Protestantism in America
Christianity was a European import to the Americas. By the end of the sixteenth century, Catholic mission stations had been established in many places colonized by France and Spain.1 One of the first Protestant colonies in America was established in April 1562 when a group of Huguenots settled at Fort Caroline on Florida’s St. Johns River. This Protestant colony did not survive long: the Spanish promptly wiped out the French Protestant refugees in 1565 and founded their own outpost at St. Augustine in its place. A more permanent French presence in America would later be established along the Mississippi Valley, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Great Lakes. Yet vast tracts of land remained unsettled by the two great Catholic maritime powers—above all, New England.
The first English-speaking Protestant colony was established in Virginia—named after the “virgin queen” (Elizabeth I)—in 1585. The fate of this “lost colony” remains unclear. When a major English plantation—named “Jamestown” after the reigning monarch, James I—was established in Virginia in 1607, no trace could be found of the earlier settlement. Jamestown was an Anglican colony whose charter stipulated that the “religion now professed and established within our realm of England” should be regularly practiced by the colonists and spread “as much as they may amongst the savage people.” One early convert was Pocahontas, daughter of the great chief Powhatan, who died during a subsequent trip to England.
Yet, despite such earlier Protestant settlements in Florida and Virginia, the history of Protestantism in America is traditionally traced to the year 1620, when the Mayflower docked in New England.2 In view of the importance of this development for the shaping of Protestantism in America, we may consider it in more detail.
EARLY NEW ENGLAND PROTESTANTISM
Those who brought their form of Protestantism to New England on the Mayflower were not economic migrants, but rather individuals who believed that they were being persecuted or oppressed on account of their faith. They saw themselves as “called”—a notion heavily freighted with the most powerful Puritan theological themes—to establish “holy commonwealths” in a new world, free from the opposition and ridicule they had faced in England. They would be the salt of the American earth, the light of the new world.3
The most famous such emigration traced its origins back to 1607 or 1608, when a congregation of separatist Protestants from the Nottinghamshire town of Scrooby, weary of the hostile religious policies of James I, migrated to Amsterdam, which had by then displaced Geneva as the center of the Reformed world. In 1609 the migrants moved on to Leiden, where they developed a sense of identity as God’s chosen people, as aliens in a strange land. Never regarding themselves as Dutch, and unwilling to return to the hostile ecclesiastical environment of England, they conceived a solution as desperate as it was brilliant. Those of their number who believed that they were called to do so would travel to America and establish a settlement there.
An initial attempt to sail to America in a smaller vessel, the Speedwell, failed when it began to leak, forcing it to dock in Plymouth and discharge its passengers. Most were able to secure passage on the larger Mayflower, which set sail in September 1620. Due to a navigation error, the “Pilgrim Fathers” arrived at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1620, some considerable distance north of their intended destination. A month later, they finally landed at Plymouth Rock and established a community there. The Puritan settlement of New England was under way.
Between 1627 and 1640, some four thousand individuals made the hazardous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and settled on the coastline of Massachusetts Bay. For these settlers, there was a clear alignment between the narrative of their journey and that of the Bible. England was the land in which they struggled under oppression; America would be the land in which they found freedom. Expelled from their Egypt by a cruel Pharaoh (as they saw both James I and Charles I), they had settled in a promised land flowing with milk and honey. They would build a new Jerusalem, a city upon a hill, in this strange land. The Pilgrim Fathers were an inspiration to many who followed them to the new world.4
The Pilgrim Fathers were not, it must be appreciated, typical of English Puritanism at this time. They were separatists whose beliefs were more characteristic of the Anabaptists than of Calvin: they were convinced that each congregation had the democratic right to determine its own beliefs and choose its own ministers.5 Most English Puritans of the age were Presbyterians who were committed to the notion of a single mother church with local outposts—a “universal church” with “particular congregations” bound together by shared beliefs and leaders. It was only a matter of time before the defining conflicts of the Old World would find themselves being replayed in the New. But this time, decentralization would win.
