While religion had previously played an important role on the American political scene, the Second Great Awakening highlighted the important role which individual beliefs would play. Unitarianism and Universalism were early Christian denominations that spread quickly during the nineteenth century.
Discuss the central commitments and development of Unitarianism and Universalism in the United States. Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement named for its understanding of God as one person in direct contrast to Trinitarianism, which defines God as three persons coexisting as one in being. Thus, Unitarians adhere to strict monotheism, maintaining that Jesus was a great man and a prophet of God but not God himself.
Unitarianism began in Poland and Transylvania in the late sixteenth century and had reached England by the mid-seventeenth century. As early as the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of clergymen in New England preached what was essentially Unitarianism. The most prominent of these men was Jonathan Mayhew — , pastor of the West Church in Boston, who preached the strict unity of God, the subordinate nature of Christ, and salvation by character.
Charles Chauncy — , pastor of the First Church from until his death, was both a Unitarian and a Universalist. From to , Unitarianism gained ground in New England and other areas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with one exception, all of the churches of Boston were occupied by Unitarian preachers, and various periodicals and organizations expressed Unitarian opinions.
Churches were established in New York, Baltimore, Washington, Charleston, and elsewhere during this period. The Brattle Street Church in Boston, ca. The period of American Unitarianism from about to can be thought of as formative, mainly influenced by English philosophy, semi-supernatural, imperfectly rationalistic, and devoted to philanthropy and practical Christianity.
In , Joseph Stevens Buckminster became minister of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, where his sermons and literary activities helped shape the subsequent growth of Unitarianism in New England.
Unitarian Henry Ware was appointed as the Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard College in , and Harvard Divinity school then shifted from its conservative roots to teach Unitarian theology. The association published books, supported poor churches, sent out missionaries, and established new churches in nearly every state.
Americans from these religious backgrounds gradually created a new denominational tradition of Christian Universalism during the nineteenth century. The Universalist Church of America grew to be the sixth-largest denomination in the United States at its peak.
He served as pastor of the Universalist Society of Boston and wrote many hymns. Another important figure in early American Christian Universalism was George de Benneville, a French Huguenot preacher and physician who was imprisoned for advocating Universalism and later emigrated to Pennsylvania, where he continued preaching on the subject.
Noted for his friendly and respectful relationship with American Indians and his pluralistic and multicultural view of spiritual truth, George de Benneville was well ahead of his time. Women constituted the majority of converts and participants in the Second Great Awakening and played an important informal role in religious revivals.
Women made up the majority of the converts during the Second Great Awakening and therefore played a crucial role in its development and focus. It is not clear why women converted in larger numbers than men. Conversion allowed women to shape identities and form community in a time of economic and personal insecurity and to assert themselves even in the face of male disapproval.
Conversion may even have served as a reaction to the perceived sinfulness of youthful frivolity. Some women, especially in the South, encountered opposition to their conversion from their husbands and had to choose between submission to God or to the head of the household. While there is no single reason women joined the revival movement, the revival provided many women with shared experiences.
Church membership and religious activity gave women peer support and a place for meaningful activity outside of the home. While they constituted the majority of converts and participants, women were not formally indoctrinated and did not hold leading ministerial positions.
They did occasionally take on public roles during revivals. They preached or prayed aloud on rare occasions, but they were more likely to give testimonials of their conversion experience or work through the conversion process directly with sinners who could be male or female. Though they typically held no formal leadership roles, women became very important informally in the process of conversion and in the religious upbringing of their children through family structure and through their maternal roles.
During the period of the revivals, mothers—who were seen as the moral and spiritual foundation of the family—used their teaching and influence to pass religion to their children. The rising number of women congregants influenced the doctrine preached by ministers as well. Through their positions in these organizations, women played a role outside of the domestic sphere. In the new frontier regions, the revivals of the Second Great Awakening took the form of vast and exhilarating camp meetings.
In the newly settled frontier regions, the revivals of the Second Great Awakening took the form of camp meetings. These meetings were often the first experience settlers had with organized religion. Settlers in thinly populated areas would gather at the camp meeting for fellowship. The sheer exhilaration of participating in a religious revival, with crowds of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people, inspired the dancing, shouting, and singing associated with these events.
Upon their return home, most converts joined or created small local churches, which resulted in rapid growth for small religious institutions. In many ways, religion was becoming more formal and less personal during this time, which led to lower church attendance. Christians were feeling complacent with their methods of worship, and some were disillusioned with how wealth and rationalism were dominating culture.
Many began to crave a return to religious piety. Around this time, the 13 colonies were religiously divided. Most of New England belonged to congregational churches. Southern colonies were mostly members of the Anglican Church , but there were also many Baptists, Presbyterians and Quakers.
The stage was set for a renewal of faith, and in the late s, a revival began to take root as preachers altered their messages and reemphasized concepts of Calvinism. Calvinism is a theology that was introduced by John Calvin in the 16th century that stressed the importance of scripture, faith, predestination and the grace of God.
Most historians consider Jonathan Edwards, a Northampton Anglican minister, one of the chief fathers of the Great Awakening. He also preached justification by faith alone. Edwards was known for his passion and energy. He generally preached in his home parish, unlike other revival preachers who traveled throughout the colonies. George Whitefield, a minister from Britain, had a significant impact during the Great Awakening. Whitefield toured the colonies up and down the Atlantic coast, preaching his message.
In one year, Whitefield covered 5, miles in America and preached more than times. His style was charismatic, theatrical and expressive. Whitefield would often shout the word of God and tremble during his sermons.
People gathered by the thousands to hear him speak. Whitefield preached to common people, slaves and Native Americans. 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 , 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 ls had become the characteristic form of most northern and western revivalism.
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 ls evangelicalism had become one of the most dynamic and important cultural forces in American life. Stay Connected. Subscribe to the ARDA:. GIS Maps. All Rights Reserved. Two major events after the turn of the century are often given as the starting point for the Second Great Awakening. At Cane Ridge , Kentucky, preacher Barton Stone organized a massive week-long revival, which proponents called the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since Pentecost.
A simultaneous revival occurred at Yale College in Connecticut where a third of the student body underwent conversion experiences. The Second Great Awakening benefited from the decline of state-sponsored churches as upstart religious groups competing with older denominations on a more level playing field. Methodism dramatically expanded during this period to become the single largest denomination in the country.
Many American Protestants left the older Calvinist tradition for theologies that emphasized human free will in choosing salvation, personal piety, and social reform.
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