One of the earliest and largest revivals of the Second Great Awakening occurred in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, over a one-week period in August 1801. The Cane Ridge Revival drew between 10,000 to 20,000 people, possibly as many as one in every ten residents of Kentucky. Though large crowds had previously gathered annually in rural areas each late summer for “holy fairs,” a tradition that began in Presbyterian Scotland to gather congregations together once a year when there was a lack of ministers, this assembly was very different. Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian preachers all delivered passionate sermons, exhorting the crowds to strive for their own salvation. They preached from inside buildings, evangelized outdoors under the open sky, and even used tree stumps as makeshift pulpits, all to reach their enthusiastic audiences in any way possible. Women, who made up the bulk of Second Great Awakening converts, also preached in public, in a striking break with common practice. Many attendees, moved by the preachers’ fervor, responded by crying, jumping, speaking in tongues, or even fainting.
Evolving Practices and Denominations
Events like the Cane Ridge Revival sparked significant changes in Americans’ religious affiliations. Many revivalists abandoned the comparatively formal style of worship observed in the well-established Congregationalist and Episcopalian churches and instead embraced more impassioned forms of worship that included the spontaneous jumping, shouting, and gesturing found in new and alternative denominations. The ranks of Christian denominations such as the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians swelled precipitously alongside new denominations such as the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The evangelical fire reached such heights, in fact, that one swath of western and central New York state came to be known as the Burned-Over District, because there were supposedly no more souls to “set on fire” with spiritual conversion, according to revivalist preacher Charles Grandison Finney, since they had all been converted already.
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Many churches had to turn to new ways of reaching the American people in their effort to find converts. Methodists used itinerant preachers, known as circuit riders. These men (and the occasional woman) won converts by pushing west over the Alleghenies and into the Ohio River Valley, bringing religion to new settlers hungry to have their spiritual needs attended. Circuit riding took preachers into homes, meetinghouses, and churches, all mapped out at regular intervals that collectively took about two weeks to complete.
In a new, radical approach to spreading the gospel, some revivalist preachers, such as Charles Grandison Finney, put theological issues aside and evangelized by appealing to worshippers’ hearts and emotions. Even conservative spiritual leaders, such as Lyman Beecher of the Congregational Church (father of famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe), appealed to younger generations of Americans by adopting a less orthodox approach to Calvinist doctrine.Whereas preachers of long-standing denominations like the Congregationalists were required to have a divinity degree and at least some theological training in order to become spiritual leaders, many new revivalist denominations only required a conversion experience and a supernatural “call to preach.” This meant, for example, that a twenty-year-old man could go from working in a mill to being a full-time circuit-riding preacher for the Methodists practically overnight, with no formal training in theology or exegesis. Indeed, their emphasis on spiritual egalitarianism over formal training enabled Methodists to outpace spiritual competition during this period by recruiting ministers quickly from almost anywhere, with the lack of formal training allowing them to be paid significantly less than a Congregationalist preacher with a divinity degree.
The Industrial Church
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American Protestantism eventually took on aspects of Industrial Revolution capitalism and the free-labor market in its effort to convert as many souls as possible. In the new “spiritual market,” converts were a commodity and ministers were the workers. The church that could get the most ministers working for the least amount of money would convert the most amount of souls the fastest. The American West became a factory for Christian converts the same way that the Northeast had become a powerhouse for the textile industry in the mid-19th century.
The new middle class—an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution—embraced the evangelical message. It fit perfectly with their understanding of themselves as independent individuals shaping their own destiny. Working-class Americans also latched onto the message that they could control their salvation. The message of middle-class growth promised workers financial “salvation” through hard work, while revival Protestantism promised spiritual salvation through faith and morality. These two messages, the middle-class “American Dream” and evangelical individual salvation became key features of American culture in the 19th century and drove many social developments in the 20th century.
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