One of the most remarkable features of the early history of New England Protestantism in the 1620s and 1630s is that most Puritan communities appear to have abandoned a Presbyterian view of church government within months of their arrival and adopted a congregational polity instead. The Plymouth Colony Separatists appear to have been significant in bringing about a major shift in how congregations organized themselves and related to other congregations.6 Reacting strongly against the rigid hierarchical structures of the European state churches, the American settlers opted instead for a democratic congregationalism. Local congregations made their own decisions. Instead of centralized authority structures—such as presbyteries or dioceses—the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay area developed “a highly decentralized and well-nigh uncontrollable Congregational church order which licensed any individual congregation to revise Calvinist theology as it saw fit. And revise it they did.”7
The Puritans who settled in America were far from theologically incoherent, on the one hand, or monolithic, on the other. The new situation in America, by allowing the unfettered exploration of religious possibilities that were simply unthinkable in England, led to diversification of religious beliefs and customs in response to local circumstances. The particular forms that Puritanism developed in the region are to be regarded as historical contingencies rather than theological necessities, and they generally derived from local issues of personality, power, and privilege rather than from any intrinsic “essence” of Puritan identity.8
Roger Williams (1603–84), one of the leading proponents of a pure separatist church, argued that the Church of England was apostate and that any kind of fellowship with it—whether in England or in America—was a serious sin. Christian believers were under an obligation to separate from apostate churches and from a secular state. Church and state should be separate; above all, the state should not be able to enforce the first four of the Ten Commandments. Disenchanted by the unwavering commitment to the mutual interpenetration of church and state in Massachusetts, Williams established the colony of Rhode Island in 1636. There he insisted upon complete religious freedom, extending this far beyond traditional Christian denominations to embrace Jews and other religious minorities.9
Yet further south, a somewhat different form of Protestantism had become established. Whereas Massachusetts became a hotbed of Protestant religious experimentation, with generally secondary interests in commerce, southern colonies from Delaware to Georgia were primarily concerned with trade and saw religion as peripheral to this enterprise. It was an ideal context for Anglicanism to take root and flourish, primarily as the religion of the planting class. Long used to issues of social class and distinction, Anglicanism proved an ideal provider of a veneer of religious dignity to the social structures of the plantations that continued to the dawn of the nineteenth century.10
THE GREAT AWAKENING
One of the most distinctive features of North American Protestant Christianity is the phenomenon of the “Awakening.” To date, three Awakenings have been documented, each leading initially to religious renewal and subsequently to social change. Sociologists have noted that such religious revitalization often originates in times of cultural stress and uncertainty and leads to radical social reform and transformation.11 The Awakening, though primarily religious in nature, has the capacity to energize the culture as a whole. The first of these religious revivals, traditionally known as the “Great Awakening,” took place in New England in 1734. To appreciate its importance, we must consider the background against which it took place.
By 1700 American Protestantism appeared to be stagnant. The first generation of Puritan immigrants was possessed by a driving religious vision that was not always shared by their children. Church membership began to decline. When increased immigration from Europe led to the middle Atlantic states becoming religiously diverse to an extent without parallel anywhere else, awkward questions were raised about earlier Puritan visions of a “holy commonwealth.” More significantly, a series of scandals rocked the credibility of Puritan institutions. The worst of these were the Salem witch trials of 1693; instigated by the clergy of that town, the trials led to the execution of nineteen people. Governor Sir William Phips eventually put an end to the hysteria, and the subsequent clerical apologies and recantations seriously diminished the standing and reputation of the clergy of the area.12
Tensions began to emerge over church membership. In the early seventeenth century, New England congregations generally had a policy of admitting to full membership only those individuals who could provide a narrative of personal conversion. As the century progressed, fewer and fewer individuals could testify to such an experience. Yet most individuals wanted some connection or association with the church, not least on account of the close ties between church membership and citizenship in most communities. As church attendance began to decline, tensions emerged between those who wanted to maintain religious purity at any cost and those who believed that the churches could survive only if they broadened their membership base by adopting less strict criteria.
A compromise was reached. In 1662 a “halfway” membership was accepted by some congregations: those prepared to accept formally the truth of Christianity and the moral discipline of the church could have their children baptized.13 The result of this idea of a “halfway covenant” was perhaps inevitable: by the beginning of the eighteenth century, a large proportion of church members were “nominal” or “halfway” Protestants. Protestantism was on its way to becoming the civil religion of New England, with primary functions that were social and moral.
All this was changed in the Great Awakening, which is often associated with Jonathan Edwards, widely recognized as America’s greatest theologian to date.14 Edwards was born at East Windsor, Connecticut, on October 5, 1703, the son of a local pastor. In September 1716, he entered Yale College in New Haven (now Yale University), where he later served as tutor from 1724 to 1726. When he was around seventeen years of age, Edwards underwent a conversion experience. As he read 1 Timothy 1:17, he was overwhelmed by a sense of God’s greatness and glory. “As I read the words,” he wrote later in his journal, “there came into my soul, and it was, as it were, diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine Being; a new sense quite different from anything I ever experienced before.”15
In 1726 Edwards resigned his post at Yale in order to take up a pastoral charge at Northampton, Massachusetts, as the colleague of his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. Stoddard was widely regarded as the leading spiritual authority in the Connecticut Valley—so much so, in fact, that local people called him “Pope Stoddard” behind his back. Edwards was ordained on February 15, 1727, aged twenty-three. In July of the same year, he married Sarah Pierrepont, with whom he had been in love for some considerable time. His grandfather died in February 1729, leaving Edwards in charge of one of the most important churches in the area. Reflecting on the events of those two years, Edwards noted the general absence of any real interest in religion: Northampton, like virtually all of colonial North America, “seemed to be at that time very insensible of the things of religion, and engaged in other cares and pursuits.”
