New England During The Great Awakening

New England was settled by English Puritans, mostly Congregationalists, in the 1620s. It was held together by its common religion, which gave the region stability in its early years. Contrastingly, the mid-Atlantic colonies were made up of a variety of different religious groups, including Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, Congregationalists, and Quakers in Pennsylvania. During the Great Awakening of the 1730s, the influence of older forms of Protestantism, especially Calvinism, increased dramatically throughout both regions. Until 1740, religion mainly united the New England region, while it mostly divided the mid-Atlantic region until the first Great Awakening.
New England was founded by a group of Puritan Congregationalists who were originally from England, but who had moved to Holland to avoid religious persecution. Once they sailed to America and settled Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they set up governments based on their religious ideals, including stability, order, and equality among men. The Puritans who migrated in 1629 and established Massachusetts Bay were intent on building a better society in America based on their reformed version of the Anglican Church. They did not want to abandon the Church of England, just remove all
Many ministers in the Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches in the Middle Colonies and New England began preaching an “evangelical” message of rebirth and religious conversion. George Whitefield, the most famous minister in this time, preached with massive gestures, tears, and depictions of G-d’s amazing grace and the terrible depths of hell. The Great Awakening changed society by increasing churchgoing by thousands of people, uniting them through their prayer. These “awakened souls” joined old churches and formed new ones, which increased the morality and religiousness of society in both the mid-Atlantic colonies and New