The early Republic witnessed major changes that forecast religion's exceptional vitality in America well into modern times. By 1830 the religious diversity that typified Britain's colonies in 1776 had developed into a far more expansive spiritual pluralism that became a touchstone of modern American life.
From the 1740s to the Revolution, the highly variegated populations in Britain's mainland colonies exhibited confusing patterns of religious diversity, revival, and indifference. Surviving Indian groups often synthesized new customs as they merged under the impress of disease and constant British territorial expansion. For example, the Catawbas of the Carolinas mixed several different native customs with Christianity learned from missionaries in a culture they sustained largely by living away from British settlements. Slaveholders in Britain's mainland colonies suppressed most African religious customs because they feared religion as a source of slave rebellion. African burial practices survived into the next century, but none of the great national African religious systems themselves—Ashanti or Ibo, for example—resurfaced in British America.
In contrast, European Christian groups thrived in British North America. By 1770 eight Protestant denominations—Congregational, Presbyterian, Church of England, Baptist, Quaker, German Reformed, German Lutheran, and Dutch Reformed—counted between one hundred and seven hundred congregations. Another five—Methodist, Roman Catholic, Moravian, Dunker, and Mennonite—counted between fifteen and one hundred congregations, while Jews clustered in the colonial cities and a variety of sects, such as British Rogerenes and Sandemanians, sustained worship in British America despite very small numbers.
Two-thirds of Revolutionary-era congregations had been formed after 1700, demonstrating how thoroughly eighteenth-century migration from Scotland, Wales, and continental Europe fractured the homogeneity of English Protestantism in British America. The variety of religious expression among Europeans also revealed the weakness of the traditional state church tradition in the colonies. Nine of the thirteen mainland colonies enacted some form of formal church establishment—Congregationalism in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, and the Church of England in New York, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. But religious dissent and diversity spread nonetheless. Varied revivals in the 1740s and 1750s—later homogenized under the label the Great Awakening—threatened established Congregationalists and the Church of England, who saw their authority questioned; another threat came from dissenting Baptists and Presbyterians, who divided over revival methods and theology. Opponents sometimes used coercion against revivalists, usually without success. When Virginia authorities attempted to suppress Baptist preaching in 1771—a sheriff and a Church of England minister caught one Baptist preacher, in the words of one witness, "by the back part of his neck, [and] beat his head against the ground, sometimes up, sometimes down"—public regard for the Church of England fell rather than rose.
Yet most colonists did not belong to any religious congregation, contrary to modern myths about a past more "religious" than the present. Only about 15 to 20 percent of British and other European colonists actually belonged to a congregation or attended services (in the year 2000, roughly 55 percent of adult Americans belonged to a religious congregation), and only the tiniest number of enslaved Africans had been converted to Christianity. This pattern actually paralleled church attendance throughout early modern Europe, where laypeople often did not attend except on the great holidays of Christmas and Easter. Laypeople were not necessarily atheists or anti-religious in either Europe or America. But they held their religious convictions in a very general sense and reacted warily to the pronouncements and power of the state-supported clergy. The variety of European religions in America probably confirmed colonists' spiritual standoffishness. The itinerant Church of England minister Charles Woodmason described the situation in North Carolina in 1767: "by the Variety of Taylors who would pretend to know the best fashion in which Christs Coat is to be worn[,] none will put it on."
The American Revolution dealt organized religion severe setbacks. Although some historians in the 1960s and 1970s argued that controversies over revival religion in the 1740s and 1750s shaped the Revolution and its rhetoric, most historians at the start of the twenty-first century agree that the Revolution focused not on religion but taxes, representation, and politics—themes confirmed throughout the Declaration of Independence. Princeton president and Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence, and some other ministers backed the Revolution vigorously. But many clergymen did not. In 1775 the Presbytery of Philadelphia made it a point to note that it was "well known … that we have not been instrumental in inflaming the minds of the people." Indeed, the Presbytery worried that the conflict with Britain could become a civil war "carried on with a rancour and spirit of revenge much greater than [a war] between independent states."
