The Second Great Awakening and its context

in early 19th century America.

The Second Great Awakening was this period

of religious revival that was kind of

at its hot point in 1820 to 1840

and in the last couple of videos,

we've been talking about just the nature

of this society that produced The Second Great Awakening,

particularly how they responded to changes

in how people related to each other in business

and also just broader social changes

like the expansion of American democracy

and the expansion of American territory west.

So in this last video, I want to talk about

some of the outgrowths of The Second Great Awakening.

So why do we care so much that

there was this period of religious revival?

What did it lead to in American life?

There are two major things that were directly related

to The Second Great Awakening in this early 19th century.

New religious movements in the United States,

some of which are still with us today

and even more importantly for the time period,

major reform movements, including

the Movement for Abolition, the end of slavery,

which is going to lead to the outbreak of The Civil War.

So let's look a little bit closer at these two things.

So as we've talked about, The Second Great Awakening

promoted both the idea that one should try

to create heaven on earth

and also, a more democratic approach to religion in general,

that it didn't matter who you were.

If you were a man, a woman, white, black, enslaved, free,

you were still entitled to a personal relationship with God

and a chance at salvation.

So one of the things this meant in this time period

is that there's just a lot of religious experimentation.

A lot of new American religions emerge at this time period,

some of which are still with us today,

some of which are not.

This here is a representation of the Shakers,

which were a religious community of,

they embrace kind of simplicity.

They separated the sexes.

They practiced celibacy.

Just as kind of trying to make their daily lives more pure

and unfortunately, the celibacy part

meant that they more or less died out by the 1940s,

although there are a handful of Shakers

who are still alive today

and they were called the Shakers

because they would have these kind of

ecstatic religious experiences,

which you can see are kind of similar to

what happened in the camp meetings.

So even though they didn't have sex,

they would kind of get out their ecstasy

in this process of these big circle dances,

which people looked at and they said

they seemed like they were shaking,

so they were the Shakers.

On the other side of the spectrum,

there was the Oneida community,

which was led by a man named John Humphrey Noyes

and they preached the idea that

one should have no earthly attachments basically

and that meant also to a spouse,

so they believed in what was called complex marriage

or what we would really call free love.

There was no such thing as an individual marriage,

that women and men could have

sex with whomever they pleased.

It's interesting that approaches to sex

were very central to these religious movements.

Probably the most important religious movement

to come out of this time period

was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,

also known as the Mormons,

who were founded by Joseph Smith in Rochester, New York

and Smith had a vision that he was visited by an angel

who presented him with gold plates

and on these gold plates was a new Scripture

called The Book of Mormon

and Smith's followers really continued to be

devoted to the religion, even though

they faced a lot of persecution,

particularly over their early practice of polygamy

until they continued to move west

under the leadership of a second man, Brigham Young,

who took over after Smith was murdered

by an angry crowd in Illinois

who then led the Mormons to Utah

where they continue to be a major

religious group to this day.

Oh, and one other interesting thing

about this is the Oneida community.

Although, it itself did not survive,

one of the ways that they made money as a community

was by making silverware and so Oneida Silverware

is actually the descendant company

of this really interesting communal experiment

and they lasted, I believe, until 2006,

so if you ever had Oneida Silverware,

you were looking at an artifact

of a 19th century religious movement.

So the last and probably the most important part

of The Second Great Awakening that I wanna talk about

is its influence on reform movements.

So let me give myself a little bit more space to write here.

There are several 19th century reform movements

that are tied in to The Second Great Awakening.

One of these would be The Temperance Movement,

which hoped to reduce and or eliminate

people's consumption of alcohol

and you can kinda tie this back

to the idea of heaven on earth, right?

How can you have a stable family home,

how can you have a godly society

if everybody's drunk all the time?

But I would say the most important

reform movement associated with The Second Great Awakening

was the Abolitionist Movement

and remember that Harriet Beecher Stowe,

who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin,

which was one of the greatest abolition or anti-slavery

advertisements in the world,

was the daughter of Lyman Beecher,

one of the greatest preachers of The Second Great Awakening

and so as people came to believe that

everyone's life was equally valuable,

they became more and more involved

in the idea that slavery should not exist,

that people who were enslaved had souls

that were just as worthy of salvation

as anyone who was already free

and so they also saw this as one of the perversions

of God's word and a perversion of the family,

which they saw as the central unit

of American democracy and Republicanism.

So slavery should not exist.

People who were really motivated by their faith in God

and their faith in trying to create

heaven on earth and a better society

campaigned really strenuously for the end of slavery

and ultimately, were successful.

So this is a really complex topic,

The Second Great Awakening.

If we look back at our web again,

we can see that this wave of religious revival

was connected in all sorts of interesting ways

to the economic and political changes of the time period

and in its way, led to all sorts of

different social changes,

so I think it's a good example of how

it's sometimes really hard to separate

things that happened in the past

into really neat boxes, right?

That, oh, there was politics.

There was religion.

There was culture.

There were economics, but in many ways,

they're all bound together in a larger culture,

within which everyday individuals navigated their lives

and it's also good to show us that

sometimes we don't exactly know

why things happened in the past.

We know that people got really interested

in religion in this time period,

but historians have differing ideas

about why that might have been.

Some say that it was a form of trying to control people

as it was more and more important to have

a dutiful workforce for a factory-based industrial society

and some people say that maybe,

it was just about demographic and political shifts

in who had power, who had money, and who got to vote,

but we do know that The Second Great Awakening

and these ideas of trying to improve America,

to improve the world, and to create heaven on earth

led to all sorts of interesting things

that are still with us today,

including religious movements and the end of slavery.