ecture 1
Part I. Religion in the Colonial Era
Chapter 1. Beginnings
Stories about historical beginnings are significant, and it is important to recognize at the beginning of the course that there are multiple narratives of the birth of American religion, just as there are for the making of the nation as a political entity. Many, though not all, of these stories will be discussed in this class (and can be read about in the textbook). Diverse groups tell different stories of their religious roots in America. American stories or religious beginnings are often somber and tend to arouse contention. This religious history opens with Native American, Spanish, and French stories before turning to English colonization, but these beginnings are also part of other beginnings along the way, narratives which also range widely.
Native American Religions and Colonial Encounter
Though America was called the New World by European explorers and colonists, it was clearly not new to those who had inhabited it for thousands of years before any Europeans arrived. Long before many of the significant events of Western history, inhabitants of the Americas had hunted and fished, planted and reaped, loved and given birth, danced and mourned their dead. These inhabitants had also ordered their lives in accord with socially prescribed patterns of behavior and explained their existence and their universe in accord with cosmological principles of understanding. In other words, they had developed complex systems of religious ritual and belief.
The religions of these indigenous peoples were as diverse as the places of their settlement, as varied as the tribal groups themselves. In fact, the American continents were never so religiously diverse (or pluralistic) as in the centuries before European discovery and exploration. No single religious institution, sacred book, unified priesthood or common creed, or core group of rituals can be found in the diverse patterns of the lives of these indigenous people. It was only centuries after colonization that a pan-Indian or Native American identity emerged, and intertribal religious movements (such as the Native American Church) came into being.
Misunderstanding between Europeans and indigenous peoples came early in the application of the name “Indian,” since Christopher Columbus thought he had reached the outermost islands of India. The term “Indian” and the abstract designation of “Native American religion” are artificial labels that suggest a unity that did not truly exist. In actuality, there were numerous diverse tribes such as the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Chumash, Delaware, Eskimo, Flathead, Ghost Dancers, Hopi, Iowa, Yunna, Zuni, and numerous others. Each tribe had to come to terms with its own specific environment and the close bond between place and people has often been of primary religious importance in native traditions.
Each tribe also had to discern and repeat the stories, often in song and dance, that explained to themselves who and why they were. In exploring the significance of a people’s place in the world, tribal storytellers pursued many different paths, even as there was often similarity in the underlying questions: How did the world come to be as it is? Where did we as a people come from? What happens after death? What things are permitted or forbidden for us to do? What rules the sun or the seasons? What will the future bring? While such questions were widely shared, there was a rich diversity in the answers.
Cherokee of the Southeast regarded the earth as a great island floating in a sea of water and suspended at its four extremities by a cord of solid rock hanging down from the sky vault. Pimas in the Southwest saw the Earth Magician as the creative agent who shaped the world. Tsimshians in the Northwest explained the light of the sun with a story of the One Who Walks All Over the Sky, wearing a mask of burning pitch that warms and illumines as he makes his way from east to west. And in the Northeast, the Iroquois elaborated their account of the Sky World, Earth, and the Underworld with stories that explained not only where people came from but also where, after death, they would go.
In addition to painting cosmological pictures that helped make sense of the world, indigenous peoples also wove a rich tapestry of rituals of community, transformation, and vision. Rites of passage, such as those surrounding childbirth or death, have been especially critical to Native American religions. Zunis of the Southwest, for example, present the eight-day-old infant to the sun after a ceremonial washing by the women of the father’s clan, and the elders dedicate the child and pray that the blessing of the sun father might rest upon the infant and the whole community. Among the Chinook of the Northwest, concern is directed toward the pregnant woman, who is forbidden to wear certain jewelry or eat certain food or do anything that might endanger her life or the life she bears within; thus, she was to take every precaution, including precautions with the spiritual world.
Tribal communities also supervised and sanctioned the transition of boys and girls from their status as children to the more responsible role of adults. In the Chinook puberty ceremony for girls, several days of fasting were required, and the girl remained hidden for five days. For the boys, puberty ceremonies required difficult or even painful initiations that would become the mark of manhood. Among the Delawares, the young man’s first successful hunt signaled the moment when he should be ceremonially accepted into the tribe and instructed in his proper duties; afterward, he may have a spiritual vision of an old man who asserted his power over all things on earth and promised the young man that he will gain much power and need not fear any man.
The grim fact of death brought all the resources of the community to affirm that the unfriendly forces responsible for this individual death would not destroy the community and that hostile spirits would not trouble the family of the departed. This world and the beyond were not separate or independent. Aged Pubelos, for example, were believed to return in another form, while spirits of children who died were feared to return and cause harm. By contrast, Huron infants who died were buried near the road so the young spirit might enter the womb of a passing wife to be born again. When an Ottawa warrior was on his deathbed, the family dressed him in a fine garment, painted his face, and dressed his hair, so he might look alive and defy death a little longer, before being buried publicly and ceremonially after death.
Before Europeans learned much about the inhabitants of the New World, they often romanticized and idealized them as symbols of innocence. This idealization did not fare well in combat, in hostilities provoked by relentless European advancement over the land, and in cultural misunderstandings by both sides. The tendency of Europeans to sentimentalize the earliest Americans was matched by a tendency to brutally oppress and exploit them, which increased as time went on.
In early America, indigenous peoples were dealt with largely in terms of their potential for trade, for labor or land, for military attack or alliance, and for conversion. These were the chief points of contact between the old inhabitants and the new arrivals. Trade was often the least disruptive form of contact, for its success generally depended on leaving native cultures and religions intact.
Before developing a system of black slavery, the English unsuccessfully experimented with making the natives into slaves. Unlike blacks, who had been completely uprooted from Africa, Native Americans still had cohesive cultural support, as well as a nearby refuge to which they could flee. But land became the sticking point in relationships between Europeans, who wanted to settle and possess the land, and natives, who found the notion of private property to be foreign. The English even ran into trouble explaining to themselves why they had a right to take over whatever Native American land they happened to occupy.
John Winthrop (1588-1649), founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, argued that the Massachusetts woodlands territory was available for the taking because the natives did not enclose it, or have permanent dwellings or titles to the land. He also compared the European settlers to Abraham, who was told by God to go and take possession of the land of others. Such sentiment led to repeated conflict and warfare between migrating Europeans and previously settled Native Americans.
Wars in Virginia, New England, and elsewhere set the tone of relationships between natives and whites through most of the colonial period of American history and well beyond. Adversaries in war rarely try to understand the opposition but instead only misrepresent and caricature each other. The view of Native Americans as noble savages turned into the view that they were an enemy whose claim to the land was foolish and outrageous, and Europeans felt that natives had to be silenced, moved, assimilated, or slain.
Christianity, the prevailing religion of the traders and settlers, sometimes moderated and sometimes intensified European severity and hostility toward the natives. Christianity could be used to label the natives as idolaters and hence worthy of being killed, as in the case of the Puritan War with the Pequots in 1636-1637. Amidst their brutal treatment of the Pequots, the Puritans claimed support from Scripture and gave credit to God for subduing the natives.
The encounter between Europeans and Native Americans was fraught with struggle, and this was especially the case in the relationship between Christian missions and indigenous religions. Often the missionary imperative of converting the natives to Christianity came to involve also conversion to Western civilization. Especially for English missionaries, conversion meant a wholesale cultural transformation. Yet missionaries also served often as cultural buffers, moderating the effects of the many detrimental agents in these colonial zones of contact. Some offered sharp criticism of the greed and immorality of traders. In addition to criticizing European hunters for overly depleting the wild animals, the Quaker John Woolman (1720-1772) spent time among the natives to learn their way of life.
Missionaries were also agents who communicated tribal traditions to wider European audiences, sending back descriptive reports on indigenous religions. Much of our modern knowledge of native traditions comes from these sources. Such missionary reports include seventy-three published volumes of Jesuit accounts of their travels and labors in New France from 1610 to 1791, as well as similar reports from Moravian missionaries. While missionaries generally regarded the natives as heathen and therefore fit subjects for conversion, this was a clear improvement over the harsh alternative of regarding them as subhuman and therefore fit subjects for extermination or enslavement. In understanding motivations, it is also important to recognize that missionaries, in transmitting Christianity to the natives, believed that they were bestowing a great gift as part of the Christian community in this life and eternal happiness in the life beyond.
It is not fully accurate to portray the missionaries as arrogant villains or the natives as hapless victims. The fateful clash between Europeans and Native Americans was ultimately far more complicated. Above all, Native American cultures and religions proved far more resilient and enduring than most missionaries ever imagined. Again and again the natives resisted Christianity, sometimes scoffing at the Christian missionaries and sometimes absorbing the missionary religion into native traditions, making room for new indigenous forms of Christianity.
What is most notable is the mixing of religions and cultures that took place through colonial contact. Native religious practices were preserved in hybridized Christian forms, such as the use of the drug peyote in prayer, promoting spiritual visions. The result of such cultural tenacity and inventiveness has been that Native American traditions and religions live on across North America despite the long history of war, disease, forced removal, reservation, poverty, boarding school education, and Christian civilizing.
Spanish Colonial Ventures and Missions
Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), a native of Genoa, wanted to go east by sailing west. He wished to find a new route to India, one that did not did not follow the medieval pattern of sailing around a coastline and never allowing land to drop from sight until the proximate goal was reached. His vision was to strike out daringly across an uncharted ocean until at least India came into view. When Portugal declined to sponsor him, Columbus headed to Spain and met with Queen Isabella, who referred the matter to a committee.
The committee to which Columbus’s proposal was sent consisted of Catholic churchmen, for in the fifteenth century most educated men held ecclesiastical titles. And churchmen for centuries had carried on endless debate about other lands beyond the world known to Europeans, wondering if such lands on the other side of the earth existed, if they were inhabited, and if Christ had appeared to such people or if they were without hope of salvation until somehow European Christians could carry the gospel to them. For a thousand years or more, the theoretical discussion raged back and forth until the day when it would no longer be a proposition for debate but a matter of sustained exploration and encounter.
To succeed, what mariners like Columbus needed most was the financial backing that would enable them to outfit a fleet of ships, complete with crew and ample provisions. Thus, he waited anxiously for the committee to issue its report. After studying the problem for four or five years, the committee concluded that the proposal to reach the East by selling west was impossible and should be rejected, arguing that the voyage would take at least three years, that the ocean might be without limit, and it was most unlikely that there were undiscovered lands on the other side of the earth.
Deeply discouraged, Columbus waited another half-year to see if the queen would summon him into her presence, but no summons came. He then prepared to set out for France in order to give King Charles VIII the opportunity to support the venture Queen Isabella had turned down. However, the Franciscan friar Juan Perez persuaded Isabella to meet with Columbus again and appoint one more committee, which also reported negatively. The General Treasurer Sanchez then entered the debate on behalf of Columbus, arguing that the potential rewards were great enough to be worth the risk and that it could be of great service to God and the church, and thus to decline would be a grave reproach.
If such a voyage were truly possible, and if the risks were truly acceptable, then nothing remained but for Queen Isabella to enable Columbus’s ambition. On April 30, 1492, she commissioned Columbus as her Admiral of the Ocean Sea to discover and acquire new lands for the glory of God and the wealth of God’s great nation Spain. Three months later, Columbus and ninety men boarded three ships—the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria and sailed into the unknown waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Seventy days later, they landed on an island of the Bahamas, which they named San Salvador (Holy Savior).
The expedition was an affair of state but clearly also of church. As the most loyal Roman Catholic nation in Europe at this time, Spain took seriously its responsibility to the pope and to maintaining the purity of its faith. For hundreds of years, Spain had fought against Muslims and had sought to convert or isolate the Jews. In the very year that Columbus set sail, more than 100,000 Jews were exiled from their homeland in a new diaspora amidst the rigorous Spanish Inquisition. Spain’s colonial endeavors in the New World were largely an extension of the Crusades in the medieval world: claiming land and riches in the name of God and of his Church.
Columbus shared the religious vision of Catholic mission even as he shared the conviction that God ruled human history. He even claimed scriptural support for his expedition—that he was a messenger of the new heaven and earth. He stated that his success was due to the Christian faith and to the piety and religion of the Spanish sovereigns. He further saw his discovery as enabling the salvation of the souls of nations previously lost (as the Christian gospel could now be preached to them). The discovery of America, thus, was seen as the climax of a great spiritual pilgrimage, the end of a noble spiritual quest as well as the opening of a new era in salvation history.
Spain moved quickly to secure its position, discovering peninsulas of enormous land masses. Spain discovered so much so fast that its neighbor, Portugal, felt it was being bypassed in this great crusade of exploration and land discovery. Portugal appealed to the papacy in Rome to settle the competitive tension between the two Catholic nations that were so busy in exploring and claiming new lands. Pope Alexander VI responded by drawing a north-south line west of which all lands discovered would belong to Spain and east of which all such lands would belong to Portugal. The line was later moved farther west, favoring Portugal (eventually giving Portugal much of Brazil and a foothold in South America).
The Spanish, who benefited most by this division of land, proceeded rapidly with their exploration, staking claims on each newly discovered territory for the nation and the church. By 1511, Hernando Cortez was in Cuba, making preparations for his conquests of Mexico and Peru. In 1513, Ponce de Leon sailed out of Puerto Rico through the Bahamas and made his way to Florida. He was appointed governor of the land by Spain’s King Ferdinand and urged to lead the native population to the Catholic faith. In 1521, another Spanish explorer named Vasquez de Ayllon ventured into northern Florida and beyond, also receiving the encouragement to lead the natives to the Catholic faith so they may be saved.
