A prominent voice in the third great awakening, Jacob Knapp was a Baptist preacher in the 19th century. He led many to Christ for the first time and brought many back. Ultimately, he was an important instrument both in the Great Awakening and American history. The third Great Awakening began approximately in 1850 and lasted until the turn of the twentieth century. This time was a time of reform, and the third Great Awakening paralleled this ideal with a strong sense of social activism. It also placed emphasis on evangelizing and spreading the gospel, which also paralleled the United States growing imperialism. This was a time of growth for both the church and the state. This was also a time for waning Christian faiths. The second Great Awakening …show more content…
had come to an end, and many people were falling away from the faith. Even Jacob Knapp himself admits to losing his zeal and being brought into a state of confusion and backsliding. Jacob Knapp was born New York in 1799 to a Episcopalian family. Though he was converted as a teenager, he was not a passionate Christian for very long before getting almost tired of Christianity. At first, he described it as, “My mind was early, and at times, deeply impressed with divine truth. From the first of my remembrance I had seasons of secret prayer, and of deep anxiety about the future welfare of my soul; but I was not led to hope in Christ until the summer of my seventeenth year, when it pleased God to take from me my dear mother,” but also noted how those feelings did not last for long. However, under remarkable circumstances, including a renewed study of the bible, he was brought back to the faith in 1819, though a Baptist this time. He was overwhelmed by the passionate dancing and celebrating of the Baptists. In 1822, he realized his calling as a preacher and began college in Hamilton, New York. While in college, he would teach at a school later and would lead many young people to the Baptist faith. After receiving his diploma, he became a pastor of two towns over the next few years, converting over 250 people. However, by 1833, he realized that being a pastor was not enough and felt called to evangelize. He attempted to gain, “an appointment from the Board of the Baptist Convention of the State of New York, as an evangelist in Jefferson and Oswego Counties,” which would increase his influence as a speaker and silence his opponents. He was even recommended by a prominent and influential doctor named Dr. Nathanial Kendrick, but his application was met with “heavy opposition.” This was very hard for Knapp, but he continued to preach and evangelize. He claimed to cast his fears on God and found solitude, which made his sermons even stronger. He would continue to preach until his was one of the most prominent speakers of the Great Awakening. Wherever he went, acts of God seemed to follow. For example, after a speech he made on revival, people claim that the entire town of Salem, Massachusetts shook with the power of God. He eventually converted almost thousands. He visited California a few years before his death and became more active in government. His ministry was primarily in Northeastern regions, though later northwestern.
However, he was mostly considered an itinerant preacher, never staying in one play for too long. A problem that he faced was that there were not many travelling Baptist evangelists. Many of the examples that he had to go by were either Presbyterians or Congressionalist. The beginning of his ministry was hard for him. In his own words, “I looked upon the past eight years of my ministry [as a pastor] as comparatively wasted,” he later commented. “I felt that I had turned aside for ‘filthy lucre.’ What he lacked was inspiration. He lacked passion. However, he turned himself to God and found what he needed not only to be inspired, but to inspire other people. In the Awakening, the idea that people could do anything to promote a revival spread rapidly. This was directly against Knapp’s teachings and caused his sermons to amass much controversy. His message was that revival is something given by God to those who have earned it. Another controversial doctrine that Knapp preached was the idea that Christ can free his followers from sin. The popular contradictory belief at the time was that Christians must undergo a second “act of grace” to cleanse them of their sins later in life. However, Knapp would eventually become very popular, having campaigns that lasted for days and speeches that lasted for hours, with thousands gathering to hear them. He was one of the first men in America, at least in the Northeastern region, to completely devote his life to teaching. He found these days to be some of the best in his life. “These were golden days, sunny spots, heavenly seasons. The memory of them is precious,” described
Knapp. Knapp would have considered himself a Calvinist, despite Calvinist’s not believing in “revival meetings”, which were a big part of his ministry. Despite being a Calvinist, he often battled Hyper-Calvinism. These people would not even pray for their own children out of fear that they were not a part of the chosen few that God has already saved. He was a believer in purgatory, often using it as the lesser of two bad choices when describing the severities of hell. He was also a strong dissenter in the belief of Universalism, which means that he was against the belief that all of humankind will eventually be saved. One once said of his passionate speeches, “infidelity turned pale, and Universalism gave up the ghost.” He was a Baptist. Baptists’ core belief’s include advocating almost extreme religious liberty and the autonomy of the local church, giving it equal say in important decisions. He frequently used the Psalms in his speeches, a popular verse being Psalms 17:15, “As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.
The theology of the Second Great Awakening can be split up into six subdivisions: personal commitment, revivals, conversion of the world, millennialism, perfectionism, and a utopia. Personal commitment consis...
The Great Awakening, occurring in 1730s American Colonies, was a religious movement that started a change in the way people in the colonies viewed religion. The movement started with fears of clergymen that western expansion, commercial development, and lack of
The Second Great Awakening began in 1790, as numerous Americans experienced uncertainty as they confronted a rapidly changing society with increases in urbanization and technology. The movement focused on the ability of individuals to change their lives as a means of personal salvation and as a way to reform society as a whole, which opened the door for many reform movements. The Second Great Awakening shaped reform movements such as temperance, abolition, and women’s rights in the nineteenth century because of the increase in concern for the morality of the American people.
