Well hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s History. We’ve been going through Unit 4 of the AP U.S. History curriculum which covers the period 1800-1848. And in this video we fixin’ to talk about Jesus. It’s time for the Second Great Awakening, so let’s get to it. So in this video we’re just trying to answer a very simple question: What were the causes of the Second Great Awakening? Now let’s start with a definition. The Second Great Awakening was essentially a series of religious revivals among Protestant Christians that emphasized righteous living, personal restraint, and a strong moral rectitude that would lead a person and society to salvation. And like the First Great Awakening this revival spread rapidly throughout America thanks to Methodists and Baptists who organized camp meetings where multiple preachers spoke with great emotion day in and day out. Now this revival did not occur in a vacuum, so what caused it? Well, let’s start with what we’ve been talking about in the last few videos, namely the Market Revolution. The messages of the Second Great Awakening and the Market Revolution weren’t all that different. In the Market Revolution individuals learned that economic success or failure was largely in their own hands. If you worked hard and dedicated yourself to improvement, then you would be successful. The same kind of message was preached to devotees of the Second Great Awakening, but in spiritual terms. Preachers of this Great Awakening told sinners that salvation was in their hands. Reform your life, do justice, control your impulses and you would receive everlasting bliss. Now, by way of comparison, this was a far cry from the kind of preaching done during the First Great Awakening. Recall that the great luminaries of that movement like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield were Calvinists and they believed that a person’s eternal salvation was in the hands of God alone, no amount of good work could contribute to or take away from redemption. The second cause for this Great Awakening was the rising tide of democratic and individualistic beliefs. Recall that during this period there was a growing desire for a more expansive participation in America’s democratic process. And this was especially true for those in the lower classes who owned no land. This same impulse transferred to the lower classes’ spiritual desires. The Second Great Awakening was largely a movement that caught up the lower classes in its fire. The camp meetings themselves were largely egalitarian including whites, blacks, enslaved and free, men and women all as equal members of the movement. A third cause was a rejection of rationalism in favor of Romanticism. Recall from the last video that Romanticism championed emotional reality over against rational reality. People wanted to use their feely-feely parts rather than their thinky-thinky parts. And to illustrate this, let’s look at the kind of preaching that was done during this revival. Now if you go back to the First Great Awakening, a read sermons from Jonathan Edwards, the preaching wasn’t without emotion, but it was highly structured and irreducibly philosophical. If you were listening to Jonathan Edwards, you had to think with him. But not so much in the Second Great Awakening, and here’s where I introduce you to one of the great preachers of this revival: Charles Grandison Finney. Finney pioneered a new kind of preaching that was less cerebral and God-centered. Instead, Finney preached with great emotion and sought to awaken the emotion within his hearers. It was way less philosophical. He preached more audience-centered sermons and used plain language and metaphors that common folks could understand. Maybe most important, his preaching was moral in nature, which is to say, his message emphasized not so much personal salvation, but the moral reformation of society. And many of the preachers of the Second Great Awakening followed suit, and the nation caught fire with it. Now with so many people being converted to a Christian program of societal reform, we’re going to see how this movement spurred other reform movements like the temperance movement and even off shoots of Christianity like Mormonism. But alas, all of that will have to wait for the next video. That’s what you need to know about Unit 4 topic 10 of the AP U.S. History curriculum. Packet right here and you will be on your way to reform. If you want me to keep making these videos then let me know by subscribing right here. Heimler out.