ABSTRACT
Britain’s amazing variety of religious life was transplanted in its American colonies along with those who willingly settled there or were forced by economic, political or legal circumstances to move across the Atlantic. The entire spectrum of religious beliefs and practices was exported to the new world – Catholics and Anglicans, Baptists and Puritans, Boehmists and occultists, Quakers, Shakers and Methodists, even the French Prophets. At the same time that Britain witnessed the tremendous religious fervor that was manifested in the Methodist movement, in the American colonies there was a related outbreak of religious revivals that now carries the misleading name of The Great Awakening, which is perhaps best understood as “a short-lived Calvinist revival in New England during the early 1740s,”85 although the revivals were also known in the southern colonies into the 1750s and 1760s. The revivals in England and in America also have a connecting link, the stirring Calvinist preacher George Whitefield, John Wesley’s associate in the foundation of the Methodist movement, who made seven revival tours through the colonies between 1738 and 1770. His arrival in New England in 1740 is usually regarded as the beginning of the socalled Great Awakening.
