Christianity

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CHRISTIANITY

CHRISTIANITY, in its many forms, has been the dominant religion of Europeans and their descendants in North America ever since Columbus. It proved as adaptable to the New World as it had been to the Old, while taking on several new characteristics. The ambiguous and endlessly debated meaning of the Christian Gospels permitted diverse American groups to interpret their conduct and beliefs as Christian: from warriors to pacifists, abolitionists to slave owners, polygamists to ascetics, and from those who saw personal wealth as a sign of godliness to those who understood Christianity to mean the repudiation or radical sharing of wealth.

Colonial Era

The exploration of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries coincided with the Reformation and Europe's religious wars, intensifying and embittering the international contest for possession of these new territories. Spanish, Portuguese, and French settlers were overwhelmingly Catholic. English, Dutch, Swedish, and German settlers were predominantly Protestant. Each group, to the extent that it tried to convert the American Indians, argued the merits of its own brand of Christianity, but few Indians, witnessing the conquerors' behavior, could have been impressed with Jesus's teaching about the blessedness of peacemakers.

Puritans created the British New England colonies in the early 1600s. They believed that the (Anglican) Church of England, despite Henry VIII's separation from Rome, had not been fully reformed or purified of its former Catholic elements. The religious compromises on which Anglicanism was based (the Thirty-nine Articles) offended them because they looked on Catholicism as demonic. The founders of Plymouth Plantation (the "Pilgrim Fathers" of 1620) were separatists, who believed they should separate themselves completely from the Anglicans. The larger group of Massachusetts Bay colonists, ten years later, remained nominally attached to the Anglican Church and regarded their mission as an attempt to establish an ideal Christian commonwealth that would provide an inspiring example to the coreligionists back in England. Neither group had foreseen the way in which American conditions would force adaptations, especially after the first generation, nor had they anticipated that the English civil wars and the Commonwealth that followed (1640–1660) would impose different imperatives on Puritans still in England than on those who had crossed the ocean. We are well informed about the New England Puritans and their reaction to seventeenth-century events because of their exceptional literacy and loquacity. From the works of Increase Mather (1639–1723) and his son Cotton (1663–1728), for example, we can reconstruct a worldview in which every storm, high tide, deformed fetus, or mild winter was a sign of God's "special providence." Theirs was, besides, a world in which devils abounded and witchcraft (notoriously at the Salem witch trials, 1692) seemed to present a real threat to the community.

More southerly colonies, Virginia and the Carolinas, were commercial tobacco ventures whose far less energetic religious life was supervised by the established Church of England. Maryland began as a Catholic commercial venture but its proprietors reverted to Anglicanism in the bitterly anti-Catholic environment of the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689) in the late seventeenth century. The middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, by contrast, were more ethnically and religiously diverse almost from the beginning, including Dutch Calvinists, German Lutherans and Moravians, Swedish Baptists, and English Quakers.

All these colonies, along with New England, were subjected to periodic surges of revival enthusiasm that are collectively remembered as the Great Awakening. The Awakening's exemplary figure was the spellbinding English preacher George Whitefield (1714–1770), who brought an unprecedented drama to American pulpits in the 1740s and 1750s and shocked some divines by preaching outdoors. The theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) of Northampton, Massachusetts, welcomed the Awakening and tried to square Calvinist orthodoxy with the scientific and cognitive revolutions of Newton and the Enlightenment.

Christianity in the Revolution and Early Republic

By the time of the Revolution (1775–1788), growing numbers of colonists had joined radical Reformation sects, notably the Quakers and Baptists, belonged to ethnically distinct denominations like the Mennonites, or were involved in intradenominational schisms springing from Great Awakening controversies over itinerant preaching and the need for an inspired rather than a learned clergy. The U.S. Constitution's First Amendment specified that there was to be no federally established church and no federal restriction on the free exercise of religion. Some New England states retained established Christian churches after the Revolution—Congregationalism in Massachusetts, for example—but by 1833 all had been severed from the government.

