In this episode, we discuss America's Third Great Awakening-the great moral revival that drove the Progressive Movement.
Unlike the First and Second Awakenings, the Progressive Movement wasn’t primarily a great religious revival. It was, however, a great moral revival. One that drove a staggering number of important social reforms meant to reform and morally uplift America.
It brought an end to child labor. It imposed maximum work hours. It created green spaces and national parks. It sought to create pure food and medicine and created a new agency in the FDA. It fought against economic abuses and monopolies and created the antitrust laws. It built public schools. It provided relief to the urban poor. It fought corruption and imposed efficiency. It won the fights for both temperance and women’s suffrage.
It tied together a loose alliance of middle-class reformers across American society and in various fields, including everyone from Ida Tarbell, to Jane Addams, to John Muir, to Frances Perkins, to Frederick Winslow Taylor, to Walter Rauschenbusch, to Carrie Nation, to many more. It united them in the belief that through social science and planning, we could create a more just and efficient society that eradicated social ills, eliminated injustices, and morally uplifted Americans.
The Progressive Movement also worked hand-in-hand with a great religious revival that occurred at the same time, Social Gospel Christianity. Like Second Awakening reformers, Social Gospel Christians believed it was a religious duty to turn American into God’s Kingdom on Earth. However, they now focused on a different set of problems, primarily the abuses of the urban poor in the wake of industrialization. And they used a new method-instead of seeking to morally reform people, they hoped to rather create new moral institutions that would create a more just society whether or not the people administering them were themselves good and moral people. The overlap between the Social Gospel and Progressive Movement was so great it can be hard to distinguish where each begins and ends.
Like in every awakening, the Third Awakening also saw the birth or growth of other moral and religious movements like the Holiness Movement and Pentecostalism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, and new interest in the occult. It also birthed movements like the Chautauqua Movement, which launched events mixing education, learning, and politics that functioned something like a secular tent revival meeting.
Although looking different than America’s prior awakenings given its secular orientation, the Third Awakening bears every mark of an American awakening movement. America plunged into a great national moral revival in which they sought to tear down imperfect institutions in the hope of replacing them with new ones that created a more just and moral nation.
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17 апр 2022
