The early 19th century was a time of great religious ferment in the United States. Most Americans were Christians, but the unity of this background disguised great variety. New forms of Christianity, such as Mormonism, were being born; old denominations were undergoing revival, change, conflict, and fragmentation. IMMIGRATION was changing religious demographics, as Roman Catholics arrived in large numbers. The fact that churches in America had been officially disestablished by the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 meant that they were responsible for their own funding, yet it also left them free to experiment with new doctrines, concepts, and appeals to attract as wide a following as possible. Religious ideas inspired social reform, utopian experiments, and movements as varied as transcendentalism and spiritual communication with the dead.
Religious revivals swept the nation from the 1790s to the 1830s in a movement called the SECOND Great
Awakening; this commemorated the Great Awakening in the thirteen colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The Second Great Awakening was marked by Evangelicalism, an enthusiastic way of spreading the Gospel that deemphasized reason and learning in favor of emotional, personal acceptance of God’s offer of grace. Coming into being at the end of the 18th century, the movement sprang forward from two areas. In Kentucky, Presbyterian pastor James McGready started the tradition of outdoor revivals called camp meetings. In Connecticut, Congregationalist Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, sought to correct the irreligion of Yale students by heartfelt preaching and common-sense application of religious truths to life.
One of Dwight’s students, Presbyterian Lyman Beecher, furthered the Second Great Awakening with revival services in Boston beginning in 1826. Charles Grandison Finney left his law practice in 1821 to make upstate New York a hotbed of revivalism. Methodist bishop Francis Asbury used revivalistic preaching to spread Methodism in western frontier areas and in settled regions of the East. Tirelessly crisscrossing the country on horseback, Asbury set an example for other circuit riders, Methodist preachers who covered a large territory through regular travel. The countryside was not the sole focus of the spreading fervor: Throughout this period evangelical preachers like Finney worked the crowds of New York and Boston and found willing and enthusiastic audiences. Perhaps ironically, industrialization contributed to religious revivalism. Its uprooting effect upon heretofore agrarian populations, male and female alike, and the drudgery of factory and mill work left many young, single people isolated and hoping for a better future. The Protestant revival answered many of the spiritual, moral, and social needs of laborers in major metropolitan centers, and thus brought many thousands of converts into the religious mainstream.
Women found opportunities to testify and preach at revival meetings, though usually without being ordained as clergy. A prominent woman preacher was Phoebe Palmer, who in the 1830s began to preach a message of holiness later promoted through her periodical Guide to Holiness (1864-74).
The printing of Bibles and a growing interest in religious education were indicators of the spiritual fervor of the times. In 1816, the American Bible Society was founded to distribute English-language Bibles to Americans; it was soon publishing 300,000 copies a year. This zealousness also led to the founding of new groups like the American Tract Society and the American Temperance Society, whose purpose was to spread the Gospel while also imparting positive social change. In 1824, the American Sunday School Union was formed to provide general and religious instruction. The spread of missions and the formation of missionary societies were other signs of widespread zeal.
Congregationalist missionaries brought the Gospel to the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii, in 1819. Other American missionaries were venturing as far as Burma and Africa by the 1820s. Closer to home, missionaries, with federal government aid, proselytized and educated Native Americans, particularly the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole). This mission effort was severely disrupted by the forced removal of Native Americans from the Southeast in the 1830s.
Evangelical Christianity was linked to reform movements such as temperance, the movement against alcohol consumption; and abolitionism, the movement to end slavery. Christians were involved in founding the Society for the Promotion of Temperance in 1826 and the American Temperance Union in 1836. Christian teaching about human equality before God was an important spur to the antislavery activists who founded the American Colonization Society (1819), which was aimed at resettling freed slaves in Africa; and the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833). Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), was a daughter of the revivalist preacher Lyman Beecher. Some Christians, particularly Quakers, took grave risks to participate in the Underground Railroad, a clandestine network that transported fugitive southern slaves to free regions in the northern United States and Canada.
Although Christians in the North were increasingly likely to oppose slavery, those in the South, where slavery was concentrated, were increasingly likely to justify it, often on Biblical grounds. From the 1760s to about the 1820s, southern Methodists and Baptists had opposed slavery, but by the 1830s they had largely joined the South’s defense of its “peculiar institution.” Differences about slavery led to schisms in many denominations, including Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists. The Southern Baptist Convention, which would become the largest body of Baptists, formed in 1845 to distinguish itself from northern Baptists who forbade missionaries to own slaves.
