In Part I, we noted the ebb tide of religious fervor and an increase in secularism and irreligion following the American Revolution, especially in the decade of 1790s. The Constitution creating the United States of America had just been ratified in 1787 and the Bill of Rights was added in 1791. Washington was President and there was an air of optimism regarding the nation’s future. But, at the same time morality at all levels of society was spiraling downward and threatened the survival of the young nation.
Following years of moral decline, the shameful debacle of the presidential campaign of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson illustrated the threat to the nation’s survival. Both candidates were vilified and slandered by their political opponents and operatives. Jefferson was accused of swindling clients as a young lawyer and charged with cowardice during his time as governor of Virginia. Pamphlets and newspapers called Jefferson a “…hopeless visionary, a weakling, an intriguer, intoxicated with French philosophy, more a Frenchman than an American…carried on with slave women…a howling atheist…” Adams was portrayed as being “…old, addled, and toothless…procuring mistresses… a vain Yankee scold, and, if truth be known, ‘quite mad’.” [McCullough, pp. 543-544.] Such was the political and immoral atmosphere that permeated the nation at the close of the century.
A society cannot avoid destruction if political ties are relaxed without a corresponding tightening of moral ties. [Tocqueville, p. 344.] The Political ties so painfully forged over a quarter century were in danger of permanently unraveling in the campaign wars of 1800 between the Federalist and anti-Federalist partisans. Destruction of the new nation was imminently possible without a corresponding tightening of moral ties. The republic had to be saved.
Thirty-one years following the end of the eighteenth century, a young Frenchman of the aristocracy traveled extensively in America and subsequently wrote of his impressions. Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has been called one of the most influential political texts ever written about America.
Americans so completely identify the spirit of Christianity with freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive the one without the other…
On my arrival in the United States, it was the religious atmosphere which first struck me. As I extended my stay, I could observe the political consequences which flowed from this novel situation.
In France I had seen the spirit of religion moving in the opposite direction to that of the spirit of freedom. In America, I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land. [Tocqueville, pp. 343, 345.]
How do we reconcile these two disparate pictures of America? Here we have a nation sinking into immorality—a cesspool of secularism, irreligion, political expediency, and debauchery following the Revolutionary War through the end of the century. Thirty-one years later Tocqueville described America as having a highly religious atmosphere in which the spirit of religion and freedom are inextricably entwined. Something must have happened to dramatically alter the course of the nation. We call that happening the Second Great Awakening.
In 1791, through the Union of Prayer that was begun with the efforts of William Carey, Andrew Fuller, John Sutcliffe, and other church leaders, the Second Great Awakening began sweeping Great Britain. It was a New England Baptist pastor named Isaac Backus that played a pivotal role in igniting the Second Great Awakening in America. Backus was both a product of and participant in the Great Awakening led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. Born in 1724, he began preaching in 1746, initially as a Congregationalist. Struggling with the issue of the incompatibility of infant baptism and salvation through grace, Backus and a number of his church members organized a Baptist church in 1756 at which he was the pastor for fifty years until his death in 1806. [McClymond, pp. 43-44; Johnson, p. 410.]
With spiritual conditions in America at their worst in 1794, Backus sent an urgent plea to pastors of all churches of every Christian denomination in America. His plea for prayer for revival was widely adopted, and a network of prayer meetings on the first Monday of each month soon led to revival. By 1800, revival had reached the western extremities of civilization in Logan County, Kentucky, if the wild and irreligious people of Rogue’s Harbour (as it was known) could be called civilized. Lawlessness was so rampant that local citizens formed themselves into regiments of vigilantes that fought outlaws, often unsuccessfully, to establish a measure of law and order for the settlements. It was here that Presbyterian minister James McCready settled and became pastor of three small churches. All through the winter of 1799, McCready and several of his congregants joined the national monthly Monday meetings to pray for revival as well as holding weekly Saturday evening to Sunday morning prayer meetings. Following months of prayer, revival came in the summer of 1800. The spiritual hunger was so great that eleven thousand came to a communion service. Overwhelmed, McCready called for help from all denominations. [Orr; Johnson, p. 410.]
Next came the famous Cane Ridge camp meeting in southern Kentucky during the summer of 1801. Six or seven ministers preached simultaneously from various points to reach crowds that were estimated to exceed 10,000. To give perspective to the significant size of the crowds, the largest city in Kentucky at the time was Lexington with a population of only 2,000. [Fishwick, p. 19; Johnson, p. 410.]
The Second Great Awakening provided spiritual and moral regeneration and initiated other civilizing influences on the young nation. These influences included popular education, Bible Societies, Sunday schools, the modern missionary movement, and ultimately sowed and nurtured the seeds that led to the abolition of slavery. [Orr; Johnson, pp. 410-411.] Just as the Great Awakening was the formative moment in American history, preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible, it is also fair to say that the Second Great Awakening was the stabilizing moment that saved the new nation from political and moral destruction.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
David McCullough, John Adams, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 543-544.
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 343-345.
Michael McClymond, ed., Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America, Vol. 1, A-Z, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), pp. 43-44
J. Edwin Orr, “Prayer brought Revival,” ochristian.com. http://articles.ochristian.com/ article8330.shtml (accessed November 26, 2010).
Marshall W. Fishwick, Great Awakenings, (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1995), p. 19.
