The Effects Of The Great Awakening And Enlightenment

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Jerry Wang Ms. Frankie Tsai 11HSS1 7 Jan 2015 The Effects of the Great Awakening and Enlightenment on Americans Through out the various topics in the history of America, the Great Awakening and Enlightenment seem to be the most debatable sources. The reason is simply because there are too many things to be discussed. Being one of the most significant revolutions throughout world history, the American Revolution had many great achievements that could be contributed to the Great Awakening and Enlightenment. Since these two major period events both stressed the opposing aspects of human experience--- emotionalism and reason, respectively--- they had similar consequences. This kind of rebelling and up-going thoughts boomed the majority to…show more content…
To make a clear meaning of this, take one of the clergymen during the Great Awakening as an example: he said, “if Christian church was moving back to the same as the old corrupted English Catholic, then this kind of coldness religion with cruel punishment and harsh inquisition had to be abolished from Christianity, thus this had to be stopped before people started to look Christianity as a cruel religion.” (George Whitefield, 1740). This demonstrated that a religious minister could use critical thinking and reasoning aside from saying things like this was the will of God and Christ. Going back to the point, with this kind of rational thinking promoted by both religious and political people, it would pioneer a new vision for America. Therefore, without any reasonable thinking and brilliant ideas from the Enlightenment, Jefferson might only be a clever man filled with great ambition with no inspiration, and Franklin a publisher working in his own company with no motivation; then the independence would not had been possible to fall on the New England. As a result, only with the help from the conception brought up the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment, works like Declaration of Independence and inventions could be made. Moreover, the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment would bring the development of education to another…show more content…
They both encouraged the United States to gain independence and inspired them to complete the first formal paper of declaration ever. The importance of logical and critical thinking is self-evident: in some sense, Enlightenment is the opposite word of disaster, because when we are enlightened, we do not shift to the way of regression, but to the way of renovation that will lead us to a brighter

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