The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order

Abstract

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.