The Second Great Awakening

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the causes of the Second Great Awakening, including the disestablishment of state churches, the cultural opening of the trans-Appalachian frontier, the social dislocations of the market revolution, and the theological reaction against Calvinist determinism.
• Describe the camp-meeting revival of the southern and western frontier (Cane Ridge, Kentucky, 1801) and the urban-revival circuit that Charles Grandison Finney built through upstate New York's burned-over district between 1825 and 1835.
• Explain the New Measures that Finney popularized, including the anxious bench, protracted meetings, women praying aloud in mixed audiences, and direct emotional appeals from the pulpit, and account for why they became standard antebellum revival practice.
• Compare the postmillennial and Arminian theology of the Second Great Awakening with the older Calvinist orthodoxy of the colonial period, and account for what each set of ideas implied about human nature, social reform, and political action.
• Account for the demographic and institutional consequences of the revival, including the explosion of Methodist and Baptist membership, the founding of new American denominations such as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830, and the moral grammar the revival lent to the antebellum reform movements covered in Lesson 4.11.

The Second Great Awakening was the long wave of Protestant religious revivalism that swept the United States from roughly the 1790s through the 1840s. It rejected the deterministic Calvinism of the colonial Puritan order, stressed individual conversion and free will, drew enormous crowds to outdoor camp meetings on the trans-Appalachian frontier and to revival circuits in the cities and towns of the Northeast, and produced an explosion of Methodist and Baptist membership that made Methodism the largest American denomination by 1850 (KC-4.1.II.A.i). Older Protestant orthodoxies had taught that salvation was a sovereign act of God, allotted to a predestined elect, and that human beings could neither earn nor refuse it; the new revivalism preached that any sinner who heard the gospel could choose conversion at the moment the appeal was made. That theological pivot, from predestination to free will, produced both the explosive growth of the revivalist denominations and the social-reform impulse that organized antebellum American culture.

The revival opened on the southern and western frontier. The most famous of the early gatherings was the Cane Ridge camp meeting, held in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in August 1801. Estimates of attendance ran from ten to twenty thousand, in a region whose largest town numbered fewer than two thousand residents. Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist preachers shared platforms. Worshipers fell to the ground in religious ecstasy, jerked, barked, and danced; the resulting "exercises" gave the camp meeting its enduring reputation for emotional intensity. The form spread quickly. Methodist circuit riders carried it through the Ohio and Mississippi valleys; Baptist farmer-preachers planted thousands of small congregations across the upland South. By 1820 the camp meeting was a fixture of American religious life from the Carolinas to Indiana to the Deep South cotton frontier.

The revival's most visible second phase ran through the towns and small cities of the Northeast and the Erie Canal corridor. Charles Grandison Finney, a former lawyer who experienced conversion in 1821, built a revival circuit through upstate New York between 1825 and 1835 in a region contemporaries already called the burned-over district because it had been burned over so often by religious enthusiasm. Finney rejected the Calvinist position that revivals were sovereign acts of God; he insisted instead that revival was a human work, the predictable result of right means rightly applied. The means he used became famous as the New Measures: protracted meetings that ran for days or weeks, the anxious bench at the front of the church for sinners under conviction, women praying aloud in mixed audiences, the public naming of unconverted neighbors, and direct emotional appeals from the pulpit. The methods were controversial. Older Presbyterians and Congregationalists objected that they substituted technique for grace and that women's public prayer broke the Pauline rule against female speech in church. Finney's Lectures on Revivals of Religion, published in 1835, codified the New Measures and made them the standard practice of antebellum evangelical Protestantism (Theme ARC).

The Second Great Awakening transformed the institutional landscape of American Protestantism. In 1776, the largest American denominations had been the Congregationalists of New England and the Anglicans (after independence, the Episcopalians) of the seaboard South. By 1850, both had been overtaken many times over by the Methodists and the Baptists. The Methodists alone counted more than a million members and were on their way to becoming, in absolute numbers and as a share of the population, the largest American denomination. Several factors drove the realignment. The Methodist circuit-rider system fielded itinerant preachers who could plant a church wherever a few families would meet, an enormous advantage on a moving frontier. Baptist polity placed authority in the local congregation, which meant that any farmer-preacher who could call a meeting could start a church. Both denominations preached an Arminian or near-Arminian theology that treated salvation as something every listener could choose, which fit the egalitarian temper of an expanding republic. And both organized themselves through the kind of voluntary, dues-paying associations that other Americans were already using to run banks, fire companies, and political parties.

