Faith in Action

LECTURE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Explain how camp meetings, itinerant preachers, and the message of free choice democratized religious authority in the Second Great Awakening.
2. Analyze Charles Finney’s “new measures” and his idea that people could choose salvation and perfect themselves.
3. Trace how that idea took many paths in the Burned-Over District: Spiritualism, the Oneida Community, temperance, women’s rights, come-outerism, and new religious movements.
4. Describe how women and African Americans used revival religion to claim spiritual authority, and the limits they met.
5. Evaluate competing interpretations of the link between revival and reform, including Gordon Wood’s, Paul Johnson’s, and Gertrude Himmelfarb’s.

Introductory Framing

Lecture 1 followed cheap print as it turned ordinary Americans into a reading public. Lecture 2 follows the same democratic energy into religion. Between roughly 1800 and 1850, waves of revival swept the United States, new denominations grew from nothing into giants, and entirely new faiths were founded on American soil. Historians call this the Second Great Awakening. Its defining feature was not any single doctrine. It was a shift in authority. Learned ministers, educated at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and supported by taxes or wealthy congregations, lost ground to preachers with little schooling, to lay exhorters, to women who testified in prayer meetings, and to Black congregations that governed themselves.

The lecture tells that story in a particular order. It starts at the camp meeting and on the circuit rider’s trail, then follows Charles Finney into the towns of upstate New York. There one idea, that people could choose salvation and perfect themselves, took off in many directions at once: séances with the dead, a commune that abolished marriage, a crusade against drink, and the first women’s rights convention. Other believers left their churches altogether or founded new ones. Only after that tour does the lecture step back to name the big pattern, the democratization of religion, and to look at the women and Black Christians who tested how far it would go. It ends by asking how revival’s moral energy became organized reform.

Throughout, this essay keeps one question in view: when religious authority spread to ordinary people, who gained a voice, who was disciplined, and who remained outside?

I. A Wave of Revivals

The Revolution had unsettled American religion. The Church of England, established in several colonies, lost its status and much of its clergy. Virginia disestablished its church with the 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom, and the First Amendment barred a national church. A few New England states kept tax support for Congregational churches into the nineteenth century; Massachusetts was the last to end it, in 1833. Elite Americans flirted with Deism, a rational faith that saw God as a distant creator. Many clergy feared that the new republic was sliding into irreligion just as settlers poured west, beyond the reach of established churches.

Beginning in the 1790s on the western frontier, in Kentucky and Tennessee, a series of intense revivals answered those fears. Over the next half century they spread through the whole country; by about 1850 a Methodist camp meeting could be found on Cape Cod as easily as in Kentucky. (The First Great Awakening was an earlier wave in the 1730s and 1740s.) The lecture names five main features of this Second Great Awakening, and they work as a checklist for everything that follows: mass revivals and camp meetings, with emotional conversions; the democratization of religion, as ordinary people claimed spiritual authority; the surge of evangelical denominations, above all Methodists and Baptists; religious innovation, including Mormons, Adventists, and Shakers; and a providential view of history, in which events were read as signs of God’s plan.

The denominational surge was dramatic. In 1776, by the estimate of sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians together claimed a majority of church adherents, and Methodists only about 2.5 percent. By 1850 Methodists made up about a third of all church adherents, the largest denomination in the country, and Baptists were second. The old colonial establishments had been overtaken by upstarts that met people where they lived.

II. Camp Meetings and Circuit Riders

Cane Ridge and the Camp Meeting

In August 1801, at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, a Presbyterian communion service hosted by minister Barton W. Stone grew into one of the largest gatherings the early republic had seen. Contemporary estimates ranged from about 10,000 to 25,000 people, astonishing figures for a state whose largest town held only a couple of thousand residents, and people traveled long distances to attend. Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist preachers spoke at once from stumps and wagons for nearly a week. Observers described worshipers who wept, shouted, fell to the ground, rolled, or shook uncontrollably with what they called “the jerks.” Critics saw disorder; participants saw the power of God made visible.

The camp meeting became a frontier institution, especially among Methodists. Families traveled long distances, camped for days, and joined a temporary community of prayer, preaching, and song. Meetings were held outdoors because no church could hold the crowds, and preachers from several denominations often cooperated. For isolated farm families, the meeting was also a rare social event. Its emotional style mattered: it treated feeling, not learning, as evidence of grace, and it let ordinary people, including women and enslaved people, testify in public.