This political separation, however, did not imply any lessening of Christian zeal. To the contrary, the early republic witnessed another immense upsurge of Christian energy and evangelical fervor, with Baptists and Methodists adapting most quickly to a new emotional style, which they carried to the rapidly expanding settlement frontier. Spellbinding preachers like Francis Asbury (1745–1816) and Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) helped inspire the revivals of the "Second Great Awakening" (see Awakening, Second), and linked citizens' conversions to a range of social reforms, including temperance, sabbatarianism, and (most controversially) the abolition of slavery. Radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) denounced the Constitution as an un-Christian pact with the devil because it provided for the perpetuation of slavery. John Brown (1800–1859), who tried to stimulate a slave uprising with his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, saw himself as a biblical avenger. He anticipated, rightly, that his sacrificial death, like Jesus's crucifixion, would lead to the triumph of the anti-slavery cause. Christian abolitionists who had prudently declined to join the rising, like Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), claimed him as a martyr. Beecher's sister Harriet published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, a novel saturated with the sentimental conventions of American Victorian Protestantism; it popularized the idea that abolition was a Christian imperative.

In the South, meanwhile, slaves had adapted African elements to Gospel teachings and developed their own syncretic style of Christianity, well adapted to the emotional idioms of the Second Awakening. Dissatisfied with attending their masters' churches, they enjoyed emotional "ring shout" meetings in remote brush arbors, or met for whispered prayers and preaching in the slave quarters. Slave owners too thought of themselves as justified in their Christianity. Well armed with quotations to show that the Bible's authors had been slaveholders and that Jesus had never condemned the practice, they saw themselves as the guardians of a Christian way of life under threat from a soulless commercial North. The historian Eugene Genovese has shown that on purely biblical grounds they probably had the stronger argument.

The early republic also witnessed the creation of new Christian sects, including the Assemblies of God, the Shakers, the Oneida Perfectionists, and the Mormons. Those with distinctive sexual practices (Shaker celibacy, Oneida "complex marriage," and Mormon polygamy) were vulnerable to persecution by intolerant neighbors who linked the idea of a "Protestant America" to a code of monogamy. The Mormons, the most thriving of all these groups, were founded by an upstate New York farm boy, Joseph Smith (1805–1844), who received a set of golden tablets from an angel. He translated them into the Book of Mormon (1830), which stands beside the Bible as scripture for Mormons, and describes the way in which Jesus conducted a mission in America after his earthly sojourn in the Holy Land. Recurrent persecution, culminating in the assassination of Smith in 1844, led the Mormons under their new leader, Brigham Young (1801–1877), to migrate far beyond the line of settlement to the Great Salt Lake, Utah, in 1846, where their experiments in polygamy persisted until 1890. Polygamy had the virtue of ensuring that the surplus of Mormon women would all have husbands. Mormonism was one of many nineteenth-and twentieth-century American churches in which membership (though not leadership) was disproportionately female.

The Mormon migration was just one small part of a much larger westward expansion of the United States in the early and mid–nineteenth century, much of which was accompanied by the rhetoric of manifest destiny, according to which God had reserved the whole continent for the Americans. No one felt the sting of manifest destiny more sharply than the Indians. Ever since the colonial era missionaries had struggled to convert them to Christianity and to the Euro-American way of life. These missions were sometimes highly successful, as for example the Baptist mission to the Cherokees led by Evan Jones, which created a written version of their language in the early nineteenth century that facilitated translation of the Bible. The Georgia gold rush of 1829 showed, however, that ambitious settlers and prospectors would not be deterred from overrunning Indians' land merely because they were Christian Indians; their forcible removal along the Trail of Tears was one of many disgraceful episodes in white-Indian relations. Southwestern and Plains Indians, meanwhile, often incorporated Christian elements into their religious systems. The New Mexican Pueblo peoples, for example, under Spanish domination until 1848, adapted the Catholic cult of the saints to their traditional pantheon; later the Peyote Way, which spread through the Southwest and Midwest, incorporated evangelical Protestant elements.

Further enriching the American Christian landscape, a large Catholic immigration from Ireland, especially after the famine of 1846–1849, tested the limits of older citizens' religious tolerance. It challenged the validity of the widely held concept of a Protestant America that the earlier tiny Catholic minority had scarcely disturbed. A flourishing polemical literature after 1830 argued that Catholics, owing allegiance to a foreign monarch, the pope, could not be proper American citizens—the idea was embodied in the policies of the Know-Nothing political party in the 1850s. Periodic religious riots in the 1830–1860 era and the coolness of civil authorities encouraged the Catholic newcomers to keep Protestants at arm's length. They set about building their own institutions, not just churches but also a separate system of schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages, and charities, a work that continued far into the twentieth century. The acquisition of Louisiana in 1804, and the acquisition of the vast Southwest after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), also swelled the U.S. Catholic population.

