During the decades after 1790, white Americans moved westward from Virginia and the Carolinas into Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, and, in a “Yankee exodus,” from New England into New York state, northern Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, and beyond.
Euro-Americans settled most of the area east of the Mississippi River by 1830 and began to move west of the Mississippi and to the Pacific coast by 1850. Meanwhile, expanding transportation systems, the commercialization of agriculture, and the onset of industrial production stimulated urban growth, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest.
Combined with religious disestablishment under the Constitution, enacted in 1789, these geographic developments left religious groups scrambling, sometimes competitively and sometimes cooperatively, to attract membership in the growing cities and in the newly opening regions of the West. The result was considerable innovation, experimentation, and diversification—in a word, expansion—in American Protestantism.Revivalism was perhaps the most important tool for addressing the new conditions. Made a central feature of American religious life by a Second Great Awakening, its use sparked among denominations embracing it (especially the Baptists and Methodists) spectacular nationwide growth unmatched by those that did not (Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Lutherans). Revivalism took different forms in different regions—more sober in the established towns of New England, more boisterous among the dispersed and socially isolated settlers of the West—but everywhere its aim was to enhance religious commitment amid rapid and sometimes disorienting change.
An anxious concern to Protestantize the nation, particularly its urban and Western frontiers, drove American religious leaders in the East—especially in New England—to promote and sponsor organized benevolent and missionary activities. They reached out with similar intent to other regions of the world. Their institutional apparatus became so massive and indicative of Protestant dominance in America that historians have dubbed it a “Protestant Empire,” “Benevolent Empire,” and “United Evangelical Front.” Dominated by Congregationalists and Presbyterians but also including Methodists, and other groups, its combined budget was larger than the federal government’s by 1840.
The goal of this “empire” was to transform America and the world into the Christian utopia forecast in the Bible—the millennium.
It was, many Americans believed, the nation’s “manifest destiny” to expand American Protestantism and republicanism across the North American continent to the Pacific—including Indians, Catholics, and Africans, sometimes viewed by white Protestants as potential obstacles—and then, perhaps, to the rest of the globe. Eastern religious leaders deemed California’s strategic Pacific location especially important to this effort.Religious freedom and open space allowed Americans to envision and pursue their religious ideals in varying ways. Some embraced notions of human perfectibility and developed radical movements to accelerate the process. Others developed new liberal theologies based on the divine potential of the individual. Still others combined Christianity with Asian ideas or rejected Christianity altogether. Energized by a sense of new beginnings, some rejected all existing churches and attempted to restore what they considered Christianity’s original purity, and others rejected urban life, commercial and industrial capitalism, and conventional social arrangements in favor of religiously inspired communal experiments in rural areas and on the Western perimeter. Again California assumed special prominence, for the inability of the Eastern-based “evangelical empire” to assume tight control over it made it attractive to those pursuing religious alternatives.
Religious Americans of the 19th century diversified Protestantism tremendously and in some cases ventured beyond it, but in all cases they identified their visions with their hope for the expanding young nation.
