Great awakening

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Camp Meeting , 2nd Great Awakening, USA, 1839

Great Awakening ( English for "Great Awakening") is the collective name for a series of large Protestant revival movements that occurred in the British colonies in North America and the United States since the 1730s . Historical research names three awakening movements in particular for the USA: The First Great Awakening (also simply The Great Awakening; 1740–1760), the Second Great Awakening (1800–1840) and the Third Great Awakening (1880–1910). The expression “Fourth Great Awakening”, which the historian Robert Fogel coined to describe a number of developments in the history of religion in the 1960s and 1970s, is controversial .

Basic pattern

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At each Great Awakening, converts flocked in large numbers to a wide range of Protestant communities - both existing and newly established denominations. The interest of these awakened turned to either completely new belief systems or to those that promised to overcome their (supposedly rigid) orthodoxy within existing teachings.

The American revival movements turned against the Enlightenment and modernity insofar as the inerrancy of the Bible was questioned and the possibility of a successful moral life even without reference to transcendence was promised. At the same time, however, they made use of genuinely modern means, particularly when communicating their message. In this respect, according to the German theologian Jörg Lauster, they are not to be understood as anti-modernist, but rather as crisis phenomena of modernity. The revival movements are the historical roots of fundamentalism .

Special features of the American revival movements

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Although revival movements have not been described specifically for American religious life anywhere in the world, the cycle of the American Great Awakenings is characterized by some peculiarities that fundamentally differentiate it from other revival movements. This is to be understood against the background of the extraordinarily broad spectrum of Protestant denominations in the USA. This diversity is an expression of the special freedom of religious life in American Protestantism. Due to the distance from the state of this Protestantism (especially in comparison to the Lutheranism of Northern and Central Europe and the Anglicanism of England) and the lack of centralism of the Roman Catholic Church , new religious ideas were able to spread there without slowly reforming the existing institutions from within. The existing religious communities, on the other hand, enjoy such prestige and persistence that the need for new religious ideas is so worn out by their resistance that a regular cycle of bloodless religious revolutions emerges.

history

The First Great Awakening

The first Great Awakening occurred simultaneously in Great Britain and the British colonies in North America in the 1730s and 1740s . While the revival movement in New England mainly influenced the Congregationalists , it influenced the Presbyterians in the central and southern colonies , especially in their hinterland . In contrast to later revival movements, the First Great Awakening was primarily an intra-church movement that intensified the religious life of church members.

course

Although the idea of ​​a "Great Awakening" is controversial in literature, this period - especially in New England - was a time of high religious activity and accelerated religious developments. These began with the missionary work of Jonathan Edwards , an educated theologian and Congregationalist preacher from Northampton , Massachusetts, who had Puritan and Calvinist roots but repeatedly emphasized the importance and power of immediate personal religious experience. Edwards' sermons were powerful and attracted large audiences from about 1731 onwards.

Methodist preacher George Whitefield , who immigrated from England, continued the revival movement, touring the British colonies and preaching in a dramatic and emotional style that was new for the period. What was also new was that Whitefield accepted everyone in the audience, including African-Americans and slaves .

The first new Congregational Church, shaped by the Great Awakening, arose in 1731 in Uxbridge , Massachusetts.

Before the Great Awakening profoundly changed New England spiritual life , British colonists had little interest in religion. Above all, they tried to get rich here. To encourage interest, the church created rules that allowed converts to join other denominations without perceiving it as a conversion. In addition, she gave preferential treatment to wealthy families by allowing them to take regular seats in church stalls close to the altar .

In the Connecticut River valley, the wealthy landowners drove up land prices, which meant that many young people could not start a farm and were therefore forced to wait before getting married. Not only did this impoverish them, but they were also unwelcome to church services. This was different with Pastor Jonathan Edwards , who especially addressed this target group and gave sermons that particularly addressed the feelings of this group of people. A spirit of passionate Puritan faith reigned in his meeting house , which also radiated to the rest of the population and attracted more and more parishioners. While religion had previously been viewed as an adult affair, church attendance by young people in particular increased.

Believers began to prefer passionate sermons and lost interest in clergymen who preached in “cool” style. Although there was ultimately an open conflict with the established churches, German Pietists and Scottish-Irish Presbyterians carried the revival movement on. In Pennsylvania , William Tennent , a Presbyterian minister, and his son Gilbert promoted the formation of a new generation of ministers. In 1726 they set up the so-called “Log College” in a log cabin in Warminster , from which the College of New Jersey , now Princeton University , emerged in 1746 .

