Final answer:
The Great Awakening encouraged a more personal and emotional religious experience (E), leading to increased individual agency in matters of faith and decreased reliance on formal religious structures.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Great Awakening significantly influenced individual and community interactions with religious authority and institutions. The correct answer to the question of how the Great Awakening affected individual and community interaction with religious authority and institutions is E. it encouraged a more personal and emotional religious experience. This large-scale religious revival movement emphasized personal responsibility, intense emotional worship, and a break from traditional clerical authority, leading to the establishment of new denominations and the spread of evangelical fervor.
The movement prompted distrust towards institutionalized authority and led to a decline in the influence of pre-existing Protestant groups such as Anglicans and Congregationalists. It fostered a more personal connection to faith, where believers sought their own salvation through a sincere emotional engagement rather than adhering strictly to established religious doctrines or formal rituals. This new approach to religion not only changed worship practices but also encouraged the proliferation of religious revivals, where preaching had a theatrical and highly impassioned quality, further democratizing religious experiences.