Religion

Religion. As the twentieth century ended, almost everything was up for grabs in American religious history. Social scientists argued whether the United States was nearly unique in its religiosity (e.g., with church attendance rates higher than anywhere else in the Western world except Poland, Ireland, and South Africa) or far gone in a process of secularization (e.g., with no obvious religious influence on the great economic realities that define the United States' place in the world). Historians quarreled over how to incorporate the voices of women, ethnic minorities, and representatives of nonwestern religions in accounts that traditionally focused on men, British‐stock communities, and the main Christian denominations. Theologians debated whether American ways of life undercut, supported, or supplanted authentic religion. The one exception to academic contention was the growing conviction that the religious practices, narratives, values, and habits of ordinary people deserve more attention than they have yet received in telling the story.

Beginnings.

About the centrality of religion throughout American history—at the end of the twentieth century no less than in the supposedly less secular periods of the past—there can be no doubt. An idiosyncratic understanding of scripture figured prominently among the motives that drove Christopher Columbus to the New World; a cosmology sensitive to the intrusion of outsiders functioned in a similar religious way for the Native Americans who witnessed his arrival. In the first period of European settlement, a variety of Roman Catholics and Protestants used religion to rationalize the destruction of Native populations. Others, like the Dominicans Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) and Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), defended with specific Christian reasoning the property, lives, and souls of the Indians. During the seventeenth century, English immigrants established several New England colonies on a foundation of private family faith as well as on public church covenants and a general sense that God was a partner in their enterprise. Conditions of settlement in the Middle Colonies—with thriving bands of Presbyterians, Quakers, Mennonites, Dutch Reformed, Moravians, Baptists, and more—soon made that region one of the most religiously pluralistic parts of the world. By the 1740s, subjective and evangelical forms of Christianity were exerting more influence in America than corresponding movements did in Britain or the Continent. During the Seven Years' War, religious passions sustained Protestant British resistance to Roman Catholic France. And the Revolutionary War was as much a religious civil war as it was an international conflict. While the Patriots' confidence that God favored the new nation received attention in later American historiography, the Loyalists' conviction that God wanted the American colonies to remain a part of Britain was almost as strong, while a significant minority of religious pacifists rejected war as a means of settling international disputes.

The Religious Nineteenth Century.

The reach of religion was most evident in the nineteenth century, which began with an unprecedented mobilization of Protestant energies. Led by grand visions of a Christian America among northern Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and fueled by the diligent labors of Methodist itinerants and Baptist farmer‐preachers, Protestant leaders, local churches, denominations, and voluntary agencies transformed the religious landscape of the country. In the wake of the Revolution, the United States had been a substantially unchurched society. Slightly more than a generation later in 1835, the visiting Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America: “There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” By that date a great migration of European Roman Catholics had also begun; by the end of the century, it would make the Catholic church the country's largest, most diverse Christian denomination. And by that time, migrations from eastern and central Europe that would soon make the United States home to more Jews than anywhere else in the world were well under way.

The effects of active religious life were everywhere manifest throughout the century. Some form of Christian (usually Protestant) faith was integral in a long list of social movements: antislavery and the defense of slavery, anti‐Catholic and nativist movements, temperance and diet reform, attacks on the sexual double standard, efforts to improve treatment of the insane, and factory conditions for women and children. The nineteenth century also witnessed the remarkable combination of black chattel slavery and the rise of vigorous Christian movements among African Americans, followed after the Civil War by the explosive growth of African‐American denominations.

The centrality of religion to the clash between North and South that led to the Civil War is indicated by the religious revivals that became a major feature of camp life for both armies (in contrast to the more dissolute camps of the War for Independence). Abraham Lincoln, who never joined a church, nonetheless evocatively used themes from the Bible in his Second Inaugural Address of March 1865.

Religion played a major role in the emergence of women into public life. Whether as founder of a religious order like Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton; novelist like Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; abolitionist and promoter of women's rights like the freed slave Sojourner Truth; or antislavery and women's‐rights reformers like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the nineteenth century's expansion of women's roles rested on a religious foundation.

The century was also a golden age for religious thought in both Protestantism and many other religious traditions. In New England, William Ellery Channing, Lydia Maria Child, and Theodore Parker pioneered progressive forms of Christianity that pleased many and angered more. During the century's middle decades a phalanx of conservative Protestants—Congregationalist Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786–1858) at Yale, Presbyterians Charles Hodge of Princeton and Henry Boynton Smith of New York, and the German Reformed John W. Nevin—offered competing varieties of Calvinism modified for American use. The antebellum revivalist Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874) became an effective advocate for Christian holiness, or sanctification. The African Methodist Episcopal bishop Daniel Alexander Payne (1811–1893) added themes from slave experience to a solidly conservative Protestantism. Samuel Schmucker (Lutheran), Philip Schaff (German Reformed), and John Ireland (Roman Catholic) were among those who gave immigrant communities fresh theological confidence. In Hartford, Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) combined his reading of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his Congregational heritage to create America's most distinctive Romantic theology, most notably in Christian Nurture (1847). Out of Boston, Mary Baker Eddy, healed spontaneously of a serious injury in 1866, founded Christian Science as a way of overcoming the “false claims” of sickness and sin by appropriate deployment of mind and spirit. In Cincinnati, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise became the architect of Reform Judaism. And hymn writers like Lowell Mason, Fanny Crosby, and the anonymous authors of African‐American spirituals provided even more effective forms of religious language for everyday life. During the first half of the nineteenth century, in short, before the Civil War and the rise of industry dramatically shifted the nation's intellectual center of gravity, religious ideas played a central role in stabilizing American society.