Soldiers on both sides in the Civil War (1861–1865) went into battle confident that they were doing the will of a Christian God. President Lincoln, and many Union clergy, saw their side's ultimate victory as a sign of divine favor, explaining their heavy losses in the fighting according to the idea that God had scourged them for the sin of tolerating slavery for so long. The defeated Confederates, on the other hand, nourished their cult of the "lost cause" after the war by reminding each other that Jesus's mission on earth had ended in failure and a humiliating death, something similar to their own plight. The slaves, freed first by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and then by the Fifteenth Amendment (1865), treated President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) as the Great Liberator and compared him to Moses, leading the Children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt.

Christianity and Industrial Society

Rapid industrialization in the later nineteenth century prompted a searching reevaluation of conventional theological ethics. Fluctuations in the business cycle, leading to periodic surges of urban unemployment, made nonsense of the old rural idea that God dependably rewards sobriety and hard work with prosperity. The theologians Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), George Herron (1862–1925), and Washington Gladden (1836–1918) created the social gospel, adapting Christianity to urban industrial life and emphasizing the community's collective responsibility toward its weakest members. Vast numbers of "new immigrants"—Catholics from Poland, Italy, and the Slavic lands; Orthodox Christians from Russia and Greece; and Jews from the Austrian and Russian empires—continued to expand America's religious diversity. They established their own churches and received help from religiously inspired Protestant groups such as the Salvation Army and the settlement house movement.

Meanwhile, Christianity faced an unanticipated intellectual challenge, much of which had been generated from within. Rapid advances in historical-critical study of the Bible and of comparative religion, and the spread of evolutionary biology after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), forced theologians to ask whether the Genesis creation story and other biblical accounts were literally true. These issues led to a fracture in American Protestantism that persisted through the twentieth century, between liberal Protestants who adapted their religious ideas to the new intellectual orthodoxy and fundamentalists who conscientiously refused to do so. In the fundamentalists' view, strongly represented at Princeton Theological Seminary and later popularized by the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), the Bible, as God's inspired word, could not be fallible. Anyone who rejected the Genesis story while keeping faith in the Gospels was, they pointed out, making himself rather than the Bible the ultimate judge.

Observers were surprised to note that in the twentieth century American church membership and church attendance rates remained high, indeed increased, at a time when they were declining throughout the rest of the industrialized world. Various theories, all plausible, were advanced to account for this phenomenon: that Americans, being more mobile than Europeans, needed a ready-made community center in each new location, especially as vast and otherwise anonymous suburbs proliferated; that church membership was a permissible way for immigrants and their descendants to retain an element of their families' former identity while assimilating in all other respects to American life; even, in the 1940s and 1950s, that the threat of atomic warfare had led to a collective "failure of nerve" and a retreat into supernaturalism. Twentieth-century Christian churches certainly did double as community centers, around which youth clubs, study classes, therapeutic activities, "singles' groups," and sports teams were organized. Members certainly could have nonreligious motives for attendance, but abundant historical and sociological evidence suggests that they had religious motives too.

Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century

Christianity remained a dynamic social force, around which intense political controversies swirled. In 1925 the Scopes Trial tested whether fundamentalists could keep evolution from being taught in schools. A high-school biology teacher was convicted of violating a Tennessee state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution, but the public-relations fallout of the case favored evolutionists rather than creationists. In the same year the Supreme Court ruled (in Pierce v. Society of Sisters) that Catholic and other religious private schools were protected under the Constitution; the legislature of Oregon (then with influential anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan members) was ruled to have exceeded its authority in requiring all children in the state to attend public schools.

In 1928 a Catholic, Al Smith (1873–1944) of New York, ran as the Democratic candidate for president in a religiously superheated campaign. Southern whites were usually a dependable Democratic block vote, but their "Bible Belt" prejudice against Catholics led them to campaign against him. This defeat was not offset until a second Catholic candidate, John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), was elected in 1960, keeping enough southern white votes to ensure a wafer-thin plurality. After this election, and especially after the popular Kennedy's 1963 assassination, which was treated by parts of the nation as martyrdom, American anti-Catholicism declined rapidly. Kennedy had declined to advocate the federal funding of parochial schools and had refused to criticize the Supreme Court when it found, in a series of cases from 1962 and 1963, that prayer and Bible-reading in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