The revival's distinctive theology mattered as much as its growth numbers. Two terms organize the change. Arminianism, named for the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, taught that human beings possessed free will to accept or reject the offer of salvation; it stood in direct contrast to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, under which God chose the elect before the world began. Postmillennialism was the eschatological view that human moral action could build the kingdom of God on earth and that Christ would return only after a thousand-year era of Christian peace and progress. Together, the two ideas reframed sin from a private spiritual problem into a social one. If every individual could choose conversion, then a converted republic could perfect the world; if the kingdom of God depended on human effort, then organized social reform was a religious duty. That logic produced the missionary societies, Bible and tract societies, Sunday-school unions, and benevolent associations of the 1820s and 1830s, and it produced the antebellum reform movements covered in Lesson 4.11: temperance, the common-school crusade led by Horace Mann, the asylum and prison reforms led by Dorothea Dix, the abolitionist movement led by William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, and the women's rights movement that culminated at Seneca Falls in 1848 with the Declaration of Sentiments.

The burned-over district also produced new American religions. In 1830 in Palmyra, New York, in the heart of the burned-over country, Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon and organized the church now known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Driven by persecution and internal disputes, the Latter-day Saints moved west, established a refuge community at Nauvoo, Illinois, and in 1844 lost Smith to murder by an anti-Mormon mob in Carthage, Illinois. Brigham Young took up the leadership and in 1847 led the Saints across the Great Plains to the Salt Lake Valley in what was then Mexican territory. The Latter-day Saints' founding sits at the intersection of Topic 4.10 and Topic 5.2: the religious origin belongs to the Awakening covered here, the migration to Utah belongs to the western expansion of Period 5. William Miller's Adventist movement, which predicted the imminent return of Christ in 1843 and 1844, also emerged out of the burned-over district, as did the Oneida community, the Spiritualist movement, and a half-dozen smaller utopian and perfectionist sects. Few regions on the continent generated as many new religious movements per square mile as upstate New York between 1820 and 1850.

The Second Great Awakening produced a distinctively American religious culture. It was democratic in style: a Methodist circuit rider with a Bible and a horse claimed the same authority as a seminary-trained Presbyterian. It was evangelical in content: the gospel was meant to be preached to every soul, and conversion was the central religious experience. It was voluntary in organization: state-church establishments, which had survived in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a few other states into the 1830s, fell away during the revival decades, and American Christianity became a religion of voluntary associations financed by their members. And it was denominationally pluralistic: rather than producing one national church, the revival multiplied churches, so that by 1850 a single small town might hold a Methodist congregation, two Baptist churches, a Presbyterian session, an Episcopal parish, a Catholic mission, and a Latter-day Saints branch (Theme ARC). The combination set the basic pattern of American religion for the next two centuries and supplied the moral grammar for the antebellum reform impulse that the next lesson takes up in detail.

Three sources span the revival's geographic and chronological range: the frontier camp meeting at the start of the period, the urban revival theology of the New Measures middle, and a participant account of the revival as social institution.

1. (Causation) Account for the causes of the Second Great Awakening. Identify two long-term conditions and one immediate trigger that, taken together, made a religious revival of this scale possible in the early American republic. Which of the three do you find most persuasive, and why?
2. (Comparison) Compare the camp-meeting revival of the trans-Appalachian frontier with the urban revival circuit that Charles Finney built through the burned-over district. What did the two settings share, and what made them different in form, audience, and theology?
3. (Continuity and Change) Compare the Calvinist orthodoxy of the colonial Puritan order with the Arminian and postmillennial theology of the Second Great Awakening. Which doctrines changed, which carried forward, and what did each set of ideas imply about whether human beings could perfect society?
4. (Causation) The Second Great Awakening produced an extraordinary realignment of American Protestantism, with Methodists and Baptists overtaking the older Congregationalist and Episcopalian denominations. Identify two reasons for the realignment and explain why the revival's preferred theological and institutional forms suited the social conditions of the early republic.
5. (Causation) Account for the relationship between the Second Great Awakening and the antebellum reform movements that follow in Lesson 4.11. In what specific senses did postmillennialism supply the moral grammar of temperance, abolition, education reform, and women's rights, and which reform movements drew their leaders most directly from the revival churches?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.