4.10 Historians on the Second Great Awakeining

"The transformation of American theology in the first quarter of the nineteenth century released the very forces of romantic perfectionism that conservatives most feared...As it spread, perfectionism swept across denominational barriers and penetrated even secular thought...

As the sum of individual sins, social wrong would disappear when enough people had been converted and rededicated to the right conduct. Deep and lasting reform, therefore, meant an educational crusade based on the assumption that when a sufficient number of individual Americans had seen the light, they would automatically solve the country's social problems. Thus formulated, perfectionist reform offered a program of mass conversion achieved through educational rather than political means. In the opinion of the romantic reformers the regeneration of American society began, not in legislative enactments or political manipulation, but in (an)...appeal to the American urge for individual self-improvement." 

"In the United States, the public sphere formed itself in a void, growing lush from the fertilization of religious and political controversies as its signature forms spread rapidly from city to town and town to village. In the ensuing decades, the public realm became an arena of initiatives and experiments, religiously-inspired reform movements and heated political contests...

In creating vast pools of proselytizers...and designing the entire society a missionary field, the evangelical Protestants, particularly in the North, encouraged social activism...

The society as a whole had to be redeemed...Once converted, men and women found ways to express their new-found spiritual awakening by getting government policy, public morals, and private lives to conform to biblical prescriptions."