Chapter 8, Section 1Religion Sparks Reform

How did religion shape social and political reforms in the years 1800-1850?

• CHAPTER 8, SECTION 1

• The spirit of optimism and reform affected nearly all areas of American life and culture, including education, the role of women and the family, and literature and the arts.

Second Great Awakening1790-1830’s

Impact of the American Revolution on Religion

Rejected: Predetermination of Calvinists and Puritans

Embraced: Democratic and Individualistic Ideals of the Revolution.

RESULT: Individuals may reform themselves to achieve salvation and may reform society.

Second Great Awakening

Revivals were the means by which the Second Great Awakening Spread.

Revivals were the site of impassioned preaching, usually in tents or halls, to awaken faith and spark conversion.

http://www.gprep.org/~sjochs/reform-revival.jpg

Revivalism and Class

Revivals are:

• More common on frontier, South and West

• Less common among elites

• Creates more democratic churches, i.e. Methodists, Baptists, Adventists, etc.

• “Canary” for societal attitudes toward slavery

Churches Split Parties Split Union Splits

Charles G. Finney 1792-1875

http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/images/CharlesGrandisonFinney.html

• Most famous preacher of the period. • Urged “Christian perfectionism”• Worked in Rochester, NY 1830-31, AKA “burned over district”

Counter-Reaction to the 2nd Great Awakening

Unitarianism: Emphasizes use of reason and conscience, not emotion, as means to reform and conversion.

Urges members to reform society.

Leader: William Ellison Channing

Transcendentalists (1830’s)

TRUTH IS NOT OBJECTIVE ALONE –DISCOVERED BY “INNER LIGHT”

Individualism, Self-reliance, Self-Discipline

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist

• Henry David Thoreau– Walden– Civil Disobedience

• Walt Whitman– Leaves of Grass

Transcendentalism

A Philosophical and Literary MovementEmphasizes: simple life, truth found in nature,

imagination and artIdeals: individualism, freedom, self-reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson: founder and leader

Henry David Thoreau: ReformerWrote Walden and Civil Disobedience,

Later inspires Ghandi, Martin Luther King, others

Civil DisobedienceA minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

African American Churches• Bethel African Church

founded by Richard Allen in Philadelphia.

• Evolves into the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

• Site for education, community, and political organization.

• Calls for reform and abolition.

School and Prison Reform

Jacksonian Democracy and Growth on Frontier spurs expansion of public schools.

Horace Mann – establishes and reforms public schools system in Massachusetts. Model for most of US.

Dorothea Dix – Reforms prisons & asylums Reformed care of mentally ill in South 1845-1852

Alexis De Tocqueville -1831, criticizes US prisons, spurs reforms. Goal of prison changes: Reform, not Punish.

Religious and Utopian Communities, 1800-1845

• Brook Farm – Founded 1841 to “prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons.”Destroyed by fire in 1845.

• Religious motives dominated the founding of Shaker and Mormon communities.

• Ideas of Robert Owen & Frenchman Charles Fourier, who sought to cure the evils of competitive society by establishing a harmonious world, influenced communities like Modern Times on Long Island and the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey.

• Noyes's Oneida mingled religious and secular motives in ways hard to disentangle

Map: Religious and Utopian Communities, 1800-1845

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