Protestantism

Protestantism. Protestantism is a complex Western Christian movement that derives from the sixteenth‐century Reformation in Europe. Rejecting the authority of the Pope and thus becoming separated from Roman Catholicism, the movement stresses the authority of the Bible, an accent on grace as the agent that brings God and human beings together, and “the priesthood of all believers,” a way of acknowledging the positive role of lay people in the church.

Protestant Foundings.

Though the first Europeans who came to the Americas were Catholic, the original thirteen colonies that would become the United States were, with the exception of Maryland, settled by Protestants. Most settlers came from England, which meant that they were either Anglicans, who established themselves in southern colonies such as Virginia and the Carolinas, or Puritans, who settled New England. The “Middle Colonies” such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania attracted Lutherans and the Reformed from northern Europe, English Quakers (members of the Society of Friends who settled mainly in Pennsylvania), and Scottish Presbyterians to add to the Protestant mix.

By the end of the Colonial Era, despite an estimated thirty thousand Catholics and three thousand Jews, the white settlers of British North America were overwhelmingly Protestant. So, too, were the founders of the nation who drafted the Constitution, but of a special sort. Influenced by the Enlightenment and promoting human reason over divine revelation in Scripture, they saw to it that none of the Protestant churches was established—which included being tax‐supported—or officially favored. By 1833 the last state establishment ended, in Massachusetts. Henceforth the Protestant churches were on their own, forming what is sometimes called “the voluntary church” and developing a form of Christian polity called “denominationalism.”

The Spread of Protestantism.

The voluntary denominational pattern forced the Protestants to compete with each other, even as most of them tried to keep Catholics from migrating to or feeling at home in the United States. Competition took the form of revivals and “awakenings,” efforts to convert people and get them to join the churches. Already in the colonial period revivalists like George Whitefield (1715–1770), who commuted from England and regularly traversed the colonies, and Jonathan Edwards of Connecticut set the pattern for conversion efforts in the First Great Awakening.

What historians call a Second Great Awakening was promoted early in the nineteenth century, with particular success in the new settlements in the South and on the Transappalachian western frontiers. Revivalists like Charles G. Finney in the 1820s and 1830s invented “new measures” to stimulate conversions, employing techniques that all but guaranteed a successful response. As Finney and his colleagues turned Protestant revivalism into an instrument of reform, many of their followers became antislavery abolitionists, advocates of temperance, and founders of denominational colleges, some of which would become highly prestigious. Though Protestants provided biblical justifications for slavery in the South, where most of the clergy supported it, those in the North, where slavery was less economically rewarding, came to oppose it, also on biblical grounds. Spreading through the plantation system, Protestant Christianity was adopted and adapted by African‐American slaves and freedmen and most of their descendants. Well over a century after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, despite racial segregation within the churches and church‐supported prejudice by whites against blacks, the nation's African Americans remained overwhelmingly Protestant, mainly Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal.

Social Policies and Divisions.

The social movements to reform individuals in the nineteenth century became efforts to spread a Social Gospel early in the twentieth. Now Protestants attacked what the leaders saw as structural and social evils: wage slavery, unregulated corporate life, slums, prostitution, exploitative liquor interests. Through the Social Gospel among liberals and more individualized reform efforts by evangelical groups, Protestants continued to influence American social policy.

The nonsectarian Salvation Army, founded in England in 1865 by the Methodist minister William Booth and brought to America in 1880 by George Railton and seven army “lassies,” represented a unique form of evangelical social action to combat poverty and other social ills. With their military‐like uniforms, street‐corner rallies, soup kitchens, work programs for the poor, and proliferating social programs in the twentieth century, the Salvation Army became a distinctive and highly visible feature of American Protestantism. In another arena of social action, the civil rights movement of the 1950s–1970s was led largely by ministers—for example, the Baptist Martin Luther King Jr.—and backed by much white church leadership.

The Evangelical movement emerged in reaction to the liberalization in Progressive social policies and modernism in theology embraced by many Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and other Protestants of the old mainstream. The extreme element among Evangelicals formed the especially reactive Fundamentalist movement, which lost battles for control of various denominations around 1925. Led by the National Association of Evangelicals (1942) and Evangelists like Billy Graham, the Evangelicals won new church members through conversion to “Born‐Again Christianity,” and by the mid–twentieth century were outfacing the mainstream churches, which became statistically static or even declined.

The newly assertive conservatives also emerged from political passivity, and by the time Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, they had become the most aggressive religious group in politics. Favoring “family values” and constitutionally supported prayer in public schools, and opposing legalized abortion, they gained control locally of many school, library, and town boards and influenced national politics through organizations such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1980s and the Reverend Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition in the 1990s.

Theology.

Theology, a word deriving from the Greek for “the word” about “god,” is the systematic interpretation of the life of a people in the light of God. Although U.S. Protestantism is better known for activism and good works than for formal theology, the American circumstance did prompt Protestant leaders to develop certain themes integral to life in the colonies and the United States. First among these had to do with making sense of divine activity in the New World. Jonathan Edwards, the most notable colonial theologian, concentrated on “the religious affections,” the meaning of the experience of God among the revived. He also contemplated the colonies’ role in the plan of God. The Edwardsians came to be called “postmillennialists” because they believed that efforts at conversion and reform would spread righteousness and justice, after which (hence, “post”) Jesus Christ would return to rule for a thousand years (hence, “millennial”), as foretold in the Book of Revelation. Later, a “premillennialist” view, impelled by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody and others, came to prevail among conservatives. They turned to biblical prophesies that suggested the world will resist conversion and that wars and wickedness will increase until, in an apocalyptic end of history, Christ will return to rule for a thousand years.

