Example research essay topic: Second Awakening Great Awakening Religious - 524 words

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The Second Awakening By the 1800, the revivalist energies of all these congregations were combining to create the greatest surge of evangelical fervor since the first Great Awakening sixty year before. Beginning among Presbyterians in several Eastern colleges, the new awakening soon speed throughout the country, reaching its greatest heights in the Western regions. In only a few years, a large proportion the American people were mobilized by the movement; and membership in those churches embracing the revival most prominently the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Person tension was mushrooming. The Second Great Awakening was not entirely uniform, but its basic thrust was clear. Individuals must readmit God and Christ into their daily lives, must embrace a fervent, active piety, and must reject the skeptical rational beliefs.

Yet the wave of revivalism did not serve to restore the religion of the past. Few denominations any longer accepted the idea of predestination; and the belief that a person could effect his or her own destiny, rather than encouraging irreligion as many had feared, added intensity to the individual s search for salvation. Nor did the awakening work to reestablish old institutional forms of religion. Instead, it reinforced the spread of different sects and denominations and helped to create a general public acceptance of the idea that people could belong to different Protestant churches and still be committed to essentially the same Christian faith.

One of the striking features of the awakening was the preponderance of women involved in it. Young women, in particular, were drawn to revivalism; and female converts far outnumbered males. In some areas, church membership became overwhelming female as a result. One reason for this was that women were more numerous than men in regions during this ear. The Second Awakening also had significant effects on black Americans and on relations between the races.

In many areas evils were open to people of all races; and many blacks not only attended, but ardently embraced the new religious fervor. Out of these revivals, in fact, emerged a substantial group of black preachers, who became important figures within the slave community. Some of them translated the apparently egalitarian religious message of the awakening that salvation was available to all into a similarly egalitarian message for blacks in the present world. The Second Awakening also had effects, of course, on the rational freethinker, whose skeptical philosophies had done so much to produce it. They did not disappear after 1800, but their influence rapidly declined; and for many years to come they remained a distinct and defensive minority within American Christianity. Instead, the dominant religious characteristic of the new nation was a fervent revivalism, which would survive well into the mid-nineteenth century.

The new religious enthusiasm meshed with the cultural and political optimism of the early republic. Many Americans were coming to believe that their nation had a special destiny: that its political system would serve as a model to the world, that its culture would become a beacon to mankind. Now there were voices arguing that the United States had a religious mission as well: that American revivalism would lead to the of the entire

Research essay sample on Second Awakening Great Awakening Religious