The Circuit Rider

Methodist success rested on organization as much as emotion. Under Bishop Francis Asbury, Methodists divided the country into circuits. Young, often unmarried preachers rode those circuits on horseback, preaching almost daily in cabins, barns, and courthouses, and leaving behind small classes led by local laymen. Their message was simple: repentance, personal faith, conversion. Their language was plain, passion over polished theology, and it was open to anyone regardless of class or education. The system was cheap, mobile, and expandable; it could follow settlers faster than any seminary-trained clergy could. Circuit riders were famously poorly paid and worn out early, and many died young.

III. Finney, the Master Revivalist

The Lawyer Who Argued for God

Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) brought revival from the backwoods to the towns and cities of the North. Trained as a lawyer in upstate New York, he experienced a dramatic conversion in 1821 and began preaching with a courtroom style: direct, logical, and personal, as if pleading a case before a jury of sinners. Active above all in the 1820s and 1830s, he became the most influential revivalist of the era. He rejected the idea that sinners must wait passively for God to act. His most famous lectures argued the opposite:

In the same lecture Finney put it more bluntly still: “Religion is the work of man. It is something for man to do.”

From Predestination to Choice

Underneath that line was a theological shift. Traditional Calvinism, the inheritance of New England Puritanism and Presbyterianism, taught predestination: God had already chosen the elect, and no human effort could change that choice. Methodists and many revivalists, Finney among them, preached instead a theology close to the ideas of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius: Christ died for all, grace is offered to everyone, and individuals can accept or reject it, today. Many Baptists remained formally Calvinist, and the lines were never neat, but the revival message increasingly sounded like an invitation to choose. That message fit a society that celebrated self-made men and voluntary association. If salvation was a decision, then every person stood equal before God and responsible for his or her own soul.

The New Measures

If salvation is a choice, then a preacher’s methods matter. Finney’s methods became known as the “new measures”: protracted meetings that ran night after night for days or weeks; the “anxious bench,” a front pew where those struggling over their souls sat in full view of the congregation; praying for sinners by name; and prayer meetings in which women prayed aloud in mixed groups of men and women. Critics, including many Presbyterian and Congregational ministers, called the measures theatrical and manipulative. Lyman Beecher and others met with Finney at New Lebanon, New York, in 1827 to try to rein him in, without success. Even the buildings changed. The Broadway Tabernacle in New York, opened in 1836 and paid for by the reformer brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan so Finney could preach to city crowds, was a round hall seating about 2,400 with the preacher on a central platform, more like a lecture hall or theater than a traditional church.

Finney’s greatest triumph came in Rochester, New York, from September 1830 to March 1831. Rochester was a boomtown created by the Erie Canal, full of merchants, master craftsmen, and journeymen. Over those six months, hundreds joined the town’s churches, and the revival rippled outward through the region. Finney later served as professor and then president of Oberlin College in Ohio, the first American college to admit both women and Black students on a regular basis, linking revival to education and reform.

IV. The Burned-Over District: One Idea, Many Paths

Why Upstate New York?

Western and central New York, especially the towns along the Erie Canal (completed 1825), saw so many revivals from the 1820s to the 1840s that it earned the nickname “burned-over district.” Finney himself spoke of a “burnt district,” meaning a region where revival fires had passed through so often that little spiritual fuel remained. Whitney Cross’s classic study, The Burned-over District (1950), argued that the region’s intensity came not from frontier poverty or ignorance but from rapid change: Yankee migrants from New England raised on Puritan traditions, fast commercial growth along the canal, the social disruption of the market revolution, and a population that was literate, mobile, optimistic, and anxious about moral order all at once.

One Idea

Finney preached that salvation was a choice and that converts could keep growing in holiness; by the late 1830s he and his Oberlin colleagues were teaching that Christians could reach “entire sanctification,” a kind of Christian perfection. In the District people ran with that idea. If people could choose salvation and perfect themselves, what else could they remake? The answers ranged from mainstream reform to radical experiment: Spiritualism, the Oneida Community, the temperance crusade, women’s rights, Mormonism, and the movement that became Seventh-day Adventism all grew in or near this region. The lecture treats the District as a laboratory for democratic religion and social change, and it follows four of those paths before turning to the new churches. Each path has a “Burned-Over connection”: a link back to Finney’s message and to the canal corridor where it spread.