The Presbyterians were not far wrong. War wreaked havoc with organized religious life in many colonies, if not all. By 1781 membership in Baptist congregations in and around Philadelphia dropped from three thousand to fourteen hundred, and easily more than half of the Church of England congregations closed, tainted because the king headed the church. Pennsylvania Patriots exiled to Virginia some Quakers who espoused pacifism. Both American and British troops sometimes burned and ransacked church buildings, and the tombstones broken off for oven hearths by British troops on Long Island produced death inscriptions baked into the soldiers' bread. Although patriotic army chaplains likened the Revolution to "spiritual warfare," soldiers attacked their ineffectiveness in salving the agonies of death and injury; as one soldier put it, a chaplain was "as destitute of employ … as a person who is dismissed from their people for the most scandalous crimes."
Religion changed dramatically after the Revolution, as did America itself. Part of that change involved a revolution in relations between religion and government. Every colony with a formally established church abandoned the practice or severely altered it. New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina abolished the legal privileges and tax revenues previously given to the Church of England, and while Connecticut and Massachusetts continued to support Congregational churches with tax revenues, they provided exemptions for Baptists, Quakers, Episcopalians (the new name for the Anglicans of the Church of England), and members of "any other Denomination."
Virginia's debate about disestablishment carried national implications. After Virginia disestablished the Church of England, Patrick Henry proposed a "general establishment" for Christianity that authorized Virginia's state government to determine which specific churches and ministers actually qualified and could be supported. George Washington initially supported Henry's bill as a middle ground between the old establishment and none. But Washington changed his mind, fearful that contests over supporting specific groups would "rankle, and perhaps convulse the state." When Henry's bill failed, Virginia passed Thomas Jefferson's bill "for Establishing Religious Freedom," which was guided through the legislature by James Madison in 1786. It prohibited taxation for "any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever" and upheld freedom of worship for all religions, not just Christianity.
The First Amendment to the federal Constitution, ratified in 1791, followed in the wake of successful disestablishments in all but Connecticut and Massachusetts. Rejecting narrow clauses that would have prohibited government support for a specific "religious doctrine" or for a national church, the Congress settled on sixteen words that spoke broadly and clearly to the religion question: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In short, the amendment protected the free exercise of religion, not just Christianity, and it prohibited "an establishment" in broad terms, rather than merely prohibiting a single national church.
If a few Americans, such as Yale president Ezra Stiles (1727–1795), worried that the abolition of a formally sanctioned religion cut America loose from any secure moral and religious foundation, most American religious groups and leaders reversed Stiles's fears. They believed that religion arrived at voluntarily was morally superior to religion guided by government. Indeed, the need for moral virtue in a republic only increased the need for religion, and precisely the kind of religion that now would prosper in America because government no longer determined its shape or directly or subtly formed the ways citizens expressed their faith.
The opening provided by disestablishment in the states and the strictures of the First Amendment against federal involvement in religious matters brought a near orgy of proselytizing that fueled exceptional denominational growth into the 1830s. Between the 1790s and the 1830s, a series of highly emotional revivals, sometimes called the Second Great Awakening, merged with exceptionally astute denominational organizing drives, especially among Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, producing congregational growth and a rising in membership that outstripped even the vigorous population growth in the new Republic. Methodist congregations increased from fifty to three hundred, and Baptist congregations almost doubled from seventeen hundred to nearly three thousand between 1780 and 1820. In all, America's superheated religious denominations constructed more than eight thousand church buildings in the United States in the five decades after the Revolution, and the church membership rate for adults probably increased into the mid-20-percent range by 1830.
Voluntary associations that emerged most prominently from America's rapidly expanding congregations and denominations set models for American civic life. Mission, literary, temperance, education, women's rights, and abolitionist societies, such as the American Bible Society (1816), American Tract Society (1823), American Colonization Society (1816), American Sunday School Union (1824), and American Temperance Society (1826), quickly typified the American reform style. They bespoke the religious foundations of innumerable American reform movements, offered leadership opportunities for women who were denied formal posts, including ordination, within denominations, and engaged every major social issue in nineteenth-century America.
New spiritual expressions and institutions accompanied the expansion of familiar religious groups in the new Republic. Formerly enslaved Africans led by Philadelphia's Richard Allen (1760–1831) opened the Bethel African Methodist Church in 1794, which in 1816 became one of the founding congregations of the new African Methodist Episcopal Church. Together with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and increasing numbers of Baptist congregations formed in the early national period, they constituted the major Christian denominations attracting African Americans up to the Civil War and well beyond. Methodist preachers outstripped businessmen in understanding and mastering the early Republic's local and regional markets and added a visionary enthusiasm to the mix. Methodist itinerants related their dreams about heaven and hell and conversations with Jesus to their listeners because, as Freeborn Garrettson (1752–1827) noted, "great discoveries were made to Peter, Paul, and others in their night visions." Unordained women preachers, such as Nancy Towle (1796–1876) and Salome Lincoln (1807–1841) and the African American Jarena Lee (b. 1783), preached with an effectiveness that questioned but did not yet overturn the prohibition against women's ordination in almost all denominations except the Quakers, which alone among major Protestant groups had allowed and even fostered female preaching.
