14 Christianity in North America from the Sixteenth Century

Richard Caw ardine

In 1650, when the first permanent settlements within the boundaries of what was to become the United States and Canada were still less than a century old, a perspicacious traveller to the New World would already have been able to discern in their infancy many of the later distinctive features of Christianity in North America.

In the very diversity of these official establishments our traveller might have foreseen the future heterogeneity of North American religious life. Moreover, America’s particular form of religious plural­ism, in which denominations would compete freely one with another, neither aided nor hindered by formal state support, was foreshadowed in the presence of dissenting groups within each colony—Huguenots in New France, Separatists in New England, German Lutherans in New Nether- land—and in the existence of colonies without any establishment at all, as in Rhode Island, established by Roger Williams as a haven for Separat­ist, Baptist refugees from Massachusetts Bay, and in Lord Baltimore’s shelter for Roman Catholics in the proprietary colony of Maryland.

The diversity of colonial Christianity continued to increase with the march of time and population. In New England the Con­gregational Calvinist establishments unsuccessfully threatened fines, disen­franchisement, imprisonment and even execution to keep intrusive Baptists and Quakers at bay. Anglican worship was introduced into Massachusetts in the 1680s. The ending of a religious test for exercising the suffrage in the same colony, and the Salem witchcraft tragedy further weakened the Puritan system. In Rhode Island and in the middle colonies various churches took advantage of conditions that favoured religious liberty. Large numbers of Quakers, following George Fox’s visit to the colonies in 1672-3 and encour­aged by William Penn, arrived to settle in Pennsylvania, as did Anabaptists from Germany, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, and General and Particular Baptists from Britain. Even in the southern colonies, where the Anglican establishment extended beyond Virginia to take root in Maryland and the Carolinas, there was a growing religious heterogeneity as Presbyterian, Baptists and Quakers, disproportionately the churches of the less well-to-do, won rights for themselves.

Despite the multiplication of churches—or perhaps because their growth threatened the concept of a cohesive Christian commonwealth—by the second and third decades of the eighteenth century there was a widespread sense of malaise in many colonial churches. In their jeremiads preachers criticised the growing materialist spirit and worried about the lowering of standards associated with the ‘Half-Way Covenant’, the arrangement by which children of non-professors could be baptised; orthodoxy seemed in danger of melting under the early rationalist rays of the Enlightenment; the majority of the population were unchurched. A series of dramatic revivals, collectively known as the Great Awakening, drawing tens of thousands of converts into the churches, represented the reaction of orthodox evangelicalism to this decline, a movement paralleling the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival in Britain and the flowering of Piet­ism in continental Europe, but one with its own indigenous sources and characteristics. The Awakening is commonly seen as originating in the middle colonies in the 1730s. Preaching a forceful evangelical Calvinism, the Dutch Reformed pastor Theodorus Frelinghuysen, the Presbyterian Tennent family and the English itinerant George Whitefield set an example to hungry revivalist elements and brought the movement to a climax in the early 1740s. A ‘surprising work of God’ in Northampton, western Massachusetts, under the ministry of the formidable Jonathan Edwards was the forerunner of a parallel awakening in New England that by the mid-1740s had reached most churches and all ranks of society. Nothing so intense or concentrated affected southern churches, but at different times between the 1740s and the 1770s the Presbyterians, the Separate and Regular Baptists and finally the fledgling Methodists profited from this pietistic movement.

The Awakening had profound consequences. In the short term it divided many churches into Old Lights, fearful of its disruptive ‘enthusiasm’, and separatist New Lights. It gave a new vigour to evangelical Protestantism, establishing new colleges and hundreds of new churches. It saw the clear emergence of a permanent tension between rationalist, Enlight­enment emphases in American religious thinking and the pietistic, revivalist thrust of ‘heart’ religion. It ensured that the revivalist strain would be the dominant one in American religious life: those churches, especially the Anglican, which opposed the movement were destined to a minority status. It reinforced anti-Catholicism. The egalitarian, democratic and individualist aspects of its theology and practice, its millennialism, its apparent confirma­tion of America’s special mission and its fostering of an intercolonial sense of nationhood were to have profound political effects during the Revolutionary era.

One by-product of the struggle for indepen­dence—which was strongly supported by most American churches— was the dismantling of all but three of the colonial religious establishments and the commitment of the emergent federal government to religious free­dom: under the Constitution of 1787 there was to be no religious test for office nor might Congress set up any national church. The experience of an increasing religious toleration through the colonial period, the proportionate increase in the strength and diversity of dissenting churches consequent upon the Great Awakening, and the formidable coalition of Enlightenment rationalists and pietists behind a movement for the separation of Church and State created an irresistible momentum for change. Once Massachusetts had dismantled her establishment in 1833 all churches were voluntary institutions that depended for survival and growth only upon their own persuasive powers.

