In North America there were two great Protestant Christian revitalization movements which captured the emotions of many people and which stressed the ideas of personal salvation, a personal relationship with the Christian god, and reliance on the bible as a sacred scripture. The First Great Awakening swept though the Colonies in the eighteenth century as an effort on the part of orthodox Calvinists to counter challenges by rationalists. The Second Great Awakening began shortly after the formation of the United States and stressed biblical fundamentalism and having a personal spiritual or mystical experience. Both movements were Protestant revitalization movements and thus anti-Catholic.
The First Great Awakening
Like many religious revitalization movements, the First Great Awakening sought to return Protestant Christianity in North America to its mythical past and purity. It was, at least in part, a reaction to the Enlightenment and the use of reason and observation (which would later be called science) to understand the world. At this time, most American Protestants adhered to some basic Calvinistic-inspired theological concepts which included a belief in divine predestination and individual corruption. Salvation would not come from human reason and an understanding of the world, but was based on soul-searching, humility, and waiting for a sign that they had been selected for salvation.
The movement was inspired by preachers such as George Whitefield (1714-1770), Gilbert Tennent (1703-1764), and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). In his book Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels, Kerry Walters writes:
“Insisting that the Christian faith had been poisoned by ungodly defenses of human reason and freedom of determination, the leaders of the revival called for a return to a religion of the heart that stressed the traditional pietistic standards of internal spiritual regeneration and rejuvenation. Introspection, fear, and self-abasement, not reason or works, were the necessary conditions for salvation.”
The beginnings of this revitalization movement are described by Karen Armstrong in her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence:
“The Great Awakening broke out first in Northampton, Connecticut, in 1734, when the death of two young people and the powerful preaching of its minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) whipped the town into a devotional fever that spread to Massachusetts and Long Island. During Edwards’s sermons, the congregation screamed, yelled, writhed in the aisles, and crowded around the pulpit, begging him to stop.”
Those who attended the religious meetings were not an audience, but rather they were active participants. Meetings stimulated emotions rather than intellectual thoughts and participants felt the “power” of the religion flowing through them.
Karen Armstrong also writes:
“The Awakening flourished in the poorer colonies, where people had little hope of earthly fulfillment. While the educated classes were turning to the rational consolations of the European Enlightenment, Edwards brought the Enlightenment ideal of the pursuit of happiness to his unlettered congregation in a form that they could understand and prepared them for the revolutionary upheavals of 1775.”
There are a couple of socioreligious factors which should be kept in mind in examining the First Great Awakening. While this revitalization movement seems to culminate in the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States, most of those involved with the movement looked at monarchy, not democracy, as the ideal form of government. There was a strong feeling that monarchy and the social stratification upon which it is based was the best expression of God’s will for the people.
Among eighteenth-century American Protestants there was also a strong hatred of Catholicism, which was often characterized as a form of atheism. As a revitalization movement, the First Great Awakening, like the American Protestant revitalization movements which would follow in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, opposed the idea of the priesthood and stressed a direct, personal relationship with God. Karen Armstrong writes:
“…hatred of Catholic ‘tyranny’ would long remain a crucial element in American national identity.”
Karen Armstrong also reports:
“When George III granted religious freedom to the French Catholics in the Canadian territory, he was denounced by the American colonists as the ally of Antichrist; and even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God’s design for the overthrow of Catholicism.”
Karen Armstrong summarizes the First Great Awakening as:
“The Great Awakening was America’s first mass movement; it gave many ordinary folk their first experience of participating in a nationwide event that could change the course of history.”
The Second Great Awakening
Many of the founding fathers of the newly-formed United States, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine, were deists who embraced a worldview that emphasized reason and natural philosophy and rejected the supernatural doctrines of miracles and special revelation. Karen Armstrong writes:
“As an apostle of Enlightenment empiricism, Jefferson rejected the idea that religious knowledge was acquired by revelation, ritual, or communal experience; it was merely a set of beliefs shared by some. Like all Enlightenment philosophies, Jefferson and James Madison (1751-1836), the pioneers of religious liberty in America, believed that no idea should be immune from investigation or even outright rejection.”
Protestant Christians in the United States experienced a religious revival which was fused with fervent nationalism and became known as the Second Great Awakening. Missionary work—that is, carrying a Protestant vision of Christianity to others—was viewed as a form of patriotism. America, as a Protestant Christian nation, was the chosen land, and it was surely going to be the throne of Jesus Christ upon his return.
The Second Great Awakening is viewed by some scholars as beginning in 1780 and ending about 1830, while others date it from the beginning of the nineteenth century and ending with the Civil War. Kerry Walters writes:
“This revivalist movement, very much like its twentieth-century American counterparts, stressed biblical fundamentalism, the primacy of a personal, saving experience of the divine, and social and political conservatism.”
This new revival movement was Bible-based and viewed American democracy as an expression of God’s will. Karen Armstrong writes:
“Now the revivalists insisted that American Christians could read the Bible without direction from upper-class scholars.”
It was anti-Catholic, stressing the idea that people should learn directly from the Bible, not from priests. For example, in 1835, Samuel F.B. Morse called for Protestant missionaries to arm the nation against the forces of evil. Catholicism was considered one of the forces of evil. Morse called for the spread of Protestant Christianity to all parts of the nation, including the Indians. In his book Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau, Christopher Miller writes:
“Thus was the nation to be converted so that it could present a united front to the evil world. At the same time, God’s work of saving the unfaithful would be carried out, thereby advancing His unfolding plan for the universe. Also in the process, America would prove it was deserving of being God’s chosen nation.”
Christopher Miller also reports:
“To Morse and his fellow firebrands, Catholicism was the natural ally of authoritarianism and was, therefore, opposed to in its whole character to Republican liberty.”
Since many immigrants coming to the United States from Europe at this time were Catholics, the Second Great Awakening was also anti-immigrant. It viewed immigrants as a vast army of poor Catholics who were determined to over-throw American democracy.
The Second Great Awakening was anti-intellectual, some describe it as rabidly anti-intellectual, dismissing the findings of science and scholarly research. It sought to suppress any idea that the Bible might not be divinely inspired. Kerry Walters writes:
“In 1830 the public library of Philadelphia, a city otherwise noted for its tolerant spirit, primly refused to purchase any books about the ex-president because of his supposed infidelity.”
Jefferson, a deist, had suggested that the Bible be read as any other book, suspending the idea of divine inspiration, and subjecting it to the same standards of evaluation as used for other ancient books.
As a religious, social, and political movement, the Second Great Awakening had immense impact on Americans. Kerry Walters writes:
“The fifty-year crusade of the Second Great Awakening to recapture the soul of America was remarkably successful.”
Christopher Miller summarizes the success of the Second Great Awakening:
“The awakening succeeded because the preachers gave the masses the sort of religion they wanted. In the process, religion was made something familiar, something that accorded with everyday experience, and therefore, something that helped the common man to make sense of his ever more complex world.”
The Second Great Awakening set the stage for the Protestant Fundamentalism which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Religion 101
Religion 101 is a series exploring various topics relating to religion in which the concept of religion is not restricted to Christianity or to the concepts of the Abrahamic religions or to the need for a god. Some of the essays in this series include:
Religion 101: Confucianism
Religion 101: Naturalism
Religion 101: Deism
Religion 101: The Evolution of Morality
Religion 101: Divination in Ancient Civilizations
Religion 101: Demons
Religion 101: Religion and Ancient Civilizations
Religion 101: Shamanistic Ceremonies
Religion 101: Atheism
