Camp meeting

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Methodist camp meeting (1878).

A camp meeting is an open air religious revival event in the United States .

history

The great awakenings of around 1800, which reached almost every corner of the United States, began in opposite parts of the country: the more moderate Second Great Awakening in New England and the exuberant Great Revival in Kentucky .

The Camp Meeting was the defining religious renewal in the course of the Kentucky revivals. These events were initially organized by Presbyterian clergy based on the Scottish model of extended open-air " sacrament feasts ", which often produced clearly visible emotional signs of religious movement and conviction.

In Kentucky, the settlers loaded their families, employees, and slaves into carriages and drove to the Presbyterian meetings, where they camped for a few days. Thousands came together like this. When they were gathered in a field or at the edge of the forest for a longer religious meeting, the participants converted the site into a camp meeting.

The 1801 Camp Meeting in Cane Ridge was a highlight . Ecstatic outbursts (jumping, dancing, laughing, running, "barking exercises") were perceived as direct spiritual influences, which resulted in rapid religious growth in the form of numerous further meetings, the building of churches and an evangelical change of heart had.

However, the religious awakening of the Kentucky Camp Meetings was so intense and provoked such emotional outbursts that its creators, the Presbyterians and the Baptists , soon distanced themselves from them. The Methodists eventually adopted a moderated and domesticated form of camp meetings and introduced them to the eastern United States.

In the UK, camp meetings were hosted by the Primitive Methodists ; the Methodist mainstream rejected this type of event as "not respectable".

Others

The 3rd symphony by the American composer Charles Ives is subtitled The Camp Meeting . It draws on American hymns - religious and national hymns of praise.

Mark Twain satirically targeting the camp meeting in his book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

See also

literature

  • Paul Gillespie and his students (ed.): Foxfire 7 , Anchor Books, New York 1980, ISBN 0-385-15244-2 (English, pp. 265-279)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn's Adventures and Rides - Chapter 17 Project Gutenberg, accessed July 6, 2018.