Spiritualism: Knocks from the Other Side

Picture a cold farmhouse in Hydesville, a hamlet east of Rochester, on the night of March 31, 1848. Two girls, Maggie and Kate Fox, snap their fingers in the dark, and something knocks back. The sisters claimed the knocks came from the spirit of a murdered peddler, and that it could answer questions. Neighbors crowded in to hear. The girls were sent to Rochester, and the knocks followed them. On November 14, 1849, managed by their older sister Leah Fox Fish, they gave a paid demonstration at Corinthian Hall, Rochester’s largest hall. Soon they were holding séances, sittings to contact the dead, for paying customers in New York City, and “spirit circles” spread across the country. By 1852 Nathaniel Currier was selling a lithograph portrait of the three sisters.

Some of the sisters’ first believers were Rochester’s busiest reformers. Amy and Isaac Post were Hicksite Quakers and abolitionists whose home hosted Frederick Douglass; Amy would sign the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls. They accepted the rappings at once, and their reform friends became Spiritualism’s first core, which is why the movement was tied from the start to abolition and women’s rights. Forty years later, on October 21, 1888, Maggie Fox stood on the stage of New York’s Academy of Music and said the rappings had been a trick, made by cracking her toe joints; a year later she took the confession back. Historians generally accept the trick, but by then millions of Americans had found comfort in séances, especially after the Civil War’s deaths. The Burned-Over connection: revivals taught the District that anyone could reach God without a minister. Spiritualism went one step further: anyone, even two farm girls, could reach the dead.

The Oneida Community: Perfection on Earth

In September 1831, a twenty-year-old named John Humphrey Noyes walked into a protracted revival meeting in Putney, Vermont, and walked out converted; 1831 was remembered as “the year of revivals,” when Finney-style new measures spread into New England. Noyes went on to study for the ministry at Yale. On February 20, 1834, he announced that he no longer sinned, and the word ran through New Haven: “Noyes says he is perfect!” He lost his license to preach and answered, “I have taken away their license to sin, and they keep on sinning. So, though they have taken away my license to preach, I shall keep on preaching.”

Noyes gathered family and followers in Putney in the 1840s. When neighbors and the law turned against their sexual practices in 1847, the group moved to Oneida, New York, in 1848, where it grew to a few hundred people and built a large brick Mansion House. Members practiced complex marriage, in which every man was considered married to every woman and exclusive couples were discouraged, with the community, led by Noyes, controlling who paired with whom. In mutual criticism, a member sat silently while others listed his or her faults. All property was shared, and members worked in community businesses making animal traps, silk thread, and later silverware. The experiment had a dark side: Noyes held enormous power, and older members, often Noyes himself, introduced teenagers to sex, which we would recognize today as abuse. In 1879, facing outside pressure and possible charges, Noyes left for Canada and the community ended complex marriage. On January 1, 1881, it reorganized as a joint-stock company, Oneida Community, Limited, which became the silverware maker Oneida Ltd. The Burned-Over connection: Finney preached that people could choose to stop sinning. Noyes took him at his word: if perfection was possible now, a perfect community could live by new rules.

Temperance: The War on Drink

Walk into a Rochester workshop in the 1820s and you might see the master craftsman passing a jug of whiskey to his journeymen in the middle of the day. Drinking was everywhere. W. J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic (1979) estimates that around 1830 Americans aged fifteen and older drank about seven gallons of pure alcohol each per year, mostly as whiskey and hard cider, roughly three times today’s level. Evangelical ministers founded the American Temperance Society in Boston in 1826. It sent out lecturers and tracts and asked people to sign a pledge, a written promise to stop drinking. At first reformers targeted hard liquor; by the 1830s many demanded total abstinence. It worked: by 1845 consumption had fallen to under two gallons. Prints like Currier’s The Drunkard’s Progress (1846), which marched a young man step by step from “a glass with a friend” to poverty, crime, and the grave, were best-selling sermons in pictures.