From about 1735 to 1745, much of New England was engulfed in religious renewal. Contemporary records speak of mass outdoor meetings that occasionally attracted twenty thousand people, open-air sermons, deserted taverns, and packed churches. Historians have pointed out that the connections between these events are often difficult to establish and that using the term “Great Awakening” retrospectively imposes a single narrative structure upon what may really have been a complex set of happenings.16 It is, however, clear that some extraordinary events that took place at this time reversed the downward trend in church attendance and the declining public profile of religion in the region.
Edwards himself was witness to such events in Northampton during the winter of 1734–35. The final weeks of 1734 witnessed several conversions, “very remarkably and suddenly, one after another.” The revival continued into the new year, reaching its peak during March and April 1735. There was hardly a household in the town that was not affected. Perhaps as many as three hundred individuals, “about the same number of males as females,” appeared to have been converted.
The phenomenon of “enthusiasm” once more made an appearance, generating concern within the churches over its apparent excesses. Edwards himself was concerned that such seemingly hysterical behavior could bring the church into disrepute and even destabilize the social order.17 Confronted with obvious evidence of ecstatic religious experiences, however, Edwards began to develop what we might now call a “psychology of religion”—an attempt to understand and make sense of ecstatic phenomena as natural responses to a sense of guilt or the realization of forgiveness. His 1741 commencement address at Yale, entitled “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God,” sought to distinguish between a primary divine inspiration and a secondary human response. The latter (but not the former), he argued, could be understood in naturalist terms.
As the revival continued in New England, it was given a new sense of direction by George Whitefield, recently arrived from England.18 England itself was then experiencing the evangelical revival associated with John and Charles Wesley as well as Whitefield. Edwards found that he himself was no longer at the forefront of the revival movement. He was also troubled by divisions within his congregation at Northampton, particularly over matters of church discipline. He moved to minister to a congregation at Stockbridge, where relatively light parish duties allowed him to write a series of major theological works that gave intellectual muscle to New England Puritanism.19 In 1757, his reputation as a scholar firmly established, Edwards was invited to become president of the College of New Jersey in Princeton (now Princeton University). Following an unsuccessful inoculation against smallpox at Princeton, intended to demonstrate the safety of the new medical procedure to his students, he died on March 22, 1758.
The Awakening, however, continued. It was far too broad and deep to be dependent upon any one individual. By 1760 it was clear that the movement was bringing about significant changes in American Protestantism. It was not simply that people were returning to church, or that religion was playing an increasingly significant role in public life. The revival changed the nature of Protestantism, bringing about a changed perception of the relationship between the individual, the congregation, and the state.
The new emphasis on individuals having undergone a personal conversion led to the emergence of “conversion narratives” as a means of proving religious commitment and affirming personal identity.20 Whereas in the 1630s a congregation would test an individual’s beliefs to determine whether that person was indeed a truly converted, orthodox believer prior to being admitted to full membership, the emphasis now fell upon the individual’s personal experience. Conversion was not authenticated by an external ecclesiastical body, but by an inward individual experience. Furthermore, these conversion narratives raised questions about the place of the precise theological formulations once favored by Puritan church leaders. It seemed to many that the convert’s immediate sense of participating directly in spiritual reality was more important and significant than such rigid formulations. In short: the Awakening led to the weakening of the intellectual side of faith and shifted the emphasis to its emotional and relational aspects.
So how might such a revival be accommodated within the confines of a Calvinist theology? How could such an experiential approach to the religious life be reconciled with the theological logic of a movement often associated with intellectual rigor rather than devotional fervor? The answer lies in the dynamics of theological internalization—the process by which ideas are transmuted into attitudes.21 The capacity of contemporary Puritanism to forge links between theology and experience must be regarded as one of its most significant characteristics, and above all in relation to explaining the origins of the Great Awakening. Most people responded to a theology focusing on divine judgment and human sinfulness by realizing their inability to achieve self-deliverance and hence totally entrusting their destiny to the will of God. For others, a discernment of divine mercy and grace led to a joyful expectation of deliverance, often linked with moments of ecstatic perception and delight.
