During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, American religion underwent a dramatic transformation. Enlightenment attacks on institutional religion were overwhelmed by a conviction that religion was an indispensable vehicle of moral progress.

     At the end of the 18th century, church membership was low and falling.  In 1775, there were probably only 1,800 ministers in a population of 2.5 million. According to one estimate, just one American in 20 was a church member.  One observer thought that "infidelity is very general among the higher classes."

     Few of the nation's founders were particularly religious.  They were men of the Enlightenment, who valued rational inquiry and rejected religious enthusiasm.  Many leaders of the revolutionary generation distrusted the clergy, doubted the divine origins of the Bible, and questioned the Biblical accounts of miracles.

     George Washington's views were not unusual among the founders.  He believed that a benevolent divine force governed the universe, but was skeptical of many specific church doctrines.  Thomas Jefferson considered himself a Christian and in a work prepared in 1798-99 revered the teachings of Jesus Christ as "the most perfect and sublime that has even been taught by man." At the same time, he apparently did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ or in the authenticity of Biblical miracles.

     Religious liberalism was an emerging form of humanitarianism that rejected the harsh Calvinist doctrines of original sin and predestination.  Its preachers stressed the basic goodness of human nature and each individual’s capacity to follow the example of Christ.

     The chief vehicle behind this outpouring of religious faith was the religious revival.  Highly emotional meetings were held by preachers in all sections of the country, which sought to awaken Americans to their need for religious rebirth.  So widespread were the revivals that the early 19th century acquired the name the "Second Great Awakening."

     The Second Great Awakening had its symbolic beginnings in a small frontier community in central Kentucky. Between August 6 and 12, 1801, thousands of people--perhaps 25,000--gathered at Cane Ridge to pray. At the time, the state's largest city, only had 1,795 residents.

     There was not one minister at Cane Ridge; there were more than a dozen.  They came from many denominations: Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist.  There was at least one African American minister. The people who attended the meeting came from all social classes.  Perhaps two-thirds were women.  A minister left a vivid first-person description of the scene:  "Sinners [were] dropping down on every hand, shrieking, groaning, crying for mercy...agonizing, fainting, falling down in distress."

     Evangelical revivalism was the dominant form of religious expression in early 19th century America.  The word evangelical refers to a belief that all people must recognize their depravity and worthlessness, repent their sins, and undergo a conversion experience and a rebirth of religious feelings.

     What explains the rapid rise of revivalism?

     In part, revivals were a response to the growing separation of church and state that followed the Revolution.  But revivals also reflected the hunger of tens of thousands of ordinary Americans for a more emotional religion. Even in the late 18th century, Americans were not as indifferent to religion as church membership statistics might suggest.  Many Americans were put off by genteel clergy with aristocratic pretensions.  They were also alienated by the older denominations' stress on decorum, formality, and unemotional sermons.

     Revivals also meet a growing need for community and communal purpose.  At a time when the country was becoming more mobile, commercial, and individualistic, revivals ensured that Americans would remain committed to higher values.

     In the South, revivals largely attracted the dispossessed, including many slaves and free blacks.  In the North, reveals appealed to upwardly mobile groups.  Middle-class women were especially attracted to the revivals.  The revivals provided many women with avenues of self-expression--through church societies and charitable and benevolent organizations.

     A key concept for the revivalists was that each person had a duty to combat sin.  For the revivalists, sin was not an abstraction.  It was concrete.  Dueling, profanity, and drinking hard liquor were sins. In the future, many northern evangelicals regarded slavery as the sum of all sins. (1)

     The revivals left a lasting imprint on pre-Civil War America.  The rituals of evangelical religion--the camp meeting, group prayer, and mass baptisms along rivers and creeks--were the truly distinctive American experience in the decades before the Civil War.  The revivals contributed to a conception of the United States as a country with a special mission to lead the world to a golden age of freedom and equality. When Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural spoke about bloody sacrifice, rebirth, and national mission, his words echoed revivalist sermons.