The postmillennialists, prevailing between the mid–eighteenth century and the Civil War, sponsored great movements of reform through religiously motivated voluntary associations. Along with antislavery and antiliquor agencies, these associations produced Sunday School unions, Bible societies, antipoverty endeavors, and an American version of the modern Protestant missionary movements. Protestant missionaries labored on the frontier and in the cities, and, along with Catholics, set out to convert and educate Native Americans.

But frustrations on the domestic missionary front led many Protestants to seek to rebuild their “Kingdom,” which was being progressively crowded by Catholic and other immigrant newcomers, through missionary efforts in Hawai'i, Africa, India, China, Palestine, and elsewhere abroad. An American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in 1810, was the first sign of a thrust that consumed Protestant energies for a century and a half and lived on, especially in conservative Evangelicalism, through the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, theologians continued to work on both “religious affections” and the theological meaning of America. The most notable nineteenth‐century Protestant was the Congregationalist pastor Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) of Hartford, Connecticut. In his book Christian Nurture (1847), Bushnell opposed the revivalists and the prorevivalist theologians. Instead of preaching human sinfulness and the need for a radical conversion experience, Bushnell and the modernists who followed him suggested that the potential good in people should be nurtured through education, example, and acts of love.

Late in the nineteenth century the liberal and modernist Protestants developed a theological justification for their social programs, notably the Social Gospel. While they treated the millennium symbolically as opposed to literally, they could still be classified as postmillennialists. In alliance with secular Progressives, they worked to make the world, beginning in America, a more righteous place. For the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch of Rochester Theological Seminary, who wrote A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918), the key idea became “bringing in the Kingdom of God.” By advancing public ownership of corporations, the organization of labor, and efforts to fight crime, unemployment, and exploitation of the poor in slums, they saw themselves as following Christ.

A reaction to the Social Gospel modernism came after the 1920s under the leadership of the theological brothers H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) of Yale and Reinhold Niebuhr of New York's Union Theological Seminary. The former, through works like The Kingdom of God in America (1937) and Christ and Culture (1951), criticized optimistic and Progressive theology as shallow. Reinhold, through journal articles, lectures, and such influential books as Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–1943), was even more critical and searching. He resurrected terms like “original sin” to describe human nature and stressed divine activity more than progressive human creativity. Both Niebuhrs, especially Reinhold, continued to urge Protestant engagement with the social order, but now on what were often called “Christian realist” terms.

Pluralism as a Protestant Theme.

While other theologians concentrated on the revelation of God, as H. Richard Niebuhr himself did in The Meaning of Revelation (1941), and on hermeneutics, the art and science of interpreting texts, still others dwelled on themes as old as Protestantism in America, themes that could be gathered under a code word seldom used before the 1950s: pluralism.

Pluralism acknowledged the reality that America harbored all sorts of Protestant and other religious groups and that theologians needed ways to interpret this reality. From the fourth to the eighteenth century throughout the West, in Europe into recent times, and in colonial America, one form of the church—such as Catholicism until the sixteenth century—was privileged and dominant. All others were “dissenters,” to be hampered or persecuted. This form of religious establishment did not long survive in America.

After the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1789 and progressively since, the United States became home to every kind of religious and nonreligious philosophy and cause. What sense should Protestants make of this diversity? Many informally followed what the University of California sociologist and religious thinker Robert Bellah in 1967 called “Civil Religion”—a blend of patriotism and generalized religious piety that transcended all sectarian and denominational divisions. Another sociologist, Peter Berger, called this a “sacred canopy” that allowed for the churches to prosper, but rendered their particular theologies irrelevant to the public purposes.

In the 1980s and 1990s, criticism by Bellah himself and others of banal civil religion and extreme individualism led to the articulation of what came to be called “public theology.” The public theologians assumed that “private religion” was relatively prospering; that “church theology” remained important for its purposes; but that an interpretation of public life “under God” was also needed.

Public theology did not have the field to itself in Protestantism. Beginning in the 1960s, Protestant women began to make major feminist theological contributions. And African‐American Protestants, inspired by books like James M. Cone's A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), developed a theology that interpreted their liberation from slavery, segregation, and oppression. Other groups and theologians, stressing ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or environmental themes, further “particularized” American theology, the interpretation of life in a bewildering and creative national circumstance.
See also African American Religion; Anti‐Catholic Movement; Baptists; Bill of Rights; Church and State, Separation of; Ecumenical Movement; Education: Collegiate Education; Feminism; Great Awakening, First and Second; Judaism; Lutheranism; McPherson, Aimee Semple; Methodism; Millennialism and Apocalypticism; Peale, Norman Vincent; Pentecostalism; Progressive Era; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Puritanism; Race and Ethnicity; Religion; Sunday, Billy; Temperance and Prohibition; Unitarianism and Universalism; Voluntarism.

Bibliography

Jerald C. Brauer , Protestantism in America, 1955.
John Dillenberger and and Claude Welch , Protestant Christianity, Interpreted through its Development, 1958.
James H. Nichols , The Meaning of Protestantism, 1959.
Winthrop S. Hudson , American Protestantism, 1961.
Sidney E. Mead , The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America, 1963.
Sydney E. Ahlstrom , A Religious History of the American People, 1972.
Martin E. Marty , Protestantism, 1972.
Edwin S. Gaustad , A Documentary History of Religion in America, 2 vols., 1982–1983.
Robert T. Handy , A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, 2d ed., 1984.

Martin E. Marty