The Awakening also had implications for the democratization of religion. The individual experience of conversion was recognized as being open to all, whether male or female, rich or poor, ignorant or wise. Religion became “popular,” in the sense that it no longer made significant intellectual demands of its adherents. Grace was something to be experienced rather than defined and articulated in the esoteric language of theology. The experience of the divine was no longer dependent upon texts or sermons. The same factors that would help make Pentecostalism the religion of the urban poor in the late twentieth century were anticipated in the Great Awakening more than two centuries earlier.
Yet the most important outcome of the Puritan commonwealths of the 1630s and their revitalization a century later was political. A radical alternative was established to the European model of Protestantism as a regional or national religion. The rise of confessionalism in Germany led to state-sponsored Protestant churches defining the religious establishment. Lutheranism was the state religion in certain parts of Germany and Scandinavia, Reformed Christianity in certain other regions of Europe, and Anglicanism in England and the British colonies—including the Carolinas and Virginia. Catholicism, of course, was firmly established as the state religion in France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, as well as in the newly established Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America.
The congregationalism of the Puritan commonwealths offered an alternative model that had no real precedent in Europe: an understanding of religious “establishment” that did not involve preferential state support for any one specific ecclesiastical body. The Puritan experimentation in defining church-state relationships was driven as much by hatred for the English model of a state church, which both patronized and oppressed alternative forms of Christianity, as by a longing for individual and corporate freedom. Yet during the first half of the eighteenth century, this was merely a local model, appropriate to the commonwealth of Massachusetts and a few other locations in New England. It would take a revolution to make it the norm for America as a whole. As events unfolded, it turned out that such a revolution lay to hand.
PROTESTANTISM AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The historical roots of the American Revolution are complex, and it is difficult to assign priority to any one factor as the ultimate cause of the rebellion against British rule. The burdens of taxation, the lack of due representation, and the desire for freedom were unquestionably integral ingredients in the accumulation of grievances that drove many colonials to take up arms against the king.22 Yet religious issues also played their part, not least in intensifying a sense of injustice over the privileged status of the Church of England in the British colonies.23 The Church of England had become established by law in the southern states of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and even in four counties of New York State. Although dissent was permitted, the situation rankled Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. Opposition began to grow.
In the early 1770s, Congregationalist ministers in New England regularly preached on the theme of religious and political freedom, linking both with resisting English tyranny. Throughout Puritan Massachusetts, pamphlets appeared offering a religious justification for the use of armed force against an oppressor and urging young men to join militias.24 The rhetoric and theology were not entirely unlike the rhetoric and theology that prevailed during the prelude to the English Civil War.
So was the American Revolution actually a war of religion? It is difficult to make the case for its being so. Religious elements were involved—above all a desire to ensure religious freedom and eliminate the privileges of the established church. Yet it would not be true to say that these concerns dominated the agenda of those driving the Revolution. The patriots came from a wide variety of religious backgrounds, only some of which were driven by the theological vision of the New England Congregationalists. The “black Regiment” of preachers such as Charles Chauncy, Samuel Cooper, and Jonathan Mayhew (so-called on account of their clerical dress) criticized the British from their pulpits. Yet the Great Awakening had renewed a sense of vision among Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptists, and that renewal widened and diversified the theological base of the Revolution.25 George Washington himself appears to have been somewhat unorthodox religiously and may be best described as a deist—someone who believed in a generic notion of divinity rather than the distinctively Christian conception of God.26
Unsurprisingly, the backbone of Protestant resistance to any form of rebellion came predominantly—though by no means exclusively—from the Church of England. Isaac Wilkens, a New York Anglican layman, decided to leave America rather than be forced into a war against England. Other Protestants, significantly drawn primarily from Anabaptist and Quaker traditions, refused to get involved in the war on either side, regarding any form of violence as unacceptable.
It is important to note that a fundamental difference existed between the American Revolution of 1776 and its French counterpart of 1789. The French Revolution was partly inspired by an antireligious agenda, with a particular animus against Catholicism.27 While the French-language Protestant intellectual tradition may have done much to lay the foundations for the revolutionary idea of “justifiable regicide,” the French Revolution appears to have harbored a generic hostility to Christianity, and many of its proponents pursed a program of “de-Christianization,” which affected most churches.28
The American Revolution, in marked contrast, was undertaken with at least some degree of explicitly religious motivation. For many, it was a defining moment of religious purification in which the excesses and privileges of the established church could be eliminated. Yet there was no question of eliminating Anglicanism, still less Anglicans. Following the Revolution, the “Protestant Episcopal Church” was reconstituted in 1789 at Philadelphia as the successor to the Church of England in the American colonies. No Protestant denomination was designated as the “established church” in its place. The religious diversity of the newly established United States of America was such that any decision along these lines would have led to intense infighting. An alternative solution was therefore proposed.
