Religious denominationalism—the peaceful co-existence of multiple churches within one community or nation—was nothing new when it became a distinguishing feature of the new Republic. Denominationalism had existed since the very beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, when the intoxicating concept of the priesthood of all believers provided many a sixteenth-century religious reformer with the empowering conviction that he and his adherents, whether large or small in number, could create the "true" Christian church. No society could survive for very long under these circumstances without an eventual agreement that "true" churches might exist side by side. What made denominationalism distinctive in the new Republic was the context of unprecedented religious freedom and competition in which it flourished.
In 1689, the English Parliament's Act of Toleration officially introduced to the nation and empire the concept of a denominationalized Christianity regulated by a tax-supported (established) church. By this time, the transition to a liberal religious order was already apparent in the British American colonies where toleration had been written into colonial compacts in Rhode Island and Maryland in the 1630s, West Jersey in the 1670s, and Pennsylvania and East Jersey in the early 1680s.
The Church of England (Anglican) consequently expended considerable energy and resources to compete with its offshoots in America, creating a distinctive but European-influenced denominational system. At first it struggled mainly against New England Congregationalists and mid-Atlantic Society of Friends (Quakers), but Presbyterians and the Regular (Calvinist) Baptists were rising in the colonial mix, as well as Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, and German Reformed, and smaller groups like the Moravian Brethren, Roman Catholics, and Sephardic Jews. Nevertheless, the Anglican Church succeeded in establishing tax-supported parishes throughout the southern colonies and in the lower counties of New York. It also initiated a building renaissance that transformed the landscape of British America. By the late 1730s, on the eve of the first Great Awakening, most Americans paid taxes to an established church (the Congregational still in New England as well as the Anglican), just as the crown's subjects did in Britain. Even in Pennsylvania, whose policy of toleration was celebrated by enlightened philosophes, Quakers, dominated the provincial government until the French and Indian War (1754–1760). Most churches still looked to Europe for models of organization and leadership.
Even the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s—embodying the first rise of evangelical revivalism in America and increasing the scope of religious choice—was still promoted largely by Calvinists migrating from Europe.
The American Revolution transformed denominationalism, both conceptually and practically. For one thing, independence as good as destroyed the idea of a tax-supported church co-existing with other churches. For another, the Revolution initiated the conversion of a largely European model of denominationalism into an American one. Twentieth-century religious historians had widely diverging takes on how this occurred.
Writing in the 1920s, H. Richard Niebuhr was contemptuous of the tendency of American Protestants to reflect social mores (which he defined as often racially biased and class-based, both in his time and in the past) rather than enduring Christian values. By contrast, Sidney E. Mead described "the denomination" as unique to the United States and unprecedented in Christendom. His six characteristics of American denominationalism remain pertinent: (1) a sectarianism heedless of history and tradition, (2) the church understood as voluntary association, (3) an emphasis on missionary enterprise, (4) tactical dependence on revivalism, (5) the flight from reason in religious practice, and (6) competition for membership. In yet another contrast, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, in his magisterial survey, A Religious History of the American People (1972), emphasized the persistence of European influence on American religion, but far-flung across a vast American continent.
Denominationalism as religious history has fallen out of fashion with American scholars. Yet the continuous dividing and subdividing of religions into competing groups before and after the Revolution and, significantly, the rejection of toleration in favor of the bolder concept of religious freedom, have by no means been exhausted as singularly American subjects. And institutional issues, particularly state-church relations and the changing internal structure of churches, are critical to understanding religious expansion in the era of nation building.
To take just two cases: the Baptists, both the Regular (Calvinist) and the older but smaller Free Will varieties, benefited from the popularity of the Great Awakening, partly because of the ease with which Baptist churches could be organized by traveling preachers, and preachers themselves could be raised up by churches. Additionally, this rising denomination embraced the powerful new definition of religious freedom as a natural right. Combining forces with freethinking politicians in Virginia, John Leland (1754–1841) and co-religionists aggressively pursued the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, or of any other form of tax support for churches. Their victory was codified in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786. Isaac Backus (1724–1806) was less successful in New England, where a form of church taxation remained in place until 1833 in Massachusetts. But in the meanwhile, Baptist congregations and membership steadily proliferated throughout the disestablished South and the West.
