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vangelical revivalism was the dominant form of
religious expression in early 19th century America. The word evangelical refers
to a belief that all people must recognize their depravity and worthlessness,
repent their sins, and undergo a conversion experience and a rebirth of
religious feelings.
What explains the rapid rise of revivalism? In part, revivals were a response to the
growing separation of church and state that followed the Revolution. But revivals also reflected the hunger of
tens of thousands of ordinary Americans for a more emotional religion. Even in
the late 18th century, Americans were not as indifferent to religion as church
membership statistics might suggest.
Many Americans were put off by genteel clergy with aristocratic
pretensions. They were also alienated by the older denominations' stress on
decorum, formality, and unemotional sermons.
Revivals also meet a growing need for community
and communal purpose. At a time when the country was becoming more mobile,
commercial, and individualistic, revivals ensured that Americans would remain
committed to higher values.
In the South, revivals largely attracted the
dispossessed, including many slaves and free blacks. In the North, reveals appealed to upwardly mobile groups. Middle-class women were especially attracted
to the revivals. The revivals provided many women with avenues of
self-expression--through church societies and charitable and benevolent
organizations.
The revivals left a lasting imprint on pre-Civil
War America. The rituals of evangelical religion--the camp meeting, group
prayer, and mass baptisms along rivers and creeks--were the truly distinctive
American experience in the decades before the Civil War. The revivals contributed to a conception of
the United States as a country with a special mission to lead the world to a
golden age of freedom and equality. When Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg
Address and Second Inaugural spoke about bloody sacrifice, rebirth, and
national mission, his words echoed revivalist sermons.
A key concept for the revivalists was that each
person had a duty to combat sin. For the revivalists, sin was not an
abstraction. It was concrete. Dueling, profanity, and drinking hard liquor were
sins. In the future, many northern evangelicals regarded slavery as the sum of
all sins.