Comparing The Enlightenment And The American Political System

321 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: American Revolution effects

The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, was a movement questioning traditional authority while embracing the notion that the human capacity for reasoning could be improved through rational changes (Schultz, n.d.). Rejecting authority due to the infringement upon their inalienable rights, consisting of life, liberty and property led the colonists to preserve and fight for freedoms. Both the American Revolution and the American political system were inspired and influenced by the Enlightenment ideals. Educated people were suggesting that natural laws seemed to determine its own course, governing society and the universe without God’s intervention (Enlightenment, 2018). Religious intellectuals tried to find the balance between science and religion, in fact, Enlightenment wasn’t unfriendly to religion and did not produce atheists or agnostics. In 1636, Harvard was founded based on Puritan philosophy and not as a school for church alone, there would be a total of nine schools during this time frame, with four of them located in the New England area. …show more content…

The Great Awakening allowed the people to express emotions to feel an intimacy with God. The revival encouraged the development of numerous educational institutes like Princeton, Brown, and Rutgers universities and Dartmouth college. During this time frame, the surge of opposition led to a better understanding and acceptance of religious diversity (Great Awakening, 2018). The new faiths that developed were much more autonomous in their approach to the message embodying greater equivalence. The Great Awakening was the first key incident that the colonies collectively shared together, breaking down the variances between them and separating them from their English cousins across the ocean. However, it was very evident that no one faith would govern a

Show More
Related

  • How Did The Great Awakening Influence American Society

    639 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Enlightenment was a great upheaval in the culture of the colonies- an intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries which emphasized logic and reason over tradition. Enlightenment thinkers believed that men and women could move civilization to ever greater heights through the power of their own reason. The Enlightenment encouraged men and women to look to themselves, instead of God, for guidance as to how to live their lives and shape society. It also evoked a new appreciation and

    Read More

  • Enlightenment Influences on American Ideals

    1182 Words  | 3 Pages

    By the late eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason as it was called had begun to rapidly spread across Europe. People began believing in the ideals of popular government, the centrality of economics to politics, secularism, and progress. This cultural movement was sparked by intellectuals and commonwealth thinkers such as the influential writer John Locke and the famous scientist Isaac Newton, both who emphasized the fact that man, by the use of reason, would be able to solve all of his problems-whether it be problems with the government, morals or the society. However, these ideals weren’t just limited to the European nations where they had first begun. On the other side of the world, off in the United States, American intellectuals began to reason with these ideas as well. As a result, the influence on the profound of modern economic and political thought had a huge impact on the United States, resulting in one of the most important documents in known in American history; the Constitution.

    Read More

  • How Did The Great Awakening Influence The American Revolution

    530 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Great Awakening was known because it brought many new ideas that influenced the American Revolution. In the 1730s, religion was the main idea that the Great Awakening introduced. It all started with Jonathan Edwards. He was a very religious man that went to Yale to become a pastor. After graduating from Yale, he had a huge spiritual encounter, which the Puritans called a “conversion”. Throughout the years, he became a minister and then took over his grandfather’s place as a minister of the Puritan Congregational Church, where he led local religious revivals.

    Read More

  • How Did The Great Awakening Influence American Culture

    1194 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Great Awakening, occurring in 1730s American Colonies, was a religious movement that started a change in the way people in the colonies viewed religion. The movement started with fears of clergymen that western expansion, commercial development, and lack of

    Read More

  • Great Awakening Dbq

    1018 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Great Awakening was a revival/ evangelical movement that swept through both England and the American Colonies within the early 18th century. During this revival Englishmen and American Colonists alike found themselves being swayed by the talk of such preachers as “ Jonathan Edwards” or “George Whitefield”, who were both noteworthy evangelists at the time. After hearing a sermon, audience members would be scared that if they died that day, they 100 percent would be going to the fiery depths of hell. In an essence, the Great Awakening was a point in time when people started getting serious about God/ being a christian.

    Read More

  • First Great Awakening Dbq

    1326 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Pilgrims were also eager to experience new religious freedom from the state-ran church of Great Britain. This helped them build vibrant faithful communities in the New World. However, many individuals came to work not for God and were not all believers. After the establishment of the Church of England, other religions were inhibited. Everyone was expected to follow one religion and to believe in one religion. This led to a sense of stability from a political perspective because everyone practiced the same religion. However, instead of being a positive force for religious belief, it created spiritual dryness among believers. Individuals weren’t feeling anything spiritual or divine and it created a lack of relationships with individuals and their religion. The First Great Awakening arose at a time when people in the colonies were questioning the role of the individual in religion and society. It began at the same time as the Enlightenment, an insight that emphasized logic and reason and stressed the power of the individual to understand the universe based on scientific laws. Similarly, the Great Awakening had influenced individuals to rely more on a personal approach to redemption than the church and doctrine. There was national hunger for spiritual freedom and had wise and moral leadership. These convictions led to a spiritual revival in the colonies known as the Great Awakening. However, little did the colonists know that this spiritual movement would aid in their separation form Britain and lead to independence in the long

    Read More

  • Taking a Look at the Great Awakening

    550 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Great Awakening was a spiritual movement that began in the 1730’s in the middle colonies. It was mostly led by these people; Jonathan Edwards, a congregational pastor in Massachusetts, Theodore J. Frelinghuysen, a Dutch Byterian Pastor in New Jersey; Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian Pastor in New Jersey; and George Whitefield, a traveling Methodist Preacher from New England. The most widely known leader was George Whitefield. At the beginning of the very first Great Awakening appeared mostly among Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey. The Presbyterians initiated religious revivals during these times. During this time, they also started a seminary to train clergyman. The seminary’s original name was Log College, now it is known as Princeton University. In the 1740s the clergymen of these churches were conducting revivals throughout that area. The Great Awakening spread from the Presbyterians of the middle colonies to the Congregationalist (puritans) and Baptist of New England.

