Episode Details

In October 1740, a Connecticut farmer named Nathan Cole dropped his tools, threw his wife on a horse, and raced twelve miles in terror of arriving too late — to hear a traveling preacher named George Whitefield. He was one of thousands; whole counties emptied into the roads. This is the story of the First Great Awakening: Jonathan Edwards reading “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in a flat quiet voice until the congregation cried out for him to stop; Whitefield emptying the pockets of a skeptical Benjamin Franklin; the revival that became the first event ever to sweep all thirteen colonies at once. Underneath the hellfire ran a radical idea — that the individual soul stands before God with no institution in between — and it was the exact twin of the age’s political claim: that the individual holds rights with no government in between. Grace prior to church, rights prior to government, the same dynamite in two registers. And it began a pattern that never stopped: America, set religiously free, became the most inventive maker of new faiths the world has ever seen. Why here? The same open ground that made everything else possible.