The Awakening of Religion among the German Settlers in the Middle Colonies

Abstract

I T was as if a wind from the Lord passed through English America during the middle decades of the eighteenth century.' So effective was the evangelistic preaching of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, Gilbert Tennent, Samuel Davies, and other revivalists, that contemporaries noted a great and general of religion.2 In this awakening the German settlers in the Middle Colonies shared more fully than historians have generally observed.3 The German Awakening began among the Baptists in the I720S and continued until the early I750s. One German religious leader claimed that his countrymen in America were awakened by the same heavenly light, which in the times following spread over almost all the American provinces.' '4 The