At the annual convention of Congregational clergy in Massachusetts, church leaders condemned the “disordly tumults and indecent behaviour” of the religious revivalism often called the Great Awakening.
Gilbert Tennent, the son of religious leader William Tennent, became pastor of the Presbyterian Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He soon met and was inspired by Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus Frelinghuysen, who emphasized piety and conversion in his sermons. Both Tennent and Frelinghuysen stirred religious fervor and revivalism among their congregations.
New England Puritans established the Half-Way Covenant, an agreement extending partial church membership to church members’ children who had not yet experienced conversion. Solomon Stoddard, grandfather ofreligious leader Jonathan Edwards, was among the major proponents of the Covenant.
John Edwards’ A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Works of God was published in 1737. The Narrative offered accounts of “remarkable conversions” in and around Northampton, Massachusetts.
In Enfield, Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards delivered his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” warning of the “torments of Hell” and urging listeners to “save themselves from Hell’s pains” by accepting Christ.
Solomon Stoddard led the first of at least five religious “harvests” stirring evangelical revivalism in Northampton, Massachusetts. Stoddard’s other Northampton revivals followed in 1683, 1696, 1712, and 1718.
Former slave Absalom Jones founded St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
Theodorus Frelinghuysen began his career as a Dutch Reformed preacher in New Jersey in January 1721.
In Salem, Massachusetts, a cluster of accusations of witchcraft led to prosecution. Cotton Mather presided over the trials of those accused of being witches, and eventually eighteen men and women were found guilty and hanged.
After returning to Connecticut, James Davenport led a burning of anti-revival tracts in a “Bonfire of Vanities” at New London.