The basic goodness of children contradicted the Calvinist doctrine of infant damnation, to which most American Protestant churches formally subscribed. “Of all the impious doctrines which the dark imagination of man ever conceived,” Bronson Alcott wrote in his journal, “the worst [is] the belief in original and certain depravity of infant nature.” Alcott was far from alone in thinking infant damnation a “debased doctrine,” despite its standing as one of the central tenets of orthodox Calvinism. Mothers enshrined infancy and childhood; they became increasingly active and vocal in church. They scathingly indicted the concept of infant damnation.
The inclination to set aside other Calvinist tenets, such as predestination, became more pronounced as a new wave of revivalism took shape in the 1790s. This Second Great Awakening began as a counteroffensive to the deistic thinking and other forms of “infidelity” that New England Congregationalists and southern Methodists alike identified with the French Revolution. Prominent New England ministers, who considered themselves traditionalists but also revivalists (men such as Yale’s president, Timothy Dwight, and Dwight’s student, the Reverend Lyman Beecher) placed less stress in their sermons on God’s arbitrary power over mortals, and more on the promise of the salvation of sinners because of God’s mercy and “disinterested benevolence.” When another of Dwight’s students, Horace Bushnell, declared in a sermon on “Christian nurture” in 1844 that Christian parents should prepare their children “for the skies,” he meant that parents could contribute to their children’s salvation.
Calvinism came under more direct assault from Charles Grandison Finney, probably the most effective of a number of charismatic Evangelists who brought the Second Great Awakening to its crest. In 1821 Finney abandoned a promising career as a
Lily Spenser Martin's painting, Domestic Happiness (1844), reflects the change in attitudes toward infants. Parents such as these could not believe that God had consigned their angelic babies to eternal damnation.
Source: Photograph © 1993 The Detroit Institute of Arts/The Bridgeman Art Library, NY.
Lawyer and became an itinerant preacher. His most spectacular successes occurred during a series of revivals conducted in towns along the Erie Canal, a region Finney called “the burned-over district” because it had been the site of so many revivals before his own. From Utica, where his revival began in 1826, to Rochester, where it climaxed in 1831, he exhorted his listeners to take their salvation into their own hands. He insisted that people could control their own fate. He dismissed Calvinism as a “theological fiction.” Salvation was available to anyone. But the day of judgment was just around the corner; there was little time to waste.
During and after Finney’s efforts in Utica, conversions increased sharply. In Rochester, church membership doubled in six months. Elsewhere in the country, churches capitalized on the efforts of other Evangelists to fill their pews. In 1831 alone, church membership grew by 100,000, an increase, according to a New England minister, “unparalleled in the history of the church.” The success of the Evangelists of the Second Great Awakening stemmed from the timeliness of their assault on Calvinist doctrine and even more from their methods. Finney, for example, consciously set out to be entertaining as well as edifying. The singing of hymns and the solicitation of personal testimonies provided his meetings with emotional release and human interest. Prominent among his innovations was the “anxious bench,” where leading members of the community awaited the final prompting from within before coming forward to declare themselves saved.
Economic changes and their impact on family life also contributed to the Second Awakening. The growth of industry and commerce that followed the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, along with the disappearance of undeveloped farmland, led hundreds of young men to leave family farms to seek their fortunes in Utica and other towns along the canal. There, uprooted, uncertain, and buffeted between ambition, hope, and anxiety, they found it hard to resist the comfort promised by the revivalists to those who were saved.
Women, and especially the wives of the business leaders of the community, felt particularly responsible for the Christian education of their children, which fell within their separate sphere. Many women had servants and thus had time and energy to devote to their own and their offsprings’ salvation.
Paradoxically, this caused many of them to venture out of that sphere and in doing so they moved further out of the shadow of their husbands. They founded the Oneida County Female Missionary Society, an association that did most of the organizing and a good deal of the financing of the climactic years of the Second Awakening. The Female Missionary Society raised more than $1,000 a year (no small sum at that time) to support the revival in Utica, in its environs, and throughout the burned-over district. Apparently without consciously intending to do so, women challenged the authority of the paternalistic, authoritarian churches they so fervently embraced. Then, by mixtures of exhortation, example, and affection, they set out to save the souls of their loved ones, first their children and ultimately their husbands too.
•••-[Read the Document Finney, What a Revival of Religion Is at myhistorylab. com
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