As we look around the landscape of modern evangelicalism, we find a wide range of beliefs and practices. The kaleidoscope of low church denominations and “non–denominations” can be almost dizzying in their variety. However, these developments result from historic events. By studying how past Christians adopted certain emphases and practices, we better understand current circumstances.
Revivalism is one very important aspect of evangelical history. In this essay, we will consider the similarities and differences between the First and Second Great Awakenings to look for good and helpful counsel from the past and warnings about what we should avoid in the present.
The First Great Awakening comprised a series of revivals throughout the British American colonies during the eighteenth century. It was followed by the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century that was most influential on the frontier, especially in upstate New York. The leaders of the Second Great Awakening were self-consciously trying to reclaim the enthusiasm of the First. In fact, some historians doubt they are even distinct events. However, I think there are good reasons to see them as separate movements with more and less helpful things to offer to the present.
Pietism: European and American
Pietism originated in Europe in response to the formalism and scholasticism of mainline, state-established Protestant churches that had been deeply influenced by the Enlightenment. Those who adopted pietism aimed to revitalize true personal religion, often downplaying doctrine in favor of enthusiastic religious experience. However, many of the dominant European denominations had well-established churches and rituals that were not receptive to this new movement.
In Europe, the formality and authority of established churches limited pietism; however, in the North American British colonies where the Enlightenment had very little influence, it found room to grow.[1] Perhaps pietism found a welcome audience in the colonies because the established churches could not solidify their dominance due to lack of sufficient numbers of trained clergy and the shifting demographics of the frontier. Their weakness meant that established denominations were constantly in competition with dissenters who had been making their way to the New World looking for opportunities to practice their specific beliefs since 1620.[2]
First Great Awakening
Aspects of European revivalism first emerged in the colonies under the leadership of Solomon Stoddard in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the 1690s. However, it received a significant boost in the 1720s when the Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus J. Frelinghuysen immigrated to New Jersey. He found the Dutch Reformed church in that colony too formalistic and concerned about what he considered external actions. Therefore, he decided to lead a renewal of the Dutch Reformed church, excommunicating cold members and calling others to repentance.
Though Frelinghuysen is not widely known today, George Whitefield, Johnathan Edwards, and other prominent First Great Awakening preachers credited him with helping to “prepare the way for the full tide of revival in the middle colonies in the later 1730s.”[3] Thus the revivals of the mid-eighteenth century were American manifestations of religious movements that began in Europe.
Second Great Awakening
The Second Great Awakening drew on the pietism of the first but was a more domestic affair. Many of the leaders of nineteenth-century revivalism were looking to reclaim the fervor of the eighteenth, while others looked for new opportunities to transform American society through religious revival. American religious leaders like Timothy Dwight worked to reignite the fires of revival in the 1790s. Dwight passed along his fervor to men like Lyman Beecher who would serve as leaders during the Second Great Awakening up until the Civil War. The most important of the nineteenth-century revivalists, Charles Finney, was born in Connecticut. While he was influenced by Wesleyan theology and practice, his experience with it was limited to the American Methodist church.
Also, Scots-Irish Presbyterians took part in the Second Great Awakening in important ways. James McGready was committed to rekindling the flames of pietistic fervor in his new home in America. He led the Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky in 1801, where some of the more extreme experiences of enthusiasm were witnessed. Plus, his fellow countryman Alexander Campbell led the Restorationist movement that sought to reclaim the pure Christianity of the New Testament by rejecting all of church history (more on this below). While McGready and Campbell played key roles in specific aspects of the movement, the leading lights of the Second Great Awakening were largely American.
Scripture
Both Awakenings emphasized the Bible’s authority over individuals’ lives. In both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preachers generally grounded their sermons in Biblical texts.
First Great Awakening
During the First Great Awakening, preachers like George Whitefield made significant changes to the delivery of sermons. Whitefield memorized his sermons rather than read them, gesturing dramatically to emphasize certain points.[4] Further, he spoke in a “direct, flamboyant, and emotive manner that blended English theater techniques” with pietistic fervor, making direct applications to specific groups in the audience.[5] While the informality of these sermons was shocking to many, the sermons were still deeply informed by Scripture.
Some ministers who were part of the First Great Awakening, like Jonathan Edwards, prepared sermons that carefully exposited Scriptural passages. On the other hand, preachers like William Tennent and his sons ranged much further from Scripture. For them, pietistic fervor was the central concern. Therefore, they spent much of their time attacking the Old Light clergy rather than expositing Scripture.
Second Great Awakening
During the Second Great Awakening, preachers continued to use Biblical texts but in a different manner. In some ways, the Bible assumed a more dominant role in religious belief but was divorced from church history or communal assistance in interpretation. Specifically, the Restorationist movement led by Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone sought to reclaim the pure worship of the apostolic church by emphasizing direct access to interpreting the Bible with a strong focus on the New Testament. They held that education and training were unnecessary for students of the Bible who could easily apprehend the simple message for themselves.