Rochester shows how revival and temperance fit together. Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1978) argues that in the 1820s the old system in which journeymen lived and drank in their masters’ households broke down. Workers moved into separate neighborhoods, and employers lost direct control over their behavior. Finney’s revival offered masters and merchants a solution: converted men internalized the discipline of sobriety, punctuality, and self-control. Converted employers stopped drinking with their workers and began demanding sober, punctual labor, and temperance became a badge of the new middle class. The Burned-Over connection: Finney taught that sinners could choose to change, and drink was the sin everyone could see. The canal towns of upstate New York became one of temperance’s strongholds.

Women’s Rights: The Road to Seneca Falls

Women made up most of the converts in revival-era churches, and Finney’s new measures let them pray aloud in “promiscuous” (mixed men-and-women) meetings, one of the practices his critics attacked at the New Lebanon Convention of 1827. Speaking before men was a new and daring experience. Women also ran benevolent, moral reform, and antislavery societies, raised money, and carried antislavery petitions door to door. Those skills, keeping minutes, chairing meetings, writing resolutions, would all be used in 1848.

In 1840, at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the men in charge refused to seat women delegates, including Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was there on her honeymoon and was not a delegate, met Mott, and the two later recalled resolving to hold a convention for women’s rights. On July 19–20, 1848, they did, at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, before about three hundred people. Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence.

One hundred people signed it, 68 women and 32 men, including Frederick Douglass and Amy Post, the Fox sisters’ friend. Stanton’s own story shows how revivals shaped reformers even when they rebelled. As a student at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary around 1831, she sat through Finney’s preaching. “Fear of judgment seized my soul,” she later wrote. “Visions of the lost haunted my dreams.” Her family took her to Niagara Falls to recover, and she turned away from revival religion for good. The Burned-Over connection: Seneca Falls, on a canal linked to the Erie, lies in the heart of the District, and the women who met there in 1848 had learned to speak and organize in revival churches. Revival religion told women their souls mattered as much as men’s; Seneca Falls asked why they should not be equal before the law as well.

V. Come-Outers and New Religious Movements

Some believers decided the existing churches were too corrupt to fix, so they left. In the 1830s and 1840s, radicals practiced come-outerism, urging Christians to “come out” (the phrase echoes 2 Corinthians 6:17, “come out from among them”) of churches that tolerated sin, especially slavery, and to form purer, lay-led, perfectionist fellowships. Come-outers were often linked to radical reform: abolitionism, utopian communities, and non-resistance, the radical pacifist position associated with William Lloyd Garrison that Christians should refuse to use or support any force, even government force. Out of the same ferment came new religious movements. Some behaved like come-outers for a season; others founded entirely new churches. A useful memory tag for the three the lecture covers: Mormons are restoration, Shakers are separation, Millerites are expectation.

Mormonism: Restoration

Joseph Smith reported visions in the 1820s, and in 1830 he published the Book of Mormon in upstate New York and organized the church that became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It claimed to restore original Christianity, with new scripture and prophetic authority. Members gathered in their own communities, which provoked violent persecution that drove them to Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, where a mob killed Smith in 1844; Brigham Young led the main body to the Great Salt Lake in 1847. Mormonism was not a classic come-outer movement but a new church.

The Shakers: Separation

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, founded by Mother Ann Lee, who brought it from England to America in 1774, grew during the revivals, with its peak roughly 1800–1850. Shakers lived in celibate, communal villages that treated women and men as spiritual equals, and their ecstatic, shaking dance in worship gave them their name. They stood outside the mainstream denominations, functional come-outers, and are remembered for their simplicity, order, and fine craftsmanship. (The lecture introduces them with a short Canvas Studio video, which may require a Richland Canvas login.)

The Millerites: Expectation

William Miller (1782–1849), a Baptist farmer, calculated from biblical prophecy that Christ would return around 1843–44. Tens of thousands prepared, and many left their home churches in 1843–44, come-outer dynamics at their strongest. When October 22, 1844, passed without the Second Coming, they called it the Great Disappointment. Some regrouped and in 1863 organized the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which stressed prophecy, the Saturday Sabbath, and health reform.

Taken together, these movements show the democratization of religion at its most radical: if anyone could read the Bible and receive revelation, then anyone could found a church. Authority shifted from clerical elites to lay-led communities, religious innovation fed social and communal experiments, and a grassroots, populist style of faith spread nationwide.