African Americans, whether slave or free, sometimes worshiped with whites during this period (usually in separate sections) and sometimes formed churches of their own. Baptist and Methodist preachers in the early 19th century converted a growing number of southern slaves to evangelical Christian worship. Black Christians formed their own meeting houses and developed distinctive spirituals, folk hymns indebted both to African tradition and to the white spirituals sung at revivalist camp meetings. Some blacks kept alive the religious traditions of West Africa, often mingled with Christianity. Voodoo or vodun, practiced in Louisiana, was a blend of Roman Catholicism and West African religion.
African-American preaching often contained references to Moses and Exodus, drawing an analogy between
Engraving showing a preacher and his audience on a southern plantation (Billy Graham Center Museum)
Black slaves and the Hebrew slaves whom God had freed from bondage in Egypt. Sometimes the radical implications of this imagery went beyond preaching. In the South, Christian teaching, with its message of equality before God, was sometimes used to justify slave rebellions, such as Denmark Vesey’s in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822; and Nat Turner’s in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.
Black churches took shape in the North as well as the South. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, an independent Methodist denomination, was founded in Philadelphia in 1816 by former slave Richard Allen, who became its first bishop. Allen started the church after being outraged by enforcement of segregation rules in a white-controlled Methodist church. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church, another black Methodist denomination, was established as a national body in 1821.
With all the changes underway, it was no wonder that religious demographics shifted. In 1800, the Congregation-alists were the nation’s largest denomination, followed in order by Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Roman Catholics. But by 1850, Roman Catholics and Methodists were vying for first place, followed by Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. Episcopalians were no longer in the top five, and the wholly new Disciples of Christ were in sixth place.
Congregationalism, a denomination descended from New England’s Puritans, was split by the secession of Unitarianism. Rejecting the Trinity and preaching human perfectibility and universal salvation, Unitarians had been active in the United States since the late 18th century, drawing on roots that dated to the 16th century in Switzerland and Poland. Many Congregationalists, particularly the intellectual and social elite, quietly embraced Unitarian belief, but the sect did not fully come into its own until after William Ellery Channing’s influential sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” delivered in Baltimore in 1819. In the 1820s, the American Unitarian Association formed, with Channing as its first president, attracting many Congregational churches.
Unitarians shifted in the early 19th century from emphasizing scripture to stressing reason and service to humankind. This shift gathered force in New England in the 1830s and 1840s under the influence of Unitarian minister Theodore Parker and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Universalism, a denomination with tenets similar to Unitarianism, spread about this time in rural and smalltown areas of the Midwest, particularly Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
Those churches that remained Congregationalist retained the Calvinist orthodoxy inherited from 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin, but exhibited tensions between liberals and conservatives. Nathaniel W. Taylor, first professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, created a schism when he questioned the doctrine of election and other Calvinist tenets. “Taylorism,” as it was known, was so detested by conservatives as to prompt the formation of a pastoral Union for the suppression of heresy (1833). Horace Bushnell, Congregational minister, author of Christian Nurture (1847) and God in Christ (1849), stressed the presence of divinity in nature and humanity and spoke against the traditional severity of Calvinism.
Among Protestant denominations, Methodists and Baptists made the greatest gains in antebellum America; by the 1850s, about 70 percent of all Protestants were Methodists and Baptists. Methodism spread thanks to the efforts of the circuit riders. Baptists, who advocated baptism of believers by total immersion, spread their emotionally charged faith throughout frontier areas by entrusting the Gospel to individual farmers who became licensed preachers in their local congregations.
After a period as a small minority, Roman Catholicism was on its way to becoming the country’s single largest denomination, as it is to this day. The great increase in Catholic numbers before the Civil War was due largely to Irish immigrants. Driven from Ireland by poverty and oppression, these devoted Catholics began migrating to America in large numbers in the 1820s. Immigration rose to a new height in the 1840s, when the Irish potato famine of 1845-46 forced many to either leave home or starve. Between 1845 and 1854 alone, about 1.3 million Irish emigrated to America. Catholic immigrants from Germany, another major source of immigration during this period, also swelled the numbers of Catholics in America. The U. S. acquisition of CALIFORNIA and major parts of the Southwest from Mexico in the 1840s brought in still more Catholics, as the Mexican population in that region was absorbed into the U. S. citizenry. Moreover, the Catholic church was the only major Christian group of this period not rent by competing doctrines. As the oldest and most highly organized branch of Christianity, it was authoritarian in tone and intolerant of criticism, requiring the laity to show unquestioned obedience to the pope in Rome. It usually won and retained the spiritual loyalty of millions of immigrants and was in many respects a counterweight to the overwhelming Protestant religious culture of America.
With the growing numbers of Catholics came a growing anti-Catholic movement among Protestants who saw the new immigrants as a threat. Tracts denouncing Catholicism proliferated, and in the 1854 local and state elections, the anti-Catholic KNOW-NoTHiNG Party scored numerous victories. This nativist impulse was stridently anti-Catholic in tenor and agitated against what it saw as a discernible tendency toward papist authoritarianism. The war of words escalated in 1864, when Pope Pius IX promulgated his Syllabus of Errors to denounce the trends of modernity, republicanism, and other tenets of “heresy” then prevalent in Protestant America.
