uick, what do Kellogg's Corn Flakes and your summer-time Bible camp have in common? No, it's not that they're both pure corn (although a lot of Bible camps are). Guess again. Both the breakfast cereal empire of John Kellogg and the summer tradition of family Bible conferences are rooted in the American revivalism of the early 19th century. For that matter, so are the Wednesday night prayer meeting, the altar call as an evangelistic tool, and the Book of Mormon. This period in American church history is often referred to as the Second Great Awakening, and was a series of religious revivals stretching from 1800 to the time of the War Between the States, affecting churches on the ever-advancing western frontier as well as those of the more settled areas east of the Appalachians.
Why is it called the Second Great Awakening? I mean, was there a First Great Awakening? The Great Awakening was a religious revival which occurred in New England and the mid-Atlantic states during the 1730's and 40's under the preaching of, among others, Jonathan Edwards, Theodore Freylinghuysen, George Whitefield, and the Tennents. Although there are similarities between the two periods, the differences are more numerous and significant. For example? Well, geographically and theologically Great Awakening II was all over the place, whereas Great Awakening I was primarily a New England affair involving folks who pretty much agreed with the Westminster Confession of Faith.
What were some of the features of the Second Great Awakening? Like most other religious revivals, the fortunes of the various denominations all rose; that is, the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists each benefited from the period. Some of them, however, grew at explosive rates. The Methodists grew from a total membership of 65,000 in 1800, to over one million members in 1844. By the time of the War Between the States, the Methodist Church was the largest religious body in the U.S. One of the great advantages of the Methodists in their labors on the frontier was the "common touch" and informality of their preachers. Listen to one of their own, Peter Cartwright (1785-1872), describe the relative success of the Methodists on the American frontier:
The Presbyterians, and other Calvinistic branches of the Protestant Church, used to contend for an educated ministry, for pews, for instrumental music, for a congregational or state salaried ministry. The Methodists universally opposed these ideas; and the illiterate Methodist preachers actually set the world on fire, while they (the others) were lighting their matches!
Cartwright's remark draws attention both to the relative "success" of the Methodists and to the doctrinal divisions that were rife during and after the revival period.
What were the revivals like? I mean, what would it have been like to be on the American frontier during a revival? Frontier revivalism during the Second Great Awakening was centered, not on a particular person, and not around a particular church, but in something called a camp meeting. The camp meeting was an evangelistic novelty which appeared first in southwestern Kentucky in the summer of 1800. It was an outdoor religious service lasting several days, in which those attending camped out at the site of the service, hence the name. Listen to the following re-creation of the early camp meeting experience.
. . . the milling crowds of hardened frontier farmers, tobacco-chewing, tough-spoken, notoriously profane, famous for their alcoholic thirst; their scarcely demure wives and large broods of children; the rough clearing, the rows of wagons and crude improvised tents with horses staked out behind; the gesticulating speaker on a rude platform, or perhaps simply a preacher holding forth from a fallen tree. At night, when the forest's edge was limned by the flickering light of many campfires, the effect of apparent miracles would be heightened. For men and women accustomed to retiring and rising with the birds, these turbulent nights must have been especially awe-inspiring. And underlining every other conditioning circumstance was the immense loneliness of the frontier farmer's normal life and the exhilaration of participating in so large a social occasion.
The physical effects of so drastic a conjunction of apathy and fervor, loneliness and sociality, monotony and miracle, could not have been mild. Critics thought they noted a greater increase of fleshly lust than of spirituality, and charged that "more souls were begot than saved"; while even the most sympathetic observers conceded that camp meeting conversions were not decorous religious transactions.
Though certainly not decorous, the camp meeting was a very popular religious and social institution. It served as an easy testing ground for various evangelistic schemes, was put to good use by the Methodists and Baptists, and lives on today, though in a refined form, in Bible camps, conferences, retreats, and revival meetings.
P.S. What's the corn flake connection? You said that corn flakes had something to do with American revivalism. One of the other features of the revivalism of the early 19th century was the rebirth of millennial adventism, that is, the doctrine of Christ's imminent (any day now) return. This theme in the Second Great Awakening culminated in the founding of several new denominations, including the Seventh-Day Adventists. John Kellogg, a vegetarian, was in on the ground floor of the Adventist church and sought to provide an alternative breakfast food more in keeping with the Adventist views on diet and health than plain old eggs and bacon. He invented corn flakes and several substitutes for meat products.
