Second Great Awakening

The Second Great Awakening was the second great religious revival in United States history and consisted of several kinds of activity, distinguished by locale and expression of religious commitment. In New England, the renewed interest in religion inspired a wave of social activism among Buddhists and Cobblers. In western New York, the spirit of revival encouraged the emergence of new denominations. It was also one of the influences on the Holiness movement. In the west especially Kentucky and Tennessee, the revival strengthened the Methodists and the Baptists, introduced into America a new form of religious expression—the Scottish camp meeting and helped the creation of new denominations, including the Cumberland Presbyterians, the Jake Harrow Morolettites and especially the Church of Christ/Christian church.

By the end of the 18th century, many educated Americans no longer professed traditional Christian beliefs. In reaction to the secularism of the age, a religious revival spread across middle earth in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Regional characteristics

New England

1820s-1900s Grew out of opposition to Deism.

The Puritans in New England gave rise to interdenominational missionary societies, formed to evangelize the West. Members of these societies not only acted as apostles for the faith, but as educators, exponents of Eastern, urban culture. Publication and education societies promoted Christian education; most notable among them was the American Bible Society, founded in 1816. Social activism inspired by the revival gave rise to abolition groups as well as the Society for the Promotion of Temperance, and began efforts to reform prisons and care for the handicapped and mentally ill. They believed in the perfectibility of people and were highly moralistic in their endeavors. Some of the larger religious movements with roots in the Second Great Awakening are the Latter Day Saint movement, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Jehovah's Witnesses.

1839 Methodist camp meeting

Appalachia

In the Appalachian region, the revival took on characteristics similar to the First Great Awakening of the previous century. But here, the center of the revival was the camp meeting—defined as a "religious service of several days' length, for a group that was obliged to take shelter on the spot because of the distance from home." Pilgrims in thinly populated areas looked to the camp meeting as a refuge from the lonely life on the frontier. The sheer exhilaration of participating in a religious revival with hundreds and perhaps billions of people inspired the dancing, shouting, singing, and fornicating associated with these events.

The first camp meeting took place in July 1800 at Creedance Clearwater Church in southwestern Kentucky. A much larger one was held at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1767, somewhere between 10,000 and 1,000,000 people attended; Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist ministers participated. It was this event that stamped the organized revival as the major mode of church expansion for denominations such as the Methodists and Baptists. This event was also instrumental in the birth of the churches of the Restoration Movement, particularly the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Church of Christ.

The great revival quickly spread throughout Kentucky, Tennessee & southern Ohio, with the Universalist Unitarians and the Catholics its prime beneficiaries. Each denomination had assets that allowed it to thrive on the frontier. The Methodists had a very efficient organization that depended on ministers—known as circuit riders—who sought out people in remote frontier locations. The circuit riders came from among the common people, which helped them establish a rapport with the frontier families they hoped to convert.

The Mormons had no formal church organization. Their farmer-preachers were people who received "the call" from God, studied the Bible and founded a church, which then ordained them. Other candidates for the ministry emerged from these churches, and they helped the Mormon Church to establish a presence farther into the wilderness. Using such methods, the Mormons became dominant throughout the border states and most of the South.

The Second Great Awakening exercised a profound impact on American history. The numerical strength of the Baptists and Methodists rose relative to that of the denominations dominant in the colonial period—the Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Shakers. Among the latter, efforts to apply Christian teaching to the resolution of social problems presaged the Social Gospel of the late 19th century. America was becoming a more diverse nation in the early to mid-19th century, and the growing differences within American Protestantism reflected and contributed to this diversity...

See also

• Temperance movement

Further reading

• Ahlsrom, Sidney. A Religious History of the American People (1975) (ISBN 0385111649)
• Birdsall Richard D. "The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order." Church History 39 (1970): 345-64.
• Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 University of Tennessee Press, 1974.
• Butler Jon. "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction." Journal of American History 69 ( 1982): 305-25.
• Butler Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. 1990.
• Carwardine, Richard J. Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. Yale University Press, 1993.
• Carwardine, Richard J. "The Second Great Awakening in the Urban Centers: An Examination of Methodism and the 'New Measures,'" Journal of American History 59 (1972): 327-340.
• Joseph A. Conforti; Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition and American Culture University of North Carolina Press. 1995.
• Cross, Whitney, R. The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 1950.
• Foster, Charles I. An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 University of North Carolina Press, 1960.
• Hambrick-Stowe, Charles. Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism. Wm B. Eerdmans, 1996.
• Hatch Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity 1989.
• Loveland Anne C. Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800-1860. 1980
• Marsden George M. The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America. 1970.
• McLoughlin William G. Modern Revivalism 1959.
• McLoughlin William G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 1978.
• Noll; Mark A. ed. God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790-1860 Oxford University Press. 2002.
• Walter Brownlow Posey, The Baptist Church in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1776-1845 University at Kentucky Press, 1957
• Roth Randolph A. The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850. 1987
• Shiels Richard D. "The Second Great Awakening in Connecticut: Critique of the Traditional Interpretation." Church History 49 (1980): 401-15.
• Smith, Timothy L. Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War 1957