In 1786 Thomas Jefferson’s “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” set out the separation of church and state and ended any legal oversight or enforcement of religious belief.29 The First Amendment to the Constitution ended the formal establishment of religion, although in terms that make its subsequent application problematic: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Constitution itself makes no reference to God, Christianity, or Protestantism. Where Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence” famously invokes a “Creator” in setting out its vision of human rights, the Constitution consciously and conspicuously avoids any such references.
The new American Constitution opened the way to a radical reshaping of the nation’s religious landscape by sweeping away established structures and creating new structures without parallel at that time. At one level, the constitutional separation of church and state could be seen as an attempt to marginalize religion in public life. This would, however, seem to be a mistaken perception. For many at the time, such as the Baptist minister Isaac Backus, this separation amounted to a virtual guarantee that America would be a Christian nation whose churches would be free from political interference and manipulation. And since the predominant form of Christianity was Protestantism, it seemed self-evident that the new American republic would be a Protestant bastion in the New World, like Calvin’s Geneva in the Old.
But as time passed the situation began to change—and Protestantism changed with it.
TENSIONS AND REVIVAL: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
American Protestantism underwent dramatic development during the nineteenth century, and many of the distinctive contemporary traits of the movement were forged at this time. That development was shaped by forces unique to the American situation, including the rapid expansion westward into geographical regions without any history of a Christian presence and an expanding Catholic population in what had once been a predominantly Protestant nation.
Between 1800 and the eve of the Civil War, the population of the United States expanded from about 5 million to 30 million. With the territorial expansion that accompanied this population growth, there was every risk that the nation’s Christian moorings would be loosened as children sought to establish their independence from their parents and formed new communities to create new identities, far removed from those of the original colonies. Yet there is abundant evidence that many sought to cope with the radical social and political change of the times by rediscovering their religious roots and the secure sense of social location and personal identity that this entailed.30
Alongside such pressures that might lead to the dilution of Protestant influence, other religious groups were making their presence felt through new waves of immigration. Puritans were not the only religious minority to flee intolerance and insecurity in seventeenth-century England. In early 1634, a group of Catholic refugees settled in the Chesapeake Bay area. Maryland—named after Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I—became the first Catholic colony in America. Although Maryland was criticized for being a Catholic enclave in the New World, it soon established its credentials as a place of religious toleration. Under Archbishop John Carroll (1735–1815), Catholicism became increasingly accepted in American culture.
However, a fresh wave of immigration from European nations in the nineteenth century led to radical change in the nation’s religious profile. Political instability and economic deprivation brought large numbers of Irish and Italian Catholics to cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. German refugees tended to settle in the upper Midwest, in centers such as St. Louis and Cincinnati. Strong ethnic loyalties led to Catholic émigrés retaining the social and religious habits of Europe and thus not integrating into American culture.31 This rapid rise of Catholicism in cities that had hitherto been staunchly Protestant led to social and religious tension.
Protestantism itself was nothing like a coherent movement, and it is far from clear whether Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregationalist, and Methodist congregations had any sense of a shared identity, heritage, or faith in antebellum America. Controversies within the Protestant movement—including especially ferocious and divisive divisions about slavery32—tended to accentuate its differences rather than identify and celebrate its commonalities.33 Indeed, it might reasonably be argued that the rise of Catholicism in America in the nineteenth century brought a new unity to the hitherto somewhat diverse movement by providing it with a common enemy, replicating the patterns of Protestant identity maintenance that emerged in Europe during the late sixteenth century.
Despite all these difficulties, Protestant church attendance rose by a factor of ten over the period 1800 to 1860, comfortably outstripping population growth. Twice as many Protestants went to church at the end of this period than at its beginning. Why? If any factor may be identified as responsible for this development, it is the “Second Great Awakening” (1800–1830) and the new patterns of religious revivalism that this brought about. Such religious revivals not only became the defining mark of American religion but also played a central role in the nation’s developing identity, independence, and democratic principles. Although the subject of criticism at the time, revivalism became deeply enmeshed within the American Protestant consciousness.34
The first such revival broke out in rural Kentucky in 1801 in the form of large camp meetings. The most famous of these was the “Cane Ridge” meeting, which lasted a week and was attended by at least ten thousand individuals. These meetings set a precedent for a wave of revivalist meetings throughout the frontier territories that appealed primarily to common folk and emphasized emotion rather than intellect. The outcome was the transformation of antebellum America and the emergence of the Protestant “Bible Belt.”
Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) was the pivotal figure of the Second Awakening.35 Following his conversion in 1821, Finney abandoned his career as a lawyer and became a Presbyterian minister. He distanced himself, however, from some aspects of the older New England Calvinism, which he regarded as in the first place unbiblical, and in the second an obstacle to effective evangelism. Finney focused on the need for people to respond to the proclamation of the gospel and on the skills that were thus required of the preacher to persuade them to do so.36 He clearly regarded it as perfectly acceptable—perhaps even as necessary—to use every technique of persuasion available in preaching for conversion.37
What sort of techniques? Finney introduced many of the standard features of revivalist preaching, which rapidly became part of a largely unquestioned tradition. One such feature was the “anxious seat,” a bench reserved for those who, as a result of the preacher’s message, were “anxious” for their soul’s safety and wanted counsel and prayer. Yet the most familiar of all Finney’s innovations was the “altar call”—the invitation to come forward in response to the invitation to receive the gospel. The technique was picked up by Dwight L. Moody, the greatest revivalist preacher in the second half of the nineteenth century, and thus passed into virtually all of nineteenth-and twentieth-century revivalist preaching, from Billy Sunday through to Billy Graham.
Finney’s attentiveness to controlling and directing the revival process marked a significant shift from the days of the first Great Awakening. Edwards and Whitefield had no place for “altar calls” or other such techniques. For them, revival was a matter of God’s grace, which lay beyond human control or influence. For Finney, revival was “not a miracle or dependent on a miracle”; rather, it was the “result of the right use of the constituted means.” Although it would be unfair to accuse Finney of reducing revival to a set of techniques, both organizational and rhetorical, those elements are certainly present in his thought.
The impact of Finney and those who developed his ministry on the shaping of modern American Protestantism was immense. The emergence of the “holiness” movement is often seen as a response to the ideas and values of revivalism. Unlike forms of Protestantism that emphasized the defense of doctrinal orthodoxy, the holiness movement was much more oriented to ethics and the spiritual life. It tended to raise ethics to the status that later fundamentalists have accorded doctrine. This emphasis on “holy living” came to be linked with support for the abolition of slavery in the antebellum period. Oberlin College in Ohio—where Finney later served as professor of theology—became a stronghold of abolitionism and a haven for those who advocated even “civil disobedience” in the face of the fugitive slave laws.38
The “holiness” tradition’s emphasis on issues of Christian living was not limited to an attempt to end slavery. Oberlin College became the center of some serious attempts to erase racial and gender barriers within both the antebellum church and society at large. Its pioneering moves toward coeducation led to its graduating some of the most vigorous and radical feminists of the era. Antoinette Brown, the first woman to be ordained in an American church, was a graduate of Oberlin. At her ordination in 1853, Wesleyan Methodist minister Luther Lee preached on “Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel.”
After the Civil War, revivalism began to develop in new directions. Revivalist rhetoric was supplemented by the emergence of a popular American hymnody. Whereas the Puritans strongly disapproved of the singing of nonbiblical texts in church, the Wesleyan revival movement in England had recognized the importance of hymns, both as a means of Christian education and as a powerful way of praising God. After the end of the Civil War, as America moved toward becoming an industrial nation, the Protestant churches were able to remain in touch with the nation’s soul through the use of music. The revivalist Dwight Moody teamed up with the musician Ira David Sankey to produce a formidable double act.
The two met in 1870 after a prayer meeting for a revivalist meeting in Indianapolis.39 The day after their meeting, Moody sent a note to Sankey, asking if they could meet on a street corner. When Sankey arrived, Moody produced a soapbox and invited Sankey to mount it and sing a hymn. Sankey—who had a magnificent voice—did so. A crowd gathered to hear him. When Sankey had finished, Moody got on the box and delivered a short sermon, inviting everyone present to follow him to the Indianapolis Opera House, where the YMCA was holding its convention. It was obvious that Finney’s method had been supplemented—and bettered.
One of the most significant consequences of the rapid growth of revivalism in nineteenth-century America was the emergence of the Protestant Bible Belt—a story that needs to be told in greater detail.
THE ORIGINS OF THE BIBLE BELT
The emergence of the Bible Belt is one of the most puzzling features of American Christianity.40 The original heartlands of Protestantism were in the greater New England area, especially Massachusetts. It was here that Congregationalism and Presbyterianism took root and quickly became the most significant and dynamic forms of Protestant self-expression in the region. The southern colonies tended to be dominated by a socially conservative and quietist Anglicanism, which lent tacit support to the hierarchical social structures that dominated their plantations and social life throughout much of the eighteenth century. The plantation aristocracy enjoyed their hunting, shooting, dueling, dancing, drinking, and gambling and tolerated Anglicanism precisely because it tolerated them. Religious commitment was low: only one in ten southerners attended church in 1776. Yet the great era of Protestant expansion and consolidation that opened up in the nineteenth century was centered in the Midwest and the South, not the original Northeast. Why?
