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”

◦ Peter Cartwright

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