Once Mexico City, formerly the capital of the Aztec civilization, was transformed into the major center of Spanish power and population, land expeditions from that point northward penetrated the vast continent into what would become later the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In 1539, Brother Marcos of Nice, a Franciscan friar, walked over three thousand miles, erecting a cross near the Zuni pueblo at Cibola and claiming all in the name of Spain, while also promising humane treatment to the natives he met.
In 1516 a Dominican missionary, Bartholomew Las Casas received the title “Defender of the Indians” for venting his fury against his countrymen because of their cruel treatment of the native peoples. His position was finally validated in 1537 by a pronouncement of the pope, who said the natives were human beings, not subhuman beasts, and that they should not be enslaved or deprived of their liberty or property, whether or not they chose to become Christians.
Missionary and native tensions were intense in New Spain as elsewhere. In 1597, natives on St. Catherine’s Island (off the coast of Georgia) justified their rebellion against Spanish overlords by explaining that their whole culture was being condemned and subverted. For them, Christianity represented a repudiation of all ancestral ways. Such a radical abandonment pushed these and many other natives into rebellion and resistance as they tried to hold off the Spanish campaign to eradicate native religious traditions and replace them with Christianity.
The southeastern corner of the North American continent proved generally inhospitable to both Spanish missions and Spanish settlements. Louis Cancer (1500-1549), a Dominican preacher who came fresh from missionary work in Central America, was determined to win equal victories in Florida. In 1549, he and several companions sailed into Tampa Bay, only to be slain the moment they reached the shore. In 1565, Pedro Menendez de Aviles managed to retake north Florida settlements from exiled French Protestants (Huguenots), who were ruthlessly slain in the New World as heretics just as they had been in the Old World (Europe). In his efforts to conquer territory to the north, the Carolinas and Virginia, Menendez met with great resistance from the natives and was also defeated. By 1571, Francis Borgia, the general of the Jesuit order, decided that the cost was too high and the number of lives lost too great to justify continuing efforts even in Florida, much less to the north.
Spain’s ecclesiastical forces left a much more enduring imprint on the American Southwest. Franciscan friars entered New Mexico as well as Texas and Arizona quite early. The royal city of Santa Fe, established in 1610, developed into the political and religious capital for the surrounding region. However, the initial governor, Don Juan de Onate, treated the New Mexico pueblo dwellers with great cruelty. His actions were protested by a Franciscan friar in 1601, who reported to the Spanish viceroy that more humane treatment would have enabled easier control of the territory.
Such undeserved treatment also harmed the missionaries’ reason for being in the New World, as it prohibited them from preaching the gospel due to the offense the Spanish had caused to the native population. The long-term effect of Spanish brutality was a native revolt in 1680 led by a shaman named Pope, which virtually destroyed Santa Fe and killed over four hundred people. Spain prevailed, however, and Diego Jose de Vargas led a powerful military force into the region several years later.
Though New Mexico was a notable center of Spanish missionary activity in North America, it did not stand alone. Franciscans and other missionaries worked hard on both sides of this territory. In Texas, mission efforts began along the Neches River, with the creation of the San Francisco de los Texas mission in 1690, overseen by Father Damien Massanet. One of the Texas missions was San Antonio de Valero, founded in 1744, which achieved special fame a century later as the Alamo where Texans died in their struggle against Mexico for independence. In Arizona, it was the Jesuit Eusebio Kino who did the most to leave a Spanish mark upon the land, as he traveled through northern Mexico and southern Arizona, mapping as he went, learning the natives’ languages, baptizing, and building chapels. In 1697, he founded his largest and best-known mission, San Xavier del Bac.
Under the direction of Franciscan Junipero Serra (1713-1784), a long chain of missions stretched from San Diego in the south to San Francisco in the north. Serra’s last mission was founded in Ventura. Native peoples struggled through the arrival of the missionaries, both resisting and accepting the Catholic faith.
Spain’s presence in North America never grew as great as it did in Central and South America, but the Hispanic presence north of the Rio Grande was strong and enduring. The Catholic missions of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries laid the foundation for a vigorous Hispanic Catholic culture in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
French Trade and Catholic Faith
Newfoundland’s fishing banks first drew France’s attention to the New World. Breton fishermen (from Brittany in France) crossed the northern Atlantic to net as great a catch as their vessels could safely carry back. In 1534, Jacques Cartier sailed from St. Malo with sixty men and two small ships past those fishing banks into the strait located between Newfoundland and Labrador and began his exploration, making contact with the Algonquian family of natives and even teaching French to two of them who became his interpreters.
Like other Europeans, the French were enamored by the idea of a Northwest Passage, a waterway shortcut from Europe to Asia. On his 1535 voyage, Cartier believed he had found it when he discovered the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River, which led in a southwesterly direction into the interior of a vast continent. Though it did not lead into Asia, it did lead to exciting possibilities of a profitable fur trade and significant settlement within North America. Other French explorers found the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, which enabled them to stake a claim to the northern part of the eastern half of North America.
The promise was much greater than the reality. A settlement effort in the 1540s proved disastrous as relations with the Iroquois turned sour, supplies ran short, and the cost of the entire venture proved exorbitant. France was also distracted by the Protestant Reformation, which threatened to cause division in France as it did in Germany. The 1598 Edict of Nantes brought a measure of peace to France and enabled it to resume the contest for colonial control of the New World.
The seventeenth century opened with commercial and colonizing ventures directed by Samuel de Champlain. While his earliest efforts at settlement turned out unhappily, a fort built at the St. Lawrence River evolved into the town of Quebec, and soon the village of Montreal up the river had its beginnings, though political control was unsure, and the population did not grow much in the first half of the century.
The Jesuits (Society of Jesus), since their founding in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola, had become one of the most vigorous missionary instruments of the Catholic Counter Reformation, and they proved as bold as ever as they moved out from their North American base at Quebec. Exploring, mapping, translating, and reporting on Algonquian and Iroquois tribal life at great length, the Jesuit missionaries sought to win converts from these native tribes to their own Christian faith. That hope often ended in frustration and forceful resistance. Jean de Brebeuf, who arrived in 1625, lived and worked with the Hurons for two years without winning a single convert.
After having worked with the Hurons for more than a decade, Brebeuf in 1636 advised potential missionaries to dispense with all illusions about the beauties and bounties of a wilderness life among the natives, soberly informing them of the difficulties they would face. In short, he concluded that they should not come to New France unless their souls burned with an irresistible passion to imitate Christ’s sufferings.
If all the hardships such missionaries faced were not enough, still greater suffering lay ahead. In 1649, war broke out between the Hurons and the Iroquois, with the Iroquois victorious. Many Hurons were slain, and Brebeuf was captured and condemned to an agonizing death.
Another Jesuit named Isaac Jogues had arrived in Quebec in the 1630s, determined to assist in the missionary venture among the Hurons. However, an epidemic broke out, affecting both the natives and the French. Jogues himself was critically ill for weeks, and the Hurons considered putting to death the missionaries, whom they held responsible for the disease. Yet the Jesuits continued ministering to the sick and dying. The sickness eventually ended, Jogues recovered, and the threat to the missionaries ended.
In 1641 the Chippewas invited Jogues to establish a mission in their midst. He established Sault Sainte Marie (which later became a major settlement) in the peninsula between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. Here for a time his work progressed without serious incident and with modest success. In 1642, he accompanied some natives back to Quebec for supplies, only to be captured by the Iroquois on their return. He was held captive for months, during which he faced repeated threats of execution.
A year later, Iroquois guards brought Jogues to the Dutch trading post at the juncture of the Mohawk River with the Hudson, in present day Albany, New York. Fellow Europeans tried to secure his release without alienating the natives, however Jogues was obliged to return with his captors to their village. Months later, the Dutch assisted him in getting aboard a ship bound for Europe, and Jogues sailed to Manhattan and then home.
Back in France, Jogues made plans to return once more to the mission field where he had labored for nearly a decade. By June of 1644, he was back in Quebec, where he sought to encourage the native groups to make peace with one another. However, a band of Mohawks captured Jogues and tortured him to death.
Probably in the very village where Jogues died, Kateri Tekakwitha, the daughter of an Iroquois chief and an Algonquin Christian mother converted to Christianity after receiving guidance from Jesuit missionaries and native converts. Her commitment was so strong that she impressed both native Christians and French missionaries. After she died, her grave became an object of pilgrimage and veneration, and stories of miraculous cures at her grave circulated.
French labors in the Mississippi Valley also left a significant imprint on the interior of the North American continent. In 1669, a Jesuit named Jacques Marquette arrived as a missionary in Wisconsin, from where he assisted in exploring the upper Mississippi River.
In 1682, Sieur de La Salle completed the exploration of the Mississippi River south of the broad delta, proving its navigability all the way from the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico. For two decades, however, no French settled along the lower Mississippi. By 1700, Jesuits arrived in what is now Biloxi, Mississippi. Father Du Ru saw a great missionary challenge in the vast diversity of languages among the native tribes he encountered.
In 1702 Mobile, Alabama was founded, the oldest French town on the Gulf Coast–since Biloxi was only a fort. In 1718 the settlement called New Orleans came into being, which would become the major center for French missionary activity and the political capital for all the Louisiana Territory. French quarrels over the economic and religious priorities frustrated the mission effort. In 1726 Father de Beaubois made an agreement with the responsible French company, making possible a more extensive missionary enterprise. Jesuits were joined by other Catholic clergy and an order of nuns in their labors in and beyond New Orleans.
Yet two major events brought an end to the extensive Jesuit effort and to much French dominance of interior America. The first event of 1763 was the French suppression of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), as the order’s increased power and wealth had aroused jealousies and fears within the wider Catholic Church and the royal family. The effects on New France were devastating and never overcome. The Jesuits had been the leading religious organization in New France, and without them much of the Catholic enterprise dwindled.
The same ship that arrived in New Orleans to bring news of the Jesuit suppression brought word of the end of the Seven Years’ War between England and France. By the terms of the Peace of Paris in 1763, France surrendered to England all territory east of the Mississippi River (except New Orleans) and to Spain all territory west of the river. After 1763, the French religious presence in the entire interior valley was virtually gone.
Chapter 2. English Exploration and Anglican Establishment
For England, as in continental Europe, the Protestant Reformation was steeped in both politics and blood. In England, King Henry VIII took the first political steps in the 1530s with Parliament at his bidding passing a series of measures that accomplished the separation of the Church in England from the pope in Rome. Henceforth Henry would be the earthly head of England’s national church. For the next century and longer, England would struggle with deciding how Protestant or Catholic the English church should be.
The blood of religious division was shed only in small amount during Henry’s reign (1509-1547), and the nation as a whole experienced widespread persecution and accusation. During the brief reign of Edward VI, England shifted in the direction of Protestantism, but it then turned back toward Roman Catholicism in the reign of Mary I. Many Protestants were sent into exile (some going to Geneva to learn from the Reformed movement led by John Calvin); others were put to death. These turbulent years made the nation yearn for religious peace and settlement. A new queen, Elizabeth I, came to the throne in 1558. Her long reign (1558-1603) gave hope for steadiness amidst the religious tumult, though her effort to promote a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism disappointed both Catholics and stricter Protestants.
Elizabeth did not rule long enough to see English colonies successfully launched in the New World. Her successor, James I (who ruled 1603 to 1625) chartered the companies that launched both Plymouth and Jamestown. Virginia especially, would be the initial prospering of the English colonial endeavor, the first and most successful establishment of the Church of England in North America.
For “The Glory of God and the Good of My Country”: The Promotion of English Colonization
In the late sixteenth century, it appeared that the colonial boldness and early adventuring of other European nationalities were so dominant as to overshadow England’s efforts. From the perspective of devout English Protestants, that meant that England’s Protestant religion would fall far behind the missionary advances made by Portugal, Spain, and France–all Catholic nations.
England had not been completely inactive in colonization. John Cabot had sailed for King Henry VII at the end of the fifteenth century, exploring Newfoundland and the Atlantic coastline and giving England something of a claim to North American lands. However, these voyages did not result in any steady development of colonies or forts, missions or trade.
The notorious Francis Drake also engaged in some exploration of the continent, though his major activity was piracy. As English and Spanish hostility increased in the 1580s, Drake became a major nuisance to the ships from the Spanish Main, which he even regarded as a kind of Protestant crusade against Catholic Spain. In 1588, the English defeated the Spanish Armada (which they believed was due to divine help), destroying Spanish naval supremacy and hindering Spain’s largely unchallenged ventures into the New World.
A little more than a decade before this defeat, Sir Humphrey Gilbert had argued for even more English piracy against Spain, claiming that England should take every opportunity to get ahead of its enemies. He proposed attacking Spanish ships everywhere by every means, legal or otherwise, seeing this as service to God.
Even more important than stopping Spanish trade and plundering its gold, other Englishmen argued, was planting an English foothold firmly in the New World. They believed that to establish colonies in North America would advance the national interest and advance the Protestant cause. Two Protestant clergymen, Richard Hakluyt the Younger and Samuel Purchas, made this argument with particular force and effect.
Hakluyt maintained a dual loyalty to religion and geography, which made sense given that accurate cartography and improved navigation were necessary to the spread of the gospel. He argued that the true gospel must be state- by Protestant England rather than Catholic Spain. He proposed to Queen Elizabeth the idea of developing settlements and towns rather than trading posts and forts, arguing genuine colonization would lead more certainty to the conversion of the natives to Christianity.
Hakluyt assured Elizabeth that England was called by God to this task. He felt that missionaries must be sent in order for the natives to hear and respond to the true gospel. He further noted that kings and queens of England had been called “Defenders of the Faith,” which gave them the duty to maintain and advance the faith of Christ.
