13. The Second Great Awakening rejected rational explanations for the vagaries of the weather
The religious movement which became known as the Second Great Awakening began around the time George Washington became President in 1789, and rejected many of the ideas expressed by the founders of the American republic, including deism, rationalism, and Unitarianism. The movement grew slowly for a time, but in the latter part of the second decade of the 19th century, it experience exponential growth in the regions of what was then the West; Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the same areas where many of the displaced and discouraged farmers of New York and New England had emigrated in search of a new start. Camp meetings and revivals condemned the evil ways of the decadent and less than god-fearing East, and exhorted a new start in the promised land of the West.
Among the sins of the East which were being punished by an angry god (according to the evangelists) was that of slavery, and from the seeds of the Second Great Awakening American abolitionism took hold. The disastrous growing season of 1816 was followed in 1817 and 1818 by somewhat better harvests, indications to the faithful in the new lands that they had been right, and were thus receiving their just reward. The Second Great Awakening continued throughout the first half of the 19th century, and as a result, fundamentalist Protestantism flourished, and the wholly American image of what came to be known as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant took form. To many, it was the return to Christian fundamentalism, born out of the hardy displaced farmers of the Northeast, who saved America from its own folly at the beginning of the 19th century.