The Second Great Awakening In Connecticut: Critique of the Traditional Interpretation

1980 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Shiels
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Yale College

As a doddering old man in 1850, Lyman Beecher told his children about the religious conditions at Yale College fifty-five years earlier. His words have become familiar to students of American religious history. The school had been “in a most ungodly state” when he entered as a student in 1795, he recalled. Its president, Ezra Stiles, had been ineffective as a pastor. Immorality and religious skepticism had been rife. Then Timothy Dwight replaced Stiles as president, and religion revived. Dwight's students embraced evangelical Christianity and followed him into battle against rationalists who challenged orthodoxy and politicians who wanted to separate church and state. Dwight transformed religious life at the college and, together with his students, rejuvenated the congregational churches of New England.

The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Birdsall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Order ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

Transatlantic Puritanism and American Singularities

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-122
Author(s):  
DAVID D. HALL
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
European Studies ◽  
American Book

The taunting question posed in the 1820s by the English critic Sidney Smith, ‘Who reads an American book?’, has long since tumbled into the dustbin of literary history. Yet it continues to reverberate in how Americanists describe the workings of Puritanism in their own country, its presence felt in two respects. One of these is resentment at the indifference to their own work of historians of the Puritan movement in Britain. Another is the assumption among Americanists that the Puritanism of the colonists who arrived in the early seventeenth century was singular in certain respects, be it their sense of ‘errand’, their modifications of Reformed orthodoxy, or perhaps their daring experiment with a congregation-centred polity, the ‘New England Way’. Whenever historians turn to the larger project of Church and State in colonial and modern America, assertions of singularity dominate the telling of our religious history. Do these endeavours warrant returning to Sidney Smith's question and rephrasing it to ask whether Americanists are making the most of European studies of Reformed theology, Puritanism in Britain, and conformity or dissent?

Educating the Heathen: the Foreign Mission School Controversy and American Ideals

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Andrew
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Mission School ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Post War

“ Never in all past ages did a prospect so glorious rise to the view of any nation, as that which is disclosed to our own.” So wrote a reviewer in the years following the War of 1812, and he echoed the millennial feelings of his countrymen. Awash in a surge of post-war nationalism, and buffeted by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, Americans struck out in search of themselves, their culture, and their future. Within a generation, the same reviewer proclaimed, “ fifty or sixty millions of men will have poured themselves over our country, carrying civilization and the arts to the extreme corner.”This spirit energized people in all sections, and in the Northeast missionary activity grew to significant proportions. Numerous state missionary societies formed, and by 1812 a larger body — the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) — had been organized to carry this spirit across the country and throughout the world. Board organizers had as their vision a world transformed, but one transformed along the lines of an idealized New England community. Religion would guide men's lives, and a spirit of morality would infuse the operations of government. They saw before them the dawning of a new age.

The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714–1796)

1992 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American People ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
Biographical Dictionary ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Spiritual Pilgrimage

Sarah Osborn does not appear in the definitive biographical dictionary, Notable American Women. She is not in the pages of Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People, nor of any more recent standard American religious history text. She failed to catch the attention of the editors and authors of the recent Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience or Dictionary of Christianity in America. The great New Divinity pastor-theologian Samuel Hopkins in some measure owed his career to Sarah Osborn, but studies of him mention her only in passing or not at all. Scholars have learned of her through the work of Mary Beth Norton and in the documentary history, Women and Religion in America, but the Sarah Osborn most often mentioned in connection with early New England is the one accused as a witch at Salem who died in Boston prison 10 May 1692.

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.

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.

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