To the argument that the pope had already divided the New World between Catholic nations, Hakluyt responded with scorn and anger, arguing that the pope had no lawful authority to give such dominion. He instead appealed to the Bible, history, the voyages of Cabot, and common sense to argue for England to go out and lay claim to the land.
To overcome timidity, Hakluyt mounted a large promotion campaign. He spurred on his people by reminding them of the great daring exhibited by the English in the past in heroic adventures at home and abroad. He wrote stories of the English voyages and discoveries, eventually filling three volumes.
First published in 1589, his widely read and greatly cherished book became England’s epic for an age of exploration, discovery, and colonization. It inspired the country, stirring the imagination and emboldening adventurers. As an author, editor, booster, geographer, and preacher, Hakluyt gave his whole being to the Christian work of imprinting the Christian gospel of England upon North America.
When he died in 1616, his successor was already hard at work. Samuel Purchas published the first edition of his book that demonstrated the universality of religion and necessity of spreading the Church of England’s religious order. In his work, he mixed geography and theology, anthropology and economics. He intended his book to be a history of the known and about-to-be-known world, with recognition that the soul of the world was religion and the hope that people of non-Christian religions would be converted to Christianity.
From the vantage point of universal history, Purchas noted that so little of the world was Christian and that even the Christian part was divided into sects. And even Protestant England was full of sin. His book of universal history contained such sermon-like statements, since he believed that the fate of the world was at stake in their being heard and obeyed. He dedicated his book “to the glory of God and the good of my country,” as he called England to rise up and become a colonial and missionary power.
The promotional efforts of Hakluyt and Purchas paid off, though the early English attempts at colonization gave little encouragement to either investor or preacher. Hakluyt’s contemporaries Gilbert and Raleigh joined him in his promotion and took action to achieve his ends. Gilbert set sail for Newfoundland in 1583, claiming all he saw on behalf of England. However, only one of the five ships completed the voyage as planned, and Gilbert was not among those who returned. His governmental grant was transferred to Raleigh, who backed an expedition to the North Carolina and Virginia coasts. He returned in 1584 to describe the land and the natives, giving an exaggerated account of its abundance that misled prospective settlers.
Actual settlement efforts got under way in 1585. Seven ships, commanded by Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Ralph Lane, left 108 settlers on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. But when Francis Drake drifted by the following year, he found the weary colonists ready to accept the passage home due to hardships that included a poor relationship with the natives. Two of the settlers carried back detailed reports and argued for a more carefully planned and better supplied effort.
Encouraged, Raleigh sent three small ships from Plymouth, England for the North Carolina coast once more, the party sailing on May 8, 1587. The settlers numbered 150 and included women and children. They landed in early August, with the first Protestant service being held on Roanoke Island that month. The governor John White returned to England to ensure that urgently needed supplies reached the struggling settlers. Due to the outbreak of war between Spain and England, he did not return for four years, and upon his return he found no trace of his family or friends. The mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke remains unsolved to this day.
“Almighty God Hath Opened the Gate”: The Anglican Establishment in Virginia
In 1606 King James I chartered two companies to support settlements in North America. One, the London Company, was granted exclusive right to settle in land between the thirty-fourth and forty-first degrees of latitude, with the company’s authority extending westward over land one hundred miles and eastward over the ocean for the same distance. The other company, named Plymouth, received a similar grant farther to the north. In 1607, the London Company sent forth its first expedition, and its ships landed on the Virginia coast and established Jamestown, the first permanent settlement.
Religious motivations received explicit acknowledgement in the Royal Charter of Virginia, as the adventure was believed to be carried on by the providence of God and for the propagation of the Christian religion to the natives, who were seen as being ignorant of the true knowledge of God.
For many years, however, these colonists no doubt wondered whether God was indeed with them, as the Jamestown colony came close to perishing. The settlers, who numbered a little more than a hundred in May of 1607, had been reduced by half the following September. They faced attack from the natives and a fire that destroyed the fort and several other houses and buildings. Sickness and famine were rampant. Though more settlers arrived with more supplies, they too faced more hardships.
Whatever the motivations of the English people who came to Virginia, the expectations were out of all proportion to the reality. They found no gold or silver, other natural resources to exploit, or profitable crops to raise for export. The struggling colony had reached about two thousand in 1622 when a counteroffensive of natives, who refused to be a passive labor force, resulted in the deaths of about one-fifth of the settlement. In 1624, the king took over control of the colony to prevent its demise. What saved Virginia, however, was its cultivation of a crop that promised to make the economy work at last: tobacco.
Religious progress was as slow as economic improvement. After Jamestown, a second parish (religious territory) was organized in 1611 in Henrico, where the rector, Alexander Whitaker, proved to be an able influencer and preached a sermon that convinced many poor people in England that they could find a better life in a new and promising land. Whitaker also performed the celebrated marriage between John Rolfe and the native woman Pocahontas. Rolfe argued that his marriage was for the honor of his country and to convert Pocahontas to Christianity, claiming that God had opened the gate and led him in the direction he took. Pocahontas died in 1617 and Rolfe was killed five years later in the native resistance.
In 1619, the Virginia legislature took steps toward making the Church of England the officially established and solely supported church in Virginia. Territories were laid out, lands to support the church were set aside, and support for the clergy was promised. In 1642 and 1662, the legislature provided for the re-creation in Virginia of the familiar English national church. Only ministers properly ordained and commissioned by bishops in England would be accepted. The state would defend and protect the English church.
In addition to laying out the geographical boundaries of the parish territories, assuring the purity of doctrine, and guaranteeing a ministerial monopoly of the Church of England in Virginia, the legislature in 1662 provided for the governance of each local parish through the creation of an office of twelve of the most able men of each parish. This board would be responsible for both church affairs and for wider concerns in the community.
A half century after the Jamestown settlement, the legal structure for a truly official church had been set in place. One might expect to see in the Virginia of the 1660s the typical English church presiding over the typical English village in a style that would almost convince English emigrants that they had never left home. However, that is not how it worked out. No English towns arose along the banks of Virginia’s rivers. Parishes stretched to miles along the rivers, and potential congregations were so widely scattered as to make the gathering of a significant number difficult. Ministers might find themselves assigned to two or more expansive parishes and could hardly offer regular services or be available to meet all the religious needs.
The parish church, therefore, was often both literally and figuratively at the edge rather than at the center of community life in seventeenth-century Virginia. The church’s marginality was aggravated by a shortage of clergy. The colony, in its early years, offered little to potential ministers but personal hardship and a meager livelihood.
Parishes also could complain that some of the clergy received better support than they deserved. Ministerial quality throughout the seventeenth century proved a problem virtually beyond solution. In 1632, the Virginia House of Burgesses felt obliged to decree that ministers shall not give themselves to excess drinking, rioting, or playing idle games, but shall occupy themselves with honest study and activity, being a model to others in purity of life. However, the legislation had little effect, as ministers continued to be known for poor preaching and drunkenness.
This dreary picture gradually improved over the second half of the seventeenth century and sharply improved in the eighteenth. Yet it was undeniable that the Church of England in early Virginia did not enjoy the prestige that its legislative favor would seem to ensure. An anonymous pamphlet in 1662 argued that towns must be created in Virginia, where schools could be supported and attended, parish churches be the true center of religious life, and worthy young men sent who, in exchange for their education, agreed to spend a minimum of seven years in Virginia serving the Anglican church and elevating the morals of the people. The advice was only met forty years later with societies that sent both literature and clergy to all the colonies of North America.
By the mid-seventeenth century about thirty Anglican parishes had been created in Virginia, that number doubling by the end of the century. Parishes in the most settled portions of the Tidewater region ranged from twenty to forty miles long, and parishes farther to the west or south of the James River might be a hundred miles or more in length. The population also varied from parish to parish, along with its ability to employ a minister, maintain a regular schedule of services, and care for those in need. Despite the considerable difficulties that Anglicanism faced in Virginia, the church steadily improved its position, growing to more than one hundred church parishes by the middle of the eighteenth century.
Unlike other southern colonies, Virginia even had its own college, founded in the final decade of the seventeenth century. Under the prompting of the Anglican church leader James Blair, the idea for a college developed. Blair petitioned the Virginia legislature, raised money, and sailed to England to win royal sanction and an official charter. In 1693, the College of William and Mary received its charter to educate Virginia youth and provide the Church of Virginia with a seminary of ministers and propagate the Christian religion to the natives. In the eighteenth century, the school educated many who would play significant roles in the formative years of the new nation.
As Anglicanism in Virginia grew stronger, new challenges confronted this legally sanctioned and state-protected church. A direct religious challenge came in the form of dissenting (non-Anglican) churches, which began to infiltrate the colony of Virginia (despite legal prohibitions). Puritan and Quaker groups in the seventeenth century met with stern resistance and hostility, prohibiting these movements from growing strong. In the eighteenth century, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists competed against the Anglican establishment. These dissenters settled in the foothills and back country of western Virginia and shared a fondness for evangelical religion, which was more intense and personal than the formal Anglican liturgy. The revival-charged evangelical movement spread in New England and the Middle Colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, and into the surrounding areas of Virginia in the 1750s and 1760s.
The Presbyterian preacher Samuel Davies exhibited this expansion when he came into the colony from Pennsylvania. Finding himself outside the law, unable to perform religious duties, and unwelcome in the eyes of authorities, Davies protested that Virginia was exceeding the prohibitions even of England, which had issued a Declaration of Religious Toleration over half a century prior that granted some measure of recognition to Protestant dissenters. Political authorities grew fearful of the evangelistic work of Davies, who preached widely, and determined to stamp out dissent. England, however, was more concerned about the economic growth of the colony, and the London-based Board of Trade advised the toleration and free exercise of religion.
Such a forceful policy declaration did not wipe away all impediments of law and custom, but it did make the colonial leaders more cautious in their harassment and persecution. Many years would pass, however, before the concept of the free exercise of religion would become a meaningful phrase throughout Virginia. Meanwhile, Davies continued to preach and win converts to evangelical religion in general and Presbyterianism in particular. He also took seriously the obligation to see that the gospel reached Virginia’s black population, who in 1750 numbered over 100,000.
Africans had been brought to Virginia as early as 1619, and once they proved to be an effective labor force, they were shipped in ever-increasing numbers to Virginia’s shores. Anglican religious instruction among this large population was impeded by the resistance of plantation owners to giving their workers sufficient time off, fear that a Christian baptism might change their civil status from slave to free person, widespread illiteracy among the slaves with few opportunities for education available to them, and the argument that blacks had no souls. With rare exceptions, Anglicans did not make significant progress in converting the slave population to Christianity.
Evangelical religion, on the other hand, made the gospel appear more accessible, liberating, and emotionally satisfying. This version of Christianity could be sung, shouted, and even danced. It offered an effective contact point between Anglo-American religious beliefs and indigenous African traditions. The spiritual egalitarianism of evangelicalism also opened paths to black leadership and preaching. Two black preachers, named Gowan Pamphlet and Moses, even organized their own independent African Baptist Church by the 1780s.
It was Baptists like these two who created the second and most powerful wave of evangelicalism in Virginia. From New England, Shubal Stearns arrived in 1754 to spread the notion of a free church without an authoritarian hierarchy, of a ministry that did not depend on a credential or ceremony other than the call of God, and a baptism by immersion of adult believers (rather than infants) who were ready to accept the gospel. When Stearns left for North Carolina, he left behind many to continue the evangelical outreach. Amidst calls to restrain the movement, forty to fifty Baptist preachers were jailed or restrained over the next fifteen years, usually under the charge of disturbing the peace. The future president James Madison, who was dedicated to religious liberty, wrote to condemn the persecution he witnessed.
John Leland, another New England Baptist who came south, was ready to join Madison in the pursuit of religious liberty. Arriving in Virginia in 1776, Leland quickly identified himself with the cause of evangelical religion and religious liberty. Baptists joined with Presbyterians in petitioning the Virginia legislature for relief from oppressive laws that favored Anglicanism and discouraged all dissent. Leland argued that state establishment of religion has done harm to the cause of Christ. Traveling across Virginia, Leland led in the rapid development of the Baptist denomination.
Women as well as men assumed prominent roles in Baptist worship, which further horrified the Anglican establishment. Sharp criticism was directed toward the Baptists for the alleged disorder of their worship. Evangelical worship further had an improvisational quality, with an emphasis on testimony and exhortation, that allowed space for women to talk publicly about their religious experiences and direct others toward holiness. The Baptists remained an unpredictable group, which undermined the predictable social hierarchies of Anglicanism.
Methodists achieved independent denominational status in America only after the nation had won its independence from England. Yet even before it became independent, it had a presence in Virginia. Launched by the brothers John and Charles Wesley, Methodism in England began as an effort to recall the Church of England from its formalism, strengthen personal piety, and reach the common laborers who seemed to be abandoning the national church in increasing numbers. Methodism was a holy club within, not apart from, the Church of England. In Virginia, Methodism used some of the Anglican churches as a base of operations.
Most Anglicans found Methodism even more disturbing than the other dissenting forces, since followers of Wesley were undermining the establishment Anglican Church from within. Many Anglicans believed that Methodists threatened to turn the whole Church of England upside down by altering its liturgy through open-air revivals and itinerant evangelism and transforming its mode of Christian living through rigorous devotional practices including small class meetings and near constant prayer. Despite harsh condemnations from the bishop of London, Methodism continued to spread in Virginia and elsewhere, growing even more swiftly after its formal break with the Church of England.
Thus, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists all struggled against the civil establishment that protected the Anglican Church. In addition, major political factors led to the collapse of this establishment. Given that the American Revolution was a war against England, most Americans were unwilling to seek or preserve special favor for the Church of England, since the very nature and government of the Anglican Church were intimately joined with England.
