Second Great Awakening Foner, Eric

¶ … Second Great Awakening

Foner, Eric Give Me Liberty! An American History Second Edition New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009

The Second Great Awakening was the antithesis of freedom and hypocrisy at its best. The United States was developed in response to several catalysts. The two primary catalysts were religion and political control. Over treacherous seas, people came to the New World to experience freedom, yet what they found with the Second Great Awakening was the polar opposite. To make matters worse, while preachers stood at the pulpit and gave sermons against greed and amassed wealth and preached free will, they used those evil-gotten gains to fund their parochial exploits while tightening the noose of control around their followers' necks.

During the 1790s, approximately 10% of White Americans attended church on a regular basis. However, the evangelicals of the Second Great Awakening felt like this low attendance was unacceptable. With the power of God -- via fear of fire and brimstone -- and societal pressure to comply, it now no longer was important that a citizen was a good person. The only way to go to not spend an eternity in Hell was to attend services regularly and worship as directed.

No longer did citizens have one of the freedoms they had come to America in the first place for -- religion. Entire areas became evangelicalized, giving little hope to the non-conformists in the area. Freedom to practice one's own religion, such as Deism that discounted organized religion, and freedom not to practice religion, were wiped away for all those touched by the Second Great Awakening. One of the founding concepts for the country was ignored completely by the tens of thousands of preachers sweeping the country. This reneging of a fundamental right to practice religion as an individual saw fit, resulted in increased control without representation for the average citizen.

Only a few decades earlier, Americans had fought and died for the principle centering on someone having control over the country, without the country having any say in the matter whatsoever. The Second Great Awakening was very much the same. This religious tyranny insisted that citizens worship in the way they felt was appropriate and the average citizen had no input. All of this was in addition to a general sense of hypocrisy of the movement.