Lecture #13: The Second Great Awakening: Reform and Resistance in the Early United States
 

 Religious Landscape Prior to First and Second Great Awakenings

1. Churches supported by taxes.

2. Belief in predestination.  Salvation only for the "visible saints."

3. Preaching often without emotion
 

Religious Landscape of First Great Awakening

1. Revivialism; emotionalism: George Whitfield

2. "New Lights": found "separatist churches," not supported by taxes (Methodists, Baptists)

3. Lay cultural foundations for American Revolution?
 

Religious Landscape of Second Great Awakening (1790-1840)

1. Rethinks two key tenets of Calvinism: predestination and depravity of human beings

2. Charles Finney: human beings "free moral agents"

3. Camp Meetings: Cane Ridge, Kentucky, 1801.

4. By Civil War, Methodists and Baptists account for 7 out of 10 Protestants nationwide; 9 out of 10 in South.

5. A "shopkeeper's millenium"?
 

The Second Great Awakening and African Americans

1. Religious reformers want to convert all, thus reach out to African Americans, both slave and free.  Second Great Awakening mark onset of large-scale African American conversions to Christianity.

2. 1816: founding of first major African American denomination: African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME)

3. Christianity used to defend slavery, but also lays groundwork for expanded attack on the "peculiar institution."