Religion

Between 1761 and 1812, religion in what became the United States underwent a great transformation in the wake of the American Revolution. The Revolution freed individuals to make their own decisions concerning religious affiliation. For many ordinary people, this freedom was novel and exciting. In response, ministers learned to use new persuasive techniques to convince people to join their churches. This combination of freedom and persuasion proved very effective, and by 1812 more people in the United States had joined churches than ever before.

During the colonial period, religious diversity differed greatly from colony to colony. The middle colonies—Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey—were the most diverse. In each of these colonies, Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, and Quakers shared the stage with various other religious and ethnic groups, the most notable being German pietists. The southern colonies were also diverse, but less so. The Anglican Church was publicly supported, but the growth of active Presbyterian and Baptist populations increasingly threatened Virginia’s Anglicans. Moreover, southern colonies had fewer religious institutions than their counterparts in the North. In New England, the Congregational church remained supported by local taxes. Most churchgoers belonged to the Congregational church, although there were significant populations of Quakers and Baptists.

In the middle of the 18th century, a revival now known as the First Great Awakening divided churches between New and Old Light congregations. These divisions affected Calvinist churches most deeply, and were inspired in part by the English preacher George Whitefield. Whitefield first came to North America in 1739 and introduced a more enthusiastic form of religion, gathering people into large groups and using emotional language to convince them to accept their dependence upon God. Similarly, Gilbert Ten-nent, a famous Presbyterian New Light minister, warned against the “danger of an unconverted ministry” in his 1740 sermon of the same name. Tennent believed that many Calvinist ministers were more interested in worldly ends than in bringing salvation to ordinary people. Despite their divisions, both New and Old Light churches remained committed to the central tenets of Calvinism, including predestination and salvation by God’s irresistible grace. As Tennent suggested, New Lights hoped to re-invigorate Calvinism by purifying it from any worldly influence.

Historians have sought to connect the divisions caused by the Great Awakening to the American Revolution. The causal relationship between the two events, however, remains uncertain. For starters, many of the founding fathers were more concerned with the political ideas of the Enlightenment than with religion, and some, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, leaned toward

DEISM. The United States Constitution itself makes no mention of God, except in the First Amendment. The First Amendment, however, was added to appease the Constitution’s opponents, who worried that Congress might threaten RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. Moreover, it is important to note that the First Amendment applied only to Congress’s powers over religion, not to the states. (Seven states maintained some aid to religion when the First Amendment was ratified.) On the other hand, New England ministers were central to securing popular support for the revolutionary cause. Most Americans, after all, organized their beliefs according to religion and not the Enlightenment. Many ministers worried that efforts to expand the Church of England (Anglicanism) in New England threatened their religious autonomy. For these ministers, Anglicanism was as serious a threat to the colonies as the political machinations of king and Parliament. The Revolution took its toll on Anglicanism even in strongholds such as Virginia. Although most elite Virginians remained members of the Anglican church, the Revolution provided an opportunity for Baptists and other dissenters to vocalize their hostilities toward paying church taxes. Moreover, many Anglican ministers remained loyal to England and fled during the war. These two forces combined created a vacuum that new religious movements would fill.

Following the REVOLUTIONARY War (1775-83), each state guaranteed religious liberty to its citizens. In doing so, they cleared the space for the dramatic growth of new sects, such as Baptists, METHODISTS and Universalists, none of whom had been major forces during the colonial period. In the absence of state support, religions developed the organizational structures that we now associate with denomina-tionalism, including central committees and independent colleges. Denominationalism was a uniquely American invention, allowing each religious community to support its own institutions independent of the state. Moreover, the development of denominations enabled each religious group to control their own populations across the extended space of an expanding United States.

In the immediate post-revolutionary years, however, Methodists and Baptists benefited less from their nascent denominational structures than from their status as outsiders. Baptists were actually the least denominationally inclined of the primary religious sects. They strongly believed that each church should be locally governed. This localism was a great asset to the democratic-minded people of the United States who sought to wrest control of their religious lives from established authorities. Methodism, on the other hand, was more centrally organized, but its theology embraced many aspects of popular religion, including supernaturalism and enthusiasm. Methodism’s success had much to do with its openness to the religious beliefs of ordinary people. In addition, the educational and social backgrounds of Methodist, Baptist and Universalist ministers were often much closer to those of ordinary people than the well-educated Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Anglicans. By the middle of the 19th century, Methodists and Baptists would become the largest Protestant denominations in the country. In 1780 there were 400 Baptist and about 50 Methodist congregations; by 1820, Baptists and Methodists had about 2,700 congregations each. After 1820 these numbers would rise even faster.

In the South, Methodists welcomed free and enslaved AfRiCAN Americans to join their churches, making great inroads among this group in the post-revolutionary decades. Nonetheless, many white Methodists remained uncomfortable with the intermingling of races in worship, especially when African Americans brought their own spiritual traditions into Methodist churches. In 1816 African Americans established their own church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In part, the success of Methodists among black Americans was due to parallels between Methodist enthusiasm and African-American spiritual traditions. The Christianizing of the South’s African-American population during this period was an important development in the larger history of religion in the United States.

In the West, the ramifications of the Revolution can be seen most clearly. Following the Revolutionary War, thousands of settlers moved westward into New York, Vermont, and the Ohio Valley. While many brought their religious beliefs with them, the lack of existing institutions or a legal

Many battle flags of the American Revolution carried religious inscriptions. (Library of Congress) establishment made settlers open game for Congregational-ists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and other denominations competing for members. The result was a veritable battle for converts. Denominations established missionary societies in the East to send ministers and money to the frontier. The battle for the West spurred denominations to organize more effectively, giving shape to the diverse, voluntary character of religion in the United States.

The most successful western preachers employed emotional language and hosted large revivals during which many anxious souls could be converted. This Second Great Awakening, which in many ways was merely a continuation of the First Great Awakening, created great outbursts of religiosity, which churches and voluntary associations channeled into denominational growth. The most famous revival took place in August 1801 in Cane Ridge, Kentucky (see also camp meetings). More than 10,000 persons were converted during a span of six intense days. To conservative eastern Presbyterians and Congregational-ists, revivals posed a serious threat to Calvinism. Calvinists struggled to hold on to their predestinarian creed and argued that western enthusiasts confused intensity of experience with the presence of divine grace. New Englanders, especially debated the role of individuals in bringing about their own salvation, continuing conflicts that began during the First Great Awakening. Methodists understood, however, that on the frontier, individuals were in charge of their own religious choices. In the absence of an establishment, people would no longer defer to clerical authority. Despite their initial resistance, most Presbyterians and Congrega-tionalists, such as the theologian Nathaniel Taylor, came to accept a greater role for the individual.

The combination of revivals, the growth of new denominations and the desire of ordinary people to choose which church they joined resulted in tremendous growth for religious institutions. By 1815 Americans founded and attended more churches than ever before in their history. Success, however, led to millennial thinking. People started to believe that the United States was paving the way for the second coming of Christ. Protestants established Bible, tract, and missionary societies to spread the Gospel to all Americans. Millennial beliefs allowed many people to conflate the purpose of the nation and of Protestantism. The tendency to combine religious and national identity led to deep conflicts. To many in the North, the continuation of slavery in the South was a gross violation of church doctrine. Northern Protestants also worried that Catholics immigrating from Ireland would threaten their millennial hopes. In the early 19th century, anti-Catholicism was a central element of American Protestantism. In time, the belief that the United States was God’s nation would legitimate the nations’s imperial expansion across the continent.

See also education.

Further reading: Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Fai-th: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Nathan Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

—Johann Neem