A Great Post about the Great Awakening

Explain what the Great Awakening was, and assess the extent to which it, an intensely religious movement, contributed to the development of the separation of church and state in America.

The Great Awakening was a religious movement that swept across America in the early to mid 18th century. The Puritan Church had gradually been weakened by various "heresies" and new ideas, such as those of free will and tha humans are not necessarily predestined and can save themselves through good works, began to take root. Many felt that the church had become severely weakened, as, in response to these ideas, conversion was not necessary for church membership. The church need some serious revival. Thus, new preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield took center stage (in Whitefield's case, almost literally!). Through sermons rich in imagery and emotional language, Edwards and Whitefield infused the Puritan (now Congregational) Church with new life.

The Great Awakening shifted the focus on religion more fully onto the individual. While the original Calvinists had emphasized individual religious devotion, such as individual, rather than communal, interpretation of the Scriptures, many other aspects of the Calvinist Church had become rather communal in nature. For instance, the Puritans who came to inhabit the Massachusetts Bay Colony were very tightknit and were a religious clique, in a sense. This clique became so obsessed with maintaining their spiritual purity that they made rules, governmental rules, to protect it. Over time, as the spiritual purity was challenged, the original intent of the rules was forgotten, and it was evident that the Church and state had pretty much been mixed. The Salem Witch Trials bring home this very point. The Church had become the entire reason why government was existing at all, and through generations of colonists, the religious devotion had been forced by a political power, and was therefore superficial.

However, according to the ideals of the Great Awakening, religion was solely individual devotion. This devotion was strongly imbued with emotion and spirit, and this was not pleasing to many older believers, who represented the hierarchy of the Church/state. The authority of the Church had passed on to ministers, such as Edwards and Whitefield, who had no affiliation with the government of the Bay Colony. The government no longer mandated religious rules, and thus could focus on political matters. Thus the Great Awakening strengthened both Church and state, because each could focus on matters more directly, and the boundary between the two was not muddled. In the aftermath of the Great Awakening, only two "established", or tax-supported churches existed in the colonies: the Congregationalists and the Anglicans (who were obviously mixed up in state affairs in the first place, what with the interests of the English crown). Many more denominations developed because of the Awakening, and all of these churches interpreted spiritual matters without the use of a stately authority.