Page 303 - American Stories, A History of the United States

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12.3

The SeConD gReaT aWakening The second Great Awakening swept across the United states in the
early decades of the nineteenth century, bringing religious camp meetings such as the one depicted here to rural
and urban areas alike. Held outdoors, these gatherings allowed huge audiences to share in a highly emotional
experience as they expressed their faith.

revivals could be stirring affairs but were less extravagantly emotional than the camp
meetings of the South. The northern brand of evangelism led to the formation of soci-
eties devoted to redeeming the human race in general and American society in particular.
The reform movement in New England began as an effort to defend Calvinism
against the liberal views of religion fostered by the Enlightenment. The younger gen-
eration’s growing acceptance of the belief that the Deity was the benevolent master
architect of a rational universe, rather than an all-powerful, mysterious God, alarmed
the Reverend Timothy Dwight, who became president of Yale College in 1795. Those
religious liberals whose rationalism reached the point of denying the divinity of
Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity, and who therefore proclaimed themselves to be
“ Unitarians,” particularly disturbed him.
To Dwight’s horror, Unitarians captured fashionable and sophisticated New
England congregations and even won control of the Harvard Divinity School. He
fought back by preaching to Yale undergraduates that they were “dead in sin” and pro-
voked campus revivals. But the harsh pessimism of orthodox Calvinist doctrine, with
its stress on original sin and predestination, had limited appeal in a republic committed
to freedom and progress.
Younger Congregational ministers reshaped New England Puritanism to increase
its appeal to people who shared the prevailing optimism about human capabilities. The
first great practitioner of the new evangelical Calvinism was Lyman Beecher, one of
Dwight’s pupils. Just before and after the War of 1812, Beecher promoted revivals in the

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