Falling for the Lord: Shame, Revivalism, and the Origins of the Second Great Awakening

This article addresses the central role of shame in accounts from revivals in the southern United States at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, with particular focus on Cane Ridge, Kentucky. Using the work of Eve Sedgwick and Silvan Tomkins on shame as affect, this article argues that participants at these revivals understood their enthusiastic physical responses as a manifestation of shame, worked through within the public space of the camp meeting. In particular, those who "fell as if dead" at these meetings understood themselves as being overwhelmed by a sense of shame, but that in embodying that shame, they came to take part more fully in evangelical community. This public, embodied performance of shame then creates a particular understanding of the affective possibilities of revivalism, as well as the challenges of distributing such revival accounts within evangelical print culture.