The camp meeting is a form of Protestant Christian religious service originating in Britain and once common in some parts of the United States, wherein people would travel from a large area to a particular site to camp out, listen to itinerant preachers, and pray. This suited the frontier lifestyle well, as such areas often lacked traditional churches and offered few other types of diversion from work. The practice was a major component of the Second Great Awakening, a rapid increase in the popularity of various Protestant denominations in the United States in the early 19th century, especially Methodists and Baptists.
Read more about Camp Meeting: Camp Meetings in America, Camp Meetings in British Methodism, Music and Hymn Singing
Famous quotes containing the words camp and/or meeting:
“The Indians invited us to lodge with them, but my companion inclined to go to the log camp on the carry. This camp was close and dirty, and had an ill smell, and I preferred to accept the Indians’ offer, if we did not make a camp for ourselves; for, though they were dirty, too, they were more in the open air, and were much more agreeable, and even refined company, than the lumberers.... So we went to the Indians’ camp or wigwam.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivabale encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)