    Read More

  • Similarities Between The Enlightenment And Great Awakening

    1091 Words  | 3 Pages

    People of all groups, social status, and gender realized that they all had voice and they can speak out through their emotional feels of religion. Johnathan Edwards was the first one to initiate this new level of religion tolerance and he states that, “Our people do not so much need to have their heads filled than, as much as have their hearts touched.” Johnathan Edwards first preach led to more individuals to come together and listen. Than after that individual got a sense that you do not need to be a preacher to preach nor you do not need to preach in a church, you can preach wherever you want to. For the first time, you have different people coming together to preach the gospel. You had African American preaching on the roads, Indian preachers preaching and you had women who began to preach. The Great Awakening challenged individuals to find what church meets their needs spiritually and it also let them know about optional choices instead of one. The Great Awakening helped the American colonies come together in growth of a democratic

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast The American Revolution And The Enlightenment

    703 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Enlightenment period in Europe was a shift in the way that society thought about power and liberty. The ideals of this period helped to inspire the revolutions of the 18th century. The American colonies desired liberty from foreign rule, the French wanted to increase the power of the people in their class structure, and the Haitians fought for representation for the millions of slaves on their island. While the ideas of the enlightenment were not fully employed in each of these revolutions, they brought the nations closer to a fully representative government, rather than one of absolute power.

    Read More

  • Dbq The Enlightenment

    962 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Enlightenment was the time period that followed the Scientific Revolution and was characterized as the "Age of Reason". This was the time when man began to use his reason to discover the world around him rather than blindly follow what the previous authority, such as the Church and Classical Philosophers, stated to be true. The Enlightenment was a tremendously broad movement that dominated much of the European thinking during the 18th century, however, several core themes that epitomized the movement were the idea of progress, skepticism against the Church, and individualism.

    Read More

  • The Great Awakening and the American Revolution

    924 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the early 1700's spiritual revivalism spread rapidly through the colonies. This led to colonists changing their beliefs on religion. The great awakening was the level to which the revivalism spread through the colonists. Even with this, there was still religious revivalism in the colonies. One major reason for the Great Awakening was that it was not too long before the revolution. The great awakening is reason to believe that William G Mcloughlin's opinion and this shows that there was a cause to the American Revolution.

    Read More

  • The Significance Of The Great Awakening

    1394 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Great Awakening was a superior event in American history. The Great Awakening was a time of revivalism that expanded throughout the colonies of New England in the 1730’s through the 1740’s. It reduced the importance of church doctrine and put a larger significance on the individuals and their spiritual encounters. The core outcome of the Great Awakening was a revolt against controlling religious rule which transferred over into other areas of American life. The Great Awakening changed American life on how they thought about and praised the divine, it changed the way people viewed authority, the society, decision making, and it also the way they expressed themselves. Before the Great Awakening life was very strict and people’s minds were

    Read More

  • Great Awakening

    1439 Words  | 3 Pages

    By the beginning of the 18th century, there was an unmistakable feeling in the American Colonies that its intemperate society had become too comfortable and assertive, and had forgotten its original intentions of religious prosperity. The result was a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s, a movement known as "The Great Awakening". This revival was part of an evangelical upsurge occurring simultaneously in England, Scotland, Germany, and other inhabitants on the other side of the Atlantic. In all these Protestant cultures, a new Age of Faith had arisen contrasting the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, advocating the belief that being truly religious meant relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason.

    Read More

  • The Second Great Awakening

    542 Words  | 2 Pages

    In essence, the Great Awakening was a religious awakening. It started in the South. Tent camps were set up that revolve around high spirited meetings that would last for days. These camp meetings were highly emotional and multitudes of people were filled with the Spirit of God. These meeting, were sponsored mainly by Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterians, and met social needs as well as spiritual needs on the frontier. Since it was hard for the Baptist and Methodist to sustain local churches, they solved the problem by recruiting the non educated to spread the word of God to their neighbors. The camp meetings eventually favored "protracted meetings" in local churches.

    Read More

  • Enlightenment and Puritans

    796 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Enlightenment period, also known as The Age of Reason, was a period of social, religious, and political revolution throughout the 18th century which changed the thoughts of man during this “awakening” time. It was a liberation of ignorant thoughts, ideas, and actions that had broken away from the ignorant perception of how society was to be kept and obeyed thus giving little room for new ideas about the world. Puritan society found these new ideas of thought to be extremely radical in comparison to what they believed which was a belief of strong rational religion and morality. Enlightened society believed that the use of reason would be a catalyst of social change and had a demand of political representation thus resulting in a time in history where individualism was widely accepted amongst the new world. Puritan society believed strongly in myth, magic, and religious superstitions that was immensely used by the Puritans before democracy, capitalism, and the scientific revolution gave rise from the Enlightenment period.

    Read More

More about Comparing The Enlightenment And The American Political System

Open Document