The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant revival movement that held back to 1790 and moved faster by 1800. It was after 1820 when membership rapidly escalated amongst Methodist and Baptism congregations led by their respective preachers. By 1870, the Second Great Awakening started to deteriorate. Millions of new members were enrolled, and new dominions formed. The Second Great Awakening, which spread religion via revivals and emotional preaching, led to the rise of various reform movements. The movement has been defined as a reaction against rational Christianity, skepticism, and deism, even though it is not fully understood why those forces became irresistible enough at the time to spark revivals. The Second great awakening expressed Arminian theology, in which each individual could be saved by conversion, recoveries, and repentance. Improvements were religious meetings led by an evangelist that featured emotional preaching.
American Christianity, as we have witnessed, was shaped by the Second Great Awakening, which, in response, impact on the politics and culture of the rising nation. It is easy to say that Christianity was one of the pillars of American culture on the eve of the Civil War. During the period of Founding Father, this was not evident: not to suggest that the split-up of the church and state those august figures had established was in jeopardy. But the great revival had formed a set Christian code in the country, which shifted the country in significant and lasting ways. The Second Great Awakening engendered moral enthusiasm, which led to the arising of the temperance campaign. The crusade reduced alcohol consumption dramatically and then concluded in the severe and unproductive alcohol prohibition in the early 20th century.
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Numerous similar efforts at uplifting the morals, egalitarianism, and sense of community of the Americans were highly inspired by the Second Great Awakening. The Abolition Movement, The ultimate goal of the abolition movement, was solely to end slavery in the United States. The movement began as a religious and moral movement pinpointed on a universal belief that all are equal before God. New antislavery sentiment was not confined to a single church, but rather, it was common among Presbyterians, Mennonites, Baptists, Amish, Quakers, among other Protestant denominations.
Abolitionist sentiment arose in the 18th century from its religious roots leading to the establishment of antislavery civilizations in the early 19th century, whose main objective was to increase awareness about moral evils surrounding slavery. Abolitionism eventually became a controversial political subject that saw the division of much of the country, even though it had initially started as a movement with religious underpinnings. Critics and supporters became violent as they often engaged in heated debates which even led to deadly skirmishes. The movement fueled animosity and divisiveness which led to the rise of Civil War, and eventually the end of American slavery. Abolitionism was not a new concept in America. The inception of the Atlantic slave trade made critics voice their disqualification of the system which had begun in the 16th century. The American Colonization Society was formed in 1816 in effort to end slavery and made a proposal to return slaves back to their motherland, Africa. By so doing, a huge number of African Americans had returned to Africa by 1860. Anti-slave movement was further provoked in the North by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. At the end of slavery, abolitionists shifted focus to women’s issues whose lessons paved the way for successful women leaders in the women’s suffrage movement.