While the Supreme Court appeared to be distancing Christianity from politics, the civil rights movement was bringing them together. A black Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), led the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) and became the preeminent civil rights leader of the 1950s and 1960s. Ever since emancipation, ministers had played a leadership role in the black community, being, usually, its most highly educated members and the men who acted as liaisons between segregated whites and blacks. King, a spellbinding preacher, perfected a style that blended Christian teachings on love, forgiveness, and reconciliation, Old Testament visions of a heaven on earth, and patriotic American rhetoric, the three being beautifully combined in the peroration of his famous "I have a dream" speech from 1963. Like Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi, to whom he acknowledged a debt, he knew how to work on the consciences of the dominant group by quoting scriptures they took seriously, interpreting them in such a way as to make them realize their failings as Christians. Religious leaders might disagree about exactly how the movement should proceed—King feuded with black Baptists who did not want the churches politicized, and with whites like the eight ministers whose counsel of patience and self-restraint provoked his "Letter from Birmingham Jail"—but historians of the movement now agree that he was able to stake out, and hold, the religious high ground.

Among the theological influences on King was the work of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). Born and raised in a German evangelical family in Missouri, Niebuhr was the preeminent American Protestant theologian of the century. Reacting, like many clergy, against the superpatriotic fervor of the First World War years (in which Christian ministers often led the way in bloodcurdling denunciation of the "Huns"), he became in the 1920s an advocate of Christian pacifism. During the 1930s, however, against a background of rising totalitarianism in Europe, he abandoned this position on grounds of its utopianism and naiveté, and bore witness to a maturing grasp of Christian ethics in his masterpiece, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). His influential journal Christianity and Crisis, begun in 1941, voiced the ideas of Christians who believed war against Hitler was religiously justified. He became, in the 1940s and 1950s, influential among statesmen, policy makers, and foreign policy "realists," some of whom detached his ethical insights from their Christian foundations, leading the philosopher Morton White to quip that they were "atheists for Niebuhr." Niebuhr had also helped bring to America, from Germany, the theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965), who became a second great theological celebrity in the mid-century decades, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), who worked for a time in the 1930s at Union Seminary, New York, but returned before the war and was later executed for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

To match these Protestant theological celebrities—of whom Niebuhr's brother Richard (1894–1962) was a fourth—the Catholic Church produced its own. The émigré celebrity was the French convert Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), who wrote with brilliant insight on faith and aesthetics, while the homegrown figure was John Courtney Murray (1904–1967), whose essays on religious liberty were embodied in the religious liberty document of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Men like King, the Niebuhr brothers, Maritain, Tillich, and Murray enjoyed almost the same prominence in mid-twentieth-century America that the Mathers had enjoyed in the seventeenth century, Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth, and the Beechers in the nineteenth—another sign of the persistence of Christian energy in America.

Ever since the Scopes Monkey Trial the evangelical Protestant churches had retreated from politics, but they had continued to grow, to organize (taking advantage of broadcasting technology), and to generate exceptionally talented individuals of their own. None was to have more lasting importance than Billy Graham (b. 1918), whose revivals became a press sensation in the late 1940s. Graham eschewed the sectarian squabbling that many evangelists relished. Instead he tried to create an irenic mood among all evangelicals while reaching out to liberal Protestants with an emotional message of Christian love, forgiveness, and Jesus as personal savior. He traveled worldwide, befriended every president from 1950 to 2000, and said, perhaps rightly, that more people had seen him and knew who he was than anybody else in the world.

Another skilled evangelical, the Baptist Jerry Falwell (b. 1933) shared many of Graham's skills but brought them directly into politics in a way Graham had avoided. Falwell, convinced that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the feminist movement, the counterculture, and the changing nature of the American family were signs of decadence and sin, catalyzed the Moral Majority, a pressure group that contributed to the "Reagan Revolution" in the election of 1980. That election was particularly noteworthy as a moment in Christian history not only because of the sudden reappearance of politicized evangelicals but also because the losing candidate, President Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), was himself a self-proclaimed born-again Christian and Baptist Sunday school teacher.

Nearly all America's Christian churches with a liberal inclination participated in a religious protest against nuclear weapons in the 1980s. Nearly all those with a conservative inclination participated in campaigns against legalized abortion. Indeed, as observers noted at the time, both sides in these and other sundering political controversies were strongly represented by Christian advocates. Collectively they demonstrated the extraordinary vitality and diversity of American Christianity into the third millennium.