Though nominally an Anglican, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) led in the fight for a full and free exercise of religion in Virginia. Proposing a Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom as early as 1779, he had to wait seven years for many forces to come together before his bill became law. Some argued for a bill that affirmed that, if not the Church of England specifically, then at least Christianity must be declared the state religion. James Madison led the opposition to passing such a bill, arguing that the government establishment of religion had always been bad for religion.
It might seem now, over two hundred years later, that the victory of Madison in this regard was assured and that the Anglican establishment in Virginia was destined to collapse under the force of a democratic Revolution. The Church of England lost its position of power and became only one denomination among many others. Just as notable, though, is how powerful a role the Church of England had come to play in colonial Virginia for over a century. However, the Anglican successes in Virginia were harder to come by in the other colonies.
Primary Text 1: Sublimus Dei (by Pope Paul III)
Sublimus Dei On the Enslavement and Evangelization of Indians (papalencyclicals.net)
Sublimus Dei
On the Enslavement and Evangelization of Indians
Pope Paul III – 1537
Pope Paul III (Topic: the enslavement and evangelization of Indians)
To all faithful Christians to whom this writing may come, health in Christ our Lord and the apostolic benediction.
The sublime God so loved the human race that He created man in such wise that he might participate, not only in the good that other creatures enjoy, but endowed him with capacity to attain to the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good and behold it face to face; and since man, according to the testimony of the sacred scriptures, has been created to enjoy eternal life and happiness, which none may obtain save through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, it is necessary that he should possess the nature and faculties enabling him to receive that faith; and that whoever is thus endowed should be capable of receiving that same faith. Nor is it credible that any one should possess so little understanding as to desire the faith and yet be destitute of the most necessary faculty to enable him to receive it. Hence Christ, who is the Truth itself, that has never failed and can never fail, said to the preachers of the faith whom He chose for that office ‘Go ye and teach all nations.’ He said all, without exception, for all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith.
The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God’s word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.
We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it. Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.
By virtue of Our apostolic authority We define and declare by these present letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, which shall thus command the same obedience as the originals, that the said Indians and other peoples should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by the example of good and holy living.
[Dated: May 29, 1537]
Lecture 2
Chapter 3. Puritan New England
While some English citizens worked to bring the established Church of England to Virginia, the Puritans labored to transform the English church into a more thoroughly Protestant institution, closer to the one that John Calvin had founded in 16th century Geneva. Stricter Protestants despaired of any genuine reformation of the state church and resolved to separate themselves completely from it, in order to create a true and pure Christian church according to their understanding of what the New Testament required. Whereas the Puritans hoped to bring a dramatic change to the theology, worship, and government of the Church of England, the stricter Separatists envisioned a radically new church model of independence from the state.
From the presence of Baptists to the even more radical Quakers, the strength of this sectarian religious trend proved considerable in New England. It forced the Puritans repeatedly to confront the elements of their own movement that were divisive and unorthodox (not conforming to traditional theology). Desire for a free church became uncontainable and was best expressed in Rhode Island under Roger Williams, which became a refuge for independent-minded dissenters.
The Arrival of Pilgrims and Puritans
Those we know as the colony of Rhode Island, who crossed the ocean in the Mayflower, determined to separate from the Anglican Church while they were still in England. In the early 17th century, this was both illegal and dangerous. Noncomformists, those who did not conform to the national church, fell into social disgrace and were subject to being arrested. A small congregation of Separatists met secretly in the early years of the 17th century, trying to decide the best course of action. Staying in England would mean either compromising their consciences by practicing a religion they believed was incorrect or risking their estates and possibly their lives by practicing their religion in a way they believed the Bible prescribed. But if they left England, where could they go?
Holland presented the likeliest option, as it was only a few miles across the English Channel and provided a greater measure of religious toleration in the early 1600s than did any other European country. Around 1607, this congregation determined to migrate to Holland to begin a new life. The people were willing to pay this price, take this risk, and leave their farms and homes to gain greater freedom of worship.
Their first new residence was Amsterdam, a major commercial port. However, the city was too full of temptations to sin for this devout religious group; thus, under the leadership of John Robinson, they moved to the smaller town of Leiden. The Separatists thought they would remain in Holland only until England would grant some measure of religious toleration.
The Pilgrims waited, but the changes for which they hoped did not come. Meanwhile, things were not going well for this congregation in Holland. It was not easy for them to make a decent livelihood. In addition, parents watched their children grow up unfamiliar with English ways, but rather learning Dutch customs. Some feared their children would also be led astray by the temptations of the sophisticated cosmopolitan center, and that being immersed in this foreign culture threatened the unity and purity of their religious fellowship. Thus, they felt it was time for them to move on.
But where could they go? They could not return home to England, since they faced being fined, whipped, jailed, or forced to conform. Thus, they faced a dilemma. To stay in Holland would mean slowly losing their religious and cultural identity; to return to England would be to face all the old persecutions again. But what if they could return to English soil without returning to England itself? This could be done by crossing the ocean and immigrating to America, where they would remove themselves from the immediate force of England’s intolerable laws, yet not remove themselves from England’s culture.
It took many years for them to make a decision. Complex negotiations were required to gain the approval of the Virginia Company and the king, James I. The Separatists had to prove that they were loyal God-fearing subjects, rather than radicals who were hostile to the nation’s interests and likely to subvert colonial efforts. In July of 1620, a portion of the Leiden church left Holland for England, where two ships were readied for the Atlantic crossing. The two ships left Southampton in August, but one proved unfit to sail. The remaining ship, the Mayflower, then set sail from Plymouth with more supplies and more passengers, setting out for Virginia with 102 passengers aboard. Sixty-six days later, the crew sighted land off Cape Cod, far north of where they had planned to land. Weary of sailing, they decided to settle where they landed, establishing another Plymouth in the New World.
William Bradford, governor of the small colony for thirty years, recorded the bleakness of their November arrival, as they faced the wilderness filled with wild beasts and wild tribes of people. He described their trust in God and the hope of leaving a good legacy for future generations.
The Plymouth Colony began to plant, to fish, to hunt, and to cut and saw. The first year proved difficult. Of the twenty-six men with families, only twelve survived into the spring. And only three of eighteen married women lived through the winter.
The Plymouth colony never grew rapidly. In 1630, the population was only a few hundred, and a decade later it was barely 1000. In 1660, only 2000 inhabited the colony that was later absorbed into the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was located a few miles farther north and began in the 1630s with massive migration from England to the bay around Boston, growing to much larger numbers.
The Puritans at Massachusetts Bay who came in such large numbers regarded themselves as part of the Church of England, feeling they would be able to demonstrate in a new England what a truly revitalized Church of England ought to be. While in England, they had hoped to move the state established religion in a more Protestant direction (specifically following the model of John Calvin), moving the church farther away from Catholic practices. But like the Pilgrims, they found the establishment religious order and laws too strong. But rather than separating from the established church, they chose to emigrate, with their own charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company.
John Winthrop (1588-1649), the governor of the Bay Colony, outlined the motive and vision of the Puritans as they sailed into their bay in 1630. He stated that they were a dedicated community, a true and pure church, and members of a covenant with one another and God. Their goal was to be a model of a true church, in order to provide an example to England. He recognized that they had a duty they must fulfill, or God would punish them.
His stern warning would be repeated many times during the course of the next several generations, as the Puritans built their model city and sought to develop a proper government for society and the church. Though the Puritans initially thought of themselves as still part of the Church of England, they gradually became so distinctive that they acquired an independent life and a new name: Congregationalism. A Boston clergyman (or church leader) named John Cotton wrote down the major complaints against the national church, which show the beginnings of the Congregational Church in New England.
Cotton noted that, in the national church, the control of the bishops and the conformity demanded by the law had become burdens too heavy to bear. He criticized the use of the Book of Common Prayer, which he considered idolatry because it was a human creation. He declared that the authority of the church should be congregational, not episcopal; in other words that the highest human authority of the church should be the local minister and congregation, not the king or archbishop that was over a wider territory of churches. In this system, church members gained great power but had to prove themselves worthy of this power by giving evidence in their lives of genuine conversion—of having been chosen by God for salvation. Cotton also argued that the church is created by contractual agreement of its members rather than legislative action by those in authority; thus, it is a gathering of the faithful in covenant with God and with one another.
The New England way took shape in the colony of Massachusetts, then Connecticut, and later New Hampshire. It marked the region with a way of thinking and living that would endure far beyond the colonial period. The immigrants made Congregationalism or Puritanism an essential part of their lives. Unlike the motives for profit upheld by the Virginia Company and Massachusetts Bay Company, those in the new commonwealth came to the colonies out of reasons of faith rather than commercial interest. They came for the proper organization of the local church, enforcement of moral discipline, and the ability to fully embody Calvin’s theological teachings and religious practices.
The Puritans also came for the freedom to practice their religion. They never intended to launch a colony that would be open to all people of all religious persuasions (or none). They came to create a pure church and conduct a holy experiment free of opposition, distraction, and error. Freedom of religion was not originally part of their plan. They came to prove that a society could be formed that was so faithful that even old England itself would be transformed by witnessing what determined believers had managed to achieve thousands of miles away.
Puritan Theology, Worship, and Education
Within the context of the Protestant Reformation, Puritanism identified with the broad tradition known as Calvinism. John Calvin and those who followed after him emphasized above all else the absolute sovereignty of God. God was in charge of the universe, and all other theology must flow from this proposition. Humankind was seen as dust, the folly of the universe rather than its glory, and the Lord of all the heavens exercises a dominion (or power) that we cannot contend against. God rules, and people obey, or more often disobey (given their fallen condition).
In the matter of salvation, therefore, Puritans held that this is an affair wholly within the power and control of God. Men and women do not choose God, but God, according to his divine grace, chooses them. The Massachusetts clergyman Samuel Willard described the covenant between God and humans, in which God binds himself in love to humans. Since salvation is given by God, not earned by humans, it is secure and assured forever. It is impossible to fall away and lose salvation. In response, humans are to be devoted to God and immovably fixed in love to him.
Despite this belief in the certainty of the salvation of elect people, Puritan society was not set and stable in a similar way. Both political and religious leaders of the second and third generations grew anxious about the decline of faith and zeal. Churches began to relax their requirements of membership, no longer insisting that newcomers tell of their own personal conversion experiences before receiving the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
Amid fears of religious decline and socioeconomic change, Puritans often resorted to confronting the dangers of Satan and his minions. Witchcraft, demonic possession, curses, and necromancy (communication with the dead) were seen as realities, and thoughts of them regularly entered into one social conflict after another, sometimes with terrifying results. One example is the witch trials at Salem, Massachusetts in the 1690s. The testimony of the afflicted was deemed sufficient evidence for witchcraft, and the biblical commandment was clear that witches should be executed. In 1692, twenty people, accused and found guilty of witchcraft, were put to death by hanging.
Puritans regularly told themselves of reformation and renewal that followed the decline of religion. In the first half of the eighteenth century, this story was embodied in the form of religious revivals and awakenings. In the 1740s, a wave of religious excitement and revivalism turned New England from religious decline. The movement eventually came to be known as the Great Awakening. Among the consequences of this revival was bringing to prominence New England’s most brilliant theologian, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards attended Yale College at a young age and served briefly as a pastor in New York before assuming leadership of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He took an active role in the revivals and reflected deeply on their meaning. In 1757, he was invited to become president of the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton). Unfortunately, he died soon afterward.
During the Great Awakening, there were strong opinions both for and against the revival. These opinions stimulated Edwards to reflect on the essential character of religion. He offered his answer in the most sophisticated defense of the Awakening and the role of emotion in the religious life. He argued that deep emotion was essential to genuine religion, in order for people to be moved and their lives altered. Edwards combined Puritan theology with evangelical piety and practice, making a strong blend that long shaped the religious and intellectual life of New England.
Puritanism was not only a theological movement but also a liturgical one, deeply concerned with reshaping the ceremonial life of the Church of England. Puritans felt that what went on in the national church was too Catholic, such as worshipers kneeling when receiving the Lord’s Supper (which seemed to be idolatry comparable to accepting the Catholic idea that the bread and wine were transformed into the very body and blood of Jesus Christ). Instead, worshipers taking communion should sit together as a community at a great feast. Special clothing by ministers was rejected, as it implied a spiritual distance between clergy (church leaders) and laity (normal church members). Puritans could find no justification in the New Testament for many Catholic and Anglican ceremonies.
For Puritans, as for most Protestants, the list of Catholic sacraments narrowed from seven to only two: baptism and communion. Baptism represented an initiation into the Christian community; it could be bestowed appropriately upon infants, properly sponsored by their natural parents (who were church members). Infant baptism was a pledge for the future by all who witnessed it—to support and sustain the child, supporting the child’s faith and bringing him or her into a full participation in mature Christian life. The Lord’s Supper sustained the Christian community, as ordinary food sustained the common life. Bread was the most basic food; thus, the bread served in the Lord’s Supper was basic to one’s spiritual life. Wine symbolized the work of Christ, comforting the heart and giving refreshment. These sacraments were observed because Christ commanded them. They served as key community moments, full of meaning and spiritual danger for those who partook of them unworthily.
