American life was transformed in the late 19th and 20th centuries by a series of forces sometimes termed “modernization.”
These years witnessed the expansion of industrial production, mechanized large-scale agriculture, national institutional bureaucracies, and the nation’s transportation and communications systems, resulting in an increasingly integrated transcontinental economy and civilization.
Other important developments included the increasing inmigration from farms and small towns to the expanding cities, the emergence of the United States as a major international power, and a series of intellectual revolutions that produced new theories of human nature. Against this backdrop formed new and combinative religious movements that sometimes incorporated and sometimes resisted these changes.“Modernism” was the name often applied to an emergent liberal Protestantism shaped by the rise of Darwinian biology, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences and embraced in particular by Northern urban ministers and their middle-class parishioners. It approached the Bible through a “higher criticism” that challenged the traditional literal interpretation and assumed Scripture to be a product of historically located human beings rather than divine inspiration. It also rejected Calvinist notions of human sinfulness, teaching instead human goodness, the humanity of Jesus, and the responsibility of the church to address the ills of an urban industrial society.
But modernism and modernization generated profound spiritual unease and provoked strong religious responses, including Protestant Fundamentalism, Holiness movements, and Pentecostalism, which emphasized timeless tradition, strict morality, an intense personal relationship with Jesus, and (in the case of Holiness and Pentecostalism) ecstatic worship. These movements found enthusiastic acceptance in the rural South, Midwest, and Central Plains, where the industrializing and diverse cities of the Northeast were perceived as threatening to traditional ways of life, and in the cities themselves, where many residents alienated by their social circumstances or by fashionable middle-class churches turned to storefront churches.
In the South in particular—less thoroughly urbanized, largely avoided by immigrants, and thus more uniformly Anglo-Protestant than other parts of the nation—conservative Protestantism became intricately tied to a distinct regional identity. Ongoing tension between liberal and conservative groups became one of the most salient facets of 20th-century Protestantism.
An 1869 photograph of National Camp Meeting Association for the promotion of Holiness. The Holiness Movement urged intense personal religious experience as an antidote to institutionalized Methodism.
Perhaps the most thoroughly disaffected people in urban America were the several million African Americans who followed a “Great Migration” northward to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest during the early 20th century to seek alternatives to sharecropping and Jim Crow segregation. Transferred from rural poverty to urban poverty, from Southern racism to Northern racism, they looked to religion, sometimes to Christianity and sometimes beyond. Among Northern urban black neighborhoods, New York City’s Harlem became a particularly important center of black culture, consciousness, and spiritual searching.
Further spiritual anxieties beset America after World War II. Despite—and because of—the nation’s economic prosperity, suburbanization, superpower status, and Cold War claims to superiority over the “godless” Soviet Union, questions arose in the 1950s about its spiritual and moral fabric. Such reassessments intensified during the 1960s, as manifest in the civil rights movement, the identity movements it inspired among women, homosexuals, Latinos, and Native Americans, protests over the war in Vietnam, and the rise of an experimental youth counterculture, and during the 1970s, when the nation was humiliated by defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate affair, a faltering economy, and foreign policy crises in the Middle East.
Some turned to Eastern religions, to psychological potential movements, or to eclectic New Age combinations of metaphysical, occult, and mystical elements in search of personal spiritual fulfillment and empowerment. Others sought new lives of moral discipline and personal commitment in strong, supportive, spiritual communities. These responses were especially pronounced in California, popular among spiritual seekers since the 19th century.
Marcus Garvey, founder of UNIA. Garvey’s racial pride movement influenced many militant African American religious movements of the 20th century.
Still others turned to conservative Protestantism in recoil from what they perceived as an increasing moral and sexual permissiveness. This response was particularly salient in the Sunbelt—an area that stretches from Florida through the Desert Southwest to southern California and that experienced tremendous demographic expansion after World War II—but was apparent nationwide. This development can be glimpsed in part through statistics. Church membership dropped in such liberal denominations as the Episcopal Church (down 14.5 percent between 1960 and 1982), the United Church of Christ (down 23.4 percent), the Presbyterian Church (down 21.4 percent), and the United Methodist Church (down 11.6 percent). But membership in conservative and Pentecostal denominations surged in this period, the Southern Baptist Convention by 43.7 percent, the Assemblies of God by 120.1 percent, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) by 172.5 percent.
Developments on the American religious scene during the 20th century, particularly during its latter third, leave little doubt of its vitality, dynamism, and expanding diversity as the 21st century dawns.