appro priate new style Christianity In Mather s veins flowed blood in herited from pioneer ministers John Cotton and Richard Mather Their grandson he was admitted to Harvard at