VI. A Providential Worldview

Most antebellum Protestants believed that God actively governed history, rewarding and punishing nations as well as individuals. Nothing happened by accident: epidemics, fires, financial panics, harvests, and military victories were read as divine messages. During the cholera epidemic of 1832, many ministers called the disease a punishment for drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, or vice; when cholera returned in 1849, President Zachary Taylor proclaimed a national day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer for the first Friday in August. The idea that God had a special plan for the United States also fed expansionism. In 1845 an essay usually attributed to the editor John L. O’Sullivan spoke of “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence,” a belief that also served to justify taking land from Native nations and Mexico. And if history was God’s story, then fighting drink, slavery, or injustice became a sacred duty: reformers saw themselves as God’s instruments.

The consequence was that ordinary Americans believed they were actors in a cosmic story. That gave reform its urgency, and it also made compromise hard. When both sides of a conflict, such as the coming fight over slavery, believe God is on their side, the stakes feel absolute. A providential worldview could inspire humility, but it could also sanctify conquest.

VII. The Democratization of Religion

Having toured the revivals and their offshoots, the lecture names the pattern behind them. The democratization of religion is the process by which religious authority, practice, and interpretation shifted from elites to ordinary people. Historian Nathan Hatch made the idea famous in The Democratization of American Christianity (1989). Four changes moved power downward. Formal education was no longer required to preach. Emotional, plainspoken, passionate preaching beat learned theology: “heart religion” over “head religion.” Free will replaced Calvinist predestination. And with no state church, people “shopped” for congregations, and congregations often voted on their leaders, so churches had to compete for members almost like a marketplace. The winners spoke plainly, sang popular hymns, licensed lay preachers who were often poor, itinerant, and self-taught, and told ordinary people that anyone could testify and anyone could be converted. The losers were not irreligious; they were outcompeted. The religious marketplace was another product of the same democratic culture that produced the penny press.

New groups stepped into that space: lay men and women who testified and helped govern their churches, women who became exhorters (people who urged others to convert) and prayer leaders, and African Americans who built independent churches; the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church had roughly 20,000 members by mid-century. The next two stories show how far that democratization reached, and where it stopped.

Women: The Majority Without a Pulpit

Walk into almost any Protestant church in the 1830s and most of the people in the pews were women. Church records suggest women made up roughly 60 to 70 percent of members; they were more likely than men to convert and attend regularly, and they were frequently the first converts in a household. Mary P. Ryan’s Cradle of the Middle Class (1981), a study of Utica and Oneida County, found that women often converted first and then brought husbands and sons into the church. Why women? They were excluded from formal politics, and church offered a respected voice, community, and networks of friends. Moral reform also fit the idea that women were naturally more pious. For Black women, churches were also centers of mutual aid, education, and resistance to racism.

Women’s voice came through exhorting at revivals, leading prayer circles and maternal associations, founding and running benevolent societies, serving as missionaries abroad, and writing religious books and hymns. Black women were teachers, mutual-aid organizers, and church founders. (The Seneca Falls story above shows how these skills fed reform; this section stays inside the church.) The limit was the pulpit. Almost no denomination ordained women as ministers. The best-known exception came in 1853, when Antoinette Brown was ordained by a Congregational church in South Butler, New York. Phoebe Palmer, the influential Methodist holiness teacher, led famous Tuesday Meetings in New York and wrote widely, but she was never ordained. (The deck has been corrected on this point.)

Jarena Lee’s story shows a woman pushing against that limit. A free Black woman, she joined Richard Allen’s Bethel Church in Philadelphia after her conversion in 1804. A few years later, about 1809 by most accounts (her autobiography gives no exact year, and some date it as late as 1811), she felt called to preach and asked Allen for permission. He refused: Methodist rules made no provision for women preachers, though women could hold prayer meetings and exhort. About eight years later, traditionally dated 1819, the visiting preacher at Bethel seemed to lose his way in his sermon. Lee sprang to her feet and exhorted the congregation on his text. Allen, who was there, rose and told the church that she had been called to preach as surely as any of the men, and he supported her work as a traveling preacher. She went on to travel thousands of miles. Her autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1836, expanded 1849), is one of the earliest published autobiographies by an African American woman.

