Evangelical Protestantism and Transcendentalism.

🟦 APUSH NOTES: Religion, Reform, and Culture (c. 1800–1860)

I. The Second Great Awakening

Time period: 1820s–1840s
What it was: A widespread religious revival movement that reshaped American religion and society.

Key Characteristics

• Spread through revivals, camp meetings, and sermons

• Strongest in:

  • New England

  • Burned-over district (western New York)

  • The South (camp meetings)

• Led to growth of:

  • Methodists

  • Baptists

  • New denominations (ex: Mormons)

Core Ideas

• Rejected:

  • Calvinism (predestination, humans powerless)

  • Deism (God revealed through reason, not religion)

• Promoted:

  • Free will

  • Personal salvation

  • Moral responsibility

• God seen as benevolent, not distant or harsh

📌 APUSH takeaway: Religion became emotional, personal, and action-oriented.

II. Charles Grandison Finney & Christian Perfection

Who: Leading revivalist preacher

Finney’s Beliefs

• Salvation requires human effort

• People can choose to be saved

• Introduced:

  • Anxious bench / anxious seat

• Promoted Christian Perfection:

  • People could eliminate sin through moral action

  • Faith should lead to social reform

📌 APUSH connection: Religion → reform movements

III. Evangelicalism & Conversion

Evangelicalism

• Emphasized:

  • Emotional preaching

  • Activism

  • Missionary work

• Shift toward practical Arminianism:

  • Humans have ability and duty to repent

Conversion Experience

• Seen as a dramatic emotional event

• Stages:

  1. Concern

  2. Anxiety

  3. Conviction of sin

  4. Repentance

  5. Rebirth / regeneration

📌 Conversion = new identity + duty to reform others

IV. Revivalism

Camp Meetings

• Frontier gatherings (Kentucky, Ohio)

• Emotional worship, mass conversions

• Example: Cane Ridge, 1801

Protracted Meetings

• Urban and northern revivals

• Organized, planned, longer-lasting

• Associated with Finney

📌 Revivalism weakened predestination and encouraged activism

V. Reform Movements (Fueled by Religion)

Religious belief → moral responsibility → social reform

Major Reform Movements

• Abolition

• Temperance

• Education reform

• Prison reform

• Women’s rights

VI. Abolitionism

Early Roots

• Quakers: equality, Inner Light

• Underground Railroad

Key Figures

• William Lloyd Garrison

  • Newspaper: The Liberator

  • Radical abolitionist

• Frederick Douglass

  • Former slave

  • Powerful speaker and writer

Divisions

• Radical abolitionists

  • Moral persuasion

  • Immediate emancipation

  • Supported women’s rights

• Political abolitionists

  • Worked through political parties

  • Liberty Party → Free Soil → Republican Party

📌 Abolition split the nation culturally and politically

VII. Early Women’s Rights Movement

Roots

• Linked to:

  • Abolition

  • Second Great Awakening

• Women excluded from public life despite reform work

Key Figures

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• Susan B. Anthony

Seneca Falls Convention (1848)

• First women’s rights convention

• Declaration of Sentiments

  • Modeled after Declaration of Independence

  • Demanded suffrage

📌 Challenged traditional gender roles

VIII. Temperance Movement

Goal

• Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption

Key Figures & Groups

• Lyman Beecher

• American Temperance Society (1826)

Beliefs

• Alcohol caused:

  • Poverty

  • Crime

  • Moral decay

📌 Popular among middle-class Protestants

IX. Utopian Communities

Purpose

• Create perfect societies

• Often religious or moral goals

Examples

Shakers

• Gender & racial equality

• Celibacy

• Simple living

Brook Farm

• Transcendentalist

• Communal living

Fruitlands

• Radical transcendentalist experiment

• Failed quickly

X. Transcendentalism

Core Beliefs

• Truth found through:

  • Intuition

  • Nature

  • Individual conscience

• Rejected materialism and conformity

Key Figures

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Nature

  • Self-Reliance

• Henry David Thoreau

  • Walden

  • Civil Disobedience

📌 Influenced reform, literature, and individualism

XI. American Literature & Culture

Goal

• Create a distinctly American culture

Key Authors

• Washington Irving

  • Rip Van Winkle

  • Sleepy Hollow

• James Fenimore Cooper

  • Frontier hero Natty Bumppo

• Nathaniel Hawthorne

  • The Scarlet Letter

• Emily Dickinson

  • Lyric poetry

• Walt Whitman

  • Leaves of Grass

  • Free verse, individualism

XII. Popular Culture

Developments

• Penny press newspapers

• Dime novels

• Mass entertainment

Figures

• P. T. Barnum

  • Circus

  • Popular spectacle

📌 Reflected democracy, expansion, and mass participation

🔑 APUSH Big Picture Themes

• Religion → Reform

• Individualism increases

• Moral activism grows

• Culture becomes distinctly American

• Reform movements expose sectional and social tensions