United States of America, Christianity in

United States of America, Christianity in. The colonial settlement of North America produced a pattern of religious diversity reflecting the fragmented state of European Christianity. In 1565 on the Florida peninsula the Spanish founded St Augustine, the oldest Christian settlement on what would become the United States. Later they established other RC missions in the SW part of the continent. RC missionaries also accompanied French fur-traders into the upper regions of North America. English land companies chartered by the Crown organized the first successful settlements at Jamestown (1603) in Virginia and at Plymouth (1620) and Massachusetts Bay (1630) in New England. In Virginia the C of E was legally established; in New England Puritanism was initially the official religion. Maryland was founded in 1634 by a RC nobleman; Roger Williams organized Rhode Island for dissenters. William Penn, a Quaker, received a charter for Pennsylvania (1681), which became a haven for the oppressed. The Dutch and Swedish brought the Dutch Reformed and Lutheran Churches to New Netherland (1626) and New Sweden (1638). By the end of the 17th cent. regional patterns were evident. The C of E was dominant in the southern English colonies; in Puritan New England Reformed ideas, as modified by covenant theology, held sway; in the middle colonies Presbyterians, Quakers, RCs, Lutherans, Jews, and Baptists lived side by side. In the Spanish and French regions of North America, RCism remained the established Church.

The most significant event of the 18th cent. was the Great Awakening, a series of religious revivals originating in isolated Dutch Reformed, Congregational, and Presbyterian congregations in the 1720s and 1730s. In the early 1740s a surge of religious activity swept through the English colonies. The ‘New Light Movement’, arising out of the Great Awakening, featured the need for a ‘new birth’, a describable spiritual experience of transforming grace. This provided grounds for an assault upon the traditional authority of the clergy and the integrity of the parish system by supporting lay exhorters and itinerant preachers. It also gave increased religious opportunities to women and new impetus to Christianize Blacks and Indians.

After the American Revolution (1776–83), the Anglicans secured their first American bishop with the consecration in 1784 of Samuel Seabury and the Protestant Episcopal Church became an autonomous organization, no longer dependent on the C of E. The Methodists decisively broke with Anglicanism when J. Wesley appointed a Superintendent for America in 1784. In the same year the RCs ceased to be dependent on the Vicars Apostolic in England; in 1790 they acquired a bishop of their own when John Carroll was consecrated. The Constitution, with its Bill of Rights (1791), guaranteed religious liberty and the First Amendment proscribed religious establishments, thus laying the foundation of the system of religious pluralism.

In the early 19th cent. the evangelical Churches experienced a new surge of revivalism at the time when thousands of migrants were leaving the seaboard areas for the transappalachian regions. The Second Great Awakening (1800–35) affected the whole republic. After 1820 an increasing stream of immigrants from N. and W. Europe added to the religious diversity. The arrival of nearly a million Irish, most fervently RC, before 1860 transformed the RC Church which by then was the largest single denomination. There were also new religious movements. Some were imported, such as the Harmonists. More were indigenous, often centred on charismatic leaders who claimed special revelations and chose unconventional patterns of life. They included the Shakers, the Oneida Community, the ‘Christians’ (later Disciples of Christ) and the Mormons.

The question of racial slavery divided American Christians. Some argued for freeing the slaves, others that slavery had biblical sanction and was a means to Christianization. In the North, free Blacks organized independent Black Churches. By the time of the Civil War (1861–5) Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists had split over the issue. The intellectual revolution symbolized by the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) was reflected in theological conflict. Conservative Protestants, later identified as Fundamentalists, rejected the new science in the name of tradition and became embroiled in ecclesiastical controversies. Protestant Liberalism, also known as the ‘New Theology’ or Progressive Orthodoxy, attempted a reconciliation of science and tradition in support of an optimistic perspective on human nature and progress, emphasizing the immanence of God. At the same time, the expanding urban environment, with its stresses and uncertainties, fostered the growth of new religious movements. These included Christian Science, Seventh-day Adventism, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Holiness and Pentecostal Churches arose in both urban and rural locations in response to a perceived loss of spiritual vitality.

In the early 20th cent. the religious and cultural hegemony exercised by Protestantism in the 19th cent. was eroded. This was partly due to the rapid expansion of the RC, Greek and Russian Orthodox, Jewish and sectarian communities, and to the theological divisions within Protestantism, especially the Modernist-Fundamentalist struggle. A growing effort to overcome divisions among Protestant denominations led to the formation by liberal Protestants of the Federal Council of Churches in 1908; the American Council of Christian Churches (1941) and the National Association of Evangelicals (1942) were formed as alternative federations of conservative Protestant Churches. Ecclesiastical mergers among Presbyterians, Methodists, and Lutherans took place around the middle of the 20th cent. After the Second World War (1939–45) large numbers of immigrants from E. Europe and the Middle East brought members of Orthodox Churches other than the Greek and Russian who had come earlier.

The beginning of the second half of the 20th cent. was one of prosperity for organized religion. The RC Church became a powerful force in American life, and in 1960 John Kennedy (a RC) was elected President. Conservative Evangelicalism experienced a resurgence, and Billy Graham rose to fame by his effective use of the media. In the 1960s there was a general shift towards a more secular life-style. The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) brought changes and upheavals in the RC Church. Most Protestant Churches suffered loss of membership, though the more conservative ones (notably the Southern Baptists) continued to grow, as did the sectarian communities. Religious issues have come to play a prominent part in politics, with the Religious Right supporting prayer and Bible reading in State schools, as well as opposing abortion, equal rights for women and homosexuals, and the teaching of evolution. Television preachers have disseminated these ideas (see BROADCASTING, RELIGIOUS). Feminist and Liberation theology have cut across denominational lines. Christianity no longer exercises the hegemony in American life that it did until the middle of the 20th cent.