The first American Revolution didn't happen in 1776.

It happened nearly 50 years earlier, and it wasn't about politics, it was about religion.

We know it as the Great Awakening, and it changed America almost as profoundly as the War of Independence did.

By the 1730s, the American colonies had achieved a permanency. That is, they were now a fixture on the global landscape. With more and more

European settlers arriving every year, the future looked bright. To some and to one clergyman in

particular, the new prosperity came at a steep price.

That clergyman was Jonathan Edwards, the fiery and brilliant pastor of Northampton Congregationalist Church in Massachusetts.

Edwards was disturbed by what he saw as his parishioners complacency.

It wasn't enough for them to show up in church on Sunday, he asserted.

They needed a personal relationship with God, something that could not be mediated by clergy.

God's grace alone, not religious ritual, would save them from the fires of hell. If we improve our lives

to any other purpose, then as a journey toward heaven, all our labor will be lost. Edward's message

struck accord. Within a year, almost every resident of his frontier town professed to be, as the

New Testament puts it, born again.

It was the beginning of evangelical Christianity in America.

If Edwards kindled a new religious fervor, it was George Whitfield who fanned it into a bonfire.

Whitfield was born in England in 1714. Although he studied philosophy and theology at Oxford University,

he never took a permanent pulpit. Instead, he traveled from town to town as a preacher,

first in England and then in the colonies.

A naturally gifted orator and an incredibly hard worker, Whitfield attracted mind-boggling crowds,

20,000 in Boston, at a time when it had a population of 17,000, and 25,000 in Philadelphia,

to cite just two examples. People would travel long distances, often walking or riding for days to hear him speak.

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