     Nineteenth century America contained a bewildering array of Protestant sects and denominations, with different doctrines, practices, and organizational forms.  But by the 1830s almost all of these bodies had a deep evangelical emphasis in common.  Protestantism has always contained an important evangelical strain, but it was in the nineteenth century that a particular style of evangelicalism became the dominant form of spiritual expression.  What above all else characterized this evangelicalism was its dynamism, the pervasive sense of activist energy it released.  As Charles Grandison Finney, the leading evangelical of mid-nineteenth century America, put it:  "religion is the work of man, it is something for man to do."  This evangelical activism involved an important doctrinal shift away from the predominately Calvinist orientation that had characterized much of eighteenth-century American Christianity.  Eighteenth-century Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield had stressed the sinful nature of humans and their utter incapacity to overcome this nature without the direct action of the grace of God working through the Holy Spirit. Salvation was purely in God's hands, something he dispensed as he saw fit for his own reasons.   Nineteenth-century evangelicals like Finney, or Lyman Beecher, or Francis Asbury, were no less unrelenting in their emphasis on the terrible sinfulness of humans. But they focused on sin as human action. For all they preached hellfire and damnation, they nonetheless harbored an unshakable practical belief in the capacity of humans for moral action, in the ability of humans to turn away from sinful behavior and embrace moral action. Whatever their particular doctrinal stance, most nineteenth-century evangelicals preached a kind of practice, Arminianism, which emphasized the duty and ability of sinners to repent and desist from sin. (2)

     The core of nineteenth-century evangelicalism was the experience of conversion.  Conversion was compelled by a set of clear ideas about the innate sinfulness of humans after Adam's fall, the omnipotence of God--his awful power and his mercy--and, finally, the promise of salvation for fallen humankind through Christ's death on the cross as the atonement for human sin.  But what students need to understand is that conversion was an experience.  It was not simply something that people believed--though belief or faith was essential to it--but something that happened to them, a real, intensely emotional event they went through and experienced as a profound psychological transformation left them with a fundamentally altered sense of self, an identity as a new kind of Christian.  As they interpreted it, they had undergone spiritual rebirth, the death of an old self and the birth of a new one that fundamentally transformed their sense of their relationship to the world.

     Conversion consisted of a sequence of clearly mapped-out steps, each of which was accompanied by a powerful emotion that led the penitent from the terror of eternal damnation through redemption to the promise of heavenly salvation.  The process of conversion characteristically began in a state of "concern" about the state of one's soul and "inquiry" into what were called the doctrines of salvation propelled by the question "what can I do to be saved?"  This led to a state of acute spiritual "anxiety," marked by deep fear over the prospect of eternal damnation, which in turn grew into an unmistakable sense of "conviction," the heartfelt realization that one stood justly condemned for one's sins and deserved eternal damnation. Conviction was the terrifying point of recognition that no matter how much one might desire it, there was absolutely nothing one could do to earn salvation.  But there was something the penitent could do, indeed, was bound to do.  That was to fully repent and surrender unconditionally to God's will to do with as he saw fit and to serve him fully.  It was this act of repentance, surrender, and dedication to serving his will that Finney meant when in his most famous sermon he insisted that "sinners [are] bound to change their own hearts." This moment of renunciation of sin and the abject surrender to the will to God was the moment of conversion, if it was to come, the moment at which, through the promise of Christ's atonement for human sin, a merciful God would bestow his grace upon the repentant sinner.

     It is important to stress the importance of the emotional state that signaled that one had received divine grace and was a converted Christian. People recognized the fact of conversion by the power and character of the emotions that accompanied it, that made it an emotional catharsis, a heartfelt rebirth.  Most characteristically, conversion, often accompanied by tears, provoked a deep sense of humility and peace marked by an overwhelming sense of love toward God, a sense that one had entered a wholly new state of being--defined as a state of regeneration--that was the utter opposite of the state of willfulness, torment, and anxiety that had accompanied unregeneracy.  The convert entered a new spiritual state referred to as regeneracy and sanctification in which the paramount desire was to do God's will, a desire expressed almost immediately in active concern for the conversion of family, friends, and even strangers who remained unconverted.  Indeed, the most important sign of sanctification was the degree of one's willingness to enlist in the ongoing evangelical campaign to convert the world. (For further discussion of the evangelical convert's role in the world see under Nineteenth Century, Evangelicalism as a Social Movement.) (2)

