Reform Movements

Aim: How did the ideals of religion and nationalism contribute to the reform movements?

VocabFirst Great AwakeningSecond Great AwakeningReform Movements - Abolition, Prohibition, suffrage, public education, aid for the mentally ill

Essential Questions: (1)How did the ideas of the Second Great Awakening and Transcendentalism contribute to and impact the Reform Movements?

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.

Great Awakening

• Push for individual religious experience (over church doctrine); individual faith and salvation

• Evangelical preaching; fire-y• 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 how religion is practiced, more

rigid with moral rules/requirements.

The Second Great AwakeningTransformations 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!• Democratization of American society.• Activist religious groups provided both the

leadership and the well-organized voluntary societies that drove reform movements. (take action, take control of your own salvation; strays from predestination)

"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]. Whenever I see a

railroad, I look for a republic.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1866

Essay Question:

Assess the validity of this statement:

The social, political, and economic trends of the early to mid 19th century demonstrated a growing sense of nationalism and democracy.

Categories to look for in documents

□ Patriotic Pride (Nationalism)

□ Evidence of Unification (Nationalism)

□ Mass political participation (Democracy)

□ People’s interests addressed politically (D)

□ Expanded sense of equality (Democracy)

□ Expanded opportunities for all (D)

http://uccpbank.k12hsn.org/courses/APUSHistoryI/course%20files/multimedia/lesson23/lessonp_uccp_ap.htmA growing national economy. http://uccpbank.k12hsn.org/courses/APUSHistoryI/course%20files/multimedia/lesson30/lessonp_uccp_ap.htmlTranscendentalism, Religion, and Utopian movements.http://uccpbank.k12hsn.org/courses/APUSHistoryI/course%20files/multimedia/lesson31/lessonp_uccp_ap.htmlReform Movements.

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/the-transcendentalism-movement-and-social-reform.html#lesson

http://mswallaceonline.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/0/1/9001256/second_great_awakening__transcendentalistspdf.pdf

Notes

Trancendentalism

Second Great Awakening

Utopianism