Religion

Between 1900 and 1930, the once seemingly unified Protestant America became a nation diverse in its religious beliefs and practices and open to new religious thought along both liberal and conservative lines. For most of the 19th century, American political leaders referred to the United States not only as a democratic republic but also as a Christian nation, by which they meant its values were those of Protestant Christianity. With the influx of the new immigration after 1900, it was clear that Americans faced a world in which religious diversity was increasing not only among Protestants and their dissenting sects but also in the growing number of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish citizens. New scientific discoveries, especially the theory of evolution; biblical criticism and comparative religion; and new liberal theology seemed to shake more traditional churches to their core. Some of these trends toward religious liberalism had been underway since the late 19th century. Evangelical and Pentecostal sects, renewed religious revivals, and what came to be called Fundamentalism developed at the same time.

For many conservative religious leaders, the most troubling development at the turn of the century was the

Emergence of religious modernism. The scientific theory of evolution, and the life sciences and geology that supported the idea of a gradually evolving human species, threatened those who believed in the literal truth of the Bible. Liberal religious thinkers and biblical scholars expanded beyond human evolution to question the authority of biblical authors and to note contradictions in the sacred texts. They offered new interpretations about how the Bible, once thought to be the literal word of God, had been written. In addition, there was an increasing interest in world religion and in ecumenicalism, which focused on common ground among competing religious faiths. The World Parliament of Religions in 1893 led the way, but questions about the need for creed - or doctrine-based religions led to the creation of the Federal Council of Churches in 1907. Unitarians, who were among the leaders of religious liberalism for over a century, had an impact on American theology out of proportion to the number of their adherents. They, like other churches, questioned both the soundness and the efficacy of petitionary prayer, the practice of invoking the direct intervention of God. While remaining primarily the-istic (that is, expressing belief in a supreme being), liberal churches began to understand many traditional religious practices as historically—not divinely—determined.

Religious liberalism found practical expression in a social movement known as the Social Gospel. As religions shifted their focus away from the mission of God on Earth to the world’s problems, many leaders such as Walter Rauschenbusch advocated practicing religion through service. His book, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), became a primary text for the social gospel movement. Developing programs to tend to the needs of the poor and indigent, the working class and the disadvantaged, ministers and lay Christians organized institutional churches such as Charles Stetzle’s Labor Temple in New York, which provided social services as well as religious ones. The influence of reforming religion could be felt in the settlement house movement, in which young socially concerned men and women moved into poor urban neighborhoods to provide a range of services, from soup kitchens and relief programs to education and political and social organizations. As Jane Addams argued in her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, the “social necessity of settlements” was not only in providing for the burgeoning needs of a poor urban population but also in offering an opportunity for the secular salvation of the settlement workers themselves.

The emergence of religious liberalism among Protestants was paralleled by developments in Roman Catholicism and Judaism. In the case of the Catholic Church, the new scientific findings and greater social consciousness had led to an opening of the church under Pope Leo XIII. His 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, was the basis of social activism among Catholic clergy and believers for the next 50 years. It inspired the work of social activist priests such as Father John Ryan, whose book, A Living Wage (1906), was a poetic call for social justice. The National Conference of Catholic Charities became an institutional voice to rival Protestant poor relief. The openness to scientific thought and scriptural criticism, however, faced opposition within both the Vatican and in the United States. The threat of theological and religious modernism provoked Leo XIII and his successor, Pius X, to issue the encyclicals Te. stem Benevolentiae in 1899 and Pascendi Gregis, in 1907, which warned against Americanism and dismissed the findings of the new science, threatened church sanctions, and reasserted the conservative stance of the Roman church. These policies caused a retreat in theological terms within the American church, even as social activism increased.

In the United States, Catholic immigrants continued to contribute to the growth of the church nationally. The number of parishes and parishioners increased dramatically, and church schools and social services expanded. In many ways, Catholicism became an ethnically defined religion, as neighbor and community churches reflected the folk practices of their national Catholic faiths, combining ethnic holidays with religious ones and shaping religious ritual with ethnic traditions. While there were some tensions among clergy who often served an ethnically diverse community of believers, the basic tenets of faith and services in Latin bound together Catholic believers beyond the church doors.

Among those of the Jewish faith, the turn-of-the-cen-tury wave of immigration brought both new growth and increasing division. In the 19th century, American Jews, the majority of German descent, had fostered Reform Judaism. Numbering only about 150,000 in 1870, they, like their Protestant counterparts, worked to incorporate the new science and commitment to social activism. Disengaged from its historic roots, Reform Jews founded Hebrew Union College and Seminary. A Reform rabbi, Stephen S. Wise, founded the Free Synagogue of New York in 1907 and later the Jewish Institute of Religion, a liberal seminary, in 1923, as a move to modernize Judaism. Arguing for absolute freedom of the pulpit, he was a well-known orator who also worked for reform causes. For new immigrants, however, much of Reform Judaism was alien in practice and belief. Nearly two million Jews from eastern Europe immigrated to the United States between 1870 and 1914, and more than half of these settled in New York City. They brought with them the traditional practices of the shtetl (or village), and their religious leaders adhered to these practices, despite the pressures to accommodate to secular American society. Conservative Judaism and a later Reconstruction movement existed as moderating influences between the forces of Reform and Orthodox Judaism.

