The Second Great Awakening
In this episode, we discuss America's Second Great Awakening—another moral and religious revival, this one driving America toward a great civil war.
The Second Great Awakening took off in 1820s as Americans moved into the frontier. It centered tent revivals meetings, which brought together local communities in multiday events that served as both religious meetings and local carnivals. The traveling preachers of the revival would preach in a similar style to the First Awakening, but carrying an explosive message—that it was the duty of everyone to make America perfectly just and moral so as to transform it into the Kingdom of God, thus brining about the Millennium.
This new revival caused Americans to throw themselves with fervor into significant projects for social reform, the most important of which were the abolition of slavery, temperance, and women’s suffrage. It created new leaders merging religion with causes like abolition such as the famous Beecher family, Charles Grandison Finney, and William Lloyd Garrison. As women in particular threw themselves into the revival, it also created a great generation of new women leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott.
Second Awakening activists believed that transforming America was a moral urgency worth any sacrifice. This attitude created an army of new abolitionists willing to do anything to end to the scourge of slavery like John Brown, if necessary even violence or war.
The Second Great Awakening was also more than just a Christian religious revival. It was another national moral revival, one that would see the creation of other religious movements like the LDS Church, other philosophical movements like Transcendentalism, and found among the most important social reform movements in American history.
The fervor of the Second Great Awakening burned out in the trauma of the war and Reconstruction, leading America into the pragmatic era of the Gilded Age. But around the turn of the century the same spirit would come back yet again as America entered yet another era of revival and moral reform called the Progressive Era.
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