     A second distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century evangelicalism was its approach to religious revivals. The phrase "religious revival" was originally coined in the eighteenth century to describe a new phenomenon in which churches experienced an unexpected "awakening" of spiritual concern, occasioned by a special and mysterious outpouring of God's saving grace, which led to unprecedented numbers of intense and "surprising conversions" that "revived" the piety and power of the churches.  In the early nineteenth century, however, as "the revival" became a central instrument for provoking conversions, it became as much a human as a divine event. In the terms of Charles Grandison Finney, a revival was something preachers and communicants did.  It was a deliberately orchestrated event that deployed a variety of spiritual practices to provoke conversions especially among the unconverted "youth" (men and women between 15 and 30) in the community.

     The new, self-consciously wrought revivals took several forms. They first emerged at the turn of the eighteenth century with the invention of the camp meeting in western Virginia and North Carolina and on the Kentucky and Ohio frontier by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists. At these meetings, the most famous (or notorious) of which took place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people would gather from miles around in a wilderness encampment for four days to a week.  There they engaged in an unrelenting series of intense spiritual exercises, punctuated with cries of religious agony and ecstasy, all designed to promote religious fervor and conversions.  These exercises ranged from the singing of hymns addressed to each of the spiritual stages that marked the journey to conversion, public confessions and renunciations of sin and personal witness to the workings of the spirit, collective prayer, all of which were surrounded by sermons delivered by clergymen especially noted for their powerful "plain-speaking" preaching.  The second, major variant of the new revivalism consisted of the "protracted meetings" most often associated with the "new measures" revivalism of Finney but which by the late l820s had become the characteristic form of most northern and western revivalism.  "Protracted meetings," ordinarily conducted once a year at a time when they would be less disruptive of ordinary life, usually lasted two to three weeks, during which time there would be preaching two or three times each day, addressed especially to the anxious penitents who would gather on an "anxious bench" at the front of the church to be prayed for by the congregation, and prayer and counseling visits by newly converted Christians to the concerned and anxious. Once a person had gone through the experience of conversion and rebirth, he or she would join the ranks of visitors and exhorters, themselves becoming evangelists for the still unconverted around them.

     One important result of the new revivalism was a further erosion of older Calvinist beliefs, especially the doctrine of predestination.  (For information on Calvinism and predestination see under Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Puritanism and Predestination.)  Although some evangelical clergymen did not abandon the idea of predestination entirely (the idea that God had preordained who would be saved and who would not was, after all, a logical extension of the conception of God as an eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent being), in practical terms they held out what amounted to an idea of universal salvation.  Most Methodist clergymen came pretty close to embracing the idea of universalism which held that Christ's atonement was potentially universal, available without restriction to all who would repent and surrender to God. Alexander Campbell, the founder of the Church of Christ, made universalism the hallmark of his doctrinal system.

     This new style of evangelicalism consisted of more than a doctrinal and devotional emphasis and a set of proselytizing strategies.  It has to be understood as a vast and powerful religious movement.  By the l820s evangelicalism had become one of the most dynamic and important cultural forces in American life.  It is here that another important term comes into play--the Second Great Awakening--the term evangelical leaders adopted to talk of the revivalism and evangelical fervor they found themselves in the midst of.  The label sought to describe a broad religious phenomenon that transcended sectarian and denominational boundaries. Most clergymen (and communicants as well) had specific denominational affiliations.  But just as the seventeenth-century Puritans saw their Massachusetts Bay experiment as the spearhead of a broader movement to reform Protestantism itself, so too did nineteenth-century evangelicals consider themselves participants in a much broader spiritual movement to evangelize the nation and world.  Secondly, they used the idea of a Second Great Awakening to signify their participation in an extraordinary religious phenomenon. The label linked them directly to a special heroic history, namely the great eighteenth-century spiritual outpouring (which they themselves first designated the original or First Great Awakening) associated with such figures as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Tennants.  Theirs, too, seemed a period marked by a special and extraordinary outpouring of God's Saving Grace, a period that placed a special burden of responsibility on ministers of God and saved Christians alike to enlist themselves wholeheartedly in the work of extending God's Kingdom. Finally, this sense of participation in and responsibility for the vast outpouring of Saving Grace promoted a sense of direct connection to the ultimate teleological goal of Christian history, namely, the millennium.  They came to believe that it was given to them and their generation of evangelical Americans to prepare the way for Christ's Second Coming (which Jonathan Edwards had predicted would take place in the New World) by working unrelentingly to bring about the thousand-year reign of righteousness that would precede his return to earth.  More specifically, what this meant was that they and their communicants were to enlist themselves in a broad set of campaigns to reform American society.  (For more on the importance of millennialism in nineteenth-century religion see under Nineteenth Century, Mormonism and the American Mainstream, African-American Religion in the Nineteenth Century.)