Unlike Catholics, Puritans did not hold that the minister was an intermediary standing between the worshipers and their God. They also did not hold that the Virgin Mary (mother of Jesus) or the saints (faithful Christians of the past) had a special intercessory role to play (praying to God more directly on behalf of Christians who were still alive). Sunday was seen as a holy day, to be strictly observed, rather than a time for trivial activities, sports, or unnecessary travel and labor. It was believed that God would strike down those who broke the Sabbath by doing improper activity on Sunday. The Puritans also sought to strip away the special days and celebrations of the church year, the altar which suggested the sacrifice of Christ was repeated, and decorations such as statues, pictures, and stained glass, which were seen as Catholic and potentially leading toward idolatry. Worship should involve prayers from the heart rather than the Book of Common Prayer or any other book except the Bible, as well as singing psalms and the preaching of the Scriptures.
All of this took place in the meetinghouse, the center of not only religious life, but social and political life in the seventeenth century New England town. It was the place of meeting for all occasions, from worship to military. On Mondays, citizens met to decide important civic matters of the community. The meetinghouse belonged to the town, for the whole population of the town contributed to its support and paid for its repair. Congregationalism was the official religion of New England, and there was a strong alliance between the civil and religious authorities.
The settlement pattern of New England centered on the creation of towns, just as the towns centered on the meetinghouse. New England was even more successful at re-creating the parish life of old England than was Virginia, which had set such a re-creation as its goal. And New England ended up as the most thoroughly churched region of colonial North America. By 1740, Congregationalists had well over 400 churches, concentrated largely in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and southeastern New Hampshire.
The revivalism of the 1740s may have awakened many New Englanders to a more earnest and committed spiritual life, but it also divided their churches into two factions—the New Lights who favored the revivals and the Old Lights who opposed them. Revivalists and itinerant ministers such as Britain’s George Whitefield alarmed and alienated many. Whitefield caused division within towns by challenging the status quo and questioning the zeal of the clergy for conversion. These itinerant ministers were often seen as obnoxious troublemakers who were unqualified for ministry. Tracts (short documents) were written by each side to criticize the other side.
These tracts did not settle matters, but they did point to the sharp divisions that led to the end for the Congregational control of the religious life of New England. Many of the New Light churches, separating from the town’s control, argued that only a zealous ministry and regenerate membership of truly converted believers reproduced the pure Christian church of New Testament times. A large number of these Separate New Light churches turned to the Baptist denomination, which grew to a powerful force in New England and beyond. Even before the Awakening, other religious groups such as Anglicanism and Quakerism had entered the Congregationalist domain of New England. Quakers initially received the harshest treatment, and four were hanged in Boston in the second half of the seventeenth century.
By the end of the colonial period, Congregational worship still dominated New England and permeated the culture of the region, but it no longer had anything near a religious monopoly. The revival movement especially disrupted Congregational consensus about pure worship and regularly split up village churches over these matters. Many now thought that revivalist features such as itinerant evangelists, new hymns, spontaneous sermons, outdoor revivals, and instantaneous conversions were the most godly form of worship, while others found such innovations to be fanatical and disorderly.
In New England, which had no bishops but strove to govern churches based on the Bible, education always had a priority. The first ministers in the great migration of the 1630s were university-educated (many having attended Cambridge University in England). As far as resources allowed, the Puritans resolved to develop education in New England to be as strong as what was available in Old England. In Massachusetts, each town of fifty households or more would maintain its own teacher of reading and writing, while each town of a hundred or more families would be required to build and support its own grammar school. Connecticut soon followed similar directions. By 1671, all Puritan New England had its own public system of education.
Grammar schools were a good beginning, but they were not enough for a colony that sought to maintain educated ministers. Soon after the Puritans’ arrival, leaders began to plan for some higher form of education. Harvard College was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard was not merely a Bible school or seminary but was dedicated to the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences. The religious commitment that characterized the colony as a whole permeated the school. Regular study of the Scriptures was required.
In 1701, Connecticut followed with Yale College, launched first at Saybrook and later moved to New Haven. Like Harvard, Yale dedicated itself to the liberal and religious education of suitable youth. It would also be a vital instrument directed toward the goal of spreading the reformed Protestant religion in the American wilderness.
New England Congregationalists, by their educational efforts, gave a distinctive coloration to their own culture and made a lasting impact on the larger nation. Given the educational programs at Harvard and Yale and the systematic qualities of Reformed theology, the intellectual legacy of colonial New England was much clearer and more defined than the legacy of any other region. New England theology left a lasting influence on American culture, seen later in its impact on nineteenth-century literature, as well as in how deeply the new American nation internalized notions of covenant and being chosen.
“A Full Liberty in Religious Concernments”: Rhode Island
Rhode Island was excluded from the category of “Puritan New England,” and Puritans would have preferred it this way. The tiny colony of Rhode Island, founded in 1636, never became part of the New England way and never pursued a religious conformity or uniformity. Nonetheless, this despised colony managed also to leave an impact on the later nation, due to its new and daring call for liberty in religion.
The efforts of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to maintain strict religious conformity exacted a high price of intolerance, persecution, and exile. One of those whom Massachusetts sought first to silence, then found necessary to expel, was Roger Williams. Coming to Boston in 1631 as a Puritan minister, Williams began to have different views from those of the other Puritans. First, he did not believe one could claim to still be part of the Church of England while pursuing distinctly different paths of worship and thought.
Massachusetts Puritans were trying to find an imaginary middle path where they could be not totally inside the Church of England but not totally outside it either. Williams stated that this path did not exist, but rather the attempt was a compromise that betrayed the purity of the gospel. A clean break was needed from the Church of England.
Second, Williams was disturbed to discover that the first immigrants from England had simply taken over and occupied the land without any reference to or acknowledgment of the natives. No one paid or bartered for the land. No one asked permission of the natives to occupy it on terms that might be mutually agreeable. Puritans considered this idea nonsense, sense the natives lived a nomadic lifestyle and did not farm or fence most of the land. Further, Puritans claimed a charter from King Charles I, which had given them the land on which they built. In response, Williams asked who had given the land to King Charles.
Williams saw a third and even more unsettling difficulty regarding the New England way. Puritans had fled England to escape the cruel legal penalties and religious persecutions that resulted. Yet in Massachusetts, they built the same kind of alliance between civil and church authorities. Williams argued that combining such force with religion resulted not in purity of faith, but only in bloodshed.
The Massachusetts authorities at first listened to Williams with patience, but eventually felt disbelief and horror at his words. They saw him as an overzealous madman who was out of touch with both reason and with God, since Williams had declared their churches impure, their title to the land unclear, and their enforcement of religion both cruel and absurd. They saw Williams as dangerous, recognizing that the spread of his ideas could create chaos.
In 1635, the colony’s General Court ruled that Williams must depart, due to his different beliefs. The judgment was rendered as the harsh winter season approached, so the court agreed to allow Williams to stay until spring if he would keep silent regarding his opinions. But Williams could not stop speaking his views to those who visited him. In January, the authorities made plans to arrest him and set him aboard a vessel bound for England. When Williams heard of these plans, he left in the bitter winter season, making his way on foot out of the bay colony’s jurisdiction to the headwaters of the Narragansett Bay, where he established a settlement he called Providence (recognizing God’s guidance and provision for him). This new colony developed into Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
The complaints Williams had with Massachusetts were on his mind as he founded his new colony. Therefore, he bought the land from the natives, helped organize a separated church, and determined that the civil government would have nothing to do with religion except to maintain a peaceful social order. He and others spent many years seeking guarantees for the colony’s territorial borders and assurances that their experiment in religious liberty could be pursued. In 1633, Rhode Island received from King Charles II a charter that declared that the experiment could continue. The colony was founded on the conviction that a flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained with a full liberty in religious beliefs.
As Williams was concerned about his own religious liberty, he was equally dedicated to the religious liberty of all others. His colony would be a haven for all dissenters, for people with all variety of religious beliefs or no religious beliefs at all. Whoever wished may come. A great number and variety of people came.
One year after the colony’s founding, Anne Hutchinson also came into conflict with the same authorities that had banned Williams. Hutchinson saw herself as a very good Puritan, perhaps better or more insightful than many of those around her. She wished to magnify the role of God’s grace, to clarify the distinction between religion and morals. She thought she was only further explaining the theology of her pastor, John Cotton, and drawing out implications already present in Puritan thought. But she went further than theologians and church leaders were willing to go, and certainly further than they were willing for a woman to go.
She, too, was brought to trial before Boston’s General Court and found it necessary to flee to Rhode Island. Her enemies accused here of being an antinomian and an enthusiast. They said she undermined the social order of New England and destroyed all basis for moral law by regarding good works as unrelated to the evidence of salvation. Thus, she was deemed to be against the law. She further presumed to be inspired directly by God, through direct revelation that bypassed the Bible, the clergy, and the Church, and this claim also threatened the social fabric of New England. The court found her guilty and exiled her from the commonwealth, while her church cast her from its fellowship. She relocated to Rhode Island with her family in 1638 and then departed for Long Island in 1642, where she and some of her children were slain by natives.
During the same time, Baptists took advantage of Rhode Island’s liberty and settled there in significant numbers, a full century before Baptists reached Virginia. The Baptists emerged as another radical Separatist Branch of English Puritanism early in the 17th century. They settled in Providence in 1638 and in Newport in 1639. Roger Williams participated in the founding of America’s earliest Baptist church in Providence, though he remained within the Baptist denomination only a short time, leaving on the conviction that a truly pure church must await the return of Christ and initiation of a new apostolic age. In Newport, John Clarke gave leadership to the new denomination throughout the colony and beyond. In 1651, Clarke and two companions were arrested while trying to advance the Baptist cause in Massachusetts.
One of Clarke’s companions, Obadiah Holmes, was publicly whipped with thirty lashes in Boston’s Market Street, to which Holmes responded that he was pleased to share in the kind of suffering Jesus knew, in order to strengthen his fellowship with Jesus. Enraged at the incident, Roger Williams protested to Massachusetts Governor John Endicott, arguing that civil magistrates had no business meddling in matters of conscience and religion and that persecution of those with different opinions would eventually mean opposition to God. Not until 1682 did Boston concede the right of Baptists to hold their own services of worship.
Long before then, Baptists had established themselves firmly in Rhode Island, but not firmly enough that they had a religious monopoly. The colony was open to others as well. The Society of Friends (or Quakers), shortly after their founding by George Fox in 1651, moved in large numbers to Rhode Island, settling especially near Newport. Soon they were strong enough to dominate the colonial government. Though urged by authorities of New England to bar the entrance of Quakers, Rhode Island authorities declined, referring to their value for freedom of conscience.
Cotton Mather, an influential Puritan minister in New England, was not happy with the situation in Rhode Island, which he considered a cesspool into which all the refuse of the world could be dumped. He argued that there had never before in history been such a variety of religions together in such a small area. What Mather intended as a criticism was for Williams and others a cherished freedom—full religious liberty.
Rhode Island never grew as large as its neighbors in either population or wealth. In 1700, when Massachusetts had over 50,000 settlers and Connecticut over 25,000, Rhode Island had fewer than 6000. Seventy years later, it still only had one-fourth the population of Massachusetts and about one-third that of Connecticut. By then, Rhode Island’s Baptists and Quakers had been joined by Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Jews, among others. Anglicans had established an outpost in Newport in 1704 and had sufficient strength to build a large church building in 1726. Yet Anglicans found Rhode Island to be a challenging environment, with Baptists and Quakers in the highest civil offices of the colony. They requested that London send them a bishop.
London never sent them a bishop. However, they had some hope when a church dignitary named George Berkeley came from Ireland, determined to build in the New World a college that would be a fountain of learning and religion for all the colonies. As an Anglo-Irish clergyman and dean of Londonberry, Berkeley often preached in the church and offered support to the Anglican clergy. Though Berkeley returned to Ireland without building a college, Berkely gave encouragement to Samuel Johnson, a man with similar ideas who became the first president of King’s College (later renamed Columbia) in New York.
Though scornful of Rhode Island’s wild varieties of religion, Congregationalists felt the obligation to spread their religion there also by the 1720s. Josiah Cotton came from Boston’s Old South Church as a missionary to Providence, where he organized a church in 1728. In Newport, Ezra Stiles exercised an effective ministry from 1755 to 1776. Stiles helped move Congregationalism toward a more vigorous participation in cosmopolitan forms of Enlightenment rationalism.
Jews also took advantage of the colony’s offer of religious freedom. Arriving in the 17th century, Sephardic Jews (whose liturgical practices stemmed from Portugal and Spain) had to wait until 1759 before their numbers and resources permitted the building of a synagogue. The synagogue was completed in 1763. Though only a tiny fraction of America’s colonial population, Jews opened synagogues also in New York City, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Charleston.
In 1764, Rhode Island acquired a college that ultimately resided in Providence under the name Brown University. With the support of Baptists from Pennsylvania and New England, Brown took as its mission to educate young men for usefulness and good reputation in serving the important offices. The school’s charter specifically refused religious tests for membership, allowing liberty of conscience to all members.
Chapter 4. Middle-Colony Diversity
Pluralism is not merely a product of the last half century. New York and New Jersey in the 17th century displayed a remarkable variety in religion without anyone having planned it that way and without laws that officially recognized the extensive diversity. Incomplete steps toward freedom in religion developed in spite of efforts to prevent it and theories that condemned it. As in much of American history, diversity itself set the agenda. In the earlier periods, the presence of many religious options demanded notice. In the Quaker effort in Pennsylvania, religious diversity more than prevailed, growing in response to the colony’s pursuit of liberty of conscience. Across the Middle Colonies, an experiment with religious pluralism took place. Protestantism itself was not uniform but instead functioned as a religious prism that allowed expression to diverse groups.