George Whitefield continued to develop his teaching. Like Edwards, he explained that people are "half angel and half devil" and therefore can hope for salvation. Many religious leaders added a demand for piety and purity to mainstream Protestantism. Believers now perceived religion as a relief from the burdens placed on them in their personal lives.

Effects

The people who joined the movement experienced new forms of religiosity. While the believers had followed the intellectual religious discourse without personal concern, their religious experience in the Great Awakening became passionate and emotional. Clergymen who used the new style of preaching, were sometimes (Engl. As "New Light" New Lights ), while preachers whose style was cool, "Old Lights" (English. Old Lights ) were called. Believers not only heard the texts of the Bible in worship, but also began to study them at home. This decentralization of religious instruction of the faithful corresponded to the general individualization that the Reformation had promoted.

The doctrines preached during the First Great Awakening centered on the personal guilt of each individual and the need to be redeemed, which redemption included final resolve and public repentance. The Great Awakening led believers to "experience God in their own way," and taught them that they were responsible for their actions. As the importance of rite and ceremony was diminished, religion became a highly personal experience for the average believer, marked by a deep awareness of spiritual guilt and penance, introspection and determined will, a new standard of personal Morality to follow. The American historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom describes the Great Awakening as part of the “great international Protestant upheaval” that also produced Pietism in Germany and Evangelicalism and Methodism in England.

The First Great Awakening exerted considerable influence on the Congregational, Presbyterian , Dutch Reformed and German Reformed churches and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist congregations. In contrast, it had little influence on the Anglicans and Quakers . Unlike the Second Great Awakening, which also aimed to reach people who did not yet belong to a church, the First Great Awakening concentrated largely on those believers who were already church members.

The Great Revival also brought many slaves to the Christian faith for the first time . In the southern colonies, Baptists allowed both slaves and slave owners to preach from the 1770s. After women had been over-represented in the churches, the number of male church members also increased.

Some historians have described the Great Awakening as the American embodiment of the second phase of the Reformation . It is estimated that the number of churches here doubled in the period 1740-1780.

The Second Great Awakening

A second great revival took place in the United States from 1790 to 1840. Major religious leaders of the time, at whose congregations innumerable believers experienced personal salvation, were Charles Grandison Finney , Lyman Beecher , Barton Stone , Peter Cartwright , Asahel Nettleton and James B. Finley . The movement also fostered a committed evangelical mindset, which was clearly evident when issues such as penal reform , the abstinence movement , women's suffrage, and the abolition of slavery were later discussed in the United States .

Emergence of new faith communities

While the renewed interest in religion in New England resulted in a wave of social activism, in western New York State (also known as the "burned-over district" due to the supposedly burning intensity of religious zeal) it led to the spread of religious currents such as that of the Restoration Movement , the Mormons, and the Sanctification Movement . In the West , especially in Cane Ridge , Kentucky and Tennessee , which strengthened Revival the Methodists and introduced a new religious expression form: the organized open-air Camp Meeting .

The Methodists and Baptists gained considerable popularity; to a lesser extent, the Presbyterians also gained new members. In addition, new religious communities emerged during the Second Great Awakening that still exist today, such as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) , the Cumberland Presbyterian Church , the aforementioned Mormons and the Seventh-day Adventists . Since many believers preferred to seek their foundations of faith in the New Testament rather than in the later Catholic and Protestant doctrines and practices, many of the new movements explicitly viewed themselves as non-denominational denominations, including the churches of Christ .

Camp Meetings and Circuit Riders

In the Appalachians, the revival movement cultivated camp meetings and adopted many of the idiosyncrasies that had already characterized the First Great Awakening. Camp meetings were church services lasting several days at which several preachers spoke. These events were very popular because they usually provided a welcome change for the residents of the sparsely populated region. The joy of participating in a religious revival together with hundreds, possibly thousands, of other believers led to the dancing, clamoring and singing that were typical for these events. Even more important than the social component, however, was the deep impression that the events made on the self-esteem of the believers, which was initially destroyed by the knowledge of guilt, but then restored by the awareness of personal salvation. Most converts joined small local churches, which grew rapidly this way.

One of the first camp meetings was held in July 1800 by Creedence Clearwater Church in southwest Kentucky. In 1801, a much larger camp meeting took place in Cane Ridge, Kentucky. It drew an estimated 20,000 attendees and the services were attended by a number of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist preachers. Religious communities such as Methodists and Baptists have seen events like this increase their membership significantly. However, Cane Ridge also promoted the Restoration Movement and nondenominational communities that professed early New Testament Christianity, such as the Christian Church, the Disciples of Christ, and the Congregations of Christ .

As the American theologian Kimberly Bracken Long pointed out in 2002, humanities scholars trace back camp meetings since the 1980s to the tradition of the Holy Fairs , which were common in Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries. Until then, its roots had only been suspected in the American frontier experience.

