Religion & Reform PPT

For Test #2

American Life in Flux

• Life changing after 1815

  • Immigration

  • Crisis of identity

  • New social status and accompanying issues

• New movement: The Second Great Awakening

  • Rallying cry for social reform

  • Birthed out of Nationalism

  • Tool to construct a more “heavenly” society

  • Activists call themselves “revivalists”

The Jefferson Bible

• The role of the Jefferson bible in context with early 1800's religion

• Excluding specific contents of the bible

• It's future influence in American politics

The Second Great Awakening

• 1795-1840

• Big tents popping up across the country

  • Evangelism in the American character

  • Preachers on horseback

  • Tents and democratic symbology

• Cane Ridge Revival 1801

  • Thousands gathered

  • Peer pressure/herd mentality

  • Unites denominations

• Circuit riders

Behaviors of the Second Great Awakening

• Abandoning a formal style of worship in churches

• Shaking, shuttering, gesturing, physical actions

• Tongues, fainting, jumping

  • Biblical references to speaking in tongue in comparison to modern worship

What Happened to Anglicanism?

• Branched out and rebranded

  • Anti-British sentiment in the U.S.

• Anglican Church's Oath of Supremacy

  • Controversial for American Christians

New Protestant Denominations

• Latter-Day Saints/Mormons

• Seventh Day Adventists

• Pentecostals

• New Testament Christianity

  • Excluding the deuterocanonical/apocrypha

• A hydra of new denominations

  • Many share more traits than differ

Shift in American Christian Doctrine

• Calvinism in the past

  • Pessimistic views and authoritarian view of god

• Arminianism going forward

  • conducive liberal view of a Christian god and humanity

  • Ideologically compatible to American values

• “Spiritual Egalitarianism”

Fringe Social Experiments & Beliefs

• Mormonism

  • Prophet Joseph Smith and polygamy

• Shakers

  • Celibacy

• John Humphrey’s Noyes Oneida Community

  • Free Love

  • Male continence

  • Group marriage

  • Stirpculture

  • Mutual criticism

• Robert Owen’s New Harmony Society

• Unitarianism

Benevolent Empire

• Interdenominational movement

• No state religion, patronage, or support from the government

  • Moral character in the national and ideological character of the U.S.

• Role of the Second Great Awakening

  • Orchestrated by the middle-class

• Key terms

  • Disinterested benevolence

  • “Perfectionism”

Benevolent Empire Continued.

• Concerns for social reform

  • Alcohol

  • Prostitution

  • Provide medical services

  • Bankruptcy laws

  • Orphanages

  • Job placement

  • Daycare

  • Prison

• Incompatibility with real empire

  • “Civilizing” efforts

  • Jackson’s Indian Removal

• Incompatibilities with the South

  • Abolition

The American Penal Systems

• Name for prison facilities?

• Prison reform

  • What should be the goal of prisons

  • Crime and justice before the reforms

• Social experimentation

• Panopticon

  • No privacy, always visible

  • Circular in structure

• Pennsylvania System

  • Extreme solitary confinement

  • Erasure of personal identity

• Auburn System (modern system with some caveats)

  • For-profit system

  • What it means to reform a person

  • Mandatory labor and exercise

  • Silence

  • A human zoo

The Temperance Movement & Booze

• Alcohol, an actual social ill?

• The price of alcohol

• What are families consuming?

• Alcoholism

• Ties to domestic abuse and neglect

• Differences from 1820 to 1840

Abolition & Atlantic Interactions

• United States does not live in a bubble

  • Christian movement across the Atlantic

    • Creates networks from America to Europe

    • Legacy traces back to the First Great Awakening

  • Anti-slavery immediatism originates from British thinkers

  • Western international institutions such as the General Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London

Abolition Movement

• Christian Revivalists saw slavery as largest god-defying sin of all mankind

  • No gradual emancipation

  • No conditional emancipation

    • Black Northern thinkers David Walker and James Forten argue for its incompatibility with Christian reform morality

    • Liberia in 1822

    • American Colonization Society

  • Integral to national redemption

American Anti-Slavery Society (1833-1870)

• William Lloyd Garrison and others spearhead the creation of the society

  • Interracial society

  • Social mixing

  • Garrison created newspaper The Liberator (1831-1865)

• Called out North’s complicity in the slave system

• Spam everyone in the South in 1835

  • “Save your souls”

  • Thousands of petitions to Congress

• Disliked by most White American citizens

• Organization’s schism

Abolitionists & politicians

• Abolitionists re-orient their energy and resources

  • “Underground railroad”

  • Frederick Douglass, the poster-child in 1845

    • Intelligent

    • Eloquent

    • Pro-active abroad

• Abraham Lincoln as an “abolitionist”

Women in Antebellum America

• Women as virtuous and spiritual heads of the household

  • “Cult of Domesticity”

• Clear cut limitations on women’s participation

  • Men control the woman’s property

  • Cannot vote

  • Cannot divorce

  • Cannot make wills

  • Cannot sign contracts

Women’s Movement in Antebellum America

• Remember the London World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840?

  • Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organize the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention

    • Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments

    • Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman?

Susan B. Anthony & The Push for Women’s Education

• New York State Teacher’s Association in 1853

  • Proposed desegregated education

  • Proposed co-ed education

• The Association’s reaction to Susan

  • Negative to say the least