The great exception to the obvious importance of religion during the nineteenth century was the economy. In its early decades, evangelical Protestant reformers like Lyman Beecher (1775–1863) tried to subject some aspects of economic life to systematic Christian critique. The same would be attempted by other evangelicals like Frances Willard (of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union), the Catholic editor Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), and Social Gospel advocates like Walter Rauschenbusch. But such attempts were far less successful than religious efforts to shape family, personal, ecclesiastical, and cultural values.

Twentieth‐Century Diffusion.

In the twentieth century, religion figured somewhat less prominently in the national consciousness, but more for reasons concerning the kind of religion present than because of a decline in religious interest. As the century began, a major division in the historically dominant Protestant churches had the indirect effect of distancing cultural elites from religion. This division, known as the fundamentalist‐modernist controversy, pitted aggressive defenders of contemporary intellectual fashion (the modernists who at their worst promoted little more than optimistic progressivism lightly coated with soothing God‐talk) against militant fundamentalist defenders of nineteenth‐century Christian revivalism (who at their worst abandoned public life, higher education, and social reform for an anti‐intellectual and reactionary biblical literalism). In consequence, religion became passé or an embarrassment in learned circles. As a result, prejudice against the academic study of religion was greater in the United States than in Europe, even though the rate of religious participation remained much higher in the United States.

An additional factor obscuring the visibility of religion in the twentieth‐century America is the wide diffusion of religious practice beyond the standard categories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, including new religions and religions new to the United States. According to the 1996 edition of the Encyclopedia of American Religion, at least 2,150 organized religious groups existed in the United States in the 1990s, with many new variations of traditional European faiths joined by indigenous products as well as those related in some way to religions in other parts of the world. The very names of the groups suggest their bewildering multiplicity: Perfect Liberty Kyodon, New Enlightened Inspired Living, Nudist Christian Church of the Blessed Virgin Jesus, Kanzeonji Non‐Sectarian Buddhist Temple, Original Hebrew Israelite Nation, Monastery of the Seven Rays.

By the end of the twentieth century two historic monotheistic faiths—Judaism and Islam—also enjoyed a significant presence in North America. Judaism had come to flourish in many ways, especially as an object of vigorous study in yeshivot, Jewish universities, and many secular campuses. All the major expressions of Jewish ethnic and religious life (each with several subgroups) had assumed a heightened visibility: Reform, which now allowed for women rabbis; Conservative, which balanced modernity with Judaic tradition; and Orthodox, which maintained the study of the Talmud and the culture of the shtetl. American Jews also experienced mounting worry over intermarriage and cultural assimilation along with internal division over the kinds and degree of support to offer the state of Israel, including the claim of Israel's Orthodox rabbinate to exercise sole authority to determine “who is a Jew.” Islam, though newer to America, grew very rapidly after the 1960s with large‐scale immigration from Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, and Turkey joining the long‐established smaller communities of Lebanese, Syrian, and various Arab groups. Most of the perhaps three million Muslims in the United States in the mid‐1990s were of the more liberal Sunni branch. The African‐American Nation of Islam was a small but visible group that under Wallace D. Muhammad, son of Elijah Muhammad, found increasing acceptance in the worldwide Muslim community.

Alongside the rapid expansion of religions new to the United States, considerable power still attended the traditional faiths. The evangelist Billy Graham, for instance, from the later 1940s through the 1990s, preached his evangelical Protestant message to more people, personally and by electronic means, than any other individual in the two millennia of Christian history. Chicago's Roman Catholic Joseph Cardinal Bernardin (1928–1996) was at his death one of America's most widely respected persons. The flourishing of Pentecostalism and charismatic versions of Christian faith—with stress on healing, special empowerment by the Holy Spirit, and affective forms of worship—not only produced a host of new denominations, but also renewed traditional Protestant bodies as well as segments of the Catholic church.

Beginning in the early 1970s, religion reemerged as a force in American politics to a degree that had not been true since the time when such religiously charged issues as slavery, temperance, and the World War I crusade to make the world safe for democracy had loomed large in public life. Now the resonant issues were abortion, prayer in the public schools, and connections between private morality and public life.

End‐Time Belief in American Religion.

