American Yawp, Chapter 10: Religion and Reform

Second Great Awakening

A nationwide Protestant revival movement from 1790 to 1840 that emphasized individual salvation, emotional preaching, and moral reform; led by preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, and Peter Cartwright, it inspired major movements for temperance, abolition, education, and women's rights.

Camp Meetings

Large outdoor revival gatherings where itinerant (preaching-from-place-to-place) ministers traveled widely to deliver emotional sermons and call for repentance, symbolizing the democratization and enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening.

Burned-Over District

A region of upstate New York so frequently swept by revivalism that preacher Charles Grandison Finney said it was "burned over" with the fires of the Spirit, leaving no one left to convert; it became a center of reform and new religious movements.

Mormonism

A new religious movement founded by Joseph Smith, who in 1823 claimed that an angel named Moroni revealed to him golden plates that he said he translated and published as The Book of Mormon; critics noted that Smith had previously been arrested for fraud and "money-digging" schemes. Growing tensions over plural marriage, political power, and the destruction of an anti-Mormon newspaper led to Smith's murder by an anti-Mormon mob while he was jailed in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844. After his death, Brigham Young led the movement west to Utah and established the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).

Spiritual Egalitarianism

The belief that all souls are equal before God and that anyone can achieve salvation through faith and personal conversion—a core idea of the Second Great Awakening that challenged church hierarchies and social class divisions in the early U.S.

Unitarianism

A liberal Christian movement that rejected the Trinity (the doctrine that God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and emphasized reason, moral conscience, and the ethical teachings of Jesus rather than divine revelation, appealing mainly to educated urban Northerners.

Transcendentalism

A New England intellectual movement of the 1830s and 1840s influenced by German Romantic thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that stressed the goodness of people and nature, individual intuition, and self-reliance; associated with writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Its lasting impact included shaping later American literature through authors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, inspiring reform movements like abolitionism and women's rights, and influencing later ideas of environmentalism, civil disobedience, and personal moral responsibility as enduring American values.

Benevolent Empire

A network of voluntary Protestant reform organizations in the 1820s and 1830s involving mostly middle-class women and men from urban churches who sought to reduce sin and social problems through Christian duty—that is, by acting out their faith through charitable works, moral persuasion, and community reform instead of relying on government action. These groups promoted temperance, education, Sabbath observance, and moral uplift as ways to improve society.

Perfectionism

The evangelical belief promoted by Charles Grandison Finney, the most influential preacher of the Second Great Awakening, that individuals and society could strive toward moral perfection through faith and reform. Finney's idea taught that sin resulted from personal choice, not inherited depravity, so people could choose to live without sin by following God's will—defined as loving God completely and treating others with perfect moral love. This belief inspired converts to join reform movements such as abolition, temperance, and education, and shaped the moral activism of Oberlin College, where Finney later taught. Finney's rejection of Calvinist predestination and his emphasis on human moral agency made his message especially appealing to Americans who wanted to believe that individuals—and society—could improve through deliberate moral effort.

Disinterested Benevolence

A theological teaching first developed by Nathaniel William Taylor of Yale Divinity School in the 1820s and later popularized by Charles Grandison Finney during the Second Great Awakening. It taught that true Christian love must be completely selfless—believers should act for the good of others and for God's glory, not for personal benefit or reward. This idea reflected the revival-era belief that faith required active moral responsibility and helped justify missionary work and social reform across the early United States.

Temperance

A reform movement urging people to limit or abstain from alcohol consumption because of widespread alcoholism and its damage to families and communities; temperance advocates linked sobriety to moral self-control and social stability, laying groundwork for later prohibition efforts.

Missionaries

Christian reformers who sought to spread their faith and moral teachings through travel, education, and charitable efforts at home and abroad, such as in India, China, the Pacific Islands, and parts of Africa. In the context of the Second Great Awakening, many were part of the evangelical movement, meaning they emphasized personal spiritual conversion and the active sharing of their beliefs as a moral responsibility to improve society. Missionaries often disregarded or sought to replace existing non-Christian beliefs and traditions, believing their own religion and culture to be universal and divinely superior, a mindset that reflected both sincere faith and the imperial attitudes of the era.

Anti-Removal Activism

Organized opposition in the 1830s to the forced removal of Native Americans by the U.S. government under President Andrew Jackson through the Indian Removal Act, which relocated tribes from the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi ("Indian Territory" in present-day Oklahoma); missionaries and Christian reformers such as Jeremiah Evarts condemned the policy as immoral and un-Christian.

William Lloyd Garrison

Radical abolitionist and self-published editor of The Liberator, a newspaper founded in 1831 whose mission statement declared, "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice; I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard." He demanded immediate emancipation without compensation to slaveholders and helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.

Nat Turner's Rebellion

A violent slave uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831 led by Nat Turner, an enslaved Black preacher and spiritual leader who believed he was called by God to end slavery; the rebellion killed about sixty white people and resulted in the execution of Turner and dozens of others, leading southern states to impose harsher slave codes.

Liberty Party

The first political party in the United States dedicated to ending slavery, founded in 1840 by abolitionists who believed that political action, in addition to moral and religious arguments, was also necessary to challenge the legal and institutional foundations of slavery. Although the party itself won few votes and elected no national candidates, its antislavery platform influenced later movements such as the Free Soil Party and the Republican Party of the 1850s—a very different organization from the modern party—which opposed the expansion of slavery into new western territories. Former Liberty Party supporters, including John P. Hale of New Hampshire, continued this work by joining the Free Soil Party and later serving in Congress, where they advanced antislavery legislation and debate.

Women's Suffrage

The movement for women's right to vote — suffrage means the right to vote in political elections — emerging from the 1840s reform climate of abolition and temperance and becoming a lasting cause for gender equality in American democracy.

Sarah and Angelina Grimké

Southern-born sisters from a wealthy, enslaver-owning Charleston, South Carolina, family (their father was a judge and plantation owner) who rejected the values of their upbringing and moved north, where they became leading abolitionists and women's-rights advocates. Motivated by deep religious conviction, they feared that slavery endangered not only the souls of the enslaved but also their own and those of their family members. Angelina Grimké's early writings expressed anguish for her brother's spiritual fate as he continued to uphold slavery. Drawing on their firsthand knowledge of southern life, the sisters linked the fight for abolition to the moral and political equality of women.

World Anti-Slavery Convention

An international meeting held in London in 1840 that excluded female delegates like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an experience that inspired them to organize the first women's-rights movement in the United States. The convention exposed the hypocrisy of a reform movement that fought for the emancipation of enslaved people while denying women a voice in its proceedings, leading many activists to see the struggles for abolition and women's rights as interconnected fights against inequality and oppression.

Seneca Falls Convention

The 1848 women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott after being excluded from the 1840 World Anti Slavery Convention in London. Drawing more than 300 attendees, including Frederick Douglass, the meeting issued the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed "all men and women are created equal." Delegates debated women's legal status, property rights, access to education, and the controversial demand for suffrage, the right to vote, marking the formal beginning of the organized women's rights movement in the United States. Supporters first sent a formal demand to Congress for women's right to vote in 1878, a goal finally achieved with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 granting women the right to vote nationwide.