To a much smaller degree, immigration during this period also increased the numbers of Jews in America.
They came mainly from Germany, beginning in the 1820s. In the 1850s, Cincinnati rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise spearheaded the development of Reform Judaism, a liberal form of the faith that incorporated Enlightenment ideals. These Jews conducted their services in both English and German and allowed men and women to be seated together. However, the firmly established Sephardic and newly arrived German communities tended to be mutually exclusive, and they lived their lives and their religion apart from each other. The CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH, which began in 1849, brought still other groups of believers, this time from China. The Chinese imported to America Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and various traditional beliefs.
Some wholly new forms of belief sprouted in the United States during this period. One of the most successful was Mormonism, or the CHURCH OF jESUS CHRIST OF Latter-day Saints. This religion was established in 1830 in Fayette, New York, by JOSEPH Smith, Jr. That year, Smith published the Book of Mormon, which he said he had translated from gold plates given to him by an angel. Smith regarded his faith as a restored version of Christianity, but it was different enough in its teachings to be regarded by outsiders as a new religion. Mormonism taught that Jesus Christ had visited the New World to preach to ancient peoples of Hebrew descent; claimed that the Second Coming would take place in America; advocated POLYGAMY; and established a centralized church structure with a strong emphasis on communal activity. The Mormon church grew rapidly but was persecuted for its beliefs, with Smith murdered in 1844. Seeking refuge, the Mormons under Brigham Young began migrating to Utah in 1847, where they established a distinctive community they called the STATE OF DESERET.
Another new denomination in this period was the Disciples of Christ, or Christian Churches. This group grew out of what was called the Restoration Movement, which sought to unite all Christian churches by restoring what it viewed as the simple Christianity of the New Testament. In Kentucky in 1803, Presbyterian minister Barton Warren Stone and like-minded colleagues founded a group who called themselves “Christians.” In Pennsylvania in 1809, Presbyterian minister THOMAS CAMPBELL and his son Alexander formed the Christian Association of Washington, Pennsylvania, which temporarily joined forces with the Baptists. The Stoneites and the Campbellites (as they were sometimes called) merged in 1832, united around such principles as the autonomy of congregations and the importance of individual interpretation of scripture.
Around the same time, another new Christian movement, Adventism, was making its mark. In 1831, New York farmer William Miller began preaching his interpretation of scripture, according to which Christ’s second coming would occur on March 21, 1843. Through periodicals, tracts, camp meetings, and lectures, Miller developed a large following of tens of thousands of Millerites or Adventists (from Latin advent, coming). When the second coming did not take place in 1843, the date was shifted to 1844, but again Christ failed to appear as scheduled. Miller and other true believers remained convinced that Christ would come soon, and they formed several Adventist churches to prepare. The largest of these, the Seventh-Day Adventists, adopted Saturday, not Sunday, as the Sabbath in 1844.
Still another new denomination was the Christadel-phians (Greek, “Brothers of Christ”), founded by John Thomas in 1848. It also emphasized belief in Christ’s Second Coming, but it had distinctive touches, including pacifism, nonparticipation in government, and rejection of the doctrines of the Trinity and hell.
Some spiritual movements of the time were not so much sects or denominations as intellectual currents. Most prominent among these was transcendentalism, a philosophical and literary movement that called for the individual to encounter God directly. Influenced by German Romanticism, the TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT celebrated the presence of divinity in nature, encouraged self-reliance, and belittled organized religion. Its greatest spokesperson was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been trained as a Unitarian minister. In 1838, at Harvard Divinity School, Emerson delivered his “Divinity School Address” marking the beginning of transcendentalism and drawing controversy for his criticism of traditional Christianity. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), based on his experiment in living simply and “deliberately” at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, further developed transcendentalist ideas.
Spiritualism, a religious movement focused on contact with the spirits of the dead, emerged in the 1840s. In 1848, Margaret, Leah, and Catherine Fox of New York claimed to hear rappings that were messages from spirits. Paying audiences flocked to theaters to see the Fox sisters communicate with the dead. Spiritualism drew much skepticism but also many followers, including newspaper editor Horace Greeley. A leading spiritualist was Andrew Jackson Davis, clairvoyant and author of Nature’s Divine Revelations (1847).
