“All the Baptists on the Continent”

2020 ◽  
pp. 299-316
Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
The South ◽  
American Baptist ◽  
Early American

Oliver Hart longed to see one more revival in his final years, but he died in 1795, just before the Second Great Awakening. The Baptist movement in America had been dramatically transformed during his lifetime, both in numbers and in cultural respectability. Twenty years after Hart’s death, “all the Baptists on the continent” would unite to support the foreign missionaries Ann and Adoniram Judson, thus birthing the first nationwide Baptist denomination and fulfilling a long-held desire of Hart’s. Fittingly, it was Hart’s successor at Charleston, Richard Furman, who would serve as the new denomination’s first president. Furman would also build on Hart’s lifework by overseeing the expansion of Baptist institutional life in the South during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Ultimately Hart’s dream of a united Baptist America was shattered over the issue of slavery, with the South’s Baptists clinging to his earlier position on slavery, and Northern Baptists following his later position. This chapter closes with a reflection on Hart’s enduring legacy as an early American Baptist and evangelical leader.

The Welsh Evangelical Community and ‘Finney's Revival’

1978 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Carwardine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
High Pressure ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Public Commitment ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
Spiritual State

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in American Calvinist churches of a new brand of religious revivalism. Energetic evangelicals successfully challenged the authority of a Calvinist theology which had seemed to emphasise the exclusiveness of the elect, and man's helplessness and inability to act in securing his own conversion. These evangelicals adopted a revivalism which, in contrast, reminded man of his responsibility and power, and which experimented with means to win converts that conservative evangelicals thought an affront to the operations of the Holy Spirit. The ‘new measures’, as they were called, included more direct preaching, often by revivalists who itinerated solely to stir churches and win converts, the ‘protracting’ of services over several days or weeks, and the ‘anxious seat’—the use of a special pew at the front of the congregation where those concerned for their spiritual state could go to be exhorted and prayed for, and where a public commitment might be expected. These measures—and the ‘New Divinity’ which gave them theological justification—became increasingly widespread during the 1820s and 1830s, the climax of the ‘Second Great Awakening’. In large part the impetus for change had come from the rapidly-growing Methodists, Arminian in theology and determined exponents of a high-pressure revivalism; but within the Calvinist churches the single most influential agent of change was the ‘high priest’ of revivalism, Charles Grandison Finney.

scholarly journals "He that Hath an Ear to Hear": Deaf America and the Second Great Awakening

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Altschuler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
The Relationship

<p>This essay explores the American Deaf community as a revealing limit-case for constructions of nineteenth-century national identity — specifically, how the religious boom during the Second Great Awakening rhetorically, structurally, and conceptually clashed with the Deaf community it spawned. The argument has three parts. The first part is a prehistory that explores the relationship between early nineteenth-century evangelism and construction of the first American Deaf community. The second part probes the hearing-based rhetoric and practice of evangelical preachers and the problems that deaf people the posed to emerging Protestant-American identity. The last section focuses on the actual battleground — language — arguing that oralism/manualism conflicts grew impassioned because they both located issues that deaf people raised with regard to oral transmission and became a lightning rod for less articulable threats to national unity. Finally, I suggest that many significant contributions Deaf studies has to offer American history and historiography have yet to be explored.</p>

The Burned-Over District Reconsidered: A Portent of Evolving Religious Pluralism in the United States

1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda K. Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Charles Finney

The hell’s-fire revivalism of western New York, christened the Burned-Over District by nineteenth-century contemporaries, was a colorful and important chapter in the Second Great Awakening. The main characters—Joseph Smith, the Fox sisters, Charles Finney, and the like—led a religious rejuvenation that presumably reorganized spiritual life in the Finger Lakes vicinity between 1820 and 1850.

Mennonites, Revivalism, Modernity—1683–1850

1979 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 398-415
Author(s):  
Theron F. Schlabach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
American Life ◽  
Organizing Process

In his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter portrayed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalism in America as part of a “revolt against modernity.” Others, however, have suggested the opposite. For instance, Timothy Smith in his Revivalism and Social Reform saw revivalism as fundamental to much nineteenth-century American benevolence, a progenitor of the very social gospel that Hofstadter associated with modernity. And Donald G. Mathews saw in the Second Great Awakening of 1780 to 1830 an “organizing process” that fostered institutional structuring, mobilization of people for action, and their nationalization—ingredients central to theories of modernization, although Mathews himself did not use the term.1

The Men of the Fifties

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-90
Keyword(s):  
Second Generation ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
The South ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
The North ◽  
Missionary Movement

