The mid-19th century, particularly the decades between the 1830s and 1850s, experienced a profound reshaping of American religious life that ultimately spilled into the public sphere. This period was dominated by the Second Great Awakening, a widespread Protestant revival that created emotional religious fervor across the nation. The movement generated a new focus on personal spiritual experience, moving away from established dogma and institutional authority. This religious surge served as the catalyst that energized and organized the subsequent era of social reform, providing a moral framework for Americans to engage actively in the improvement of society.
The Centrality of Individual Moral Agency
A fundamental theological shift during the revivals replaced traditional religious thought with a new understanding of an individual’s role in their own salvation. Older Calvinist doctrine held that a person’s eternal fate was predetermined by God, meaning human action had little bearing on whether they were among the “elect.” The new religious ideas rejected this strict predestination, moving toward a theology known as Arminianism. This change emphasized that salvation was a matter of free will and personal choice, placing the power to accept or reject divine grace directly into the hands of the individual.
The famed revivalist Charles Grandison Finney championed this new perspective, asserting that religious conversion was not a passive miracle but a deliberate act of the will. Finney’s preaching focused on the themes of “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts,” instructing people that they possessed the innate ability to reform themselves. This concept of “individual moral agency” taught that every person was responsible for their sins because they freely chose them.
This theological democratization empowered the common person by making their spiritual destiny dependent on their own moral decisions, rather than on esoteric theology or clerical authority. A converted individual was understood to be morally capable of making good choices and actively working against sin. This new focus on self-determination demanded personal action and commitment. The individual, having achieved personal salvation, was viewed as a morally competent agent prepared to confront the world’s evils.
The Doctrine of Societal Perfectionism
The belief in the individual’s power to achieve relative sinlessness was quickly extrapolated from the personal realm to the community and the nation. This expansion of moral agency gave rise to the Doctrine of Perfectionism, which held that if individuals could conquer sin, society could also be cleansed and perfected. This philosophical move shifted the focus of religious observance from personal piety to active engagement with the external environment. Reform was redefined as the necessary work of eradicating sin wherever it existed.
This societal mandate was further supported by a theological view known as postmillennialism, which was widely accepted by evangelicals like Finney. Postmillennialists believed that Christ’s Second Coming would occur after the “Millennium,” a period of peace and righteousness. This belief translated into a moral imperative: Christians were required to actively work to purify and perfect the world, building God’s kingdom on Earth.
Inaction against societal wrongdoings was therefore seen as a spiritual failing that delayed the coming of the Lord. This concept created an engine for social change, asserting that the world was improvable and that human effort could hasten its purification. The goal was to remove moral obstacles that hindered a person’s ability to exercise free will and choose righteousness. The sins of the world were no longer tolerated as inevitable but were viewed as immediate problems demanding collective, organized eradication.
Applying Religious Mandates to Social Action
The confluence of individual moral agency and societal perfectionism provided the necessary theological and organizational framework for the major reform movements of the mid-19th century. Having accepted the responsibility for their own souls, converts felt compelled to address the “sins” that corrupted the public sphere. The resulting reform efforts were channeled through new voluntary organizations, allowing reformers to scale up their efforts and apply moral pressure across the country.
Abolitionism became the foremost expression of this religious mandate, with slavery viewed as the ultimate societal sin that corrupted the entire nation. Revivalists like Theodore Dwight Weld employed emotional techniques to preach against the sin of slaveholding, demanding immediate eradication. The anti-slavery movement gained momentum in the 1830s, largely driven by Northern churchgoers motivated by the religious obligation to eliminate this profound evil.
The Temperance movement was another direct outgrowth of the new theology, viewing alcohol as a primary barrier to individual moral agency. Evangelical leaders believed that intoxication undermined a person’s free will, leading to moral decay, domestic violence, and poverty. Organizations like the American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, grew rapidly, promoting total abstinence as a means of personal and societal purification.
The perfectionist impulse also extended to institutional reform, seeking to create environments that could perfect the individual, not merely punish them. This was evident in the efforts toward Education and Prison Reform. Reformers like Dorothea Dix advocated tirelessly to improve conditions in prisons and mental asylums, demanding that these institutions focus on rehabilitation rather than simple confinement.