The Great Awakening is one of the fixed points of American religious history, and historians have spent forty years arguing about whether it existed as a single event. The sceptical case, put most sharply in the 1980s, is that the phrase names a set of scattered and locally distinct revivals, some of them decades apart, that were assembled into one movement afterwards by nineteenth-century writers who needed a founding moment for American evangelicalism.
The evidence for the sceptical position is real. Revivals occurred at different times in different colonies, some communities were untouched, contemporaries did not use the term, and the sense of a general awakening is much stronger in retrospective writing than in the sources of the 1740s. The defenders answer that Whitefield's tours, the printed accounts that circulated between colonies, and the shared vocabulary of the new birth constituted a genuine intercolonial phenomenon that participants recognised.
The dispute matters beyond the label. A great deal has been built on the Awakening, including the claim that it prepared Americans for revolution by teaching them to challenge established authority. If the event is partly a later construction, those inferences need re-examining.
What is not disputed is that a style of religion organised around personal conversion and itinerant preaching established itself in this period and has been a permanent feature of American religious life since.