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Led by James McGready, Timothy Dwight, Asahel Nettleton, and Charles Finney, the Second Great Awakening (1800–40) had a significant impact on American society. Both prominent revivalists and ordinary pastors painted vivid pictures of heavenly life, especially stressing the saints’ relationship with God, celestial worship, and progress in knowledge, love, and power. Much more than did subsequent generations, they warned their readers and listeners of the suffering that awaited them in hell if they refused to repent of their sins and accept Jesus as their savior and Lord. During the revolutionary, early national, and antebellum periods, numerous deists, free thinkers, and Unitarians attacked conventional Christian understandings of God, the Bible, the means of salvation, and the nature of heaven. Meanwhile, Universalists repudiated the orthodox view that individuals had to receive Jesus as their redeemer to gain entry to heaven.

While America’s founders sought to create a nation of religious freedom, not a Christian nation, Christians in the early nineteenth century effectively Christianized the American Republic through the Second Great Awakening. Over the course of American history, many whites have accepted the claim that America is a Christian nation. Blacks from an early date, however, have argued that Christian America is a hollow concept, informed by assumptions of white supremacy. In the nineteenth century, David Walker ridiculed the notion of Christian America, while Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells claimed that the idea of Christian America was a cover for horrendous crimes against blacks. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, blacks as disparate as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Cone unmasked the myth of a Christian America. By the twenty-first century, the collapse of Christian dominance in the United States could be traced, at least in part, to the complicity of white American Christians in the myth of White Supremacy. Many white Christians responded by attempting to restore a lost golden age, ignoring their complicity in the myth of White Supremacy that had helped bring on America’s fourth time of trial.

Drawing from empirical research on the psychology and sociology of religion and from historical analyses of American religious life, this chapter describes how religiosity among Americans is positively associated with physical health, psychological well-being, and generativity. Case studies of moral exemplars and empirical research on the life narrative and generativity, strongly suggest that highly generative American adults often draw upon religious traditions to articulate their redemptive stories of self. The chapter also considers how Americans have reacted to the narrative challenge of reconciling within their own redemptive life stories their devout religious sentiments on the one hand, and the drive for money and material gain on the other.

The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century constituted a transitional period for orthodox Congregationalists, as they moved from their eighteenth‐century establishmentarianism toward a new, evangelical social ideology. Despite what appeared to them as the baleful state of politics, standing‐order ministers maintained their commitment to engaging society through both their providential interpretations and pronouncements about a righteous social order. The experience of religious revivals during the Second Great Awakening and news of missionary advances fostered renewed optimism and a new conception of the church's impact on society. Congregational ministers of an evangelical bent now portrayed the church as the key institution that would spread godliness and counteract social disorder, and they created new missionary and moral reform societies to put this vision into effect, thereby creatively substituting for their earlier reliance on the religious establishment and civil magistracy. As a microcosm of changes taking place throughout southern New England, the chapter examines events in Worcester County, Massachusetts, where Congregational ministers such as the Rev. Joseph Goffe of the North Parish of Sutton led grassroots religious revivals and founded new local organizations for evangelization and public morality.

The Edwardsians were not only thinkers but doers; speculative theologians, but like their eponymous leader, revivalists. This was particularly evident among the third generation of Edwardsians, a postrevolutionary cohort whose ministry extended from 1790 to the 1820s. Among the Edwardsian revivalists of the Second Great Awakening in New England, Edward Dorr Griffin and Asahel Nettleton excelled at the craft. Griffin, the “prince of preachers,” who held several pastorates and then presided over Williams College, wielded the sermonic rhetorical conventions of his day with “tenderness and tears” to lead sinners to Christ. As an itinerant revivalist who specialized in personal small group “conference meetings,” Nettleton far exceeded Griffin’s success. In the words of Francis Wayland, “I suppose no minister of his time was the means of so many conversions.” This chapter examines the theology and preaching of the New Divinity revivalists of the Second Great Awakening.

The introduction explains the book's historical significance in the context of recent scholarship on women's history, education, and the Second Great Awakening. Susan Nye Hutchison's story illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions between published rhetoric and actual experience. She lived through a period of rhetorical backlash against women's work and activism, yet she succeeded in establishing and running more than one incorporated academy in the South. Her experience provides a case study of the way one woman accommodated to social mores in some respects but also resisted cultural constraints. The introduction also explains the nature of her journals, which provide an important grassroots perspective on the role of female teachers in the Second Great Awakening. Finally, the introduction presents an overview of the organization of the book.

Second Great Awakening preachers and commentators prompted believers to reconceptualize the meaning of their everyday lives, but researchers know little about how they actually altered their material worlds in order to affirm and reflect their faith. After reviewing the ways that historians have approached lived religion as it relates to the Second Great Awakening, this chapter explores how and why historical archaeologists are uniquely positioned to make significant contributions to this research domain. It reviews the ways that past archaeologists have already begun to do so and describes the areas that require further exploration. The value of a dialectical approach to this research (with its focus on lived experience, social relations, and the process of abstraction that takes place when interpreting material and textual sources) is explained.

A major part of Universalism’s appeal through the first half of the nineteenth century was its proponents’ reputation for contentiousness. The movement had always attracted more than its share of self-taught religious critics, and this was never more the case than during the Second Great Awakening, when the opportunities for denouncing irrationality and superstition seemed endless. However, as the revivals subsided, the targets for popular rationalism became less obvious, and Universalist energies were forced to seek new outlets. Without their traditional enemies, many Universalists began to waver in their sense of direction, and the denomination became subject to powerful centrifugal tendencies. Among the major new preoccupations of Universalists in this period were the popular “spiritual sciences” of phrenology, mesmerism, and spiritualism, and the heirs of John Murray and Hosea Ballou proved remarkably receptive to these and related teachings, which flowered in the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.