The reasons for this development cast an interesting light on the remarkable ability of some forms of Protestantism to adapt to new situations and challenges. In her analysis of the emergence of the Bible Belt, Christine Heyrman shows that evangelical Protestants virtually reinvented their religion, setting aside any of its aspects that might alienate southern culture. By adapting to the realities of the South, evangelical Baptists and Methodists laid down the foundations of the Bible Belt. The task of adaptation and modification took over two generations. Ministers such as John Taylor, Stith Mead, and Freeborn Garrettson were able to build bridges to different cultural groups—young people, slaves, women, and, perhaps most difficult of all, white males—to defuse initial anxiety and hostility against evangelicals. Over the period 1770 to 1830, egalitarian forms of evangelicalism eventually managed to establish deep roots in southern culture, despite the tensions this created with the middle-aged white gentry.
Yet this adaptation created a form of Protestantism that stood at some distance from the forms found in the Northeast. This divergence was more than purely denominational. (In 1830 the Northeast was dominated by Presbyterians and Congregationalists, the South by Baptists and Methodists.) The new religion made its appeal primarily to individuals, focusing on the transformation of their personal lives rather than of society as a whole.41 These characteristics appear to have persisted in the religious individualism of contemporary southern religious approaches to the reading of the Bible and the understanding of the nature of salvation.
Yet the term “Bible Belt” reflects something deeper than denominational or theological distinctions. Those observers of southern religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who coined the phrase used it primarily to denote the remarkable religious homogeneity of the region. Once the hiatus of the Civil War had passed, allowing the South to regain religious and social stability, it became clear that southern religion had crystallized into predominantly conservative forms of Protestantism and was relatively unaffected by the social and intellectual challenges that Protestantism faced in the North, especially in urban centers.
If any religious group has an especial association with the distinctive Protestantism of this region, it is the Southern Baptist Convention, founded in Augusta, Georgia, in May 1845.42 Up to that point, Baptist congregations in the South had operated without feeling the need for any national or regional structure, and they never thought of themselves as belonging to a “denomination.” Yet there was a growing recognition that such a centralized denomination would be more efficient, more powerful, and capable of achieving greater influence. Anxious not to compromise the autonomy of local Baptist congregations, the Convention adopted a Congregationalist model of church governance: the decision of a local church in a matter of doctrine, discipline, or church order could not be overturned by any superior body, since there was no body that had authority over the local church. This principle, which was vigorously upheld by the second president of the Convention, R. B. C. Howell, during the period 1851 to 1858, is essential to any understanding of the subsequent dynamics of Southern Baptist life.
Yet the upsurge in religious interest in the South was not limited to white Americans. Black Protestantism was already a significant force in the antebellum era, even though restrictions were placed upon it—for example, worship had to be supervised by whites.43 In Columbus, Mississippi, 80 percent of the antebellum Baptist church membership was black. In Georgia at this time, 35 to 40 percent of Baptist church members were black. The end of the Civil War brought about emancipation, and with it new possibilities for Protestantism.
With the ending of the Civil War, black Protestant churches underwent new growth—this time, under black leadership, unrestricted by white supervisors. Baptist churches quickly became core institutions of newfound black freedom, with their own styles of worship and preaching.44 One legacy of the past was the lack of education among members of such congregations, so preachers often seemed more concerned with heightening their congregation’s sense of God’s love and presence than with educating them in the fundamentals of faith. Many inequities remained in the South, where blacks found themselves largely excluded from the traditional, predominantly white denominations. Yet the foundation was being laid for significant future developments.
“OPPOSITIONALISM” AND THE SHAPING OF AMERICAN PROTESTANT IDENTITY
How was a sense of identity shaped and reinforced within American Protestantism until the eve of the First World War? This important question penetrates to one of the fundamental questions probed throughout this volume—namely, what is it that actually “defines” Protestantism?
For the first Protestant settlers, their Protestant identity was what had singled them out for victimization and discrimination in Jacobean and Caroline England. Their sense of identity, already strong, was reinforced by their experience of suffering, which was frequently compared to the experiences of Israel in Pharaonic Egypt. The dangerous voyage across the Atlantic was like the crossing of the Red Sea, and the arrival at New England like the entry into the promised land of Canaan. The long history of the exodus narrative as a source of inspiration to American Protestants began with the founding of the nation.
Once settled in America, the predominantly Congregational church polity of the seventeenth century diluted a sense of Protestant identity. Memories of a European past began to fade, and the new generation knew the past indirectly, not as a lived reality or shared experience. Diaries and journals of the period certainly emphasize the importance of religious faith to many early Americans. However, this was not articulated in terms of a shared Protestant identity. The religious identity of many seems primarily to have been developed within the family, among neighbors, within the congregation, and at the level of the township. Faith was often a strongly individual commitment, expressed by church attendance and in civic responsibility.
