AHC & WI: No First Great Awakening

With no PoDs prior to 1702, how could the Great Awakening of the 1730’s and 40’s be averted? And given this PoD, how is British North America up through 1754 affected, and how does this, in turn, affect their history for the rest of the 18th Century?
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Perhaps I am lacking in imagination, but I cannot for the life of me see a way to get it done with a POD that late. The thing is, the Great Awakening is part of a much larger movement (the Evangelical evival in great britain; the rise of Pietism in Protestant regions of Continental Europe). It all boils down to a reaction to pre-existing trends. The "Protestant scholasticism" that tended to dominate European Protestant theology was considered dry and abstract, while the churches in Anglo-America were perceived as having sunk into formalist routine that was likewise unappealing to the masses. A factor in this was the nascency of Enlightenment ideas. A religious practice had become too "distant" and "theoretical", quite a lot of people turned to a certain sceptic approach-- hence the rise of deism, unitarianism and universalism.

In this situation, the devout felt threatened by the current state of affairs, and were thus "ripe" for a more direct, practical and experiential faith.

What I'm trying to say is that none of this happened in a vacuum, and you can't just flip a switch and change the conditions that led to it. You can easily steer it into a different direction, but by 1700 or so, the advent of some kind of experiential "upsurge" is pretty much bound to happen. To change that, you'd have to go back (by my estimate) at least another fifty years. In essence, that kind of time-frame is the bare minumum needed to more gradually "evolve" the faith into a more direct and less abstract practice. If you introduce more moderate changes in that direction as of 1650 or so, you can end up with the faith just growing towards a more personal and direct approach over the decades, which would n turn remove the basis for any kind of radical "Awakening".
 

Skallagrim

Banned
@Skallagrim Would you say that Queen Anne’s War (taking the course it did) had any effect on the Great Awakening (taking the course it did)?

If anything, I vaguely suspect that the sense of "us against the eeeeeevil Catholics!" which the war inspired amongst North American Protestants may have delayed the Awakening by a bit, by providing a very focused sense of purpose and unity. Avoiding the war might mean the Awakening comes just a bit earlier.
 
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