Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening, The NineteReligion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center

4/7/09 3:26 PM

from
the
National
Humanities
Center

NHC Home

TeacherServe

Divining America

19th Century

Essay:

Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great

Awakening
Donald Scott
Queens College / City University of New York

National Humanities Center

Links to online resources

Nineteenth century America contained a bewildering array of Protestant sects

and denominations, with different doctrines, practices, and organizational forms.
But by the 1830s almost all of these bodies had a deep evangelical emphasis in
common. Protestantism has always contained an important evangelical strain,
but it was in the nineteenth century that a particular style of evangelicalism
became the dominant form of spiritual expression. What above all else
characterized this evangelicalism was its dynamism, the pervasive sense of
activist energy it released. As Charles Grandison Finney, the leading evangelical
of mid-nineteenth century America, put it: "religion is the work of man, it is
something for man to do." This evangelical activism involved an important
doctrinal shift away from the predominately Calvinist orientation that had
characterized much of eighteenth-century American Christianity. Eighteenthcentury Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield had stressed the
sinful nature of humans and their utter incapacity to overcome this nature
without the direct action of the grace of God working through the Holy Spirit.
Salvation was purely in God's hands, something he dispensed as he saw fit for
his own reasons. Nineteenth-century evangelicals like Finney, or Lyman
Beecher, or Francis Asbury, were no less unrelenting in their emphasis on the
terrible sinfulness of humans. But they focused on sin as human action. For all
they preached hellfire and damnation, they nonetheless harbored an unshakable
practical belief in the capacity of humans for moral action, in the ability of
humans to turn away from sinful behavior and embrace moral action. Whatever
their particular doctrinal stance, most nineteenth-century evangelicals preached a
kind of practical Arminianism which emphasized the duty and ability of sinners
to repent and desist from sin.

Conversion
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm

Page 1 of 6

Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening, The NineteReligion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center

4/7/09 3:26 PM

The core of nineteenth-century evangelicalism was the experience of conversion.

Conversion was compelled by a set of clear ideas about the innate sinfulness of
humans after Adam's fall, the omnipotence of God--his awful power and his
mercy--and, finally, the promise of salvation for fallen humankind through
Christ's death on the cross as the atonement for human sin. But what students
need to understand is that conversion was an experience. It was not simply
something that people believed--though belief or faith was essential to it--but
something that happened to them, a real, intensely emotional event they went
through and experienced as a profound psychological transformation left them
with a fundamentally altered sense of self, an identity as a new kind of
Christian. As they interpreted it, they had undergone spiritual rebirth, the death
of an old self and the birth of a new one that fundamentally transformed their
sense of their relationship to the world.
Conversion consisted of a sequence of clearly mapped-out steps, each of which
was accompanied by a powerful emotion that led the penitent from the terror of
eternal damnation through redemption to the promise of heavenly salvation. The
process of conversion characteristically began in a state of "concern" about the
state of one's soul and "inquiry" into what were called the doctrines of salvation
propelled by the question "what can I do to be saved?" This led to a state of
acute spiritual "anxiety," marked by deep fear over the prospect of eternal
damnation, which in turn grew into an unmistakable sense of "conviction," the
heartfelt realization that one stood justly condemned for one's sins and deserved
eternal damnation. Conviction was the terrifying point of recognition that no
matter how much one might desire it, there was absolutely nothing one could do
to earn salvation. But there was something the penitent could do, indeed, was
bound to do. That was to fully repent and surrender unconditionally to God's will
to do with as he saw fit and to serve him fully. It was this act of repentance,
surrender, and dedication to serving his will that Finney meant when in his most
famous sermon he insisted that "sinners [are] bound to change their own hearts."
This moment of renunciation of sin and the abject surrender to the will to God
was the moment of conversion, if it was to come, the moment at which, through
the promise of Christ's atonement for human sin, a merciful God would bestow
his grace upon the repentant sinner.

Guiding Student Discussion

It is important to stress to your students the importance of the emotional state
that signaled that one had received divine grace and was a converted Christian.
People recognized the fact of conversion by the power and character of the
emotions that accompanied it, that made it an emotional catharsis, a heartfelt
rebirth. Most characteristically, conversion, often accompanied by tears,
provoked a deep sense of humility and peace marked by an overwhelming sense
of love toward God, a sense that one had entered a wholly new state of being-defined as a state of regeneration--that was the utter opposite of the state of
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm

Page 2 of 6

Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening, The NineteReligion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center

4/7/09 3:26 PM

willfulness, torment, and anxiety that had accompanied unregeneracy. The

convert entered a new spiritual state referred to as regeneracy and sanctification
in which the paramount desire was to do God's will, a desire expressed almost
immediately in active concern for the conversion of family, friends, and even
strangers who remained unconverted. Indeed, the most important sign of
sanctification was the degree of one's willingness to enlist in the ongoing
evangelical campaign to convert the world. (For further discussion of the
evangelical convert's role in the world see under Nineteenth Century,
Evangelicalism as a Social Movement.)

