The Second Great Awakening: a Christian Nation?
| Publication year | 2010 |
Georgia State University Law Review
Article 10
5-31-2012
The Second Great Awakening: A Christian Nation?
Geoffrey R. Stone
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Recommended Citation
Stone, Geoffrey R. (2009) "The Second Great Awakening: A Christian Nation?," Georgia State University Law Review: Vol. 26: Iss. 4, Article 10.
Available at: http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/gsulr/vol26/iss4/10
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THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING: A CHRISTIAN
NATION?
Geoffrey R. Stone*
on the occasion of the 45th Henry J. Miller Distinguished Lecture
October 15, 2009 Georgia State University College of Law
Last year, I delivered a lecture at U.C.L.A. entitled "The World of the Framers: A Christian Nation?"1 The essential thesis of that lecture, which was published in the U.C.L.A. Law Review, was that our nation "was conceived 'not in an Age of Faith . . . but in an Age of Reason.'"2 As members of a Revolutionary generation steeped in the Enlightenment, the Framers of the American Constitution "viewed 'issues of religion and politics through a prism' that was highly critical of what they saw as Christianity's historical excesses and superstitions."3
Indeed, many of our founding fathers, including Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and George Washington, were full or partial deists, who questioned all religious beliefs they could not reconcile with reason. Although they accepted the idea of a Supreme Being, the deist God was not the Judeo-Christian God who intervenes in human history and listens to personal prayers, but a more distant being, who had created the universe, including the laws of nature, and given man the capacity to understand those laws through the exercise of reason.4
* Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, The University of Chicago.
1. Geoffrey R. Stone, The World of the Framers: A Christian Nation?, 56 UCLA L. REV. 1, 4 (2008).
2. Id. at 4 (quoting Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America 161 (2003)).
3. Id. (quoting lambert, supra note 2, at 161).
4. See Kerry Walters, Rational Infidels: The American Deists, at ix-x (1992).
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Most deists did not accept the divinity of Jesus, the truth of miracles or revelation, or the doctrines of original sin or predestination. They rejected such concepts as "antithetical to the dictates of reason" and believed they had "kept mankind in the shackles of superstition and ignorance."5 For the most part, the founding generation viewed religion, and particularly religion's relation to government, through an Enlightenment lens that was deeply skeptical of orthodox Christianity.6
At the same time, the founders believed that religion could play a positive role in helping to shape both the "people's moral conduct" and their "ideas about justice, decency, duty, and responsibility." Religion, they believed, could be a source of republican virtue. But by religion, the framers did not mean traditional Christianity, with all of its complex dogmas and tenets. Rather, as John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, the essence of sound religious belief on which public morality should be based was captured in the phrase, "[b]e just and good."8 And, as Jefferson replied, "What all agree in is probably right."9
Thus, the Framers drew a sharp distinction in their understanding of the proper relation between religion and law in a free society. They valued religion, but given their knowledge of the religious strife that had plagued man's history and their appreciation of the importance of both freedom of and freedom from religion, "they saw the wisdom of distinguishing between private and public religion." In churches, temples, and homes, "anyone could believe and practice" what he wished. But in the "public business of the nation," it was essential for the government to speak of religion "in a way that was unifying, not
5. Id. at x.
6. See generally id. at ix-x.
7. Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation 27 (2006).
8. The Adams-Jefferson letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams 499 (Lester J. Cappon ed., 1959).
9. Id. at 506.
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divisive."10 For the founding generation, the United States was not and was not intended to be "a Christian nation."11
All this began to change a decade after the adoption of the Constitution with the coming of the Second Great Awakening, which is the subject of my talk this afternoon.
The Second Great Awakening
In the decades following independence, the United States experienced profound changes in commerce, politics, culture and religion. Among the most important of these transformations was the Second Great Awakening, which lasted from roughly the 1790s to the 1840s. The Second Great Awakening marked a reemergence of religious enthusiasm, as millions of Americans were "born again" in emotionally-charged revival meetings.
Although mainstream Protestants tended to dismiss these spectacles as mass hysteria dressed up as religion, the Second Great Awakening triggered a nationwide campaign to transform American law and politics through the lens of evangelical Christianity. It was in this era that the claim that the United States is a "Christian nation" first seriously took root.
The Second Great Awakening posed fundamental questions about the appropriate role of religion in American politics. Both the Framers and the nineteenth-century evangelicals believed that a sense of public morality was necessary for self-governance. But the Framers and the evangelicals differed sharply in their understanding of the proper relationship between Christianity and public morality.
Whereas the Framers believed that the principles of public morality could be discovered through the exercise of reason, the evangelicals insisted that it must be grounded in Christian revelation; and whereas the Framers maintained that public morality must be founded on the civic obligation to "do good to one's fellow man," the evangelicals declared that true public morality must be premised on
10. Meacham, supra note 7, at 23.
11. Id.
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obedience to God.12 Indeed, the nineteenth-century evangelicals preached that only obedience to the Bible, not only in private life but in public law, could save America from sin and desolation.13
Many factors contributed to the Second Great Awakening. In part, it was a response to the secularization of the late eighteenth century, the violence of the French Revolution, and the often bitter social and political divisions that emerged in the United States in the 1790s.
As early as 1798, a disillusioned Benjamin Rush predicted "nothing but suffering to the human race" as long as the world continued to embrace "paganism, deism, and atheism."14 By 1800, many religious leaders had come to fear the advance of deism and the prospect that the violence of the French Revolution might "sweep the United States into its fiery storm."15
With the election of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800, many religious leaders warned that the nation was at risk of an imminent "descent into atheism" and "a spiritual deterioration hardly to be equaled in the darkest chapters of Christian history."16
The Second Great Awakening was also fueled by general feelings of personal anxiety, cultural confusion, and class conflict generated by the tumult of the early nineteenth century. The radical transformation of agriculture and industry, rapid geographic expansion and urbanization, and the explosive democratization of Jacksonian politics combined to cause traditional social restraints to collapse.
In the face of unsettling change, many individuals were desperate for a clearer sense of community, and the rebirth of religious passion helped satisfy the need for a sense of "order" and "common purpose"
12. John g. West, Jr., The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation 119-20(1996).
13. Id. at 120-21.
14. Letter from Benjamin Rush to Noah Webster (July 20, 1798), in JJ letters of benjamin rush 799 (Lyman Henry Butterfield ed„ 1951); Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious imagination 27 (1994).
15. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind dm America: From the Revolution to the Civil War 4 (1965).
16. miller, supra note 15, at 3-4; see west, supra note 12, at 9.
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in a nation of increasingly "rootless individuals."17 By appealing to the anxieties of the common man, the charismatic preachers of the Second Great Awakening excited a new era of mass religious passion.18
Later, I will examine several hot-button issues that bitterly divided the nation as early nineteenth-century evangelicals sought to enlist the power of the state in their effort to Christianize American law. These included such matters as Sabbath-breaking, blasphemy, temperance, slavery, and sex. Before getting to the specifics, however, we need to know a bit more about the style and substance of the Second Great Awakening.
Although the Second Great Awakening first found expression in the small towns of New England in the 1790s, the most "cataclysmic" explosions of religious passion took place in the West at the turn of the century.19 The meeting that dominated the American vision of evangelical revivalism began in Cane Ridge Kentucky on August 6, 1801.20 A crowd estimated at between ten and twenty-five thousand attended, as scores of preachers held forth simultaneously in all...
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