What was the social and political impact of the Great Awakening?

The main social impact of the Great Awakening was, not surprisingly, related to religion.  The Great Awakening brought about splits in many of the major religious denominations in the American colonies.  Denominations ended up splitting between the “old lights” who held to the traditional religious ways, and the “new lights” who wanted to follow the ideas of the Great Awakening.  The Old Lights wanted highly educated preachers who taught their flocks to believe in the “correct” ideas from the Bible.  By contrast, the New Lights wanted preachers who could connect with people on an emotional level and who were not necessarily educated in the niceties of theology.  Thus, the Great Awakening created splits between newer, more evangelical and older, more hierarchical wings of the various denominations.

Politically, the Great Awakening is usually credited with helping (in the long run) to bring about the American Revolution.  The Great Awakening, historians say, helped make the colonies more democratic.  The New Light preachers were, in essence, preaching a democratic message.  Any person, they said, could understand what God wanted.  The word of God was not known only to the educated elites.  Instead, it was something that everyone could understand.  People did not need religious hierarchies, headed by the elites, to guide them.  This idea, we are told, carried over to political life.  Since colonists believed that they were capable of determining their own religious beliefs, they also started to believe that they were capable of guiding their own political destinies.  The Great Awakening, in other words, made people believe that they could and should have a democratic government in addition to a more democratic religion.