“Religions of All Sorts”: New York, New Jersey, and Delaware
Under the auspices of their West India Company, the Dutch in 1626 sailed into the mouth of the Hudson River then later up the river to establish trading posts that would bring to Holland some share of New World riches. A major seafaring power at this time, Holland moved upriver from the claims of the Virginia and Plymouth companies, to establish Fort Orange near the present-day site of Albany. Here furs could be received from natives to the west, and vessels could sail down the Hudson to the larger port of New Amsterdam. Trade with Europe and throughout the Caribbean would make Holland a major player in the markets of the world.
While the company’s interest was clearly commercial, merchant promoters urged that ministers be sent to instruct both the few settlers and many natives in religion and learning. Those ministers would represent the Dutch Reformed Church, Holland’s legal religious institution. Amsterdam’s company would direct the economic life, while Amsterdam’s church would direct the spiritual life. The first ordained clergyman, Jonas Michaelius, arrived in 1628 to find a rough group of settlers and the natives he characterized as entirely savage. The West India Company was also displeased with Michaelius, and he sailed for home four years later.
In 1629, the Dutch Reformed Church received official recognition as the established church of New Netherland, technically excluding the presence of other religions. However, the company preferred to follow a relaxed policy that would not make religion a large issue that would interfere with commerce and economic growth. In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant took over as the director-general of the colony. Seeing all the diversity as disorderly, he failed to apply the liberal company policy and sought instead to turn New Amsterdam into a neat Dutch village.
Already dismayed by the presence of Lutherans, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Catholics, Stuyvesant did not wish to tolerate the group of impoverished Jews that arrived in his city in 1654. When he asked the Jews to depart, they protested to the West India Company, who allowed them to remain. They first held religious services in their homes, then purchased land for a cemetery, and finally in 1729 organized America’s first synagogue in New York City.
Stuvyesant had even greater difficulty with the Quakers. He tried for years to stamp out this movement, which he saw as a heresy, yet the sect continued to grow. Outside the law, Quakers also met in private homes and kept their faith flourishing. Informed in 1662 that a majority of the citizens in the town of Jamaica on Long Island gathered in secret Quaker meetings, Stuyvesant arrested the man in whose home such meetings had been held, hauled him to New Amsterdam for trial, and found him guilty of harboring and encouraging a subversive religion. The Quaker, John Bowne, was fined and then thrown in prison when he refused to pay. Bowne then argued his case before the West India Company, which affirmed the religious freedom of New Amsterdam and overturned Stuyvesant’s judgment.
Stuyvesant fought against not only his own company but also the attitude of his own people. In 1657, the inhabitants of Flushing protested his edict that any ship daring to bring a Quaker into his colony would be confiscated and anyone allowing a Quaker to spend the night in his home would be fined, with half the fine amount going to the informer. The residents of Flushing instead advocated that liberty and free entrance should be extended to all in Christ Jesus—whether Quakers, Baptists, Independents, or Presbyterians.
Meanwhile, Swedish Lutherans had settled along the Delaware River near the modern city of Wilmington. The Swedes also saw the New World as a potential source of wealth and trade, and their national church would go wherever merchants and governors went. In 1643, John Printz, the governor who arrived in the small colony, was given instructions in both economic matters and in paying true worship to God, according to the Lutheran Augsburg confession and the ceremonies of the Swedish Church.
While the colony of New Sweden was the first formal introduction of Lutheranism to North America, the real strength of the Lutheran denomination had to await the arrival of much larger numbers from Germany in the 18th century and from Scandinavia in the 19th century. The few hundred Swedes at Fort Christina could not greatly advance the Lutheran cause, despite efforts of a minister named John Campanius to minister to the Delaware Indians and to translate the catechism of Martin Luther into the common language of America. Stuyvesant was outraged when a few hundred more Swedes arrived in 1654 and took over a nearby Dutch fort, and he led seven armed vessels up the Delaware, where he forced the surrender of Fort Christina.
While the Swedish flag came down, the Swedish mission itself remained until the American Revolution. In New York, Stuyvesant’s effort to guarantee a Dutch Reformed monopoly soon was irrelevant, as the Dutch outposts fell to the English in 1664. When English soldiers landed at Gravesend and marched over Long Island and British ships arrived with guns ready, the Dutch wisely surrendered, and New Amsterdam became New York. However, Dutch religious services were allowed to continue.
English authorities were prepared to acknowledge another national church, that of Holland, as having the same status as their own Church of England. However, they did not look with favor upon all the religious diversity around them. In 1678, Governor Edmund Andros described the picture of the diverse religions—with congregations of the Church of England, Presbyterians and Independent Congregationalists, Quakers, Anabaptists, and some Jews. Eight years later, Governor Thomas Dongan faced a similar situation, with even more diversity added by Catholics, both male and female preachers, an increased number of Quakers, and much more, as well as people with no religion at all.
Early in the 18th century, an arrogant governor, Lord Cornbury, resolved to penalize or imprison people in order to make the establishment of Anglicanism a reality rather than mere ideal. He turned against even the Dutch Reformed, who had previously been left alone. When Dutch churches lost their ministers, he appointed Anglican ones in their place. He also refused to grant licenses to preach to Dutch ministers that arrived from Holland, or to recognize a congregation’s right to install them.
Lord Cornbury treated other dissenters with even more contempt. In 1707, he challenged the Presbyterians, arresting Francis Makemie and John Hampton for preaching without a license. When these traveling preachers claimed the protection of England’s Declaration of Religious Toleration, Cornbury replied that this act did not extend to New York. Cornbury, who felt no obligation to read the act, declared that it had been passed to prevent itinerant preachers such as Makemie. Makemie, who had read the law, observed that it said nothing about itinerant preachers. Though the judge, at Cornbury’s request, directed the jury to render a verdict of guilty, the twelve jurors instead found Makemie innocent. Cornbury was soon recalled to England.
Anglicanism in New York prospered more in spite of Cornbury than because of him. The city’s first Anglican church was chartered in 1697. A half century later, New York had twenty such churches, and there were an additional eighteen in New Jersey and fourteen in Delaware. By the middle of the century, New York Anglicans were strong enough to consider starting a college to represent their cause in the North. In 1754, King George II granted a charter for the college in New York, which would be called King’s College (and later renamed Columbia).
Presbyterians and others protested that New York’s one college was too distinctly Anglican in liturgy and government. Since the colony had religious diversity, that diversity should be reflected in the regulation of the college. William Livingston, a Yale graduate and Presbyterian lawyer, led the forces opposed to a strictly Anglican school. He pointed out that Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Dutch Reformed were more numerous than Anglicans in the 1750s, and there were also Anabaptists, Lutherans, Quakers, and a growing church of Moravians. To give any one group exclusive control of King’s College would kindle the jealousy of the rest. The school’s trustees, the majority of whom were Anglican, specified that daily worship services would be conducted according to the liturgy of the Church of England and that the college president would always be Anglican, yet also allowed a measure of diversity as all academically qualified New Yorkers were able to attend. By the time of the American Revolution, the idea of an Anglican school lost any chance of continued public support, as the Church of England suffered from its identification with the authorities against whom Americans went to war.
Far more than in Virginia or the South, Anglicans in New York and New Jersey opposed the Revolution and took England’s side. The clergy, sent by England, continued to see England as their home and their work in America as only a temporary exile. They saw their task as advancing the cause of Anglicanism everywhere, which meant loyalty to the British king and his church. In 1767, a New Jersey Anglican named Thomas Bradbury Chandler wrote an appeal calling for sending Bishops from the Church of England to America. However, in his argument, he connected the episcopal form of government (used by the Church of England) and monarchy, stating that episcopacy could not thrive in a Republican government.
Chandler was right. As republicanism spread throughout the colonies, the Church of England did not thrive, and it would not thrive until it reconstituted itself with American-elected bishops, who were not favorable to the English monarchy. Chandler returned to England in 1775, while his fellow clergyman in New York, Charles Inglis, continued the plea for a bishop and condemned the American Revolution.
While Anglicanism suffered, other denominations grew: Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Lutherans, and especially the Scots-Irish Presbyterians and the Dutch Reformed. Colleges founded in New Jersey reflected the prestige and strength of the two latter groups. Presbyterian forces sympathetic to the revivals of the 1730s and early 1740s established the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton). Princeton identified itself with the patriotic cause, and its president John Witherspoon was the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. Scots and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, who took much of their identity from the long history of Scotland’s conflict with Anglicanism and English power, made the revolutionary cause their own. Presbyterians grew in the Middle Colonies, much of the growth resulting from the hundreds of thousands of Scottish immigrants from Scotland and the Northern Ireland.
The Dutch Reformed, like the Presbyterians, participated in the larger revival movement and benefited from it. Under the leadership of Theodore Frelinghuysen, churches found new strength and membership during the course of the Dutch version of the evangelical and pietist revival. In 1755, Frelinghuysen directed the plan for a Dutch Reformed college to educate their young men for the ministry. Queen’s College (later renamed Rutgers University) was formed a decade later, both to train ministers and offer a broad education to all its students. While never sweeping across the country, the Dutch Reformed Church continued to be a major cultural force in New York and New Jersey.
Quakers also survived and prospered in New York and New Jersey, despite the opposition of both Stuyvesant and Cornbury. But they flourished most dramatically in a colony of their own, founded across the Delaware River. Pennsylvania went a far greater distance in encouraging religious diversity.
“In No Ways Molested or Prejudiced”: Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania came into existence much later than the early decades of the 17th century. The colony, founded in 1682, had the advantage of learning from all the others—learning what mistakes to avoid in starting a new colony. This Quaker colony avoided the struggles for survival faced by Jamestown and Plymouth, as well as the mistake of encouraging all to come and expect bounty without labor. But for those willing and ready to work, a rich land promised rich reward.
William Penn (1644-1718) was born in London and attended Oxford in the early 1660s. In 1667, he turned to the Society of Friends (Quakers), entering an active ministry on their behalf in England and elsewhere. He first tried to reform his own nation and its church before facing the need, like the Pilgrims, of saving the small sect from harsh persecution. In 1670, he wrote a treatise condemning the intrusion of civil power into religious conscience and arguing for liberty of conscience.
Penn argued vigorously but mostly unsuccessfully for a far more liberal policy of toleration in England, making his argument long before England took such a step in 1689. Before this date, Penn found in the New World an even happier solution. Since King Charles II owed a large debt to Penn’s father, he discharged that debt by giving to the son a vast tract of land on the west side of the Delaware River. Pennsylvania would offer English and Irish Quakers a refuge from persecution and a path to prosperity, and not only to Quakers, but to all who acknowledged the one God to be the creator. All such citizens, agreeing to live peaceably and justly in civil society, would in no ways be molested or prejudiced for their religious persuasion or practices, nor compelled to worship in a manner not of their choosing. Thus, Penn’s holy experiment set out to avoid another earlier mistake: religious harassment and persecution. His colony would grant not merely moderation or toleration, but a much bolder invitation to religious freedom. To the amazement of all, the colony quickly prospered.
Another mistake that William Penn wished to avoid pertained to the natives. Both Virginia and Massachusetts had offended and alienated different tribal groups and suffered from costly native wars. Even before coming to America, Penn sent agents ahead to let the Delaware Indians know of his intention to occupy the land only with their consent. Penn sent gifts and promises that when he arrived, he would seek a fair treaty and league of peace. The treaty, agreed to in 1701, set Pennsylvania on a course of better relations between the natives and English than any other colony had known.
Quakers settled in large numbers in Philadelphia, William Penn’s carefully laid out town, and in nearby lands along the river. German emigrants soon arrived also, founding Germantown in 1683. Later, Mennonites and Amish, Anabaptist groups who had suffered terrible persecutions across post-Reformation Europe, moved into Lancaster County, west of the Quaker settlements. In the 1730s and beyond, many German Lutherans and German Reformed developed farms and churches in the region, developing an enduring German American folk culture. Near Lancaster, a German communitarian group of Seventh-day Baptists settled in 1732. Another German-speaking pietist group, the Moravians, set up their own closely governed community at Bethlehem. In addition, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Welsh Baptists, free African Methodists, Irish Catholics, and missionary Anglicans settled in Pennsylvania.
Earliest settlers and administrators soon learned that there were a few negative aspects to the liberty granted. Penn faced many disappointments. Quakers quarreled among themselves, while trusted deputies mismanaged their funds and abused their positions. Many mistook freedom for the equivalent of moral anarchy. While he continued to work for a virtuous society, Penn slowly lost much of the control over his colony. In 1718, he died as a disheartened man.
Nonetheless, the colony flourished economically and proved by 1750 to be the major center for Lutheranism, German Reformed, and Presbyterianism. Lutheranism, largely German at this time, gained a strong leader in Henry Muhlenberg, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1742. Muhlenberg could preach in English, Dutch, and German, even preaching outside the boundaries of Pennsylvania. He journeyed to New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, preaching and conducting classes, settling congregational disputes, introducing some measure of Lutheran liturgy and discipline, and carrying out correspondence with those he could not reach in person.
As Muhlenberg noted in his journal, his willingness to minister to any and all he encountered left some people unsure whether he was even a Lutheran. The German Reformed thought he was one of them. An Anglican also clergyman also approached him, seeking to work out a coalition for a bishop in America that would allow the training of Germans in English academies for employment in the Church, but he gracefully declined as he recognized the impracticality of doing so.
Muhlenberg was annoyed by one aspect of Quakerism—namely pacifism. Quakers believed that the command of Christ to love enemies meant that followers of Christ could not take up arms and fight their enemies. In addition to the Quakers, Pennsylvania was filled with other pacifists with roots in the radical Reformation of sixteenth-century Germany, Switzerland, and Holland: including Mennonites and Amish. The large number of people unwilling to bear arms threw the burden of defense upon those who were left, a burden which was sometimes resented and protested. The pacifists refused to bear arms and fight during the French and Indian War (1756-1763), except against frontiersmen that marched upon Philadelphia after murdering twenty Conestoga Indians.
