01:512:205 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: American Temperance Society, Deism, Co-Operative Economics
18 May 2018
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Chapter 15: The Ferment of Reform and Culture,
1790-1860
1. Reviving Religion
1. Church attendance was still a regular ritual for about three-fourths of the
23 million Americans in 1850; religion of these years was not the old-time
religion of colonial days
1. The austere Calvinist rigor had long been seeping out of the American
churches; the rationalist ideas of the French Revolutionary era had
done much to soften orthodoxy
2. Many of the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson and Franklin,
embraced the liberal doctrines of Deism that Thomas Paine promoted
in his book The Age of Reason
3. Deists relied on reason rather than revelation, on science rather than
the Bible; they rejected the concept of original sin and denied Christs
divinity; yet deists believed in a Supreme Being who created a
knowable universe (humans and moral behavior)
2. Deism helped to inspire an important spin-off from the severe Puritanism
of the past—the Unitarian faith, which began to gather momentum in NE
at the end of the 18th century
1. Unitarians held that God existed in only one person and no in the
orthodox Trinity
2. Although denying the deity of Jesus, Unitarians stressed the essential
goodness of human nature rather than its vileness (belief in free will
and salvation through works)
3. They pictured God not as a stern Creator but as a loving Father; the
Unitarian movement appealed mostly to intellectuals whose
rationalism and optimism contrasted sharply with the hellfire doctrines
of Calvinism (predestination, depravity)
3. A boiling reaction against the growing liberalism in religion set in about
1800
1. A fresh wave of roaring revivals, beginning on the southern frontier but
soon rolling even into the cities of the Northeast, sent the Second
Great Awakening surging
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2. Sweeping up even more people than the First Great Awakening, the
Second Awakening was one of the most momentous episodes in
history of American religion
3. The tidal wave of spiritual fervor left converted souls, many shattered
and reorganized churches, and numerous new sects; it also
encouraged an effervescent evangelicalism that bubbled up into
innumerable areas of American life—prison reform, temperance
cause, womens movement, and the crusade to abolish slavery
4.
4. The Second Great Awakening was spread to the masses on the frontier
by huge camp meetings; as many as 25,000 people would gather for an
encampment of several days to drink the hellfire gospel as served by an
itinerant preacher; revivals boosted church membership and stimulated a
variety of humanitarian reforms (missionary work)
5. Methodists and Baptists reaped the most abundant harvest of souls from
the fields fertilized by revivalism; both sects stressed personal conversion,
a relatively democratic control of church affairs, and a rousing
emotionalism; powerful Peter Cartwright was the best known of the
Methodist circuit riders or traveling frontier preachers
6. Charles Grandison Finney was the greatest of the revival preachers;
Finney abandoned being a lawyer to become an evangelist after a
conversion experience as a young man
1. Finney held huge crowds spellbound with the power of his oratory and
the pungency of his message; he led massive revivals in Rochester
and NYC in 1830 and 1831
2. He devised the anxious bench, where repentant sinners could sit in
full view of the congregation, and he encouraged women to pray aloud
in public
7. A key feature of the Second Great Awakening was the feminization of
religion, both in terms of church membership and theology; middle-class
women were the first and most fervent enthusiasts of religious revivalism
(majority of new church members)
8. Evangelicals preached a gospel of female spiritual worth and offered
women an active role in bringing their husbands and families back to God;
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that accomplished, many women turned to saving the rest of society
(epitomized the eras ambitious reforms)
2. Denominational Diversity
1. Revivals also furthered the fragmentation of religious faiths; Western New
York, where descendants of NE Puritans had settled, came to be known
as the Burned-Over District
2. Millerites, or Adventists, who had several hundred thousand adherents,
rose from the super-heated soil of the Burned-Over region in the 1830s;
named after William Miller, they interpreted the Bible to mean that Christ
would return to earth on October 22, 1844
3. The failure of Jesus to descend on schedule dampened but did not
destroy the movement
4. Like the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening tended to
widen the lines between classes and regions; more prosperous and
conservative denominations in East were little touched by revivalism, and
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians
continued to rise mostly from wealthier, better-educated levels of society
5. Methodists, Baptists, and other new sects spawned by swelling
evangelistic fervor tended to come from less prosperous, less learned
communities in the rural South and West
6. Religious diversity further reflected social cleavages when the churches
faced up to the slavery issue; by 1844-1845 both the southern Baptists
and the southern Methodists had split with their northern brethren over
human bondage (Presbyterians split)
7. The secession of the southern churches foreshadowed the secession of
the southern states
3. A Desert Zion in Utah
1. The smoldering spiritual embers of the Burned-Over District kindled
Joseph Smith, a rugged visionary, who reported that he had received
some golden plates from an angel
1. When deciphered, they constituted the Book of Mormon, and the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) was launched
(American product)
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