Points:

1. An explosion of religious energy (aka. the "Second Great Awakening") swept the US during the early 1800s. Its cause appears to have been the coincidence of new religious freedom with societal changes brought by the Market Revolution.
2. Together, this created new and uniquely American forms of religious belief and practice -- making faith more indivdualistic, market-link, and democratic than ever before.

Market Society & the Reformation of American Religion

• High culture is culture in museums.
• Popular culture is now.
• What are the areas of pop culture today that aren't in 19th century

Part I - Inventing Religious Freedom

A. Established Churches

• Thanksgiving associated with celebrating religious freedom

Unequal Religions in Colonial America

• Established churches have religious freedom,
• Established churches: Anglican, Congregational, Quaker, and Catholic
• Major Non-Established churches: Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist
• Local Minority Churches/Faiths: Baptist, Quake, Lutheran, Catholic, Judaism, Islam
• Place in hierarchy may be in two because it depends on where. May be established in one colony but not another. For example, Maryland was the only catholic colony.

Reality of Discrimination

• Punitive taxes or tythes
• Voting and public offices diminished

B. The Religious Revolution

• States start to disestablish churches beginning in the 1780s
  • Virginia religious freedom (1779; 1786)
  • Final states were Connecticut (1818), New Hampshire (1819), Massachusetts (1833)
• Federal disestablishment is after states
  • Article VI (1787)
  • Bill of Rights (1791)

Part II - New Possibilities

A. Collapse of Old Barriers

• Religion can expand a lot of places
• Small towns grow
  -A society of strangers experience disruption
• Lots of churches built

Part III - The New American Religion

A. Salvation & Sin

• Shifting views of Salvation.
• Calvinism
  • Humans are spiritually "dead" and sinful by nature
  • Only a predestined Elect are resurrected by the Holy Spirit.
• Arminianism
  • Humans are sick
  • can choose faith and spiritual life
  • preachers can finesse the choice

B. Markets and Democracy

• A Religious Marketplace?
• A Religious Democracy