The revivals opened space for people the settled churches had kept silent, and this is among the most consequential things about them. Women exhorted and testified in meetings and organised the societies that carried the movement's practical work, in numbers and with a public prominence that had no precedent. Black Americans, enslaved and free, converted in large numbers, preached, and founded institutions: an independent African Methodist Episcopal denomination was organised in 1816 out of congregations that had walked out of segregated seating, and the independent black church became the most durable institution of black American life.
The energy released also went outward into reform. The same networks produced temperance societies, missionary and Bible societies, campaigns for prisons, asylums and schools, and a substantial part of the abolitionist movement, whose leaders frequently came out of revivalist religion and argued in its language.
And it produced new religions. The region of upstate New York burned over by successive waves of revival gave rise within two decades to the Latter Day Saint movement, to the Millerite expectation of an imminent advent and the Adventist bodies that followed its disappointment, and to a broader spiritual ferment that fed Spiritualism. A period that made religion a matter of personal decision rather than inherited membership produced, predictably, a great many decisions its promoters had not anticipated.