Reform Movements

Aim: How did the ideals of religion and nationalism contribute to the reform movements? Key Terms: First Great Awakening Second Great Awakening Transcendentalism Reform Movements - Abolition, Prohibition, suffrage, public education, aid for the mentally ill Essential Questions: How did the ideas of the Second Great Awakening and Transcendentalism contribute to and impact the Reform Movements? How did leaders of the reform movements advocate their beliefs? Were they effective?

The Great Awakening

The Great Awakening… Not all American ministers were swept up by the Age of Reason. In the 1730s, a religious revival swept through the British American colonies. JONATHAN EDWARDS, the Yale minister who refused to convert to the Church of England, became concerned that New Englanders were becoming far too concerned with worldly matters. It seemed to him that people found the pursuit of wealth to be more important than John Calvin's religious principles. Some were even beginning to suggest that predestination was wrong and that good works might save a soul. Edwards barked out from the pulpit against these notions. "God was an angry judge, and humans were sinners!" he declared. He spoke with such fury and conviction that people flocked to listen. This sparked what became known as the GREAT AWAKENING in the American colonies.

The Great Awakening Push for individual religious experience (over church doctrine); individual faith and salvation Sent a powerful spiritual message: God works directly through the people, rather than through churches or other public institutions. Encouraged trampling of sectional boundaries and denominational lines set up by Brits b/c of idea of individual “power.” Wealth should not distract from being moral Less Rigid with... More Rigid with... How Religion is practiced Moral rules/requirements

The Second Great Awakening Transformations in American economics, politics and intellectual culture found their parallel in a transformation of American religion in the decades following independence, as the United States underwent a widespread flowering of religious sentiment and unprecedented expansion of church membership known as the Second Great Awakening. A number of basic features are generally agreed upon: The Awakening lasted some 50 years, from the 1790s to the 1840s, and spanned the entire United States. The religious revitalization that the Awakening represented manifested itself in different ways according to the local population and church establishment, but was definitely a Protestant phenomenon. The social impact of the Second Great Awakening: a period marked by widespread secularization and the concomitant efforts of church elites to reestablish order and bring wandering Christians back into the ecclesiastical fold.

2nd Great Awakening Preachers spoke for all audiences, easily understood Opportunity for salvation to all! Focus more on the individual, YOU could achieve salvation, less about predestination. Democratization of American society. Activist religious groups provided both the leadership and the well-organized voluntary societies that helped drive reform movements.

"Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (996). - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836) What is Emerson’s philosophy?

Transcendentalism "Transcendentalism, in fact, really began as a religious movement, an attempt to substitute a Romanticized version of the mystical ideal that humankind is capable of direct experience of the holy for the Unitarian rationalist view that the truths of religion are arrived at by a process of empirical study and by rational inference from historical and natural evidence.” - Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986) "Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the single-eyed and pure-hearted. Amidst materialists, zealots, and skeptics, the Transcendentalist believed in perpetual inspiration, the miraculous power of will, and a birthright to universal good.” - William Henry Channing(1810-1844)

Transcendentalism Argued for a mystical and intuitive way of thinking as a means for discovering one’s inner self and looking for the essence of God in nature. Challenged materialism of American society by suggesting that artistic expression was more important than the pursuit of wealth. Valued individualism (organized institutions unimportant); Supported reforms, especially the antislavery movement. Free will!

“The Progress of invention is really a threat [to monarchy] “The Progress of invention is really a threat [to monarchy]. Whenever I see a railroad, I look for a republic.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1866

Henry David Thoreau American essayist, Poet, Transcendentalist

Prohibition

Come Home Father --Henry Clay Work Father, dear father, came home with me now! The clock in the steeple strikes one – You said you were coming home from the shop, As soon as your day’s work was done. – Our fire has gone out, our house is all dark, And mother’s been watching since tea, With poor brother Benny so sick in her arms, And no one to help her but me, - Come home father, come home, come home! – Please, -father, dear father, come home! --Henry Clay Work