As an American history teacher at Montgomery High School in central New Jersey, I particularly enjoyed teaching my students about the history of Camp Meeting Road. The road forms a straight line that slices through farmland and borders one side of the school. Its distinctive name derives from the Second Great Awakening camp meetings that were once held on the now peaceful fields along the road. At one time thousands of spellbound people listened to preachers passionately calling upon them to repent their sins.
“Moral free agents”
The revivals on Camp Meeting Road in Montgomery, New Jersey were a small part of the wave of religious fervor known as the Second Great Awakening that swept across American in the early 1800s. Leading Second Great Awakening ministers such as Charles Grandison Finney delivered inspiring sermons stressing that Christians are not doomed by original sin. Instead, he emphasized humanity’s inherent goodness and each individual’s potential as a “moral free agent” to achieve personal salvation and thus spiritual rebirth.
A new American religious landscape
The Second Great Awakening altered America’s religious landscape. The Congregationalists in New England and the Anglicans in Virginia dominated religious life in colonial America. During the Second Great Awakening these faiths receded. Energized by passionate itinerant ministers, membership in the Baptist and Methodist churches surged.
The Second Great Awakening witnessed the birth of a distinctive Black Church in America. Most enslaved Africans gravitated to the Baptist and Methodist faiths. By the middle of the nineteenth century, white and Black Baptist and Methodist denominations constituted two-thirds of the Protestant ministers and churches in America,
The Second Great Awakening also played a role in the birth of the Morman faith. Intense religious revivals were especially widespread in central and western New York, This area became known as the “Burned-Over District” because of the particularly enthusiastic revivals that crisscrossed the area. The Burned-Over District was the birthplace of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, or the Mormons. Founded in the 1820s by Joseph Smith, Mormonism attracted a number of loyal followers. In 1847, Brigham Young led more than 2,000 Mormons on an arduous journey to the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
PERFECTIONISM
It was a short step from the Second Great Awakening emphasis upon spiritual progress to a belief in the possibility of social progress. For example, a convert who pledged to give up alcohol could then be persuaded to work for temperance in his or her community. The Second Great Awakening thus inspired a commitment to PERFECTIONISM – a deep sense that individuals acting together could build a just society. The optimistic belief that Christians have an obligation to improve society inspired reformers to promote better care for the mentally ill, combat alcoholism, reform public education, abolish slavey, and expand women’s rights.
Middle-class women played an especially important role in the Second Great Awakening. Denied roles in politics and the new market economy, many women found they could make a difference by championing social change. For example, Dorothea Dix urged humane treatment for the mentally ill while Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton worked tirelessly to fight for women’s rights.
The close link between religion and reform awakened America to the evils of slavery. For example, the call for moral reform influenced William Lloyd Garrison’s demand for the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people.
So why should you remember the Second Great Awakening?
The Second Great Awakening has generated a number of APUSH multiple-choice and short answer questions. Be sure that you can identify Charles Gandison Finney and the Burned-Over District in New York. In addition, be prepared to discuss the link between the Second Great Awakening’s call for moral improvement and the efforts of ante bellum reformers to build a better society.