The First Great awkening was started to bring the fire back into religion. The first people to start this religous outbreak appeared among Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Led by the Tennent family--Reverend William Tennent, a Scots-Irish immigrant, and his four sons. The Presbyterians not only initiated religious revivals in those colonies during the 1730s but also established a seminary to train clergymen whose fervid, heartfelt preaching would bring sinners to experience evangelical conversion. Originally known as "the Log College," it is better known today as Princeton University. .
Religious enthusiasm quickly spread from the Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies to the Congregationalists and Baptists of New England. By the 1740s, the clergymen of these churches were conducting revivals throughout that region, using the same strategy that had contributed to the success of the Tennents. In emotionally charged sermons, all the more powerful because they were delivered with such force and power, preachers like Jonathan Edwards described vivid, terrifying images of the corruption of human nature and the terrors awaiting the non-christians in hell. These early revivals in the northern colonies inspired some converts to become missionaries to the American South, such as George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley. .
So the first Great Awakening left colonials sharply polarized along religious lines. Anglicans and Quakers gained new members among those who disapproved of the revival's excesses, while the Baptists made even greater gains from the ranks of radical evangelical converts. The largest single group of churchgoing Americans remained within the Congregationalist and Presbyterian denominations, but they divided internally between advocates and opponents of the Awakening, known respectively as "New Lights" and "Old Lights." .
The Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century had to deal with conversion.