Pacifism proved even more difficult during the American Revolution, which lasted from 1776 to 1783. During this troubled period, Benjamin Franklin advised all pacifists to render some kind of service on behalf of the united colonies—to help care for the wounded, to provide food, or to form emergency fire brigades—so their neighbors would not feel hostility toward them. In a petition to the Pennsylvania Assembly, Mennonites agreed to accept this advice. A few Quakers enlisted in the Revolutionary Army, but most did not, due both to their pacifism and doubts about the colonial cause (given that earlier English kings had made possible their religious freedom in Penn’s colony).
German Reformed immigrants, like the Lutherans with whom they shared an ethnic bond, were not fond of pacifism. Moving first into the upper Hudson River valley in 1708, German Calvinists made Pennsylvania the place of their largest settlement. By mid-eighteenth century, over sixty Reformed churches had been planted in Pennsylvania, far more than in all other colonies combined. In their earliest years, these Calvinists often joined with Lutherans, sharing meeting space and sometimes even the minister until each group gathered sufficient strength to establish its own church and hire its own clergy.
Presbyterians moved in force toward the colony’s western frontier, many of them migrating from that point down the valleys into the back country of Virginia and the Carolinas. At the conclusion of the French and Indian War, England tried to halt all overland migration across the Allegheny Mountains, but Presbyterians would not be halted. At the middle of the century, Presbyterians counted over 200 churches throughout America, with the largest number in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The earliest Baptists in Pennsylvania came from Wales, settling in or near Philadelphia before the end of the 17th century. In 1707, Baptist churches joined together to form the Philadelphia Association, which was the first such interchurch fellowship among Baptists in America and one that had enduring strength. By the time of the Revolution, Pennsylvania (and much of the South) numbered more Baptist churches than Rhode Island. Baptists, who spoke much of liberty, favored the rhetoric of resistance to tyranny.
Coming from nearby Maryland, as well as Philadelphia, Roman Catholics also freely conducted their worship services in Penn’s colony. Though most of colonial America continued throughout the 18th century to bar entrance to Catholics, they were welcome in Pennsylvania (in addition to Maryland). However, suspicions continued that Catholic loyalty to the pope and potential common cause with the French would lead Catholics to subvert the interests of England.
Philadelphia also became a major center for Jews in America. Though synagogue services did not begin until the middle of the 18th century, the Philadelphia Jewish community grew by the end of the colonial period to be the largest in the new nation. Much later in the nineteenth century, Rabbi Isaac Leeser would make Philadelphia an important center for Jewish educational and theological life in America.
After the Revolution, Methodism made its presence felt in Pennsylvania, as it did elsewhere. But Philadelphia was uniquely important in the organization of and ministry to black Americans. In 1787, Richard Allen, along with other African Americans, left the white-controlled St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, where blacks had faced segregation and other indignities. Allen founded Bethel Church to be a fellowship for others of his own race. This move led to the beginning of the first independent black denomination in America: the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The Anglicans had only built a single church in Pennsylvania prior to 1700, but their prospects sharply improved after Thomas Bray created the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. By 1750, nineteen churches had been built in the colony. Anglicanism seemed headed for even larger successes in the prosperous colony, but it suffered from anti-English and anti-bishop sentiment. Like elsewhere in the colonies, Pennsylvania’s Anglican clergy felt unable to cope with all the religious diversity and indifference unless supported by a resident bishop. As the revolution began, and prescribed prayer for the king and royal family became unpopular, many Anglican churches closed.
Even this strategy did not save all the Anglican clergy from violence. Thomas Barton, an Anglican society missionary in Lancaster, described closing his churches, yet still facing death threats due to suspicion that he was not friendly to the American revolutionary cause. He further described instances of assault and harassment faced by fellow Anglican clergymen.
Anglicanism suffered not only from its identification with England but also from its strong distaste for the wide diversity in religion that was manifest in Pennsylvania. It adjusted more easily to situations in which it was the established Church, while all other groups, if present at all, were identified as dissenters, noncomformists, or worse.
For the direction that America would later take, Pennsylvania made two critical contributions. First, it offered religious liberty on a wider scale than had been available anywhere before, and it found the offer accepted by a greater number than had been the case elsewhere. Second, and probably even more important, Pennsylvania demonstrated that religious liberty and economic progress could occur together. By the time of the Revolution, Pennsylvania had caught up to the wealth of Massachusetts and Virginia, which were founded much earlier. Philadelphia also became the cultural capital of America, being seen as a center of light and learning as well as of prosperity, amidst its rampant religious variety.
Primary Text 2: “A Persuasive to Moderation to Church Dissenters In Prudence and Conscience”
(by William Penn)
A Perswasive to Moderation, &c.
MODERATION, the Subject of this Discourse, is in plainer English, Liberty of Conscience to Church Dissenters: A Cause I have, with all Humility, undertaken to plead, against the Prejudices of the Times.
That there is such a Thing as Conscience, and the Liberty of it, in Reference to Faith and Worship towards God, must not be denied, even by those, that are most scandal’d at the Ill Use some seem to have made of such Pretences. But to settle the Terms: By Conscience, I understand the Apprehension and Perswasion a Man has of his Duty to God: By Liberty of Conscience, I mean, A Free and Open Profession and Exercise of that Duty; especially in Worship: But I always premise this Conscience to keep within the Bounds of Morality, and that it be neither Frantick nor Mischievous, but a Good Subject, a Good Child, a Good Servant, in all the Affairs of Life: As exact to yield to Caesar the Things that are Caesar’s, as jealous of withholding from God the Thing that is God’s.
In brief, he that acknowledges the civil Government under which he lives, and that maintains no Principle hurtful to his Neighbour in his Civil Property.
[{293}]
For he that in any Thing violates his Duty to these Relations, cannot be said to observe it to God, who ought to have his Tribute out of it. Such do not reject their Prince, Parent, Master or Neighbour, but God who enjoyns that Duty to them. Those Pathetick Words of Christ will naturally enough reach the Case, In that ye did it not to them, ye did it not to me;8 for Duty to such Relations hath a Divine Stamp: And Divine Right runs through more Things of the World, and Acts of our Lives, than we are aware of: And Sacrilege may be committed against more than the Church. Nor will a Dedication to God, of the Robbery from Man, expiate the Guilt of Disobedience: For though Zeal could turn Gossip to Theft, his Altars would renounce the Sacrifice.
The Conscience then that I state, and the Liberty I pray, carrying so great a Salvo and Deference to publick and private Relations, no ill Design can, with any Justice, be fix’d upon the Author, or Reflection upon the Subject, which by this Time, I think, I may venture to call a Toleration.
But to this so much craved, as well as needed, Toleration, I meet with two Objections of weight, the solving of which will make Way for it in this Kingdom. And the first is a Disbelief of the Possibility of the Thing. Toleration of Dissenting Worships from that establish’d, is not practicable (say some) without Danger to the State, with which it is interwoven. This is Political. The other Objection is, That admitting Dissenters to be in the Wrong, (which is always premised by the National Church) such Latitude were the Way to keep up the Dis-union, and instead of compelling them into a better Way, leave them in the Possession and Pursuit of their old Errors, This is Religious. I think I have given the Objections fairly, ’twill be my next Business to answer them as fully.
Lecture 3
Chapter 5. From Maryland Catholics to Georgia Evangelicals
Unlike other British colonies in North America, Maryland came into existence under Roman Catholic support and served as a haven for English Catholics. Just as relations between Catholics and Protestants were stormy in England, so that turbulence characterized most of Maryland’s colonial years. As Maryland shifted toward Anglican establishment, the Catholic haven did not remain secure. The Carolinas and Georgia also presented other locations for the exercise of Anglican power. Sometimes the power proved significant, but just as often it proved fragile. By the time of the American Revolution, evangelicals had gained ground from the Methodist advances in Delaware to the itinerant ministry of George Whitefield in Georgia.
Maryland
In 1632, King Charles I granted a charter to Cecil Calvert for lands on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay. Calvert, who inherited the title of Lord Baltimore, became the founder of the first private colony in America, in which all the land legally belonged to Calvert himself. As landlord, Calvert hoped his colony would attract many settlers and quickly become an economic success. Thus, he encouraged both Protestants and Catholics to emigrate, and he instructed his fellow Catholics aboard the first ships to the colony to preserve peace and unity among all the passengers.
However, jealousy, suspicion, and political plots prevented peace both in Maryland and back in England. Many in England protested the notion of giving land to a Catholic family, which necessarily would mean offering encouragement to a religion which the kingdom opposed. In 1633, Calvert and his friends tried to overcome the protests by explaining that sending Catholics off to Maryland was not necessarily doing them a great favor, considering they would be banished from England and would need to settle in a harsh environment. In addition, they would be offering service to England by possessing the land as English subjects. And Catholic uprisings were unlikely against the much greater numbers of Protestants in the colonies.
In March of 1634, the two ships with their cooperative passengers arrived at the mouth of the Potomac River and then made their way northward up the Chesapeake Bay to St. Clement’s Island. A Jesuit priest named Andrew White led the first Catholic worship service, and the Jesuits later directed the building of the first Catholic chapel in St. Mary’s City, the original capital of Maryland.
White he attempted missionary work among the natives, the natives’ resistance made it necessary for him to return to St. Mary’s. Jesuit missions among the natives continued to be a major objective around unsettled areas, which White saw as a better alternative to the practice of extermination as well as an opportunity to expand the cause of Christ.
In the early 1640s, Protestants took control from Lord Baltimore and expelled the Jesuits from their own land. In 1646, when lawful authority was restored, the Jesuits returned to resume their labors. In an effort to prevent future religious conflict, the Maryland Assembly in 1649 passed a Toleration Act, which guaranteed to all Christians the right of free worship and immunity from all religious coercion. Yet in the aftermath of England’s Civil War, execution of Charles I, and rise to power of Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant rebel named William Claiborne managed to win full control of the Maryland colony and moved to bar Roman Catholics from any civil office and to restrain the practice of the Catholic religion.
In 1660, when the monarchy was restored in England, Calvert regained his authority and a comparative peace settled once more upon Maryland. However, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William and Mary to the English throne, led to renewed anti-Catholic sentiment in England and in the colonies. In 1692, Maryland lost its proprietary status forever, becoming a royal colony under the control of Protestant monarchs and a Protestant Parliament. Maryland’s own assembly passed an act that provided for the establishment of the Protestant religion. Despite the earlier efforts of the Calverts to balance the competing interest of Catholics and Protestants, by the end of the century Maryland became another Anglican colony, with the Church of England the established religion.
In 1696, three Anglican clerics in Maryland wrote to the bishop of London, complaining of the presence of Roman Catholics, Quakers, and wandering preachers. New immigration (particularly from Ireland) also increased the number of Catholics, even bringing priests. The Anglian clergymen in Maryland wanted England to send a bishop to establish Anglican control more completely.
As was the case with other territories, Maryland did not receive a bishop from England. However, Thomas Bray came as a bishop’s representative at the end of the seventeenth century. He was already known in England for his concern to advance the Anglican cause. He had written proposals that described the weaknesses of Anglicanism in the colonies as insufficient attention to means for education and inadequate supply and inappropriate quality of clergy. He proposed agencies that would take charge of the situation.
In 1699, Bray founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which would print and distribute literature, encourage the creation of parish libraries, and resolve to make each Anglican church a center of education and religious training. Bray’s second agency, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, was formed to hire ministers to send as missionaries where the need was greatest, support them financially, and encourage them. To persuade England of the need for this society, Bray described a somewhat exaggerated condition of the bleak state of religion in the colonies, particularly Anglicanism.
There was a measure of truth in Bray’s description, given the lack of effects that had been achieved in reaching natives, blacks, and back country settlers, as Anglicanism struggled to reach beyond its own social and geographic strongholds. Despite Bray’s efforts, there was still little progress in the next generation. Part of the reason was that many slaveowners had no concern for the conversion of their slaves and did not give them sufficient time off for religious instruction.
By 1750, Anglicanism was far ahead of all other religious groups in Maryland, but Catholicism was still present. One particular family, the Carrolls, enhanced the political and social status of Catholicism during the revolutionary years and beyond. Charles Carroll, a wealthy and eloquent spokesman for the Catholic cause, served as an adviser to the First Continental Congress and a delegate to the Second, becoming the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence. Despite his cooperation with non-Catholics, he was opposed by Daniel Dulany for his Catholicism, for his presumed sympathies with the Stuart kings of England, and for allegedly being a threat to religious and civil liberty. Carroll responded that he despised bigots of whatever sect (implying Dulany was a bigot).
John Carroll, a cousin of Charles, also played a large part in reducing the suspicions with which Catholicism was regarded. After being educated abroad, he returned to his homeland in 1774, as tension between England and its colonies reached the point of war. Siding with the American cause, he joined efforts to win France’s aid and keep Canada neutral in the event of war. In 1784, he was named vicar apostolic for the new nation, a prelude to his being elevated to the dignity of America’s first Roman Catholic bishop. He chose Baltimore as the site for his cathedral, and a classical structure was designed. In 1785, he reported to Rome that there were about 25,000 Catholics in the country, most of whom were in Maryland and Pennsylvania. At his death in 1815, he left behind a much stronger Catholic church body than what he had found in America.