Religion both empowered and limited women. It gave them influence and organizing experience, which many later used in abolition and women’s rights. It also reinforced the idea that women’s proper sphere was moral and spiritual, not political, a tension Lecture 3 takes up in the domestic ideal.

Richard Allen Walks Out

Jarena Lee preached because Richard Allen finally said yes. So why did Allen have a church of his own to say yes in? Allen (1760–1831) was born enslaved, bought his freedom, and became a Methodist preacher in Philadelphia. During a Sunday service at St. George’s Methodist Church, a white trustee tried to pull Absalom Jones up from his knees in the middle of prayer, because Black worshippers had knelt in a section of the new gallery that whites wanted for themselves. When the prayer ended, the Black members walked out together.

The date of the walkout is debated. Allen’s memoir implies 1787, and that date is still often repeated. But historians have pointed out that St. George’s gallery was not built until about 1792, so many now place the walkout around 1792. Historians debate the year, not that it happened. Allen founded Bethel Church in 1794, and in 1816 Bethel and other Black Methodist congregations formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States, with Allen as its first bishop. The AME Zion Church followed in New York in 1821, and Black Baptist churches grew in both North and South, though in the South many had to operate under white supervision.

Black Christians built independent churches because of racism and segregation in white churches, a desire for self-governance and cultural expression, and the need for centers of community life. Those churches became schools, mutual-aid societies, training grounds for Black leaders, and political, social, and economic hubs; Black preachers became community leaders, and religion was tied to resistance and liberation. That last point could be deadly. Denmark Vesey, a free Black carpenter in Charleston, South Carolina, belonged to the city’s AME congregation, founded around 1817–18. In 1822 authorities uncovered what they said was his plan for a slave uprising. Vesey and more than thirty others were executed, and white Charlestonians, who saw the church as a breeding ground for rebellion, burned its building. Its members worshipped in secret until they could rebuild after the Civil War; today the congregation is Mother Emanuel AME.

In the South, enslaved people built what Albert J. Raboteau, in Slave Religion (1978), called the “invisible institution”: secret worship in brush arbors and cabins, where enslaved Christians preached a God of deliverance rather than the obedience their enslavers’ ministers taught. (Chapter 9’s background essay on slave religion develops this story.) Revival culture, with its emphasis on direct experience of the Spirit, gave Black preachers and exhorters authority that no slaveholder had granted. Black churches were the most important institutions free Black Americans controlled, and their story shows democratization at its most powerful: people denied equal citizenship used religion to claim dignity, leadership, and a public voice.

VIII. From Revival to Reform

What the Awakening Changed

The lecture sums up four lasting effects. The Awakening shattered religious complacency, as formal, established churches lost ground to emotional, competitive denominations. It democratized faith, passing spiritual authority from educated clergy to ordinary believers in the same years that Jacksonian politics expanded the vote for white men. It birthed new, uniquely American religious movements. And it instilled a providential worldview that shaped Manifest Destiny and, later, how both sides understood the Civil War. Its effects reached far beyond the churches, into culture, politics, and social reform for generations.

From Saving Souls to Saving Society

The lecture’s core idea is that revival faith created moral energy, and the emerging northern middle class, especially middle-class women, turned that energy into durable institutions. It happened in three stages. First came the religious spark. Perfectionism held that people, and society, could become free of sin. Postmillennialism taught that Christians must build a righteous world before Christ’s thousand-year reign, which turned waiting into working. Drawing on the eighteenth-century theologian Samuel Hopkins, many embraced disinterested benevolence: true faith showed itself in selfless action for others. The conversion ethic held that a changed heart must produce visible fruits. (The deck originally called this idea the “social gospel,” a term that properly belongs to a movement of the 1880s–1910s; it has been corrected.)

Second, moral energy moved from personal piety to public duty. If individuals could choose righteousness, communities could choose to confront “social sins” such as drink, slavery, and cruelty. Temperance, abolition, women’s rights, and prison and school reform all drew on this energy, and the revival values of self-improvement, moral discipline, and individual agency became the cultural markers of the northern middle class. Abolitionism drew on the same moral language: William Lloyd Garrison began The Liberator in 1831, and the American Anti-Slavery Society formed in 1833, defining slavery as a sin requiring immediate repentance.

