Summary: During the early-mid 19th C, an interesting phenomenon spread over the thinking of parts of Western Europe and the US. It was a general negativity about the present, but a strong optimism about the future. In some places, it was almost giddy. The current political and economic situation might be a mess and the number of social ills piling higher. But the Enlightenment’s promise of a bright new day gripped the imagination of thousands. The recent boom in technological progress with things like steam engines, cotton gins, and spinning machines promised endless new products, markets, and employment. Medicine was making dramatic steps forward, promising less pain and longer life. Trains & steamships conquered distance in a way the generation before could not have imagined.“Yeah, today might be tough; but hang on, because tomorrow is going to be awesome.”While that mentality was spotty in Western Europe, it was pretty much a blanket across the United States. European immigrants remarked on the nearly euphoric positivity of their new homeland. This positivism was largely the product of the pervasive Evangelical Revivalism that owned most American churches and a good portion of the population. That Evangelicalism conveyed the idea that conversion to Faith in Christ conveyed a new heart that sought after holiness. People began to reason that that new heart ought to pursue holiness in a new world shaped by holiness. All this spilled into numerous reform efforts; attempts to remedy past grievances and address the growing number of new challenges industrialization had produced. For progress did not come cheap. As Charles Dicken’s wrote, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”So, Evangelicals went to work on reforming society.Charles Finney championed abolition as being part & parcel of the Christian faith. He went so far as to refuse Communion to slave-holders.Stephen Caldwell called for new tariffs to protect American wages and to fund the Christianizing of the public school system.In 1816, the American Bible Society proposed distributing Bibles as a moral and spiritual antibiotic aimed to eradicate Theological Liberalism and any goofy ideas brought over by Immigrants.The American Sunday School Union set up dozens of schools in urban centers to educate the growing pool of child laborers.By 1858, Evangelicals in NYC had established 76 missions to minister to the needs of the urban poor.While most reform-minded Evangelicals engaged the culture, a smaller group decided to pursue holiness by withdrawing from society to form separatist communes. Nathaniel Hawthorne labelled these religiously-motivated separatists “Come Outers.”One example is a group known as the Shakers. Their original name was the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. They began in the mid-18th C as a splinter group from the Quakers who at the time were moving away from their reputation as enthusiasts of ecstatic forms of worship. The Shakers didn’t just want to maintain that reputation; they wanted to ramp it up. So they became knowns as the Shaking Quakers. They were lead by the ardent and eloquent preaching of Jane Wardley who said the Millennium was about to begin with the Return of Christ. In preparation for the Return of Christ, they gave themselves to strict celibacy and a remarkable egalitarianism that saw a notable influence of women in the leadership of the group.Shakers settled in colonial America but never saw many members until this era of reform in the mid-19th C when their community grew to its largest number, about 6000. The policy of celibacy as well as changes in society saw the eventual dwindling of the Shaker movement to just a single community today.Another group of Come Outers were the Millerites.William Miller was a well-off farmer and Baptist lay preacher in NE New York. He became convinced Christ would return sometime between 1843 & 44. His calculatio