Maryland, the colonial center for Catholicism, also became the colonial center for Methodism. Emerging out of the Church of England as an evangelical movement dedicated to revival, personal holiness, and devotion, American Methodism was spread in its earliest years by the efforts of dedicated laymen and laywomen (normal church members). In 1766, Robert Strawbridge first introduced the Methodist message in Maryland. A Methodist conference meeting in 1773, reported more Methodists in Maryland than in any of the other colonies, though Methodism quickly spread south into Virginia and north into Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.
One decade later, Methodists gathered in Baltimore to declare themselves separate from the Church of England and to begin an American denomination that would reach far beyond Maryland. Francis Asbury (1745-1816) emerged as the leading voice from this conference in 1784 and also as the leading itinerant preacher who advanced the Methodist movement. Setting the example of a circuit rider, Asbury traveled constantly. Methodist clergy did not settle into a single parish but moved across great distances, visiting isolated settlements and families and drawing people into the evangelical movement more successfully than any other group.
This situation was true up and down the Atlantic Coast, especially in Maryland, where Methodists grew dramatically in number, reaching both blacks and whites, using both church leaders and members, and employing devout women no less than men. In 1787, the Methodist General Conference exhorted its ministers to make a special effort to reach the slaves. The effort paid off as blacks, both free and slave, responded to the gospel as it was made accessible to them. Former slave Richard Allen, aided in gaining his freedom by the Methodist preacher and antislavery advocate Freeborn Garrettson. Early Methodism moved in power across racial lines, across the categories of class and gender, and across age hierarchies.
Methodism provided an important base of organization and initial strength for both Roman Catholics and Methodist evangelicals. That made Maryland an important sign of the new nation’s emerging religious demography. By the 1830s, Catholics and Methodists had grown to become the two largest religious bodies in the land and would remain so for decades afterward.
The Carolinas
When the monarchy was restored to England in 1660 and Charles II became king, the English moved to end the religious chaos that had characterized the period under Cromwell. It was now assumed that stability and order required unquestioning loyalty to the king, and that experiments with republican government and religious innovations had to be abandoned. All land was considered to belong to the king, and he could grant portions of it to merchants, planters, and loyal supporters. In 1663, Charles bestowed lands that would take the name of Carolina (named after King Charles II). The major settlement and port of the territory was also called Charlestown.
Settlement of the territory occurred slowly. By 1670, fewer than 200 people lived in the colony. By the end of the century, the numbers had risen to around 8000. A large slave population was imported from Barbados, and this black population grew even more rapidly than the white population; South Carolina became the only colony in which the white settlers were a minority. The slaves experienced harsh treatment and cruel punishments, while white settlers carefully guarded their own liberties and asserted their own freedoms.
Population centered on Charlestown (later called Charleston), which served as the center for the trade in furs and slaves. Immigrants from France, Germany, and Ireland, as well as from the Caribbean and England, surged into the town. Settlers also came from New England. Once again, diversity defied all plans to reproduce an English society and unified Anglican establishment in an American environment.
One element of that diversity resulted from a coincidence of timing. The Edict of Nantes, which had granted a measure of toleration to Protestants in France, was revoked in 1685. Finding it necessary to flee their homeland, French Protestants (known as Huguenots), sought a refuge where they would be safe. Carolina, which was still in its earliest years of settlement, presented a possibility, with the result that about 500 had settled there by 1700. The French-speaking settlers quickly moved into the political life of the colony and organized their own church in Charleston.
Both political and religious instability kept the French community distressed and unsure of the best path to follow. Some Huguenot ministers thought it best to develop close relationships with official Anglicanism. Others determined to maintain their own liturgy, language, and Calvinist theology. A Huguenot clergyman named John La Pierre even complained to the bishop of London for mistreatment by the leading Anglican clergyman Alexander Garden after being charged with a crime for baptizing an infant without Garden’s consent. When Garden reported the offense to both the governor and bishop of London, La Pierre was not given the opportunity to present his case at a meeting of the clergy. Despite the uneasy relations that continued between Huguenots and Anglicans, Huguenots maintained a visible presence in and near Charleston.
The Church of England struggled through many political shifts, from the initial charter that had offered a large measure of religious toleration, to a privately-owned establishment of the Church of England with few concessions to dissenters, to a royal colony that again gave some toleration to non-Anglicans. Anglican missionaries complained about the resistance they faced from settlers, natives, and blacks. Later Alexander Garden found the population somewhat improved but the prospects of the Anglican Church still greatly decreased by all the competition. He was troubled by the Huguenots and other dissenters, but he was even more outraged at his fellow Anglican George Whitefield, who came to the colony in 1740, preaching to and even encouraging all the dissenters. His outrage was at least partially provoked by Whitefield’s criticism of Garden and the general spiritual state of Anglicanism in Carolina.
Garden summoned an ecclesiastical (church) court in Charleston and tried to suspend Whitefield from exercising the ministerial office of an Anglican minister. He even informed the bishop of London that, if it were in his power, he would excommunicate Whitefield due to Whitefield’s actions that undermined the Anglican church. However, it was not in Garden’s power either to excommunicate Whitefield or prevent his continuing ministry. His efforts only served to drive Whitefield even more toward the dissenters, and Whitefield was welcomed by Charleston’s Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists.
The Great Awakening proved to be another trial to Carolina’s Church of England. Nonetheless, Anglicanism could boast of at least sixteen churches in 1750, some of them large structures. But Anglicanism still had to endure a revolution, survive disestablishment, and absorb the policy of religious freedom.
Much later to be settled were the regions well to the north of Charleston, which would eventually be designated as North Carolina. In the 17th century, the small rule these lands had came from Charleston. In 1711, North Carolina gained its own governor and, in 1729, its full status as a distinct royal colony. It proved to be even more inhospitable to religion than South Carolina.
Anglicans were not reassured when, in 1707, a Quaker was named deputy governor of the province. Quakers had migrated down from Virginia, finding no government that was strong enough to persecute them or drive them away. By the early years of the 18th century, they had become a significant body in North Carolina, which was the only southern colony in which a Quaker presence endured. John Archdale, the Quaker deputy governor, tried to downplay the religious distinctiveness, instead focusing on the importance of clearing and developing the land. He pointed to the success of Pennsylvania as a colony that allowed dissent. Thus, he sought to welcome dissenters.
Dissenters arrived in North Carolina with force and variety, making North Carolina a scandal to Virginia and South Carolina. By 1750, Baptists had built more churches than Anglicans, and joined with Quakers and Presbyterians, Moravians and German Reformed, to bring a rich degree of religious dissent to the colony. While Anglicans may have sometimes been encouraged by the progress of the Church of England in South Carolina, they were completely displeased with the northern province. One Anglican cleric named Charles Woodmason found himself in conflict with back country dissenters who disrupted his worship services and committed acts of vandalism to inhibit the Anglican work.
Woodmason thought that evangelical dissenters misunderstood Christianity, placing too much emphasis on religious experiences. He further criticized Baptist meetings for alleged indecent behavior, which he said had led to religion being despised. He argued that unless the Church of England were made stronger in North Carolina, it would lead to the end of religion, with moral anarchy resulting.
His harsh judgment was indicative of the severity of the conflict between weakly established Anglicans and the new evangelicals across the southern colonies. The larger point Woodmason sought to make was that, without an official church, the colony was doomed and much of American religion along with it. Despite Woodmason’s sentiment, Baptists grew and spread throughout the South, spurred by the ongoing evangelical revival.
In Salem, North Carolina, the communitarian Moravians made their mark, just as they had in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This devout and pacificist group had escaped persecution for a time by taking refuge in Saxony on the estate of a leading pietist named Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf (1700-1760). In America, they saw the promise of both a larger mission field and a more lasting refuge. The North Carolina settlement resulted from their purchase of a large tract of wilderness in the northwestern part of the colony. They named the area Wachovia, and Salem became its capital in 1766, as the Moravians began to build their homes, congregational house, a community store, and a tavern. Despite scarce resources and a small population, the community rejoiced at the arrival of the company that arrived from Europe, thanked God for the new beginning, and continued to hope for better times.
As the Moravians settled more firmly in North Carolina, they became ever more intertwined, like other religious groups, with the institution of slavery. They used slave labor on their farms and in their ships, and enslaved Africans became indispensable in the building of the Moravians’ community. A number of black Moravians, still enslaved, entered into the spiritual life of this fellowship. Despite their acceptance of the slave economy, the Moravian Brethren also affirmed the spiritual equality and fundamental humanity of slaves.
This encounter between blacks and European settlers was larger in the vast plantations, where social relations were harsher and deeper antagonisms grew strong. In the Carolinas, as in Virginia, missionaries reported the reluctance of many masters to see their slaves become Christian, and barbaric cruelties were inflicted upon the slaves even more in the Carolinas. In the early 18th century, an Anglican missionary named Frances Le Jau described the difficulty he experienced in witnessing a slave owner pray in his church, knowing the horrific manner in which he treated his slaves. Many slaves even were driven to commit suicide whenever they found the opportunity.
Nonetheless, many slaves turned to the Christian religion and its promises of a loving and just God, who would ultimately punish iniquity and comfort the afflicted. Le Jau baptized some slaves and noted they were more dutiful afterwards, as he petitioned for masters to show more charity to slaves. He also tried to reach the nearby natives with the Christian message, but his efforts were doomed by the hostilities caused by settlers in the Carolinas who had made war on the natives.
Georgia
Thomas Bray, whose societies made such an impact on all of North America, was even more intimately involved in the founding of Britain’s last colony on American soil, namely Georgia. Bray’s idealism joined with certain social and political necessities in England to bring Georgia into being. Britain needed another military outpost against Spain, whose forces threatened to creep up from Florida to the borders of Carolina. Britain also needed some place to send poor people who had been confined to debtors’ prisons. In the 1720s, Bray received a donation in order to build a school to instruct the children of slaves (as well as interested parents) in the Christian religion. Bray formed another organization, Dr. Bray’s Associates, to oversee the expenditure of the money and the founding of the colony of Georgia (named after King George II).
Georgia was initially under the control of trustees from 1732 to 1752. This body of men decreed that Georgia should be free of both slavery and alcohol, as well as profitable to England. None of the ideals endured. By the time Georgia became a royal colony in 1752, it was like its neighbors farther north in establishing an Anglican church, adopting the practice of slavery, and consumed by quarrels about land and profits. The population remained small, with scarcely more than 2000 people in Georgia’s vast territory, mostly around Savannah.
In its brief experimental period, Georgia did prove a haven for both the worthy poor and persecuted Europeans. Lutherans from Salzburg, Austria came as a community to the new colony in 1734 to escape their tormentors. Johann Martin Boltzius, pastor of the Salzburg group, conducted services aboard the ship and provided encouragement to the group during their two months at sea, finally leading the group in a service of praise when land was sighted.
Though it had not been planned for Jews to be part of the early colony, they nonetheless came in 1733. The resident governor James Ogelthorpe welcomed them and game them land. Soon synagogue services began in Savannah. Scottish Presbyterians were encouraged to settle father to the west, where they could defend against Spanish encroachment. Moravians also arrived early, but they soon moved northward to Pennsylvania since they were not interested in serving as part of the military defense. The poor also came, seeking the promise of land abroad and driven by the harshness of life at home. Those of the higher-class gentlemen also came, with indentured servants, tools, commodities, and other essentials.
The Church of England, arriving with the class of gentlemen, gained protection in laws passed by the Georgia Assembly. This church’s progress was slow. John and Charles Wesley came to Georgia in 1736 as young and devoted Anglican missionaries. Neither found much satisfaction in the labor in Georgia, and the brothers soon returned to England, having done little for the Anglican cause (though their contact with the Moravians through these travels had a lasting impact on them and helped inspire the Methodist movement).
As the Wesleys left Georgia, the itinerant evangelist George Whitefield arrived, making a much greater impact and giving a strong evangelical influence to the colony. In 1740, he started an orphanage named Bethesda near Savannah, traveling up and down the Atlantic coast to raise money for the project. Whitefield was hopeful at the growth of Christianity in Georgia, yet Anglican critics felt the orphanage was a haven for enemies of the Church of England (given the criticism of Anglican church priests made by other leaders of the orphanage).
Contrary to the enthusiasm of George Whitefield for Georgia, lonely Anglican clergymen in Augusta complained of the lack of religious knowledge among the colonists. At the middle of the century, Georgia had only a small number of churches, and the population remained small until the time of the Revolution, though Christianity in Georgia would grow much more quickly afterward.
Part 2. Religious Ferment from the Revolution to the Civil War
Chapter 6. Liberty and Enlightenment
The long War of Independence successfully concluded with a generous peace treaty in 1783. The thirteen colonies were now sovereign states. Much uncertainty lay before them, as they struggled with the question of federal and national authority, as well as seeking some security, or at least recognition as a nation among other nations. The states were bound together in peace by the fear of all tyranny, whether civil or ecclesiastic.
Americans in the 18th century understood the commonalities of all forms of tyrannical authority. Overbearing authorities in both the political and religious spheres paid little attention to ordinary folk, made few concessions to the will of the people, and seldom spoke of natural or inalienable rights bestowed upon humankind. This new revolutionary line of thinking reflected on the fourteen hundred years of the alliance between church and state that was designed to suppress those rights and liberties. This united front of tyranny forced those who would declare their independence to fight a revolution to resist all tyranny, whether of church or state. This common conviction of the victorious Americans led them to see the American Revolution as a struggle for religious liberty as well as civil liberty.
No Lords Temporal or Spiritual
Resistance to spiritual lords, specifically to bishops being sent from England to America, grew especially strong in the 1760s when England tightened its control over the colonies. Many Anglican clergy in the Middle Colonies and New England pleaded fervently that bishops be sent before it was too late, meaning before the colonists turned away from the Anglican Church and against England itself. Even as late as 1776, