4.10 The Second Great Awakening

Earlier Puritan and Calvinist teaching stressed predestination, the belief that God had already decided who would be saved. Second Great Awakening preachers taught instead that individuals had free will: anyone could choose to accept God, repent and be saved. This was a hopeful, democratic message that fit a society where ordinary white men were gaining political power.

Many believers also held that Christians could perfect society and prepare the world for Christ's return. That idea turned personal faith into a push for social reform (4.11).

On the frontier, revivals often took the form of camp meetings, outdoor gatherings that lasted several days. The meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801 drew many thousands of people, who sang, prayed and sometimes shook, shouted or fainted with emotion.

Charles Grandison Finney, a former lawyer, became the most famous revivalist. He used 'new measures' such as the 'anxious bench', where people unsure of their salvation sat in front to be prayed over, and held meetings night after night. His revivals in Rochester, New York, in 1830–1831 converted many middle-class residents, who then supported temperance and other reforms.

Methodist circuit riders, ministers who traveled on horseback from one community to the next, brought religion to scattered frontier settlements. Methodists and Baptists, with their emotional preaching and less formally educated ministers, grew from small sects into the nation's largest Protestant churches by the mid-1800s.

Western New York along the Erie Canal saw so many revivals that it was called the 'burned-over district', as if the fires of religion had passed over it again and again. The rapid economic and social changes brought by the canal may have made people especially open to new religious ideas.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) was founded there by Joseph Smith in 1830. Mormons faced hostility for their beliefs and, later, for the practice of polygamy. They moved to Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, where a mob killed Smith in 1844. Under Brigham Young, they migrated to the Great Salt Lake valley in 1847.

Other groups included the Millerites, who predicted Christ's return in 1843–1844, and the Shakers, a celibate group that lived in communal villages.

• Women made up a majority of converts in many places and led church charities and reform societies, gaining experience in organizing and public speaking.
• African Americans joined in large numbers. Many enslaved people embraced Christianity and shaped it to their own needs, and free Black Americans built independent churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church (4.12).
• The revivals strengthened reform movements, including temperance, abolition, education and prison reform.
• Religion became more democratic and competitive, with many denominations competing for members instead of one established church.