The Second Great Awakening
Religion in America
1790s: Is religion dead?
French Revolution: Festival of Reason, 1793
New England ministers worry
◦
Tom Paine’s Age of Reason
◦
Victory of rationalism?
Revivalism quiet in the South
◦
Migration from Piedmont to the West
Jefferson’s victory in 1800: official atheism?
Revivalism returns
Revivals in Connecticut & at Yale, late 1790s, to counter Age
of Reason
Presbyterians on the frontier
Camp Meetings
Cane Ridge, 1801: “America’s Pentecost”
◦
Organized by Barton Stone
◦
First large camp-meeting
◦
Perhaps
20,000 attend
The Methodists
John Wesley (1703-1791)
◦
Ordained Anglican priest, 1728
◦
Joins “Methodist” study group, 1729
◦
SPG mission to Georgia, 1735-37
◦
Aldersgate (Moravian) Chapel experience, 1738
◦
Organizes “classes” & circuit preachers
Charles Wesley and hymns
◦
Following Isaac Watts’s lead
Growth of Methodism
Francis Asbury
◦
First bishop, 1785
Success of the circuit rider
Methodist meetings
◦
Emotional
◦
Dreams and visions
◦
Miraculous healings
◦
Speaking in tongues
Camp Meetings
Methodists embrace camp-meetings
◦
Lorenzo Dow and the “jerking exercise”
Presbyterians recoil from Cane Ridge
Baptists grow reluctant
Methodist Camp-Meeting
Plan, 1809
Methodist Camp-Meeting,
1819
Methodist Camp-Meeting,
1839
African Americans &
Revival
Attraction to emotional spirituality
African elements
◦
Ring shouts
◦
Spirituals
Methodism’s antislavery principles
◦
“Thoughts upon Slavery,” 1744
African Methodist Episcopal Church
◦
Richard Allen, 1816
Baptist churches in the South