The growth of immigration, religious expansion among non-Protestants, and the impact of liberal theology provoked a response among conservative religious leaders beginning in the 1910s. While they, along with religious liberals, had been active in social causes such as Prohibition, the belief that traditional religion was losing ground caused some conservatives, such as Baptist minister William Bell Riley, founder of the Northwestern Bible School, to call upon their peers to organize against the modernists. A series of pamphlets, called The Fundamentals, published between 1900 and 1930, addressed the threat of the new biblical criticism and other forces such as Roman Catholicism and the study of comparative religion. At yearly conferences, conservatives laid the groundwork for the emergence of what came to be called Fundamentalism in all the major Protestant denominations. Central to its appeal was its ideological opposition to the new science, especially evolution, and its insistence on codifying religious creeds. The northern Presbyterians and Baptists faced the most serious challenge from religious reaction, but they soon defeated calls for them to abandon the historical independence of local congregations.

Fundamentalists were only one part of the evangelical revivals of the 1910s and 1920s. Holiness churches and Pentecostal sects grew rapidly, especially among Methodists and in the African-American community. The Holiness movement had its roots in late-19th-century reform within the Methodist Church. Its followers believed that sanctification, which in the Methodist Church was seen as a lifelong process of salvation, could be granted immediately. The sinner would then be relieved of a life of sin. By the turn of the century, Holiness churches had become independent. One of the Holiness preachers, Charles Parham, pushed its ideas further, arguing that sanctification, or the baptism of the Holy Spirit, manifested itself in signs. In Kansas in 1901, Agnes Ozma, a student at Bethel College and Parham’s follower, spoke in tongues. Another of Parham’s students, William Seymour, the minister of an African-American Holiness church in Los Angeles, employed Parham’s ideas in a revival that began in 1906. The Azusa Street Revival, which lasted until 1909, recruited thousands. This new evangelical turn identified itself as Pente-costalism, after the day when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’s disciples. Speaking in tongues, faith healing, distrust of medical care, and puritanical social mores characterized the new religious movement. An interracial movement from its beginnings, Pentecostalism soon divided along racial lines. A 1914 meeting of white Pentecostals had as its mission the creation of a new religious organization and the election of leaders to the presbytery. White followers separated from the African-American Church of God in Christ to form their own denomination, later called the Assemblies of God.

The revival of Protestant evangelical religion inspired new religious activism in the political realm. Seeing a “moral breakdown” in American life, conservative Protestants called for a stop to attacks on the Sabbath, the family, moral purity, and “the right to teach our children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths.” The teaching of evolution in schools led to the passage of several antievolution laws in states where fundamentalists were well organized. In 1925, the Scopes Trial, in which fundamentalists technically won their case, had unexpected consequences, including rallying liberal Christians against the backlash of Fundamentalism. The causes for the revival of traditional religion, however, are unclear. Some reacted to fears about the impact of rural-to-urban migration, which caused a decline in rural church membership and the closing of many crossroads churches. A younger, more liberal clergy staffed new, consolidated churches that were located in larger towns. To a great extent, militant Protestant fundamentalism staged a comeback in both religious and political terms in order to survive.

Fundamentalist expressions drew from the surrounding consumer culture. Evangelists such as William “Billy” Sunday and Aimee Semple Mcpherson relied on radio broadcasts, new forms of advertising, and the sale of religious literature to pay the costs of the religious life. While revivals continued to sprout in rural Protestant areas, many of the new revivalists were dependent on urban donations to sustain their ministries. Marrying new forms of Pentecostal religion to old-time Protestant faiths, McPherson and Sunday, the precursors of later-day revivalists, used faith healing, talking in tongues, and “miracles” of faith to recruit new members. They also used the language of business and sport to bring in converts.

The darker side of the fundamentalist insistence of Protestant Christian orthodoxy was its intolerance toward the beliefs of others. For some conservative Protestants, the social threat of difference led to the growth of organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, which merged a belief in white superiority, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism, and general fears about strangers in American society with the language of fundamentalist Christianity. For others, the influence of religious liberals in secular life meant a conservative retreat from public activism. Not until the 1970s did fundamentalist Christians reemerge as a political force and seek to use public power to implement their religious principles.

By 1930, divisions within every major Protestant denomination, within the Catholic Church, and among Jews shifted religious disputation away from the differences among churches and toward the liberal/conservative divide in religious belief. For religious liberals, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jew, rigorous textual criticism, an understanding of comparative religion, and social activism seemed to underline the secularization of society and the uses of religion in secular politics. For religious conservatives, the battle to retain religious influences in a secular world remained the principal challenge of the 20th century.

Further reading: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972); Robert T. Handy, A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Rick Ostrander, The Life of Prayer in a World of Science: Protestants, Prayer and American Culture, 1870-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880-1930 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982).