Gospel of Liberty

The revivals of the Great Awakening shook Britain's North American colonies from spiritual slumber during the 1730s-1750s. In Virginia it touched men and women whose spiritual needs had been too long neglected by the legally established Anglican Church. In homes, meeting houses, and in open fields, rich and poor, black and white, men and women mingled to hear emotional messages of a personal God and salvation. The Great Awakening rattled and cracked the foundations of hierarchal authority and official religion from Georgia to New England, reverberating through the decades to the Revolution and the collapse of British rule.