The revival quickly spread to Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio . Each denomination had virtues that enabled it to thrive in the sparsely populated regions. The Methodists had an efficient organization based on preachers who traveled to extremely remote areas for their missionary work. This " circuit rider " (English: Circuit Riders ) were recruited from the common people, which made it easier to them to enter into a relationship with the borderland residents who hoped to convert them.

effect

Congregationalists in Florida , Kansas, and Hawaii established mission societies to evangelize the West. Its members, who represented the culture of the urban American East, appeared in the West as educators and apostles of the faith. Christian publishers ensured the spread of Christian education; the most important of these was the American Bible Society founded in 1816 . The social concern that arose with the Revival led to the establishment of the American Temperance Society and abolitionist groups, and efforts to reform the penal system and care for the disabled and the insane. The movement's followers firmly believed that people could be bettered and had high moral standards in their efforts.

The Second Great Awakening was immensely influential in American religious history. Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Reformed denominations had been the dominant denominations since colonial times. The Second Great Awakening now helped the Baptists and Methodists to significantly increase their membership numbers.

Efforts to apply Christian teachings to solving social problems were important forerunners and precedent cases for the social gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even if in their own time they were only very limited on certain issues such as alcohol and slavery came into play and were not related to the economy as a whole. The United States became a culturally diverse country in the first half of the 19th century, and the growing differences and contradictions within American Protestantism both reflected and contributed to this diversity.

Notable figures from the Second Great Awakening

The Third Great Awakening

The period of the third Great Awakening extends from the 1850s to the early 20th century. This revival movement influenced the pietist Protestant faith communities and produced strong social activism. It gained its strength from the post-millenarian theology, according to which Christ would return to the world when mankind had converted the entire earth. The revival movement promoted the social gospel movement and a worldwide missionary movement. New religious groups such as the Sanctification Movement , the Church of the Nazarene, and Christian Science emerged.

While the Civil War (1861–1865) interrupted the revival in the cities of the north, the war in the south tended to promote it in some ways, particularly in Robert Edward Lee's Confederate forces . As spokesperson for the abolitionists were Frederick Douglass , Wendell Phillips and Lucy Stone particularly well known.

In Chicago , Dwight Lyman Moody founded the Moody Bible Institute after the war . Moody's partner, Ira David Sankey , wrote a variety of sacred songs that were widely used in the Third Great Awakening.

At the end of the 19th century, the wealthy ruling class of the Gilded Age was the target of massive criticism from social gospel preachers and progressive reformers. In this context, the historian Robert Fogel particularly mentions the disputes over child labor , the introduction of compulsory schooling and occupational safety for female factory workers. In addition, an extensive campaign to introduce alcohol prohibition was carried out. The large Pietist Protestant denominations carried out missionary work, the scope of which grew worldwide. Denominational universities emerged and offered ever more extensive study programs. The YMCA and denominational youth organizations such as the Methodist Epworth League and the Evangelical Lutheran Walther League gained strong influence in many cities .

Tolstoy's imprint had, however, the Christian idealism, from the Jane Addams was influenced, the founder of social work in the United States.

Emergence of new faith communities

In the 1860s, Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science , which soon found a national following. Charles Taze Russell founded a Bible study group in 1876 that became Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931 . In the same year, Felix Adler founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City , which primarily attracted Reformed Jews . In 1880 the Salvation Army founded in Great Britain began to expand in the USA. The doctrine of this Free Church was based on ideals that had found expression during the Second Great Awakening; however, her main focus was the fight against poverty: one of the big themes of the Third Great Awakening.

The Fourth Great Awakening

The “Fourth Great Awakening” is a series of developments in the history of religion that took place in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s. This linguistic usage was particularly shaped by the economic historian Robert Fogel . Since many other historians are of the opinion that the developments described by Fogel are far less important than those of the first three Great Awakenings, the term “Fourth Great Awakening” is controversial.

It is undisputed that American religious life has changed significantly again since the 1960s. Moderate Protestant churches such as the Methodists, Presbyterians, and the Christian Church lost significant membership and influence in denominations with traditional doctrines such as the Southern Baptists and the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church . Even evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups found strong inflow. At the same time, secularism grew strongly and conservative Christian churches found themselves forced to argue when subjects such as the lesbian and gay movement , abortion and creationism were discussed in public .

