The Second Great Awakening | America's Religious History | Thomas S. Kidd

By the year 1800, American Christianity, in tandem with the nation’s population, entered a new phase of westward growth and organization. The nation’s progress into the West displaced many Native Americans and precipitated the monumental Louisiana Purchase of 1803, by which the United States roughly doubled in size. Even before the Louisiana Purchase, white settlers surged into the Ohio River Valley region and the Deep South. By the 1840s, westward settlement spread out to California and the Oregon Territory, with people seeking gold and more farmland. Churches and itinerant pastors kept up with and even surpassed the pace of settlement, and they sometimes sought to address the plight of displaced Native Americans. Led by the Methodists and Baptists, churches socially organized the West on the ground level. The Second Great Awakening was punctuated by massive revivals. These included its seminal event, the Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky in 1801. Revivals often resulted in significant seasons of church growth. More than a series of revivals, the Second Great Awakening was also a process by which millions of Americans came into the fold of Christian congregations. Sometimes attending a revival was a critical part of the process for those who became devout church members. Just as important over the long term were the quieter labors of hard-working ministers who spread through the Midwest, Southwest, and ultimately the Far West. Town by town, family by family, they gave frontier people a message of gospel hope. They also provided them with a local church, which often represented the only regular social outlet that frontier families had. VIEW THE 16-PART VIDEO SERIES: https://masterlectures.zondervanacade... GET THE BOOK: https://zondervanacademic.com/product...