Revivalism and the Second Great Awakening

A second distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century evangelicalism was its
approach to religious revivals. The phrase "religious revival" was originally
coined in the eighteenth century to describe a new phenomenon in which
churches experienced an unexpected "awakening" of spiritual concern,
occasioned by a special and mysterious outpouring of God's saving grace, which
led to unprecedented numbers of intense and "surprising conversions" that
"revived" the piety and power of the churches. In the early nineteenth century,
however, as "the revival" became a central instrument for provoking
conversions, it became as much a human as a divine event. In the terms of
Charles Grandison Finney, a revival was something preachers and
communicants did. It was a deliberately orchestrated event that deployed a
variety of spiritual practices to provoke conversions especially among the
unconverted "youth" (men and women between 15 and 30) in the community.
The new, self-consciously wrought revivals took several forms. They first
emerged at the turn of the eighteenth century with the invention of the camp
meeting in western Virginia and North Carolina and on the Kentucky and Ohio
frontier by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists. At these meetings, the most
famous (or notorious) of which took place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801,
hundreds and sometimes thousands of people would gather from miles around in
a wilderness encampment for four days to a week. There they engaged in an
unrelenting series of intense spiritual exercises, punctuated with cries of
religious agony and ecstasy, all designed to promote religious fervor and
conversions. These exercises ranged from the singing of hymns addressed to
each of the spiritual stages that marked the journey to conversion, public
confessions and renunciations of sin and personal witness to the workings of the
spirit, collective prayer, all of which were surrounded by sermons delivered by
clergymen especially noted for their powerful "plain-speaking" preaching. The
second, major variant of the new revivalism consisted of the "protracted
meetings" most often associated with the "new measures" revivalism of Finney
but which by the late l820s had become the characteristic form of most northern
and western revivalism. "Protracted meetings," ordinarily conducted once a year
at a time when they would be less disruptive of ordinary life, usually lasted two
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm

Page 3 of 6

Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening, The NineteReligion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center

4/7/09 3:26 PM

to three weeks, during which time there would be preaching two or three times
each day, addressed especially to the anxious penitents who would gather on an
"anxious bench" at the front of the church to be prayed for by the congregation,
and prayer and counseling visits by newly converted Christians to the concerned
and anxious. Once a person had gone through the experience of conversion and
rebirth, he or she would join the ranks of visitors and exhorters, themselves
becoming evangelists for the still unconverted around them.
One important result of the new revivalism was a further erosion of older
Calvinist beliefs, especially the doctrine of predestination. (For information on
Calvinism and predestination see under Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, Puritanism and Predestination.) Although some evangelical
clergymen did not abandon the idea of predestination entirely (the idea that God
had preordained who would be saved and who would not was, after all, a logical
extension of the conception of God as an eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent
being), in practical terms they held out what amounted to an idea of universal
salvation. Most Methodist clergymen came pretty close to embracing the idea of
universalism which held that Christ's atonement was potentially universal,
available without restriction to all who would repent and surrender to God.
Alexander Campbell, the founder of the Church of Christ, made universalism the
hallmark of his doctrinal system.
This new style of evangelicalism consisted of more than a doctrinal and
devotional emphasis and a set of proselytizing strategies. It has to be understood
as a vast and powerful religious movement. By the l820s evangelicalism had
become one of the most dynamic and important cultural forces in American life.
It is here that another important term comes into play--the Second Great
Awakening--the term evangelical leaders adopted to talk of the revivalism and
evangelical fervor they found themselves in the midst of. The label sought to
describe a broad religious phenomenon that transcended sectarian and
denominational boundaries. Most clergymen (and communicants as well) had
specific denominational affiliations. But just as the seventeenth-century Puritans
saw their Massachusetts Bay experiment as the spearhead of a broader
movement to reform Protestantism itself, so too did nineteenth-century
evangelicals consider themselves participants in a much broader spiritual
movement to evangelize the nation and world. Secondly, they used the idea of a
Second Great Awakening to signify their participation in an extraordinary
religious phenomenon. The label linked them directly to a special heroic history,
namely the great eighteenth-century spiritual outpouring (which they themselves
first designated the original or First Great Awakening) associated with such
figures as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Tennants. Theirs, too,
seemed a period marked by a special and extraordinary outpouring of God's
Saving Grace, a period that placed a special burden of responsibility on
ministers of God and saved Christians alike to enlist themselves wholeheartedly
in the work of extending God's Kingdom. Finally, this sense of participation in
and responsibility for the vast outpouring of Saving Grace promoted a sense of
direct connection to the ultimate teleological goal of Christian history, namely,
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm

Page 4 of 6

Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening, The NineteReligion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center

4/7/09 3:26 PM

the millennium. They came to believe that it was given to them and their
generation of evangelical Americans to prepare the way for Christ's Second
Coming (which Jonathan Edwards had predicted would take place in the New
World) by working unrelentingly to bring about the thousand-year reign of
righteousness that would precede his return to earth. More specifically, what this
meant was that they and their communicants were to enlist themselves in a
broad set of campaigns to reform American society. (For more on the
importance of millennialism in nineteenth-century religion see under Nineteenth
Century, Mormonism and the American Mainstream, African-American
Religion in the Nineteenth Century.)

Links to online resources

Donald Scott was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in

1985-86. He has taught at the University of Chicago, North Carolina
State University, Brown University, the New School, and is
currently Dean of Social Science and Professor of History at Queens
College / City University of New York. He is the author of From
Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850 (1978),
America's Families: A Documentary History (1982, with Bernard
Wishy), The Pursuit of Liberty (1996, with R. J. Wilson, et al.); and
he is the co-editor of The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social
Imagination and American Culture (1993). He is currently at work
on a book entitled Theatres of the Mind: Knowledge and Democracy
in 19th-Century America.
Address comments or questions to Professor Scott through
TeacherServe "Comments and Questions."

The Foreign Missionary Movement | American Jewish Experience through the 19th Century |
Mormonism and the American Mainstream | Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great
Awakening | Evangelicalism as a Social Movement | American Abolitionism and Religion
Civil War: The Southern Perspective | Religion in the Civil War: The Northern Side
| African American Religion, Pt. I | African American Religion, Pt. II |
Roman Catholics and Immigration in 19th Century America |
19th Century Links

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm

Page 5 of 6

Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening, The NineteReligion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center

4/7/09 3:26 PM

TeacherServe Home Page

National Humanities Center Home Page
Revised: October 2000
nationalhumanitiescenter.org

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm

Page 6 of 6