     One of the most dramatic consequences of the revivals was the conversion of hundreds of thousands of enslaved African Americans to Christianity.  During the 17th century, many slaveholders feared that baptized slaves would have to be set free.  But by the second quarter of the 18th century, a growing number of slave owners concluded that Christianity would make slaves more conscientious.  It would place them "under strong Obligations to perform [their] duties with the greatest Diligence and Fidelity...from a sense of Duty to God."

     The first concerted campaigns to convert slaves to Christianity were led by Quaker, Moravian, and Anglican ministers and missionaries during the early 18th century.  But it would not be until the late 18th century when Methodists and Baptists licensed African Americans to exhort and preach that truly significant numbers of slaves converted to Christianity.  Most slaves attended churches alongside whites, although a small number of separate black churches (mainly Baptist) began to emerge as early as the 1760s.

     Within the Baptist and Methodist churches, slaves created a hybrid form of Christianity, blending Christian rituals and beliefs with elements of West and Central African cultures.  The result was a religion with its distinctive forms of preaching and worship, including rhythmic sermons, ecstatic behavior induced by spiritual possession, and singing and dancing influenced by African traditions.  This African heritage gave many slaves a hopeful, optimistic view of life, which contrasted sharply with the evangelical stress on human sinfulness.

     During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the denominations that had dominated religious life in colonial America--the Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians--grew slowly.  Other groups grew at a staggering pace.  Baptists expanded from 400 congregations in 1780 to over 12,000 in 1860; Methodists from 50 to 20,000; Roman Catholics from 50 to 2,500.  The African Methodist Episcopal church grew from 5 congregations in 1816 to more than 100 by 1850.

     In the history of religion, few stories are more dramatic than that of the Mormons.  It has haunting biblical overtones of divine revelations and visitations, of persecution and martyrdom, of an exodus virtually across a continent, and of ultimate success in establishing a religious society in an uninhabited desert.  This story, however, did not take place in a foreign land in the distant past. It took place in the United States during the 19th century.

     The Mormon church had its beginnings in western New York, which was a hotbed of religious fervor. Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Universalist preachers eagerly sought converts. Fourteen year old Joseph Smith, Jr., the son of a migrant farmer, listened closely to the preachers, but was uncertain which way to turn.

     In the spring of 1820, Smith went into the woods near Palmyra, N.Y., to seek divine guidance. Suddenly, he was "seized upon by some power that entirely overcame me." According to his account, a brilliant light revealed "two personages," who told him that the existing churches were false and that the true church of God was about to be reestablished on earth.

      Three years later, he underwent another supernatural experience.  A spectral visitor told him of the existence of a set of buried golden plates that contained a lost section from the Bible describing a tribe of Israelites that had lived in America.  The next morning, Smith proceeded to unearth the golden plates.  He was forbidden to reveal their existence for four years, when he translated them into English, published the Book of Mormon, and founded the church that would later be known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

     His movement quickly grew.  Part of Mormonism's attraction may be that it spoke to the beliefs and yearnings of antebellum rural New Yorkers.  The folk culture of the time paid a great deal of attention to diviners who used rods and seer stones to find water or buried treasure, to magical talismans and mystical visions, and to legends about Indians and mysterious Indian mounds.  Smith had an extraordinary capacity to speak to these people, offering (as poet John Greenleaf Whittier put it) "a language of hope and promise to weak, weary hearts, tossed and troubled, who have wandered from sect to sect, seeking in vain for the primal manifestation of the divine power."