Ultimately, in politics as well as in religion, Bentley's projects came to little. For while he had led the Republicans to success, that very success then led them to abandon him. The party would grow ever larger and more influential, but the tenor of the party changed too, away from the rationalist, libertarian egalitarianism that Bentley wanted it to have. Meanwhile, his efforts to convert Americans to Unitarian Christian naturalism came to even less. His church actually shrank and was the only congregation in Salem to do so, for it was the age of the Second Great Awakening, and Bentley could only stand by and watch as many more Americans moved toward an evangelical, experientialist version of Christianity rather toward his side. This chapter offers some explanations for these failures, in the limited appeal of his desires for a free America, compared to those of most Americans, and the failure of his Christian naturalism to meet the spiritual, communal, and emotional needs of those who looked to their Christianity to provide more than just a rationally consistent explanation of the world.

This chapter discusses what is often referred to as “the Second Great Awakening,” in which popular opinion was galvanized around the belief that moral resolve alone is sufficient to bring about salvation and the regeneration of society. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants confidently set about the task of constructing an empire that they believed would in and of itself inaugurate the millennium. This view, known as post-millennialism, touts the power of concerted human effort to perfect the earth in expectation of—and prior to—Christ's final return. Those in the consensus culture knew full well what agencies of the Antichrist still stood in their way: non-Protestants, immigrants, intemperance, the city, and—at least to Northerners—the institution of slavery. Yet new religious voices were championing the pre-millennial form of apocalyptic thought, in which Christ was expected to return to earth in order to defeat the Antichrist personally. The Mormons and Millerites (later to emerge as the Seventh-Day Adventists) appeared on the American religious scene as forerunners of the revival of pre-millennial and apocalyptic understandings of the Antichrist tradition.

What gave Universalists identity as a group in the early decades of the nineteenth century was primarily their acceptance of a single controversial doctrine. Beyond this, Universalists were united mostly by a sense of what they opposed: all that appeared unreasonable, superstitious, arbitrary, and oppressive in traditional and prevailing religious teachings. Precisely because its central teaching was so controversial, Universalism attracted members who were not afraid of disputation; indeed, their rationalist streak made many Universalists positively eager for debate about religious questions. During the ferment of the Second Great Awakening, this aspect of Universalist identity came to the fore; the period between 1820 and 1840, when Universalists were most openly and consistently engaged in battle with other religious groups (although they were less disturbed by Catholic expansion than by the course of American Protestantism), was also the period of the denomination’s most rapid growth and greatest overall vitality. However, when the intense controversy of that era began to ebb, Universalists showed growing confusion about the proper direction of their movement.

Chapter 1 investigates the socioeconomic factors that drew Susan Nye to leave her parents' farm in rural New York and teach in the South. This chapter establishes her personal and ideological connections with the Litchfield Female Academy in Connecticut and the revival movements of the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840). During this era, women’s opportunities for work and meaningful activity outside the home expanded. Her journal entries indicate that Susan Nye initially travelled south to teach in Raleigh Academy, not only for economic reasons, but also from a sense of mission. This chapter argues that new social networks established through churches and schools facilitated the migration of young single women across vast geographic distances.

The book's conclusion situates Susan Nye Hutchison's experience in larger context, exploring the educational legacies of the Second Great Awakening and identifying some of the opportunities and constraints female educators encountered during her lifetime. Women educators like Hutchison played a significant role in shaping Americans’ views of faith, social responsibility, slavery and emancipation before the Civil War. The divisions in the major Protestant churches brought the Second Great Awakening to a close, but that era left a number of important legacies in American Society. The churches created meaningful social and community networks that functioned somewhat like kinship groups, creating bonds among people separated by enormous distances. This bonding and bridging mobilized people and financial capital across different localities for a wide range of reform projects, and that reform impulse—in a more secular guise—continued into the progressive era.

Prior to the late eighteenth century, only a few maritime memorials featured any form of religious symbolism or inscription. The frequency of memorials with religious themes began to increase around the turn of the 1800s and soared dramatically in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The percentage remained substantial until the end of the Age of Sail. This chapter explores the nature of the nineteenth-century maritime religious boom and places it within its historical context. The boom was part of a larger religious movement that took place in both British and American society. The ideas and motifs found on maritime memorials were directly related to religious trends that took place in both nations beginning in the late eighteenth century. However, rather than mimicking prevalent religious sentiments and forms around them, maritime culture selected which elements of the religious revitalization movement to emphasize in their memorials, thereby exercising cultural agency. The group chose text and emblems that, because they employed maritime symbolism, held deep meaning for the group specifically. Like memorials for the missing, faith was another way by which maritime culture attempted to cope with the deadly nature of seafaring life.

Chapter 2 analyzes the influences that shaped education reform in Raleigh, from 1799—when the English émigré Joseph Gales arrived as printer of the Raleigh Register—to 1823, when Susan Nye left North Carolina to establish an independent female school in Georgia. During this period, new ideas about schooling spread across the Atlantic through networks of Enlightenment philosophers, religious groups and teaching orders, missionaries, politicians, social commentators, evangelical reformers, pamphlet writers, and teachers like Susan Nye. By analyzing Susan Nye’s academic responsibilities in Raleigh Academy, her influence on curriculum and instruction in the female department, her lay ministry in the community, and her social obligations, this chapter illuminates the work of evangelical teachers during the early decades of the Second Great Awakening.