- [Instructor] Okay, so we've been talking about
The Second Great Awakening and its context
in early 19th century America.
The Second Great Awakening was this period
of religious revival that was kind of
at its hot point in 1820 to 1840
and in the last couple of videos,
we've been talking about just the nature
of this society that produced The Second Great Awakening,
particularly how they responded to changes
in how people related to each other in business
and also just broader social changes
like the expansion of American democracy
and the expansion of American territory west.
So in this last video, I want to talk about
some of the outgrowths of The Second Great Awakening.
So why do we care so much that
there was this period of religious revival?
What did it lead to in American life?
There are two major things that were directly related
to The Second Great Awakening in this early 19th century.
New religious movements in the United States,
some of which are still with us today
and even more importantly for the time period,
major reform movements, including
the Movement for Abolition, the end of slavery,
which is going to lead to the outbreak of The Civil War.
So let's look a little bit closer at these two things.
So as we've talked about, The Second Great Awakening
promoted both the idea that one should try
to create heaven on earth
and also, a more democratic approach to religion in general,
that it didn't matter who you were.
If you were a man, a woman, white, black, enslaved, free,
you were still entitled to a personal relationship with God
and a chance at salvation.
So one of the things this meant in this time period
is that there's just a lot of religious experimentation.
A lot of new American religions emerge at this time period,
some of which are still with us today,
some of which are not.
This here is a representation of the Shakers,
which were a religious community of,
they embrace kind of simplicity.
They separated the sexes.
They practiced celibacy.
Just as kind of trying to make their daily lives more pure
and unfortunately, the celibacy part
meant that they more or less died out by the 1940s,
although there are a handful of Shakers
who are still alive today
and they were called the Shakers
because they would have these kind of
ecstatic religious experiences,
which you can see are kind of similar to
what happened in the camp meetings.
So even though they didn't have sex,
they would kind of get out their ecstasy
in this process of these big circle dances,
which people looked at and they said
they seemed like they were shaking,
so they were the Shakers.
On the other side of the spectrum,
there was the Oneida community,
which was led by a man named John Humphrey Noyes
and they preached the idea that
one should have no earthly attachments basically
and that meant also to a spouse,
so they believed in what was called complex marriage
or what we would really call free love.
There was no such thing as an individual marriage,
that women and men could have
sex with whomever they pleased.
It's interesting that approaches to sex
were very central to these religious movements.
Probably the most important religious movement
to come out of this time period
was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,
also known as the Mormons,
who were founded by Joseph Smith in Rochester, New York
and Smith had a vision that he was visited by an angel
who presented him with gold plates
and on these gold plates was a new Scripture
called The Book of Mormon
and Smith's followers really continued to be
devoted to the religion, even though
they faced a lot of persecution,
particularly over their early practice of polygamy
until they continued to move west
under the leadership of a second man, Brigham Young,
who took over after Smith was murdered
by an angry crowd in Illinois
who then led the Mormons to Utah
where they continue to be a major
religious group to this day.
Oh, and one other interesting thing
about this is the Oneida community.
Although, it itself did not survive,
one of the ways that they made money as a community
was by making silverware and so Oneida Silverware
is actually the descendant company
of this really interesting communal experiment
and they lasted, I believe, until 2006,
so if you ever had Oneida Silverware,
you were looking at an artifact
of a 19th century religious movement.
So the last and probably the most important part
of The Second Great Awakening that I wanna talk about
is its influence on reform movements.
So let me give myself a little bit more space to write here.
There are several 19th century reform movements
that are tied in to The Second Great Awakening.
One of these would be The Temperance Movement,
which hoped to reduce and or eliminate
people's consumption of alcohol
and you can kinda tie this back
to the idea of heaven on earth, right?
How can you have a stable family home,
how can you have a godly society
if everybody's drunk all the time?
But I would say the most important
reform movement associated with The Second Great Awakening
was the Abolitionist Movement
and remember that Harriet Beecher Stowe,
who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which was one of the greatest abolition or anti-slavery
advertisements in the world,
was the daughter of Lyman Beecher,
one of the greatest preachers of The Second Great Awakening
and so as people came to believe that
everyone's life was equally valuable,
they became more and more involved
in the idea that slavery should not exist,
that people who were enslaved had souls
that were just as worthy of salvation
as anyone who was already free
and so they also saw this as one of the perversions
of God's word and a perversion of the family,
which they saw as the central unit
of American democracy and Republicanism.
So slavery should not exist.
People who were really motivated by their faith in God
and their faith in trying to create
heaven on earth and a better society
campaigned really strenuously for the end of slavery
and ultimately, were successful.
So this is a really complex topic,
The Second Great Awakening.
If we look back at our web again,
we can see that this wave of religious revival
was connected in all sorts of interesting ways
to the economic and political changes of the time period
and in its way, led to all sorts of
different social changes,
so I think it's a good example of how
it's sometimes really hard to separate
things that happened in the past
into really neat boxes, right?
That, oh, there was politics.
There was religion.
There was culture.
There were economics, but in many ways,
they're all bound together in a larger culture,
within which everyday individuals navigated their lives
and it's also good to show us that
sometimes we don't exactly know
why things happened in the past.
We know that people got really interested
in religion in this time period,
but historians have differing ideas
about why that might have been.
Some say that it was a form of trying to control people
as it was more and more important to have
a dutiful workforce for a factory-based industrial society
and some people say that maybe,
it was just about demographic and political shifts
in who had power, who had money, and who got to vote,
but we do know that The Second Great Awakening
and these ideas of trying to improve America,
to improve the world, and to create heaven on earth
led to all sorts of interesting things
that are still with us today,
including religious movements and the end of slavery.