     Because Smith said that he had conversed with angels and received direct revelations from the Lord, local authorities threatened to indict him for blasphemy.  He and his followers responded by moving to Kirtland, Ohio, near Cleveland, where they built their first temple.  It was in Kirtland that the Mormons first experimented with an economy planned and run by the church.  In this community, church trustees controlled the members' property and put members to work building a temple and other structures.

     From Kirtland, the Mormons moved to Independence, Missouri, and then to a town in the northern part of the state.  Beginning in 1832, proslavery mobs attacked the Mormons, accusing them of inciting slave insurrections.  They burned several Mormon settlements and seized Mormon farms and houses.  Smith was arrested for treason and sentenced to be shot, but managed to escape several months later.  Fifteen thousand Mormons fled Missouri to Illinois after the governor proclaimed them enemies who "had to be exterminated, or driven from the state."

     Trouble arose again in Illinois after dissident Mormons published a newspaper denouncing the practice of polygamy and attacking Smith for trying to become "king or lawgiver to the church."  On Smith's orders, Mormon legionnaires destroyed the dissidents' printing press. Authorities charged Smith with treason, but the Illinois governor gave Smith his pledge of protection. Smith and his brother were then confined to a jail in Carthage, Ill. Late in the afternoon of June 27, 1844, a mob of prominent citizens, aided by jail guards, broke into Smith's cell, shot him and his brother, and threw their bodies out of a second-story window.

     Why were the Mormons subjected to persecution?  Why did the Mormons seem so menacing?

     Today it is hard to believe that Mormons could ever have been regarded as subversive, since they are known for their abstinence from tobacco and alcohol and their stress on family and community responsibility. Anti-Mormonism was partly rooted in a struggle for economic and political power. Individualistic frontier settlers feared the Mormons, who voted as a bloc and whose trustees controlled their land.

     Mormonism was also denounced as a threat to fundamental social values.

     Protestant ministers attacked the Mormons for rejecting the legitimacy of the established churches and for insisting that the Book of Mormon was Holy Scripture, equal in importance to the Bible.

     The Mormons were also accused of corrupt moral values, especially after 1842 when rumors about polygamy began to spread.  Indeed, Mormons did practice polygamy for half a century, which was justified theologically as an effort to reestablish the patriarchal Old Testament family.  Polygamy also served an important social function, absorbing single or widowed women into Mormon communities.  Contrary to popular belief, polygamy was not widely practiced.  Altogether, only 10 to 20 percent of Mormon families were polygamous and nearly two-thirds involved a man and two wives.

     The Mormons were not the only pre-Civil War group subject to intense prejudice.  Catholics, Jews, and African American Protestants also faced hostility from the dominant culture.  In response to discrimination, Catholics, Jews, and free black Protestants formed fraternal lodges, benevolent associations, and mutual benefit societies which allowed them to preserve a distinctive group identity.

     No church grew more rapidly or faced more bitter hostility than Roman Catholicism.  Numbering no more than 25,000 in 1776, Catholics grew to 1.75 million in 1850, making them the nation's largest religious group and the country's first truly multicultural church.

     During the colonial period, Catholics constituted a tiny minority, just one percent of the population, concentrated in three colonies: Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. In 1776, there were just six priests in the American colonies and not a single bishop.

     Massive immigration from Ireland and Germany between 1820 and 1860 dramatically increased the size of the Catholic church, from 195,000 to 3,103,000, but also generated ethnic tensions within the church. Following the Revolution, the church had been led primarily by English Catholic families from Maryland and by French Catholics.  As the composition of the American Catholic population changed, Catholics of German and Irish ancestry wanted priests of their own background.

     During the pre-Civil War era, Catholics faced intense hostility and even violence.  The evangelical Protestant revivals of the 1820s and '30s stimulated a "No Popery" movement.  Prominent northern clergy, mostly Whigs in their politics, accused the Catholic church of conspiring to overthrow democracy and subject the United States to papal despotism.