The diversionary effect of the Revolution on spiritual life, the threat posed to revealed religion by Deism and other forms of ‘infidelity’ (particularly diabolical in its French Revolutionary guise), the shift in the demographic centre of gravity as millions crossed the Appalachian range, the emergence of a national market economy, and the growing democratisation of American politics and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: all demanded an evangelical response. The Second Great Awakening (c. 1795-c. 1840) originated in the orderly revivals of predominantly Calvinist New England and in the tumultuous, emotional revivalism of the frontier regions. In Kentucky and Tennessee conversions multiplied under revivalists whose preaching at vast, noisy outdoor gather­ings, as at Cane Ridge in 1801, produced ‘physical exercises’ in their hearers. The frontier revivals split Presbyterian churches worried about good order, but the democratic theology and flexible, itinerant-based organisation of Arminian Methodism and the social and theological accessibility of Baptist preachers won huge numbers of converts to both those denominations. In the extraordinary work of the celebrated Charles G. Finney in the north-east, the middle Atlantic states and the old north-west, the emotional, cruder revival­ism of the frontier and the more orderly traditional approach coalesced into a self-conscious, high-pressure revivalism based on an activist, Arminianised Calvinism. This ‘new measures’ revivalism became the orthodoxy in Ameri­can Protestantism by the mid-nineteenth century.

Revivals encouraged a millennialist optimism in the perfectibility of American society through Christian activity. Partly a prod­uct of a dream of evangelical Protestant unity, led by men but dispropor­tionately dependent on women, such interdenominational agencies as the American Bible Society, American Education Society, American Home Missionary Society and American Temperance Society formed a ‘benevolent empire’ committed to changing the world from within.

At the same time, other forms of Christianity were influential in the United States. Some Protestants resisted new measures revivalism. Liberal, Arminian, rationalist and anti-Trinitarian critics of orthodox New England Calvinism drew towards Unitarianism, centred on a Boston elite, and Universalism, more demotic and rural-based. High- churchmen in the Episcopal Church stressed the importance of liturgy and ‘catholic’ traditions; a parallel movement in the German Reformed Church benefited from the writings of the Mercersburg theologians, as did conserva­tive Lutherans of the Missouri Synod, whose presence was dramatically increased by mid-nineteenth-century immigration. The greatest beneficiary of this immigration was the Roman Catholic Church, growing from fifty thousand members in 1800 to over four million by 1860; some of this growth, however, which made the Church the largest denomination in the United States, followed the incorporation of an indigenous Catholic population as the United States successively acquired Louisiana territory, Florida, and Mexican lands that included California. The Church was reorganised to meet this challenge but was not wholly successful in dealing with internal conflicts over the power of lay trustees and over the place of poorer Irish and German immigrants in an institution historically dominated by American, English and French. Additionally, it faced a fierce anti-Catholicism, ever present in this culturally Protestant society, but now exacerbated by the Church’s moving from the margins to the mainstream of American life. Worried by the poverty and political illiteracy of the immigrants, frightened by the Church’s ‘superstition’ and despotic structure, and dismayed by its challenge to public school education, anti-Catholic nativists responded with threats, violence and attempted political proscription. The American commitment to religious toleration was stretched to its limits.

Similar questions—of the relationship between Pro­testant and Catholic, and between Church and State in a rapidly growing society—affected the Christian community in British North America in the years before Confederation in 1867. However, Canadian Catholics were able to protect themselves more easily than their co-religionists in the United States: they were historically and socially entrenched and not even the eighteenth-century defeat of the Catholic French by the Protestant British had left them wholly without some privileges of establishment in Quebec (Lower Canada). In Upper Canada to the west and the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland to the east the privileged and protected Anglican Church faced the increasing muscle of Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists and other dissenting groups. One controversial issue was that of state help for denomi­national education; even more intense and bitter was the conflict over the disposition of the Clergy Reserves, millions of acres of land set aside for the endowment of the Protestant clergy and virtually monopolised by the Church of England. The outcome was the overturning of the establishment and the acceptance of a voluntary system, although the separation of Church and State was never to be as strict as in the United States.

During the later nineteenth and early twentieth cen­turies Christian churches in both societies had to face a variety of social and intellectual challenges emanating from immigration, urbanisation, indus­trialisation, war and Darwinian thought. Immigration drew into the United States many non-Christians, particularly Jews, swelled the Lutheran family of churches into the third largest Protestant grouping in the country, estab­lished a significant Eastern Orthodox presence and trebled the size of the Catholic Church between 1880 and 1920. The arrival of many southern and eastern Europeans intensified ethnic conflict within Catholicism, polarising around the ‘Americanists’, who stressed the compatibility of Catholicism and American traditions of democracy and religious pluralism, and the conservatives, opposed to Anglo-Saxon culture and arguing for separate dioceses for each nationality (‘Cahenslyism’). Pope Leo XIII’s settling of the issues in the 1890s ensured that American Catholics would follow a con­servative route until the mid-twentieth century. In Canada, Cathohcs were likewise divided, between natives and newcomers, and between an ‘ultra­montane’ party and liberals in Quebec.

