The Awakening and New Religious Societies for Social Reform

Abstract

This chapter examines how the Awakening became a modern, popular religious movement through the foundation of hundreds of new religious voluntary societies to ameliorate the living conditions of those in poverty. Such efforts were related to awakened Protestants’ holistic understanding of evangelism, in which the physical needs of those in difficult circumstances had to be addressed in order to remove them as obstacles to their hearing of the gospel message. This chapter examines new societies and institutions that awakened Protestants created to provide care for the unemployed, orphans, and those in need of medical care. In particular, it analyzes the principal roles that Protestant women played in such new organizations. In establishing these new religious institutions to alleviate social problems, awakened Protestants rationalized the church’s historic task of charity by creating administrative bureaucracies to operate these new institutions.