AP® United States History · Unit 4 · Topic 4.10
The Second Great Awakening
The Second Great Awakening was a wave of Protestant revivals that replaced predestination with the idea that anyone could choose salvation, inspiring believers to try to perfect both themselves and society.
The revival hit hardest in a strip of upstate New York along the Erie Canal, a region nicknamed the burned-over district because wave after wave of religious fervor swept through it. The canal brought booming trade, new towns, and fast money, but it also tore up settled community life: neighbors moved, old churches lost authority, and families faced a world changing faster than anyone could plan for. That unsettled feeling made people hungry for certainty, and traveling preachers supplied it.
A camp meeting could draw thousands of people to an outdoor site for days. Preachers like Charles Finney worked the crowd with emotional, plainspoken sermons, singing, and testimony, building toward a climax where the anxious and the convicted came forward to the mourner's bench to publicly wrestle with their sin and seek conversion. This was democratic theater: no Latin, no formal theology degree needed, just a direct emotional reckoning with God. Finney and others taught that salvation was not fixed in advance by God, as Calvinist predestination held, but was open to anyone who chose faith and worked for it.
That shift mattered far beyond church membership rolls. If a person could choose to be saved, then a person, and a whole society, could choose to be improved. This optimism about human and social perfection fed directly into reform: temperance crusades against alcohol, new asylums and schools for the mentally ill and the deaf, public education campaigns, and abolitionism. The revivals sit right next to these reform movements in the period because they supplied the religious energy and moral urgency behind them.
Key terms
- Burned-over district
- The upstate New York region along the Erie Canal that saw repeated, intense waves of revival preaching.
- Predestination
- The Calvinist belief that God decided before birth who would be saved, leaving no room for individual choice.
- Camp meeting
- An outdoor revival gathering, often lasting days, built around emotional preaching and public conversion.
- Mourner's bench
- The seat at a revival where anxious sinners came forward to publicly confront their sin and seek conversion.
- Perfectionism
- The belief that individuals and society could be made morally perfect through effort and reform.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does a camp meeting actually work, from the arrival to the mourner's bench?
- How it worksWalk me through the shift from predestination to the idea that anyone can choose salvation.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the Second Great Awakening only a story about churches and church membership?
- Ties togetherHow does a theology of personal perfection turn into a wave of social reform movements?
Check yourself
End of topic.