And then there were the Methodists. Multiple variables account for the perfectionist and anti-Calvinist evangelical movement of John Wesley (1703–1791) and its unexpected triumph on the American continent. But the Methodists' success derived in part from their rapid and pragmatic organization into the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784, just in time to compete with the newly formed Protestant Episcopal Church. Ironically, despite their reputation for empowering women, working men, and slaves (much like the Baptists), the Methodist ministerial hierarchy (unlike the Baptist) was among the most autocratic in the country. Bishop Francis Asbury (1745–1816) controlled many aspects of Methodist preachers' lives. Yet this control permitted the bishop to create an expansive organization capable of sending itinerants into any part of the American states at virtually a moment's notice. Methodist membership throughout the nation, but especially in the South and West, soared after 1800. The Revolution provided opportunities that made the religious order of the colonies look restricted and strongly derivative of European models by comparison.
Three major late-twentieth-century interpretations will likely shape twenty-first-century understandings of the character of American denominationalism after 1800. Nathan O. Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity (1989) revives an older historiographical concern with what he argues is the uniquely democratic ethos of American religion. Christine Leigh Heyrman's Southern Cross (1997) attributes the rising dominance of evangelicalism in the South to the eager adoption of the South's culture of male mastery by Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian ministers. Mark A. Noll's America's God (2002) traces the intellectual and social evolution of mainstream American theology from the Great Awakening to the Civil War, arguing that American religious culture forged the core of American national identity over the same time.
For these and many other reasons, Americans evinced greater religious faith in the years following disestablishment of churches rather than less. It was not necessarily because they agreed with each other. While churches made efforts to cooperate in camp meetings, in urban Bible and other tract societies, and in missionary work (long-standing among Native Americans), the high tide of the Second Great Awakening was marked by sometimes virulent denominational and theological conflict, especially between the Methodists and the Calvinist churches. Earlier and new splinter movements also thrived, among them the Shakers, Universalists, and Swedenborgians; the Unitarians, Christians, and Disciples of Christ; and German Pietist and Methodist breakaway sects. In the 1840s would come the Millerites and Seventh-day Adventists, and ultimately outpacing them all, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).
Disputes were also common between blacks and whites in the larger churches, prompting preachers like Richard Allen to lead black membership into separate denominations, especially the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1822). African Baptist churches were legion, especially in the South. Denominational splinterings also affected, and were affected by, gender relations. An unusually large number of women became prophets and preachers in the Second Great Awakening, and an unusually large number of these first burst forth in small movements like the Free Will Baptists; the Christians; the Primitive Methodists; and later, the Millerites. How institutionalization changed gender roles is one of many understudied issues relating to American women and their churches.
Despite this diversity, the two churches that had accepted religious freedom from the start—the Methodists and the Baptists—replicated themselves spectacularly, becoming the overwhelming majority in much of the country as early as 1830. Among the older churches, Congregationalists survived in New England; the Presbyterians in northern New Jersey, western Pennsylvania, and other parts of the Appalachian West; and the Roman Catholics in Louisiana. Episcopalians and Quakers likewise remained concentrated in small congregations in various parts of the country. But while American denominationalism encompassed a tremendous variety of groups practicing an extraordinary variety of faiths, it was also influenced by the increasingly dominant evangelical Methodists and Baptists in all parts of the country.
In conclusion, the denominational order in the new Republic was shaped by the old-fashioned issues of disestablishment, religious competition, and Americans' rising acceptance of freedom of conscience unimpeded by government regulation. The rejection of the concept of toleration in favor of religious freedom, along with the sensitivity to church and state relations it demanded and the cultural, particularly evangelical, energies it unleashed, remains among the most important transformations in American history.
See also African Americans: African American Religion; Anglicans and Episcopalians; Baptists; Congregationalists; Disciples of Christ; Disestablishment; Methodists; Missionary and Bible Tract Societies; Moravians; Presbyterians; Professions: Clergy; Quakers; Religion: Overview; Revivals and Revivalism; Shakers.
Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972.
Andrews, Dee E. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Gaustad, Edwin Scott, and Philip L. Barlow. New Historical Atlas of Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, Conn.: University Press, 1989.
Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Lambert, Frank. The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Mead, Sidney E. The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Mullin, Robert Bruce, and Russell E. Richey, eds. Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Holt, 1929.
Noll, Mark A. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Smith, Timothy L. "Congregation, State and Denomination: the Forming of the American Religious Structure." William and Mary Quarterly 25, 3rd ser. (1968): 155-76.
Dee E. Andrews