Evangelical Protestants in the United States sought to preserve their predominance in the face of pluralist, secularising forces by expanding their home missionary work and devising new forms of urban evangelism, most notably through the work of Dwight L. Moody. The clearest symptom of evangelical success was in the extraordinary growth of black churches, particularly Baptist and Methodist. Black religion, so im­portant before emancipation in combating the dehumanising tendencies of slavery, continued to offer blacks a social and spiritual focus in their mar­ginal existence. Revivalistic, emotional and theologically uncomplicated, it suffered few of the crises that attended the Darwinian challenge to biblical literalism within white evangelicalism. Many northern liberals, Con- gregationalist and Methodist in particular, sought successfully to unite an historical approach to the Bible with a Christ-centred profession of faith. Conservatives, strong in the south but by no means confined there, centred intellectually on Princeton, and reinforced by the millenarian ‘dispensational- ism’ ofjohn N. Darby, fought back strongly in defence of‘the fundamentals’ of faith provided by an inerrant Bible. Conservative biblicism and revivalism were the hallmarks of the new, schismatic holiness movements of the late nineteenth century, notably the Nazarenes, and of the Pentecostalist move­ment, which reached the poor in particular through a blend of glossolalia, faith-healing, physical emotionalism and millennialism. Conflict between conservative and liberal was further aggravated as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, representing Protestants for whom laissez-faire indi­vidualism was a bankrupt social philosophy, fashioned a new ‘Social Gospel’ out of socialist and progressive ideas. Conservatives continued to stress the need for individual, not social, regeneration. In Canada, even though many churches employed Moody-style revivalism, Christocentric liberalism and the social gospel made faster headway and was more widely accepted. A smaller number of major Protestant denominations dominated religious life in that country especially after the drawing together of Congregationalists, Methodists and most Presbyterians to become the United Church of Canada in 1925, and their adherence to social Christianity helped preclude the traumatic quarrels between liberals and fundamentalists that marked church life in the United States.

Growing secularisation has marked North American life through the twentieth century, but the weakening of Christianity’s hold has not been uninterrupted (nor, in the light of recent developments, would all consider it irreversible). The 1920s and 1930s saw a general loss of Protestant morale: missions and church attendance declined, the social gospel lost its vigour, the anti-evolutionists’ hollow victory at the Scopes trial in 1925 and the growth in black, holiness and pentecostal churches could not hide a general spiritual decline. But a clear revival of religion developed after the Second World War, originating in the neo-orthodox theology of the brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr. Church membership and atten­dance figures increased in both newer and older denominations. Conserva­tive evangelical Protestantism in particular enjoyed a resurgence, aided by the efforts of the mass evangelist Billy Graham, whose preaching combined patriotism, anti-Communism and old-fashioned Southern Baptist theology. Roman Catholic status and numbers also grew and some slackening of the historical tension between Catholic and Protestant was evident, symbolised by John F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960 and further encour­aged by the pontificate ofjohn XXIII. The period saw a number of ecumeni­cal and co-operative movements both within and between denominational families, including the Canadian Council of Churches (1944), the National Council of the Churches of Christ (1950) and the United Church of Christ (1957-61). The social traumas of the 1960s, generated by racial and ethnic conflict and foreign war, threw up radical new theologies and religious movements but also brought the earlier revival to an end. Yet the return of a more conservative political mood in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by a resurgence of the conservative evangelicalism of the 1950s and by a growth in pentecostal and charismatic movements. A majority of North Americans in the 1980s continued to attend a Christian church, many of them as convinced as had been the continent’s first white settlers of their unique role in the unfolding of God’s plan.

North America’s contribution to the history of Christianity has been distinctive and profound. The circumstances of its settlement and its ethnic heterogeneity have generated denominational pluralism, theological diversity and religious freedom. The churches’ depen­dence on voluntary efforts has resulted in much experimentation, particu­larly in the United States. Revivalism, in conjunction with the democratic, egalitarian emphases in American culture, has encouraged lay power and the emergence of a female ministry. It has also thrown up hundreds of new sects and denominations, some of them theologically orthodox offspring of tradi­tional churches, others (such as the Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Wit­nesses, Christian Scientists and Mormons) offering variants of conventional Christianity, many of them ephemeral, but all of them adding to a religious Efe in North America that has been as rich and heterogeneous as the wider culture.

Further Reading

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1972)

Gaustad, Edwin S. Historical Atlas of Religion in America, rev. edn (Harper & Row, New York, 1976)

Handy, Robert T. History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977)

Herberg, Will Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Doubleday and Co., Garden City, New York, 1955)

McLoughlin Jr, William G. Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (Ronald Press Co., New York, 1959)

Smith, James Ward and Jameson, A. Leland Religion in American Life, 4 vols. (Prince­ton University Press, New Jersey, 1961)