     Popular fiction (such as Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal [1836], which sold 300,000 copies before the Civil War), offered fictitious descriptions of priests seducing women during confession and nuns cutting infants from the womb and throwing them to dogs. A popular children's game was called "Break the Pope's neck."

     Anti-Catholic sentiment culminated in mobs rioting and the burning of churches and convents.  In 1834, after a vicious anti-Catholic sermon, a Protestant mob burned the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Mass.  A decade later, after Philadelphia's Catholic convinced the city's school board to use both the Catholic and Protestant versions of the Bible in schools, a vicious riot erupted in the nearby suburbs of Kensington and Southwark.

     The advent of massive immigration from Ireland and Germany after 1845 led to renewed anti-Catholic outbursts. Native born workers blamed Irish and German Catholics for increases in poverty and crime and briefly supported the anti-Catholic Know Nothing political party.

     23 refugees from Portuguese Brazil who arrived in New Amsterdam in the summer of 1654 were the first Jews to settle in the American colonies. At the time of the Revolution, the American Jewish population numbered no more than 1500. There were no more than five or six Jewish congregations in the colonies, no Jewish newspapers, and not a single rabbi.

     During the early 19th century, the Jewish population remained small. By 1812, New York City had the new nation's largest Jewish population--just 50 families.  In 1816, the first organized Protestant efforts to convert Jews to Christianity began.  These efforts sensitized American Jews to their distinctive identity and encouraged Jewish communities to establish their own schools, hospitals, and synagogues and appoint foreign rabbis as religious leaders.

     By 1850, migration from central and western Europe increased the Jewish population from approximately 2,000 to 50,000.  Thousands of immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Hungary in the 1850s tripled the size of the Jewish population to 150,000 in 1860.

     A major challenge American Jews confronted with adapting religious orthodoxy to the realities of American life.  Most early 19th century Jews lived in small towns where it was impossible to obey traditional laws--towns lacked synagogues, a mikvah (ritual bath), a ritual circumciser, and a kosher butcher.  Many Jews also found it impossible to refrain from working on the Jewish Sabbath, Saturday.

     As early as 1824, a group of Jews in Charleston, S.C., organized one of the country's first Reformed congregations.  Their aim was to modify "such parts of the prevailing system of Worship, as are inconsistent with the present enlightened state of society, and not in accordance with the Five Books of Moses and the Prophets."  Contrary to Orthodox practice, they worshiped from an English language prayer book, with their heads uncovered, while listening to instrumental music.  In later years, many other congregations "Americanized" their rituals by playing organ music during services, permitting men and women to worship side by side, allowing men to prayer without the traditional prayer shawl and head covering, and establishing confirmation ceremonies for boys and girls.

     American Jews avidly formed community and charitable institutions. Even small towns that lacked Jewish congregations had a B'nai B'rith, a lodge and benevolent society founded in 1843, or a Young Men's Hebrew Association (the first was formed in 1854), as well as separate orphan asylums and burial societies.

     In November 1787, white elders of Philadelphia's St. George's Methodist Churched ordered black Methodists to sit in a newly built gallery. Several free blacks refused, including Richard Allen (1760-1831), a former slave, who had supported himself as a brickyard laborer, shoemaker, wagon driver, and wood chopper.

     Shaken by this experience, Allen founded the Free African Society of Philadelphia, which is usually considered the first autonomous black organization in the United States. Seven years later, in 1794, Allen founded a separate black Methodist church.  That same year, Absalom Jones (1746-1818), also a former slave and a former Methodist preacher, formed the African Church of Philadelphia as a racially separate non-denominational church.  Discriminatory treatment in white-controlled churches led free black communities across the North to establish separate black congregations.

     Between 1804 and 1815, separate black Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches were founded in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Wilmington, Delaware.  In 1816, Richard Allen formed the first autonomous black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal church. Five years later, a separate denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, was established in New York.

     By 1820, there may have been 700 African American congregations.  Black churches served as centers of political life, communal self-help, and social reform, and black ministers were community leaders.