The perennial American fascination with eschatology (religiously infused theories about the end of the world) offered another indication of continuing religious ferment. In the mid‐eighteenth century, Protestant evangelists had discerned the dawn of the millennium in the spread of revival. Revolutionary‐Era patriots felt that American independence might inaugurate a divinely inspired Golden Age of freedom for all humanity. William Miller's Bible‐based prediction of the world's end in 1843 (later postponed to 1844) was only the most widely publicized of many apocalyptic visions that enraptured millions of Americans during the nineteenth century. Miller's near contemporary Joseph Smith left a broader legacy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints (or Mormons), another movement inspired in part by relevations concerning the fulfillment of ancient scripture and the end of time. In the twentieth century Mormonism became a major missionary force, with about two‐thirds of the denomination's fifteen million adherents in the 1990s located overseas. Mormons emerged as leaders in the politics of several western states, in education with Brigham Young University and a host of other institutions, and in some high‐tech industries. Mormon concerns for family life, preference for the King James version of the Bible, and defense of traditional morality drew them closer to conservative Protestants, even as their loyalty to the distinctive teachings of Smith's Book of Mormon kept them separate.

Such currents again ran strong at the end of the twentieth century, now with a panoply of nontraditional sources like horoscopes augmenting more traditionally religious means of foretelling the future. Eschatological interest often percolated beyond the attention of the national media as with The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), a book by campus evangelist Hal Lindsey, who applied biblical prophecy to current events. With perhaps thirty million copies in circulation, it was the best‐selling American nonfiction book of the 1970s. But eschatology could also leap boldly into public consciousness, as during the lengthy and tragic siege at Waco, Texas, in 1993. The struggle that pitted David Koresh (1959–1993) and his Branch Davidians against the U.S. government occurred in part because Koresh's end‐time beliefs both nerved his followers and confused government agencies. An initial clash in February 1993 left four federal agents and six Davidians dead. Two months later, on 19 April, some eighty Davidians died when fire enveloped their compound as federal agents moved in. The mass suicide in San Diego, California, of thirty‐nine members of the Heaven's Gate sect in 1997 also involved apocalyptic beliefs. With fatal consequences, the leader of the movement, Marshall Herff Applewhite amalgamated New Age, Christian, and astrological elements to convince his followers that the Hale‐Bopp Comet was a sign that their destinies lay in another realm.

Comparisons, Regions, Practices.

While a broad national survey reveals much about religion in American history, studies of individual regions, as well as comparisons with other nations, are illuminating as well. It is revealing, for example, to speculate on why church‐going in Canada until about 1960 was more common than in the United States, but after 1970 became much less widely practiced. (While reported rates of church attendance in the United States remained about 40–45 percent per week from the 1950s through the 1990s, the rate in Canada declined from about 65 percent to 25 percent in the same period.) Whereas in Canada modern media, a rising standard of living, and the commodification of culture appeared to have displaced traditional religious practice, in the United States these same phenomena of modern life seemingly were incorporated into traditional religion.

Regional variation is an important part of the story as well. For most matters of religious belief and practice, geography has always been a factor. Thus, the American West—without a history of church‐state establishment but with a pluralism of denominations, ethnic groups, and economic patterns from the start of European settlement—is now more typical of religion in America generally than other regions, even though New England, the Mid‐Atlantic, the South, and even the Middle West enjoy fuller traditions of religious scholarship. Geography matters because history matters—whether in the South with its preponderant affiliation of conservative and evangelical forms of Protestantism; the regions with intensive concentrations of Roman Catholics (urban New England, the Upper Midwest, and the Southwest); Mormon Utah and environs; or the concentration of Asian religions and nontraditional spirituality on the Pacific coast.

Whether defined as a structured response to divine revelation or as the rituals, values, and practices that embody a community's orientation to reality more generally, religion has always loomed large in American history. And religious stories, whether one is considering broad national characteristics or the particularities of specific places, enrich the American story. It is well to remember, however, that religion makes a difference in large‐scale American narratives only because the practices of religion have been a part of ordinary daily life—prayer; ritual; sermons; sacred songs and hymns; a broad range of responses to divine revelation; a mighty river of religious publications, including the Bible and other sacred books; and a cornucopia of sanctified material objects from statues and garments to buildings and broadcasts.

Although religious connections with politics, commerce, and entertainment have sometimes been obscured, U.S. history can never be fathomed fully without understanding the rich substratum created by the presence and creative multiplication of religious practices and beliefs.
See also African American Religion; Anti‐Catholic Movement; Fundamentalist Movement; Gospel Music, African American; Indian History and Culture; Lutheranism; Methodism; Millennialism and Apocalypticism; Missionary Movement; New Age Movements; Pacifism; Peace Movements; Puritanism; Seventh‐day Adventism; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Slavery: Slave Families, Communities, and Culture; Temperance and Prohibition; Voluntarism; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Sydney A. Ahlstrom , A Religious History of the American People, 1972.
George M. Marsden , Fundamentalism and American Culture, 1870–1925, 1980.
Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, 3 vols., 1988.
Daniel G. Reid et al., eds., Dictionary of Christianity in America, 1990.
Catherine L. Albanese , America: Religions and Religion, 2d ed., 1992.
Mark A. Noll , A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, 1992.
Susan Hill Lindley , “You Have Stept Out of Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America, 1996.
Colleen McDannell , Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, 1996.
Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds., African‐American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture, 1997.
Jonathan Sarna, ed., The American Jewish Experience, 2d ed., 1997.
Thomas A. Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History, 1997.
Mark A. Noll , America's God, 2002.

Mark A. Noll