Second Great Awakening

In American Zion, the Second Great Awakening is the religious context for the founding of Mormonism. The book describes 1820s Palmyra, New York, as being amid what Joseph Smith’s mother Lucy called “a great revival of religion” — a series of spiritual upheavals so pervasive across upstate New York that later historians dubbed the region the “burned-over district.” Itinerant ministers preaching hellfire sermons stirred constant religious competition; the revivals, in young Joseph Smith’s telling, succeeded mainly at producing “division amongst the people,” as good feeling was “entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions.” That chaos of competing creeds is the backdrop the book gives for Smith’s search for truth and his First Vision.

Context: The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant religious revival movement that swept the United States roughly from the 1790s through the 1840s, marked by emotional camp meetings, itinerant preaching, and the founding of new denominations. Upstate New York was so repeatedly “burned over” by revival fervor that the phrase “burned-over district” became its enduring nickname — and the same region produced several new religious movements, including Mormonism.

Where this appears

• American Zion — the revival culture and “burned-over district” of 1820s upstate New York as the central context for Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the church’s founding.