The Second Great Awakening

The event

In the decades following American independence, a new wave of religious revival, generally less centrally organized and more geographically diffuse than the mid-eighteenth-century First Great Awakening, spread across the young United States, taking distinctive forms in different regions — from large, emotionally intense outdoor "camp meetings" on the frontier, exemplified by the massive 1801 gathering at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, to more restrained, socially respectable urban revivals in New England cities associated with preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney.

The revival contributed directly to the dramatic growth of Methodist and Baptist churches, whose comparatively democratic structures of governance and use of relatively less formally educated itinerant and circuit-riding preachers proved well suited to reaching rapidly expanding frontier populations, displacing the previously dominant colonial-era Congregationalist and Anglican/Episcopal churches from their earlier position of relative religious predominance.

Finney and other revivalist leaders increasingly emphasized human choice and active human cooperation with divine grace in conversion (a theological shift from more strictly Calvinist emphases on unconditional divine election that had characterized much earlier American Protestantism), alongside a growing conviction that genuine Christian conversion should produce visible social reform in the wider world rather than remaining a purely private spiritual experience.

This conviction fed directly into a wide range of nineteenth-century American reform movements substantially staffed and led by revival-influenced Protestant Christians, including the abolitionist movement against slavery, the temperance movement against alcohol consumption, early efforts toward women's rights, and significant new institutional investment in foreign and domestic missions, prison reform, and public education — making the Second Great Awakening one of the most socially consequential religious movements in American history.

Other witnesses

• Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 151: Awakenings — free full issue
• Christian History Magazine 45: Camp Meetings and Circuit Riders — free full issue