Christianity in America

A religious free market

After independence, America did something new. It had no national established church (see The Great Awakening). Churches had to survive by persuading people to join and support them voluntarily. Visitors from Europe, like the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, were amazed that religion flourished more in this free system than in Europe's state churches. Tocqueville noted that religion in America took no direct part in government but was the first of its political institutions.

The result was a nation of denominations, a word that suggests different "names" for parts of one Christian church rather than rival "true churches." Denominations competed vigorously for members, especially on the rapidly expanding frontier.

The Second Great Awakening

Around 1800 a new wave of revivals swept the country. In New England it was relatively orderly, led by figures like Timothy Dwight at Yale and the energetic preacher Lyman Beecher. On the frontier it was wild. In August 1801, at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, a Presbyterian communion service led by Barton W. Stone turned into a gigantic camp meeting. Between 10,000 and 25,000 people gathered for about a week, at a time when Lexington, the largest town in Kentucky, had fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Preachers of several denominations spoke simultaneously from stumps and wagons. People fell down, wept, shouted, laughed, "jerked" and danced. Critics were horrified. Supporters saw a new Pentecost.

The camp meeting became a frontier institution. The denominations best suited to the frontier grew fastest:

• Methodists used circuit riders, young, often barely educated preachers on horseback who traveled endless circuits of scattered settlements. Under Bishop Francis Asbury, who himself rode some 270,000 miles, Methodists grew from about 15,000 members in 1784 to over a million by 1844, becoming America's largest denomination.
• Baptists used farmer-preachers who worked their own land and needed no salary or seminary training.
• Older, more educated churches such as Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians grew more slowly.

New movements also arose. Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell led a "Restoration Movement" that rejected denominations and creeds in favor of simple "New Testament Christianity." It produced the Disciples of Christ and the Churches of Christ.

Charles Finney: revival as method

Charles Finney (1792–1875), a lawyer converted in 1821, became the most influential revivalist of the age. In upstate New York's "Burned-over District," so called because revivals swept it so often, he introduced "new measures": protracted meetings over many nights, the "anxious bench" at the front for those under conviction, women praying aloud in mixed meetings, and direct, lawyer-like pleading with sinners. Rejecting strict Calvinism, he taught that revival "is not a miracle" but the result of using the right means. Sinners could and must choose to repent now.

For Finney, conversion led to action. Converts should work to reform society. He became a fierce opponent of slavery and later president of Oberlin College in Ohio, the first American college to admit both women and Black students. Revival fed a "benevolent empire" of voluntary reform societies: temperance, abolition, Sabbath observance, Bible and tract distribution, prison reform and missions.

The Protestant family tree, 1517 to today

The Black church

African American Christianity came into its own in this era. Enslaved people often worshiped in their masters' churches, seated in balconies, hearing sermons on obedience. But they also met secretly in the woods at night, the "invisible institution," where they sang spirituals ("Go Down, Moses," "Steal Away to Jesus"), prayed for freedom, and identified with Israel in Egypt. Some leaders of slave revolts, like Nat Turner (1831), were preachers inspired by biblical visions of judgment. That made slaveholders even more suspicious of Black religion.

In the North, free Black Christians formed their own churches after facing discrimination in white congregations. In 1787, Richard Allen and others were pulled off their knees during prayer at St George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia for sitting in the "wrong" section. They walked out. Allen founded Bethel Church and in 1816 the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first independent Black denomination, with himself as bishop. Jarena Lee, licensed by Allen, became the first woman authorized to preach in the AME Church. Other Black Baptist and Methodist denominations followed. After emancipation in 1865, nearly all Southern Black Christians left white-controlled churches and formed their own. The Black church became the center of African American life: worship, education, politics and mutual aid. It would provide much of the leadership of the 20th-century civil rights movement (see Evangelicals and Fundamentalists).

New American religions

The religious ferment of the "Burned-over District" also produced entirely new religious movements:

• Latter-day Saints (Mormons): Joseph Smith (1805–1844) reported visions and said an angel led him to golden plates, which he translated as the Book of Mormon (1830), an account of ancient Israelites in America. His followers were persecuted and Smith was killed by a mob in Illinois. Brigham Young led them to Utah in 1847. Most Christian churches do not consider Latter-day Saint theology to be within historic Christianity, because of its distinctive teachings about God and additional scriptures.
• Adventists: The Baptist farmer William Miller calculated from Daniel's prophecies that Christ would return in 1843–44. When he did not come on 22 October 1844, the "Great Disappointment," many lost faith. Others reinterpreted the date. Under the prophetic leadership of Ellen G. White, they formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church (1863), which worships on Saturday and emphasizes health (it gave the world cornflakes, through Dr Kellogg). Charles Russell's Bible Students, later the Jehovah's Witnesses, also emerged from Adventist ideas.
• Christian Science: Mary Baker Eddy taught that sickness and matter are illusions to be overcome by spiritual understanding (1879).
• Utopian communities like the celibate Shakers and the Oneida Community experimented with new forms of shared life.

Catholic America

In 1789 John Carroll of Maryland became the first Catholic bishop in the United States. American Catholics then numbered about 35,000. Massive immigration from Ireland (especially after the famine of 1845–49), Germany, and later Italy, Poland and elsewhere transformed the picture. By 1850 Catholicism was the largest single denomination in the US. Catholics built a vast network of parishes, schools, hospitals, orphanages and colleges, staffed largely by religious sisters. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a widowed convert, founded the American Sisters of Charity and the first parochial school. She was the first US-born saint.

Catholics faced fierce anti-Catholic prejudice ("nativism"). Mobs burned an Ursuline convent near Boston in 1834 and Catholic churches in Philadelphia in 1844. The anti-Catholic "Know-Nothing" party had many followers in the 1850s. Bishop John Hughes of New York ("Dagger John") defended Catholics vigorously.

Women in American religion

Women formed the majority of church members and drove much of 19th-century religious life. Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874), a Methodist laywoman, led the "Holiness" movement, teaching that believers could experience Wesley's "entire sanctification" instantly by faith. Her "Tuesday Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness" were hugely influential, and the Holiness movement later gave birth to Pentecostalism (see Pentecostals and Charismatics). Frances Willard led the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the largest women's organization of the century, campaigning against alcohol and for women's suffrage. Women also led missionary societies and, in some denominations, began to preach.

Moody and the urban revival

After the Civil War, revivalism moved to the growing cities. Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899), a former shoe salesman with little education, became the greatest evangelist of the age. With the singer Ira Sankey, he held massive campaigns in Britain (1873–75) and American cities, preaching a simple message of God's love. He organized his campaigns like a business, with careful planning, publicity and cooperation among churches. He founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago (1886) and the student conferences from which the Student Volunteer Movement for foreign missions grew. Moody's style set the pattern for 20th-century evangelists like Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.