Week 5 Day 4

      In class on Thursday, we finished the movie God in America.  This time the focus was in the revival and religious conflict aspects of the Second Great Awakening.  We began learning about James Finley, who had doubts about his faith, similar to the doubts of Marin Luther.  He went to one of the revivals that characterized the Second Great Awakening with their dramatic and exciting sermons.  There he and his friends became dedicated to Christianity just as so many did during that time in american history as it became the center of culture again.
      With the new focus on Christianity came some conflict as well.  Since the Christianity that everyone in America came to love was Protestantism, the Catholics weren't too happy about this.  The Protestants were the majority at that point and had a lot of influence in other aspects of american culture, one of which being the education system.  Around 1840, Ireland suffered from a potato famine, causing many Irish to flee and emigrate to America.  This large influx of Catholics caused much unrest in the religious world as the Catholic numbers began to rival that of the Protestants.  Soon enough, there were riots and churches of Catholicism and Protestantism being burnt down.
      One major issue was found in the public school system.  The Catholics didn't like that the Protestants dictated what was being taught, as they were afraid of future generations being lost to Protestantism.  A catholic priest named John "Dagger" Hughes fought against the protestant public school system on behalf of all the Catholics.  His persistence brought a lot of awareness about the issue, even though the courts did not fix the issue or give him money to fund catholic schools.
      Once the movie ended, we were assigned a reflection which was to make an argument of how religion helped democratic reforms in American history.