Welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. You know you're meandering around a country road or a scenic place and all of a sudden you see it

Overlook ahead. Well, let's pull over and take an overlook of the second great awakening was a very pivotal moment in American church history. It was a transatlantic phenomenon element to it but I want to primarily focus on the second grade

awakening in America. First of all, why was it needed? How was the American church or

American culture asleep?

Well, if we look at the 1790s, we see that it was an age of reason,

as the book title has it by Thomas Payne, and at the very beginnings of this young American

republic there was a strong sense of secularism historians have documented that church attendance in the decade of the 1790s

in America was in the single digits percentage wise. It was not only an age of secularism, it was also an age of deism.

These old congregational churches in New England were quickly careening into what was called Unitarian Universalism.

And neither one of those are good doctrines and put them together it's really bad.

So whether you're looking at the church and deism and

Unitarianism and universalism or you're looking at the culture and

secularism you could say yes asleep. So time for awakening.

The second grade awakening is dated from 1800 to the 1840s and anything that runs a whole generation

is going to have multiple arms to it and sometimes difficult to wrap

ourselves around it and get a handle on it, but let's do our best. It begins in the 18 zeros,

that first decade, and it seems like it starts on college

campuses. It starts on the campus of Yale Timothy Dwight. He's Jonathan

Edwards's grandson. He comes in as president and he realizes that not only are most of the students

unconverted and not really wanting anything to do with God, church, or religion, but so too are some of the faculty.

And so Dwight starts doing two things.

He starts preaching the gospel in chapel.

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