Two spiritual revivals known as the First and Second Great Awakenings permanently changed the cultural and religious makeup of the fledgling United States. North Carolina experienced both revivals firsthand, and both revivals saw the state transformed from periods of irreligiousness to periods of widespread religiosity. The second of these national movements played out in North Carolina during the close of the 18th century in an era of war, poverty, and recovery.
The story of North Carolina’s Second Great Awakening begins in 1780, when a circuit riding Methodist minister named Francis Asbury made his first of 72 circuit trips through the Tar Heel state. He noticed what he described as a profound spiritual deadness amongst the state’s inhabitants, writing in his diary that throughout the state “The Baptists appear to be very dead; their people will not attend…The people are taken away and times are so difficult that they appear to be under a judicial hardness, having heard so much and felt so little.”[1]
He also lamented, “I acknowledge the goodness of God in preserving my health, life and horse, from these people; they are very vile, and if there is any mischief done it is laid to the soldiers; people rob, steal, and murder one another with impunity.” [2]
This departure from religious expression likely had a few sociological causes. North Carolina was a poor colony in the 1780s, and the raging war between the Continental Army and the British forces contributed to the poverty of many North Carolinians. This poverty resulted in a coarseness that circuit riders like Asbury attributed to a spiritual hardness.
Hard economic times were not the only cause of spiritual decay. Tension between the Anglican elites and Scotch-Irish mostly Presbyterian back country dwellers had politicized religious activity in the decade leading into the revolutionary war.[3] Additionally, amongst the gentry, new ideas from the enlightenment permeated bookshelves and social gatherings, with writers like Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer advocating for deist and rationalist thought amongst North Carolina’s small learned population. [4]
But this litany of forces pushing North Carolinians away from Christianity wouldn’t hold forever. In 1794, near what is now the small town of Denver, North Carolina, the first camp meeting revival of the Second Great Awakening was held.[5] Called the “Rock Springs” revival, this tent meeting eventually became a well-attended annual event.[6]
The camp meeting revival was a simple but potent innovation in rural ministry. Wagons and tents would circle a main preaching area where worship, preaching, and other assorted revival activities took place. These revivals were held by circuit riding Methodists, often in conjunction with local Presbyterian and Baptist clergymen. Major camp meeting-style revivals in North Carolina included the Waxhaw Revival in Mecklenburg County, the Bell’s Meeting House revival in Randolph County, as well as the annual Rock Springs revival in Denver, mentioned above.[7] Countless smaller, less documented revivals continued through the 1810s and well into the 1820s.
The first meeting may have been held in North Carolina, but the meetings would hit their stride on the American frontier, where the notoriously gruff inhabitants of states like Kentucky and Tennessee regained the distinctive religiosity still dubbed today as the “Bible Belt” phenomenon.
Francis Asbury continued to travel throughout the country, leading revivals as well as training and ordaining more than 4,000 Methodist ministers, many of whom served in North Carolina.[8] As the co-founding bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church (now the United Methodist Church), Asbury facilitated the growth of American Methodism in synchrony with the spread of revival. This effort led to Methodism taking a greatly increased role in the American religious landscape by the time of his death in 1816.
Asbury, along with other English and Northern circuit riders detested slavery and were shocked and appalled by the practice in the American South. Asbury noted on one trip to North Carolina that he was
“grieved to see slavery and the manner of keeping these poor people.”[9] It’s no surprise then that he ordained Richard Allen, a recently freed black abolitionist minister who would go on to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first African-American-focused Christian denomination. The denomination would go on to play a large role in the religious lives of the South’s formerly enslaved population during Reconstruction and beyond.