Emergence of new faith communities

This shift in the balance of power was accompanied by changes in evangelicalism itself, in the course of which new religious communities emerged; existing ones often changed their focus. New non-denominational churches and community faith centers put special emphasis on the believer's personal relationship with Jesus Christ . At the same time, however, non-traditional churches and megachurches with conservative theologies and para-church organizations such as Focus on the Family or Habitat for Humanity saw growth , while the mainline church lost many members. Occasionally the Jesus Movement is classified as an expression of the Fourth Great Awakening.

In connection with the “Fourth Great Awakening”, the Charismatic Movement , which arose in the USA since 1961, was sometimes referred to . This has its origin in the Pentecostal movement , in which special attention is paid to the experience of the gifts of the Holy Spirit , such as speaking in tongues , spiritual healing or prophecy . These gifts, which are regarded as signs of God or the Holy Spirit , also serve the believers here to strengthen their spiritual convictions. Despite its Protestant origins, this movement also influenced many Catholics , whose leadership at the same time opened up to the ideas of ecumenism , placed less emphasis on institutional structures and instead began to give space to the spirituality of the laity .

Influence on politics

Because political programs in the United States have often been supported by religious denominations, the Great Awakenings have had a significant influence on the politics of that country. The priest and historian Joseph Tracy (1793-1874), who gave this religious phenomenon his name in his influential book The Great Awakening (1842), described the First Great Awakening (1740-1760) as a pioneer of the War of Independence . The influence of the Second Great Awakening (1800–1840), which promoted abolitionism and contributed to the fact that the institution of slavery was called into question in such a way that the civil war became possible, is also obvious. The Third Great Awakening (1880-1910) took huge impact on tackling the Great Depression and the Second World War .

The idea of ​​"awakening" implies a state of sleep or passivity in times of worldliness or diminished religiosity. The term “revival” is therefore used especially by evangelical Christians . In recent American history, the concept of "revival" has been widely advocated by conservative American evangelicals, including George W. Bush .

See also

literature

All book titles given are in English:

  • Jim Wallis: The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America ; HarperOne, 2008, ISBN 978-0-06-055829-1
  • Alan Heimert: Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution ; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966
  • Robert William Fogel: The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, ISBN 0-226-25662-6
  • Alan Heimert, Perry Miller (Eds.): The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences ; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967
  • Frank Lambert: Inventing the Great Awakening ; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999
  • Frank Lambert: Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals ; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994
  • William G. McLoughlin: Revivals, Awakenings and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America. 1607-1977 ; 1978
  • Joseph Tracy: The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield ; Banner of Truth, 1997, ISBN 0-85151-712-9 (reprint of the original 1842 edition)
  • Harry Stout: The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism ; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1991

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jörg Lauster: The enchantment of the world. A cultural history of Christianity. CH Beck, Munich 2014, pp. 504–509.
  2. ^ Joseph Sylvester Clark: A Historical Sketch of the Congregational Churches in Massachusetts from 1620 to 1858 ; Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1858; Chapter 12: 1730-1740 ; Pp. 148–159 in Google Book Search
  3. ↑ a b c d e f John Mack Faragher u. a. (Ed.): Out Of Many: A History of the American People , Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2006
  4. ^ Robert Middlekauff: The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 , London, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-531588-2 , p. 41.
  5. ^ Sydney E. Ahlstrom: A Religious History of the American People ; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972; ISBN 978-0-300-01762-5 ; P. 263
  6. ↑ Cross, Whitney, (1950) R. The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850.
  7. ↑ For the Scottish influence see: Kimberly Bracken Long: The Communion Sermons of James McGready: Sacramental Theology and Scots-Irish Piety on the Kentucky Frontier , in: Journal of Presbyterian History 80 (2002), No. 1, pp. 3-16; ISSN  0022-3883 ; Elizabeth Semancik: Backcountry Religious Ways
  8. ↑ Timothy Beal: Religion in America: a very short introduction ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; ISBN 978-0-19-532107-4 ; P. 75
  9. ^ Robert William Fogel: The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism , University of Chicago Press, 2000, ISBN 0-226-25662-6 excerpt
  10. ↑ Fogel, p. 108
  11. ↑ Jane Addams: Twenty Years at Hull House; Edmund Wilson, The American Earthquake
  12. ^ Robert William Fogel: The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism , University of Chicago Press, 2000, ISBN 0-226-25662-6
  13. ^ William G. McLoughlin: Revivals, Awakenings and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 , 1978; Randall Balmer: Religion in Twentieth Century America , 2001
  14. ^ Edith L. Blumhofer, Randall Balmer: Modern Christian Revivals , 1993
  15. ^ Frank Lambert: Inventing the “Great Awakening” ; Princeton University Press, 1999
  16. ↑ Peter Baker: Bush Tells Group He Sees a “Third Awakening” ; Washington Post, September 12, 2006 issue