Jonathan Edwards said, “True liberty consists only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.” Edwards played a critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening and administered some of the first enthusiasms of revivals in 1730. The First Great Awakening occurred around 1730 to 1760 and its significance has had a great impact on the course of the United States. It was a major influence on what caused and led up to the American Revolution. The First Great Awakening was a movement that was engrained in spiritual growth and also ended up bringing a national identity to Colonial America and preparing colonists for what was to come about forty years later. The awakening had a dramatic
People of all groups, social status, and gender realized that they all had voice and they can speak out through their emotional feels of religion. Johnathan Edwards was the first one to initiate this new level of religion tolerance and he states that, “Our people do not so much need to have their heads filled than, as much as have their hearts touched.” Johnathan Edwards first preach led to more individuals to come together and listen. Than after that individual got a sense that you do not need to be a preacher to preach nor you do not need to preach in a church, you can preach wherever you want to. For the first time, you have different people coming together to preach the gospel. You had African American preaching on the roads, Indian preachers preaching and you had women who began to preach. The Great Awakening challenged individuals to find what church meets their needs spiritually and it also let them know about optional choices instead of one. The Great Awakening helped the American colonies come together in growth of a democratic
The Second Great Awakening was significant because reform movements were connected with religion. Most of reform movements were in fact influenced by the religious ideas expressed during the Great Awakening. Religious congregations and sermons challenged the true faith of people, and as a result different religious groups emerged in order to purify the society. With the ongoing religious revivals, different group of people also began to question the governing norms, which contradicted with religious teachings. In David Walker’s, “African American Abolitionist David Walker Castigates the United States for Its Slave System, 1829,” Walker also raised the question of African slavery, and how it did not agree with Christianity. Walker said:
The Second Great Awakening was extremely influential in sparking the idea of reform in the minds of people across America. Most people in America just accepted things the way they were until this time. Reforms took place due to the increase of industrial growth, increasing immigration, and new ways of communication throughout the United States. Charles Grandison Finney was one of the main reasons the Second Great Awakening was such a great success. “Much of the impulse towards reform was rooted in the revivals of the broad religious movement that swept the Untied State after 1790” (Danzer, Klor de Alva, Krieger, Wilson, and Woloch 240). Revivals during the Second Great Awakening awakened the faith of people during the 1790s with emotional preaching from Charles Finney and many other influential preachers, which later helped influence the reforms of the mid-1800s throughout America.
During the Second Great Awakening, a mass revival of American society took place. Reformers of every kind emerged to ameliorate women’s rights, education and religious righteousness. At the forefront of the movement were the temperance reformers who fought for a change in alcoholism, and abolitionist who strived for the downfall of slavery.
In the early 1700's spiritual revivalism spread rapidly through the colonies. This led to colonists changing their beliefs on religion. The great awakening was the level to which the revivalism spread through the colonists. Even with this, there was still religious revivalism in the colonies. One major reason for the Great Awakening was that it was not too long before the revolution. The great awakening is reason to believe that William G Mcloughlin's opinion and this shows that there was a cause to the American Revolution.
The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival. It influenced the entire country to do good things in society and do what was morally correct. The Second Great Awakening influenced the North more than it did the South and on a whole encouraged democratic ideas and a better standard for the common man and woman. The Second Great Awakening made people want to repent the sins they had made and find who they were. It influenced the end of slavery, abolitionism, and the ban of alcohol, temperance.
The Awakening was a very exciting and motivating story. It contains some of the key motivational themes that launched the women’s movement. It was incredible to see how women were not only oppressed, but how they had become so accustomed to it, that they were nearly oblivious to the oppression. The one woman, Edna Pontellier, who dared to have her own feelings was looked upon as being mentally ill. The pressure was so great, that in the end, the only way that she felt she could be truly free was to take her own life. In this paper I am going to concentrate on the characters central in Edna’s life and her relationships with them.
The Great Awakening was a superior event in American history. The Great Awakening was a time of revivalism that expanded throughout the colonies of New England in the 1730’s through the 1740’s. It reduced the importance of church doctrine and put a larger significance on the individuals and their spiritual encounters. The core outcome of the Great Awakening was a revolt against controlling religious rule which transferred over into other areas of American life. The Great Awakening changed American life on how they thought about and praised the divine, it changed the way people viewed authority, the society, decision making, and it also the way they expressed themselves. Before the Great Awakening life was very strict and people’s minds were
In essence, the Great Awakening was a religious awakening. It started in the South. Tent camps were set up that revolve around high spirited meetings that would last for days. These camp meetings were highly emotional and multitudes of people were filled with the Spirit of God. These meeting, were sponsored mainly by Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterians, and met social needs as well as spiritual needs on the frontier. Since it was hard for the Baptist and Methodist to sustain local churches, they solved the problem by recruiting the non educated to spread the word of God to their neighbors. The camp meetings eventually favored "protracted meetings" in local churches.
Reform movements including religion, temperance, abolition, and women's rights sought to expand democratic ideals in the years 1825 to 1850. However, certain movements, such as nativism and utopias, failed to show the American emphasis on a democratic society. The reform movements were spurred by the Second Great Awakening, which began in New England in the late 1790's, and would eventually spread throughout the country. The Second Great Awakening differed from the First in that people were now believed to be able to choose whether or not to believe in God, as opposed to previous ideals based on Calvinism and predestination.
In the essay, “The Second Great Awakening” by Sean Wilentz explains the simultaneous events at the Cane Ridge and Yale which their inequality was one-sided origins, worship, and social surroundings exceeded more through their connections that was called The Second Great Awakening also these revivals were omen that lasted in the 1840s a movement that influences the impulsive and doctrines to hold any management. Wilentz wraps up of the politics and the evangelizing that come from proceeding from the start, but had astounding momentum during 1825.The advantage of the Americans was churched as the evangelizing Methodists or Baptists from the South called the New School revivalist and the Presbyterians or Congregationalists from the North that had a nation of theoretical Christians in a mutual culture created more of the Enlightenment rationalism than the Protestant nation on the world. The northerners focused more on the Second Great Awakening than the South on the main plan of the organization.