However, the rejection of education and training inhibited preachers’ ability to deal with a text properly. Throughout the frontier, untrained, and sometimes, illiterate preachers preached moralistic but fervent sermons meant to stir up the emotions but little else. This facet of the Second Great Awakening was particularly true of enslaved preachers who were not allowed to learn to read but were encouraged to preach at community revivals and in local churches (usually black congregations but also many integrated ones).[6]
The Restorationist emphasis on rejecting historical developments in the church and the demands of education had broader implications for society. As historian Nathan Hatch has argued, Restorationists believed that all human creeds had served only to corrupt the church. In a world of radical political changes, these Christians believed they had an opportunity to wipe away all kinds of so-called doctrinal and institutional disorder caused by manmade innovations.[7] This mentality was also adopted by the social reformers who were inspired by the millenarian preaching of Second Great Awakening leaders like Finney who once told his congregation the millennial reign of Christ could be achieved through human effort in three months.[8]
Social reformers continued to give lip service to the value of Scripture, but they often ignored authors’ original intent. Instead, they used Biblical texts as moralistic support for their middle–class plans for social transformation.[9] Others, like the early feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, denied the inspiration of Scripture but still sought to reinterpret it to support her ideological commitments.[10] As a group, all reformers drew their sense of moral righteousness for their causes from Scripture. Further, many believed that the righteousness of their causes gave them the authority to use the power of the state to force all of society to submit to their plans, even though that would shatter the public harmony they were trying to create.[11]
Soteriology
Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer observe a major difference between the two Awakenings, notwithstanding their commonalities. In the First Great Awakening, Calvinism shaped the preaching of the revivalists who emphasized the sinner’s helplessness waiting for the action of God upon their souls.
However, in the Second Great Awakening, preachers embraced a radical Arminianism that assumed God had already given people the power to accept His gift of salvation through their own free will.[12]
This semi-Pelagian theology led preachers like Finney to develop manipulative emotional experiences that would facilitate conversion experiences. Finney did not just adopt methods of promotion to draw crowds and excitement; he sought to develop methods of shaping the experience of revival attendees to cause experiences. As Roger Fink and Rodney Stark explain, Finney thought about every detail, including ventilation of the meeting space, the length and number of songs and prayers, and the removal of children and dogs from the congregation. He encouraged preachers to confront audience members directly from the stage about sin. This approach was a rational and direct system of producing a revival for those who wanted one.[13]
Conclusion
The First and Second Great Awakenings had much in common. The revival services of both were filled with enthusiastic preaching meant to draw the congregation into a direct experience with God. Both made constant reference to the Bible as proof for their teachings.
However, they were also distinct. Where the pietism of the First Great Awakening overemphasized emotional experience in an understandable attempt to reject the growing rationalism of Protestantism, the enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening was a tool to manipulate people into conversion experiences. The elevation of emotional experience denigrated careful analysis of the Bible and thoughtful sermons in the Second Great Awakening. Instead, the Bible became either a historically isolated text guiding the practice of modern believers or a proof-text for middle-class social reform. This understanding of the Bible differed significantly from the thinking of the best of the First Great Awakening preachers like Jonathan Edwards.
We can see the influences of both movements in the modern church. However, the First Great Awakening has much more to offer as a legacy for evangelical Christians. We should seek to avoid the cold ritualism of extreme rationality in favor of warm-hearted devotion to God evidenced by consistent study of His word, regular prayer, and communion with His saints. Our sermons should engage the emotions of the congregation. As laymen we should prepare our hearts to be engaged by Scripture through the power of the Holy Spirit.
On the other hand, the manipulative enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening that saw the Bible as merely a tool to achieve successful revivals or social reform should be avoided. This aspect of our past leads to what Leroy Forlines referred to as cheap-easy-believism, along with religious pride. Further, it causes us to ignore the counsel of church history in favor of our own limited understandings of the Bible.
While we cannot easily pick and choose how we are influenced by our forefathers, we can work to emphasize the best part of our past and attempt to limit the excesses of destructive habits. The best way to begin this process is to give attention to what has been handed down to us and give it careful thought.
[1] Sidney Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 29.
[2] Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 42–43, 53.
[3] Robert T. Handy, A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 79.
[4] Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History, 2nd ed.(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 121.
[5] Douglas Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteeenth–Century New England (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Press by the University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 140.
[6] William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 21–22.
[7] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 169.
[8] Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 3–4.
[9] Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 28–29.
[10] See Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible: A Classical Feminist Perspective (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002).
[11] Johnson, 83.
[12] Butler, Wacker, and Balmer, 172.
[13] Finke and Stark, 89–90.
December 22, 2023
I really enjoyed this post! My question for Phillip Morgan is whether or not there is a good book that covers both of the Great Awakenings that takes a deep look into the methods and spirit of both of them…on both sides of the Atlantic? Also, why was not Wesley’s teachings considered in this article? Or did this article only intend to review the revivals on U.S. soil? HELP!