This lecture looks at a second generation of exiles that left the South in the 1850s. Unlike the dissenters of the 1830s, who were influenced by the evangelical impulses of the Second Great Awakening, these exiles were motivated by sectional politics. Heightened tension over the expansion of slavery westward, the constitutionality of personal liberty laws, and the fate of fugitive slaves hardened divisions between the North and the South. Woodward argued in this lecture that abolitionism was no longer primarily a missionary movement to save the souls of slave owners from sin by bringing salvation through repentance. Hatred of the sin of slaveholding was transferred to hatred of the enslavers and their region. The dissenters of the Fifties exemplified this shift. Their outspoken condemnation of institutionalized slavery drew fire from their compatriots, forcing them to leave the region. With the notable exception of Moncure Daniel Conway, these dissenters typically came from more modest means rather than from the southern elite. These exiles included Hinton Rowan Helper, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, Daniel Reaves Goodloe, and John Gregg Fee.

Revivalism, Historians, and Lived Religion in the Eastern Canada-United States Borderlands

2008 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Hannah Lane
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Eastern Canada ◽  
Human Effort

Historians of evangelicalism in Canada and the United States have long debated the timing and nature of changes in revivalism in the northeast during the nineteenth century and the vocabulary that best describes these changes. Calvinist and Arminian theologies provided two approaches to this history: revivalism and ‘declension’ as widespread but cyclical, and wholly dependent on God; or revivalism as a dispersed but continual force, sustained also by human effort. The former framework has informed studies of Baptists and Congregationalists, and the latter, studies of Methodists, whose history did not fit common periodizations of the Second Great Awakening.

Jonathan Edward's Most Popular Work: “The Life of David Brainerd” and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture

1985 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Conforti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Student Leaders ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
New Haven ◽  
College Administration ◽  
First Great Awakening ◽  
Early American ◽  
Evangelical Culture ◽  
Popular Work

When students of early American religion remember David Brainerd, if they remember him at all, it is usually in the context of the First Great Awakening. Born in Haddam, Connecticut in 1718, Brainerd enrolled at Yale in 1739, shortly after he had experienced conversion. By his sophomore year, when New Haven was aflame with the religious fervor that spread like a brush fire through New England, Brainerd was recognized as one of the “New Light” student leaders at Yale. For this reason, he was among the first undergraduates to be disciplined by the college administration as part of an effort to contain religious enthusiasm. Rector Thomas Clap expelled Brainerd in 1742 for remarking that tutor Chauncy Whittelsey had no more grace than a chair and for attending a meeting of Separate Congregationalists in defiance of college rules.

Death, Friendship, and Female Identity During New England's Second Great Awakening

1987 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-387
Author(s):  
Irene Quenzler Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spiritual Culture ◽  
Rational Capacity

The memoirs of pious Christians, frequently edited by family members or intimate friends and carefully based on their extant papers, proliferated in the first half of the nineteenth century. These lives document the legacy of the Didactic Enlightenment of the previous century in their preoccupation with death and inclusive friendship, their refusal to draw sharp boundaries between the public and the private, the spiritual and the temporal and in their appreciation for the rational capacity of women. This study focuses on the life of Mary Hawes Van Lennep (1821–1844), missionary wife to Turkey, as traced by her mother, wife of the prominent Hartford, Connecticut preacher, Rev. Joel Hawes. It argues that friendship, as a moral and spiritual culture of bonding and separation, disciplined parents, children and friends alike and has particular significance for female identity formation. It also concludes that these evangelical memoirs are an important source for understanding a particular historical effort to live by a difficult form of affectivity that linked individuals to family and the wider community in a time when historical forces tended to promote the opposite.

Presbyterians and Ethics

2019 ◽  
pp. 525-537
Author(s):  
Mark Douglas
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

The history of ethics in the Presbyterian Church has been shaped by the theological commitments of Reformed theology, the church’s ecumenical and interreligious encounters, its interactions with the wider cultures in which it functions, and its global scope. Consequently, Presbyterian ethics have become increasingly diverse, culturally diffused, ecumenically directed, and frequently divisive. That said, its history can helpfully be divided into three lengthy periods. In the first (roughly from the church’s origins in 1559 to the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century), theology, ethics, and politics are so interwound that distinguishing one from the others is difficult. In the second (roughly from the Second Great Awakening to the end of World War II), moral concerns emerge as forces that drive the church’s theology and polity. And in the third (for which proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 might be a heuristically helpful starting point), ethics increasingly functions in ways that are only loosely tethered to either Reformed theology or polity. The strength of the church’s social witness, the consistency of its global engagements, and the failings of its internecine strife are all evident during its five-hundred-year history.

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