Os ventos da modernidade sobre as estruturas presbiterianas: uma análise pré Guerra de Secessão

Abstract

Protagonists of the First Great Awakening, the Presbyterians were also touched by the second wave of revivals and reacted to it by defending their moral and ethical values but also their standards of living. An understanding that the challenges posed by Modernity to the nineteenth-century Presbyterians of the Second Great Awakening are the cracks that fostered deep discussions and divisions within the Church, bringing about a new, divided, frail church; in fact two Churches within one denomination; was the object of study ins this thesis. Old and New School, fruits of the First Great Awakening, inaugurated the era of multiple reactions to Modernity and the division between Northern Church and Southern Church was a more advanced stage of a process already begun in the late eighteenth century by the Second Great Awakening. This thesis aims to investigate the effects of Modernity, which flooded the Western world in the nineteenth century, on the Presbyterian Denomination in the South of the United States, from two different documents; Speech on Slavery, given at the Detroit Synod, and the book Cotton is King. Modernity would have, to a certain extent, contributed to the outbreak of the civil conflict, as it intensified the divisions between two distinct economic models in the USA. The Presbyterians in this context reacted in their own way to Modernity, denying the new and trying to cling to the old, openly defending slavery, so dear to the sustenance of their society.