Protestant and Roman Catholic proselytizing among Indians increased and achieved some particular successes, most notably among the Cherokees of the western Carolinas and northern Georgia. Other Indians responded to new prophecies. The Seneca prophet Handsome Lake (1735–1815) offered a new teaching called the Gaiwiiyo, or Good Word, to set Indians on a new moral path. Neolin (fl. 1760–1766), a Delaware prophet, demanded that Indians reject European civilization and its products, especially alcohol. Tenskwatawa (1775–1836), the Shawnee prophet, denounced Europeans as descended from a lesser god and demanded a return to traditional native culture and the expulsion of Europeans.
In a Republic that represented the "new order of the ages," it scarcely is surprising that reform overtook, and split, many religious groups. New England Baptists who rejected the traditional Calvinist theology of predestination formed a new denomination called Free Will Baptists. Universalists emphasized the breadth of Christian salvation, not its narrowness, and drew believers from urban and rural New England alike. Revivals that began in 1801 at Cane Ridge in Kentucky produced converts to evangelical Protestant groups, especially Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians. They also spawned yet more movements and denominations. Followers of Barton Stone and Thomas and Alexander Campbell, disaffected Presbyterians, sought to recover the spirit of the early Christian church, forming the Disciples of Christ in 1832. A "unitarian controversy" split several hundred New England Congregationalist churches between 1805 and 1835 over the question of the Trinity. The argument also led to the demise of America's last state church establishments in Connecticut in 1818 and Massachusetts in 1833 as state lawmakers and lawyers reeled from the spectacle of congregants suing each other over tax revenues rather than simply worshiping together.
The new Republic's spiritual hothouse sustained prophets as fully among Europeans as among Indians. The followers of the Shaker visionary and millennialist Ann Lee, who migrated from England to New York in 1774, expanded to their greatest number in the four decades after Lee's death in 1784. Freemasonry won an enormous following among middle-class men fascinated by mystical spiritual teachings, alchemy, and alleged Egyptian secrets. Prophets and short-lived sectarian movements popped up almost everywhere. New York City witnessed two prophets in the late 1820s: Elijah the Tishbite (Elijah Pierson), an affluent merchant and evangelical reformer who sought to raise his wife from the dead, and the Prophet Matthias (Robert Matthews), who headed an authoritarian Christian commune that included Pierson as well as the African American reformer and visionary Sojourner Truth, but which ended when Matthews was charged with Pierson's murder (although he was later acquitted).
The history of New York's Joseph Smith Jr. exemplified all the themes of reform, prophecy, and renewal that invigorated religion in the early Republic. Disaffected by the competition of religions in America and sensitive to evangelical revivalism, Smith initially imbibed occult techniques to locate buried fortunes in the late 1810s. Later, Smith's visions of visits with the angel Moroni resulted in the 1830 publication of The Book of Mormon, which he described as a translation of hieroglyphic texts engraved on golden plates or tablets presented to him by Moroni that described God's dealings with ancient groups of people called Jaredites, Lamanites, and Nephites. Smith's writings and beliefs became the foundation for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The controversies stirred by The Book of Mormon and its adherents not only capped the lively assertiveness of religion in the early Republic but prefigured Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish expansion and the rise of new groups such as Spiritualists, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah's Witnesses in the later nineteeth century.
See also African Americans: African American Religion; American Indians: American Indian Religions; Anglicans and Episcopalians; Baptists; Catholicism and Catholics;Congregationalists; Deism; Disciples of Christ; Disestablishment; Jews; Methodists; Mormonism, Origins of; Moravians; Presbyterians; Quakers; Revivals and Revivalism; Shakers; Unitarianism and Universalism; Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom; Voluntary and Civic Associations.
Andrews, Dee E. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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.
George, Carol V. R. Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760–1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989.
Johnson, Paul E., and Sean Wilentz. The Kingdom of Matthias. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Noll, Mark A. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Jon Butler