Third, the middle class institutionalized that energy. Print, literacy, and steady incomes funded a dense network of voluntary societies that critics and later historians called the Benevolent Empire: the American Bible Society (1816), the American Sunday School Union (1824), the American Tract Society (1825), the American Temperance Society (1826), and many more, with dues, bylaws, boards, and annual reports. They borrowed the tools of Lecture 1’s print revolution, flooding the country with Bibles, tracts, and pledges. Middle-class women did much of the work through mothers’ societies, moral reform associations, and female auxiliaries, organizing visits, fundraising, and relief. Their respectable image gave reform legitimacy and staying power. In the lecture’s words, the revival provided the spark, and class and gender supplied the structure; reform was not a secular departure from revivalism but its fulfillment.

Three Readings of Reform

Historians disagree about what this partnership meant. Gordon S. Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) and Empire of Liberty (2009), reads the period as a democratic explosion. The Revolution’s attack on hierarchy freed ordinary people to reject inherited authority in religion as in politics, and revival churches and voluntary societies were schools of self-government in which citizens learned to organize, persuade, and act. Johnson, as the temperance section showed, reads reform as middle-class social control, teaching workers sobriety and punctuality. Gertrude Himmelfarb, in The De-Moralization of Society (1995), offers a third view drawn mostly from Victorian Britain: the virtues reformers promoted, such as sobriety, thrift, and self-discipline, genuinely improved the lives of many poor families, and working people often embraced them for their own reasons. Ryan adds that revival was a family strategy, led by women, as much as a class strategy.

The readings need not cancel out. Johnson explains why employers embraced revival; Wood explains why millions of ordinary people did so too. Students should test each interpretation against the evidence. Temperance could be coercive and condescending, and it could also protect wives and children from drunken violence. Both things were true.

Closing Synthesis

The Second Great Awakening democratized religious authority. Camp meetings and circuit riders made faith a matter of personal choice and feeling. Finney turned revival into a method and brought it to the canal towns of the market revolution, preaching that people could choose salvation and grow toward perfection. In the Burned-Over District that one idea took many paths: the Fox sisters’ séances, Noyes’s perfect community at Oneida, the temperance pledge, and the Declaration of Sentiments. Come-outers left their churches, and Mormons, Shakers, and Millerites built new ones. Women, the majority in the pews, claimed a voice but rarely a pulpit, and Black Christians like Richard Allen and Jarena Lee built churches where they could lead. Revival’s moral energy flowed into the Benevolent Empire and the great reform movements.

Historians still argue over what it all meant. Wood sees democratic citizens in the making; Johnson sees a middle class disciplining its workers; Himmelfarb sees virtues that helped the poor; Ryan sees women leading their families into the churches. The strongest answer holds these views together. Revival expanded who could speak, while reformers also tried to control how others lived. Lecture 3 follows that moral energy into the homes, workplaces, and leisure of the Northern middle class, and Lecture 4 turns from the church and the parlor to the theater, the minstrel stage, the prize ring, and Barnum’s museum, places where many of the same Americans went to be entertained and where reformers feared their moral project was being undone.

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989). The essential account of how popular preachers and upstart denominations overthrew the authority of the learned clergy.

Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District (1950). The classic regional study of upstate New York’s religious enthusiasm.

Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (1978). A short, influential case study linking Finney’s revival to class relations and temperance in a canal boomtown.

Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (1989). Shows how Spiritualism and women’s rights grew up together, starting with the Posts’ circle in Rochester.

Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (1993). A readable history of Noyes and Oneida, including the community’s dark side.

W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1979). The source of the drinking statistics and of the argument that heavy drinking reflected the anxieties of a fast-changing society.

Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (2004). Places Seneca Falls in the reform and religious networks of upstate New York.

Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009). Broad synthesis that reads revival and voluntary association as part of the Revolution’s democratic legacy.

Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (1981). Shows women and families at the center of revival and middle-class formation.

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978). Foundational study of enslaved people’s Christianity.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society (1995). A conservative defense of Victorian virtues; best read alongside Johnson as a deliberate counterpoint.

Primary sources: Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835); Jarena Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1836); the Declaration of Sentiments (1848); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1898). (Sources on domesticity and women’s work now appear with the Lecture 3 essay.)