Second Great Awakening and Moral Agency: Revival, Reform and Religious Choice
The Second Great Awakening linked moral agency with revival and reform. Preachers urged personal conversion, while voluntary societies organized missions, education and social campaigns. For CLEP U.S. History I, connect religious arguments with institutional action without assuming that every evangelical shared one theology or political program.
U.S. History to 1877 | Chapter 13 | Lesson 13.1
How Did Revivalists Emphasize Individual Decision?
The Second Great Awakening was a diverse evangelical revival extending from the late eighteenth century through the antebellum decades. On the Kentucky frontier, large meetings such as Cane Ridge drew crowds for emotional conversion. In the Northeast, Charles Grandison Finney used planned revivals, direct preaching, an “anxious bench,” and invitations to immediate decision. Methodists and Baptists expanded through itinerant preachers and local congregations. Finney’s approach challenged emphases on human inability by stressing immediate decision and moral action; this was not a creed shared by every revival participant.
How Could Moral Agency Support Organized Reform?
That emphasis on moral agency supported reform: if sinners could change, communities might change institutions. Voluntary societies distributed Bibles, supported missions, promoted temperance, observed the Sabbath, and attacked slavery. Women supplied much of the membership, fundraising, teaching, and petitioning. Reform offered public influence while churches and law still denied women equal formal authority.
Why Did Revival Produce Different Religious and Political Paths?
Revival did not produce one politics. Some evangelicals became radical abolitionists. Others defended slavery or concentrated on personal conduct. Black Christians built independent churches that joined worship to education, mutual aid, and antislavery activism. Joseph Smith’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged in the same religiously inventive environment, though its new scripture, communal strength, and claims to authority provoked persecution and migration. Shakers, Millerites, and other groups show that antebellum religion cannot be reduced to one denomination.
How Did Disestablishment Change Religious Organization?
Disestablishment helped produce competition. Without a national established church, denominations and societies recruited supporters in a religious marketplace. Market mobility and social disruption also made conversion communities attractive. Yet revival discipline could enforce conformity. Moral reformers sometimes treated poverty or addiction primarily as personal failure.
Review the Second Great Awakening
Watch this account from Heimler's History with one question in mind: which evidence makes the lesson's strongest claim hold up?
Video: The SECOND Great Awakening [APUSH Review Unit 4 Topic 10] Period 4: 1800-1848, Heimler's History.
Check your understanding
- Finney’s revival methods most strongly emphasized
- waiting passively for evidence of predestination
- immediate moral choice and conversion
- obedience to a legally established church
- sacramental authority controlled only by clergy
- withdrawal from organized moral action
- Revivalism most directly encouraged voluntary reform by emphasizing
- permanent inherited differences in moral capacity
- the inability of institutions to change conduct
- reform through state coercion alone
- capacity for individual and social change
- rejection of organized associations
- Deep Practice: select all that apply. Awakening-era religion included
- itinerant preaching
- voluntary societies
- Black churches
- new religious movements
- one uniform politics
- Deep Practice: open response. Explain how moral agency could inspire reform and moral coercion.
Write a brief response using a named fact from the lesson.
Open the answers and reasoning
Independent preparation. CLEP is a registered trademark of the College Board, which does not endorse this lesson.
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