Great awakenings
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The Great Awakenings are a reference to notable periods of religious revival in Anglo-American religious history. There are three generally accepted Great Awakenings in American history:
- The First Great Awakening (1730s - 1740s)
- The Second Great Awakening (1820s - 1830s)
- The Third Great Awakening (1880s - 1900s)
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[edit] First great awakening (1730s - 1740s)
The First Great Awakening was a religious movement among American colonial Protestants in the 1730s and 1740s. It began with Jonathan Edwards, a Massachusetts preacher who sought to return to the Pilgrims' strict Calvinist roots and to reawaken the fear of God. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is perhaps his most famous sermon. Edwards was a powerful speaker and attracted a large following. The English preacher George Whitefield continued the movement, traveling across the colonies and preaching in a dramatic and emotional style, accepting Christians as his audience.
The new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. People became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. People began to study the Bible at home, which effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious manners and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Protestant Reformation.
Those attracted to his message and that of the itinerant preachers who sprang up across the colonies called themselves the "New Lights," and those who were not were called the "Old Lights." One manifestation of the conflict between the two sides was the establishment of a number of universities, now counted among the Ivy League, including Kings College (now Columbia University) and Princeton University. The Great Awakening was perhaps the first truly "American" event, and as such represented at least a small step towards the unification of the colonies. Thus, many historians point to the Great Awakening as one of a number of events which provided a basis for a truly "American" society, and increased the independent, self-determined spirit of colonists.
The Great Awakening may also be interpreted as the last major expression of the religious ideals on which the New England colonies were founded. Religiosity had been declining for decades, in part due to the Enlightenment and to the negative publicity resulting from the Salem witch trials. After the Great Awakening, it subsided again, although later American history abounds with revival movements (most notably the Second Great Awakening). The forces driving the colonies' history for the next eighty years would be overwhelmingly secular, although America would remain (and many parts of the nation remain to this day) a deeply religious nation.
[edit] Second Great Awakening (1820s - 1830s)
The Second Great Awakening was the second great religious revival in United States history and consisted of several kinds of activity, distinguished by locale and expression of religious commitment. In New England, the renewed interest in religion inspired a wave of social activism. In western New York, the spirit of revival encouraged the emergence of new denominations. It was also one of the influences on the Holiness movement. In the Appalachian region of Kentucky and Tennessee, the revival strengthened the Methodists and the Baptists, and spawned a new form of religious expression—the camp meeting.
By the end of the 18th century, many educated Americans no longer professed traditional Christian beliefs. In reaction to the secularism of the age, a religious revival spread westward in the first half of the 19th century.
[edit] New England
The evangelical enthusiasm in New England gave rise to interdenominational missionary societies, formed to evangelize the West. Members of these societies not only acted as apostles for the faith, but as educators, exponents of Eastern, urban culture. Publication and education societies promoted Christian education; most notable among them was the American Bible Society, founded in 1816. Social activism inspired by the revival gave rise to abolition groups as well as the Society for the Promotion of Temperance, and began efforts to reform prisons and care for the handicapped and mentally ill.
[edit] New York
The revival in western New York was largely the work of Charles Finney, a lawyer from Adams, New York. The area from Lake Ontario to the Adirondack Mountains had been the scene of so many religious revivals in the past that it was known as the "Burned-Over District." In 1821 Finney experienced something of a religious epiphany and set out to preach the Gospel in western New York. His revivals were characterized by careful planning, powerful preaching, and many conversions. Finney preached in the Burned-Over District throughout the 1820s and the early 1830s, before moving to Ohio in 1835 to take a chair in theology at Oberlin College. He subsequently became president of Oberlin.
Two other important religious denominations in America—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which today has over 12 million members (LDS Church or Mormons) and the Seventh Day Adventists also got their start in the Burned-Over District.
[edit] Appalachia
In the Appalachian region, the revival took on characteristics similar to the First Great Awakening of the previous century. But here, the center of the revival was the camp meeting—defined as a "religious service of several days' length, for a group that was obliged to take shelter on the spot because of the distance from home." Pioneers in thinly populated areas looked to the camp meeting as a refuge from the lonely life on the frontier. The sheer exhilaration of participating in a religious revival with hundreds and perhaps thousands of people inspired the dancing, shouting and singing associated with these events.
The first camp meeting took place in July 1800 at Gasper River Church in southwestern Kentucky. A much larger one was held at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801, where between 10,000 and 25,000 people attended, and Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist ministers participated. It was this event that stamped the organized revival as the major mode of church expansion for denominations such as the Methodists and Baptists. This event was also instrumental in the birth of the churches of the Restoration Movement, particularly the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Church of Christ.
The great revival quickly spread throughout Kentucky, Tennessee and southern Ohio, with the Methodists and the Baptists its prime beneficiaries. Each denomination had assets that allowed it to thrive on the frontier. The Methodists had a very efficient organization that depended on ministers—known as circuit riders—who sought out people in remote frontier locations. The circuit riders came from among the common people, which helped them establish a rapport with the frontier families they hoped to convert.
The Baptists had no formal church organization. Their farmer-preachers were people who received "the call" from God, studied the Bible and founded a church, which then ordained them. Other candidates for the ministry emerged from these churches, and they helped the Baptist Church to establish a presence farther into the wilderness. Using such methods, the Baptists became dominant throughout the border states and most of the South.
The Second Great Awakening exercised a profound impact on American history. The numerical strength of the Baptists and Methodists rose relative to that of the denominations dominant in the colonial period—the Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Quakers. Among the latter, efforts to apply Christian teaching to the resolution of social problems presaged the Social Gospel of the late 19th century. America was becoming a more diverse nation in the early to mid-19th century, and the growing differences within American Protestantism reflected and contributed to this diversity.
[edit] Third Great Awakening (1880s - 1900s)
The Third Great Awakening was a period in American history from 1886 to 1910. It is also called the Missionary Awakening.
The Third Great Awakening's beginning is associated with the Haymarket riot and student missionary movements. It was characterized by agrarian protest and labor violence, climaxing with the revivalist candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Gilded Age plutocracy came under harsh attack from trust-blasting muckrakers, Billy Sunday-style evangelicals, "new woman" feminists and chautauqua dreamers.
The Third Great Awakening spawned the Niagara Bible Conference, the rise of U.S. Fundamentalism, and the independent Bible institute and Bible college movement, all generally in reaction to liberalism in the mainline denominations. It also saw a series of attempts at creating new belief systems in the face of assertions that the Bible was fallible. Many of these new sects were atheistic or materialistic in their perspective.