by Fred Moleck
Twenty-First-Century Camp Meetings
In the last decade of the 1700s and in the late 1820s and 1830s a great wave of religious fervor swept over the United States known as the Second Great Awakening.It was very similar to the first Great Awakening in the colonies that took place in the towns and villages whose believers sought personal salvation by personal testimony at large group meetings out of doors.
They literally camped out and gathered to hear preaching and sang hymns and gave witness. They were born again. The “got” religion.
The nineteenth-century Awakenings were reactionary against the “deism” of the American and French revolutions, although both revolutions proved that humankind could govern themselves without a monarchy.
Most of the rallies of these Awakenings were conducted out-of-doors. They were prayer meetings, time for personal witness statements whose participants frequently fell under the power of the Holy Spirit.
The participants demonstrated their resignation to the Spirit’s power by speaking in tongues (glossolalia), barking like dogs, and rolling on the ground.
My parents—God rest them—called these people “holy rollers.”
Watching the past twenty-odd months of political rallies of the candidates for the presidency and vice presidency of the United States, I was amazed at the similarity of the fervor and feverish abandonment of the twenty-first-century Democrat or Republican who waved the signs, shouted slogans, and truly believed that a Utopia was on the way.
It all came to a head last Tuesday with President-elect Obama’s acceptance speech in front of the thousands in Chicago’s Grant Park and the adjoining streets to the millions in the radio and TV audiences.
I thought of Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, Joseph Smith Smith Jr., James Finney Jr., and hundreds of others whose camp meetings attracted thousands and brought religion to thousands.
What they would have given for such coverage.
There is another element that emerges from the nineteenth-century Awakening and it deals with secular reforms: public education, abolition of slavery, control of alcoholism, prison reforms, care for the handicapped and mentally ill, philanthropies, and—God bless them—dueling!
Another interesting aside in this wave of reforms: it gave a strong and influential voice to women of the day who assumed strong leadership in education and preaching.
Wonderful things happen we gather out doors.
You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@comcast.net