Utopian experiments attempting to reestablish society on a sounder basis were characteristic of this period of spiritual fervor. New Harmony, Indiana, was founded in 1814 by the Harmony Society, a German Separatist group espousing communal ownership and celibacy. (They were also known as Harmonists or Rappites, for their leader George Rapp.) New Harmony was sold in 1825 to British socialist reformer Robert Owen, who turned it into a communistic colony that quickly broke up due to internal dissension. The Shakers, or the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, also espoused communal ownership and celibacy. Founded in the 18th century, the movement established 18 Shaker communities in eight states by 1826. In decline after 1860, the Shakers left a legacy of fine furniture and handcrafts.
At Putney, Vermont, in 1839, John Humphrey Noyes founded a society that sought to carry out his perfectionist teachings of Biblical communism. Forced to flee when neighbors became outraged at the colony’s polygamy, Noyes moved to Oneida, New York, in 1848, where his experiments in communal living continued until the 1870s. At Brook Farm near Boston, several transcendentalists tried an experiment in communal living (1841-47). And in Iowa, the Amana Church Society, a group of seven colonies, was founded by a German Pietist group called the Ebenezer Society in 1855. Known for their fine woolens and expert farming, the cooperative villages would survive into the 20th century.
As previously mentioned, the Bible was central to the proselytizing that accompanied the Second Great Awakening. The first organization to actively distribute this seminal text was the Philadelphia Bible Society, which first arose in 1808 and locally distributed several hundred bibles every year. The scope of spreading religious texts reached national proportions in 1816 with the founding of the American Bible Society (ABS) under Elias Boudinot, formerly the first head of the United States Congress. Its self-proclaimed goal was to place a copy of the King James Bible in every household in the nation, and within two years it had enlisted the active support of 41 like-minded societies. The ABS found Americans to be receptive to their goal, and within four years it had distributed 100,000 Bibles across the nation. Between 1829 and 1831 it subsequently published 1 million copies of the Scriptures at a time when the country’s population hovered around 13 million.
However, in 1835 the ABS experienced a major schism when its Baptist auxiliaries protested the translation of the Greek word for “baptize” and sought to substitute “immerse,” a word more consistent with their own doctrine. Neither side yielded in this semantical dispute, so in 1836 the Baptists withdrew from the ABS to founded their own American and Foreign Bible Society. Further squabbling among Baptists led to another dispute and creation of the new American Bible Union in 1850 under the aegis of philanthropist William Colgate. Trouble also arose with the influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly Irish, in the 1840s and 1850s. When their children were required to read the King James Bible in public schools, Catholic parents sometimes resisted, and in 1844 a violent riot in Philadelphia over precisely which Bible to use at school left 13 people dead and scores of houses in ruins. Despite this sometimes rocky reception, the Bible and Bible societies were a permanent fixture of 19th-century America and a vital conduit for disseminating Christian scripture to the citizenry.
Another significant development in this period was the rise of the Sunday school movement, whereby reading and writing was taught using the Bible as the central text. This movement was largely the outgrowth of British efforts in the 1780s to provide rudimentary education and moral training to urban youth, as well as to restrain them from impious behavior on the Sabbath. The first American “Sunday schools” arose around 1790, and the movement persisted until the 1830s. In this context, education came first and religious indoctrination was a secondary concern. H owever, with the coming of the Second Great Awakening at the beginning of the 19th century, the Sunday school movement acquired an evangelical bent it previously lacked.
The American Sunday School Union (ASSU) was founded in Philadelphia in 1817, entirely committed to providing, for both children and adults, religious instruction consistent with the norms of evangelical Protestantism. ASSU even published its own Sunday School Magazine to help propagate its mission and message nationwide. Sunday schools flourished in America’s urban settings and subsequently branched out to the frontier, where schools and churches were few and far between. Other branches arose for the specific purpose of training and educating African Americans, free and slave alike. These institutions constituted part of a much larger reform movement in American life, which also included the rise of hospitals, prisons, asylums, orphanages, and free public schools.
The first national convention of Sunday school workers was held in New York in 1832, and by the opening of the Civil War in 1861 Sunday schools were located in virtually every major city and many rural districts. Sunday schools earned their success largely by trying to be more than simply institutions for the poor, and proponents deliberately sought patrons among the middle and upper classes. Many different Protestant sects were involved with the movement, and despite doctrinal differences, all were concerned with evangelizing their youthful charges for active participation in church life. They also strove to impart such socially useful principles as cleanliness, neatness, punctuality, honesty, and hard work. Overall, the Sunday school movement in America was a useful institutional adjunct to Protestant religious instruction, and it continues to play an important role in that process in present times.
Further reading: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972); Raymond Bial, Nauvoo: Mormon City on the Mississippi River (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2006); James D. Bratt, ed., Antirevivalism in Antebellum America: A Collection of Religious Voices (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Bryan F. Le Beau, Religion in America to 1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1985); Dan McKa-nan, Identifying the Image of God: Radical Churches and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Grant Wacker, Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
—George Ochoa
World History