The Great Awakening and its successor movements certainly gave a new energy and sense of direction to religious faith in America. Yet the renewal of individual faith was not linked with a deeper commitment to some pan-denominational entity called “Protestantism.” My own reading of the journals and sermons of the period, while not exhaustive, suggests that a sense of transdenominational identity was articulated using the category of “the gospel,” not Protestantism. In part, this may reflect growing tensions within society over the colonial question, which highlighted fissures within American Protestantism of the time—above all, between Anglicans, on the one hand, and Presbyterians and Congregationalists, on the other. At the time of the Second Great Awakening, American Protestant identity was shaped primarily by the concrete experiences of the denomination, especially its officers and structures. “Protestantism” seemed to be something ethereal and hypothetical—an abstract entity lying over the horizon of everyday church life.
If any one factor can be identified as sharpening up a sense of shared Protestant identity, it is “oppositionalism”—the belief that an outside agency threatened the future of all Protestants in America. One of the defining features nourishing and fueling a sense of Protestant identity during the period 1750 to 1960 was open hostility toward Catholicism.45 Protestants were those who abhorred Catholicism—whether for its ideas, intolerance, oppression, or religious practices. In the eighteenth century, this opposition was often rather theoretical—there were few Catholics in America at this time—but lacked nothing in vigor for that reason. Paul Dudley (1675–1751), chief justice of Massachusetts, established the Dudleian lectures on religion at Harvard College, one of which was required to expose “the idolatry of the Romish church,” including its “damnable heresies” and “abominable superstitions.”46
When the British government extended full civil and religious freedom to Catholics in the colony of Quebec in 1774, American Protestants reacted with indignation, seeing this as legitimizing tyranny in the region. This hostility toward Catholicism was deeply ingrained across the denominations, and thoroughly embedded within American culture as a whole, shaping both the cultural and religious identity of Protestantism.47
Conspiracy theories mushroomed. In 1834 the somewhat incendiary Lyman Beecher published his Plea for the West, which portrayed the pope in cahoots with degenerate Catholic European monarchs in a plot to take over the Mississippi Valley. Tensions rose, leading to the burning of a convent in Charlestown in 1834.48 These were given credibility as Catholic emigration to America began to surge in the second half of the nineteenth century. “Nativism” became a significant ideology, rallying those already settled in America against the newcomers, whom they believed threatened to undermine their religious and political freedoms.49 Catholicism was regularly and aggressively portrayed as “the other” or “the threat,” and as fundamentally at odds with the libertarian and republican principles of the United States. Rhetoric shaped perception, and perception became reality.
The case of late nineteenth-century Boston illustrates this trend well. In 1800 Boston, the city at the heart of the largely Puritan commonwealth of Massachusetts, was a powerful symbol of the American Yankee Protestant heritage. Yet mass immigration from Catholic Ireland from 1840 onward changed everything. In 1885 three Protestants were arrested by the police for preaching on Boston Common, sparking protests that revealed the deep levels of insecurity within the community—above all, the sense of having become aliens and strangers in what was once their heartland.50
Protestantism closed ranks against this growing threat. Its somewhat tenuous and fluctuating sense of shared faith and values was given both focus and substance by the perception of a serious external threat to church and nation. Other external threats helped shape the notion of a mainline Protestant identity, which had to be defended against external threats. The election of Mormon apostle Reed Smoot to the U.S. Senate in 1903 caused the mainline Protestant denominations to react against a clear threat to their ideas and values, particularly in the light of Smoot’s commitment to polygamy.51
The decade before the First World War represents a transitional period in American Protestant history. There was little, if any, sense of a looming crisis of identity. Protestants, having always enjoyed the liberty that comes from writing the law, were confident that no difference existed between duty to the church and to the state. Yet change was under way. By about 1910, the role of government was in transition: it was turning from the enforcement of a particular moral or religious order to ensuring that competition was fair among the various concentrations of power—whether these took the form of political parties, pressure groups, business interests, or religious communities.
The scene was thus set for new tensions as American culture appeared to move in a more progressive, secular direction. The ground had been prepared for the preliminary skirmishes of the culture wars and a fundamental realignment of American Protestantism in the twentieth century—a matter to which we shall return in a later chapter.
But our attention now turns to the great events of the nineteenth century, during which Protestantism experienced massive expansion—and in growing, changed in more ways than its numerical strength. The global expansion of Protestantism reshaped its ideas and attitudes, with highly significant results for its understanding of its identity and mission.