Response to Great Awakening Prompt

I think that what happened during the Great Awakening definitely played a big role in the separation of church and state. The Great Awakening was a nation wide revival in the 1730's and 40's. The revival began in Northampton, Massachusetts and quickly spread through all the colonies. The Great Awakening happened because people had become lax about their religion and attendance at church services. Therefore the preacher John Edwards rose up as leading character in the revival and brought people to realize their "wrong" ways and to take action. Another leading character throughout the revival was George Whitfield who was said to have the ability to make a audience weep.

In the 1730's and 40's religion had become laxed and less heated than what it had previously been only a few decades ago. Furthermore people had started to stop going to church, not really feeling a need to participate and include themselves in the congregation. But, when the revival spread people realized that they could have a personal relationship with God and that just going to church was not enough or maybe not even what you needed in your spiritual walk. Never before had these people known that there could be a separation of church and state and that the two didn't necessarily have to go together.

So, I think that once people got a small taste of what religious life could be like without the state and politics they took it to a national level. Making sure that there was not an official state or national church. I think that in the back of the populations mind they must have remembered that one of the initial reasons that their ancestors came over to America was because of their being forced to follow a mold, and with that in the back of their minds I think they realized that there was a better/fairer way to handle religion and politics as two separate arenas. I think that at this point when people had essentially given up on churches, and the revival came around people realized that religion was a personal thing and they wanted that. They wanted religion to be a personal/intimate thing that you could either support or choose to ignore. And if there was a state church people wouldn't have a personal choice.