The Great Awakening or First Great Awakening is a Protestant religious revival that sweeps Protestant Europe and British America in the 1730s and 1740s.

An evangelical and revitalization movement, it leaves a permanent impact on American Protestantism.

It results from powerful preaching that gives listeners a sense of deep personal revelation of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ.

The Great Awakening pulls away from ritual, ceremony, sacramentalism, and hierarchy, and makes Christianity intensely personal to the average person by fostering a deep sense of spiritual conviction and redemption, and by encouraging introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality.

The movement is an important social event in New England, which challenges established authority and incites rancor and division between traditionalist Protestants, who insist on the continuing importance of ritual and doctrine, and the revivalists, who encourage emotional involvement.

It has an impact in reshaping the Congregational church, the Presbyterian church, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the German Reformed denominations, and strengthens the small Baptist and Methodist Anglican denominations.

It has little impact on most Anglicans, Lutherans, Quakers, and non-Protestants.

Throughout the colonies, especially in the south, the revivalist movement increases the number of enslaved and free blacks who are exposed to and subsequently converted to Christianity.

The Second Great Awakening begins about 1800 and reaches out to the unchurched, whereas the First Great Awakening had focused on people who were already church members.

18th-century American Christians add an emphasis on "outpourings of the Holy Spirit" to the evangelical imperatives of Reformation Protestantism.

Revivals encapsulate those hallmarks and spread the newly created evangelicalism in the early republic.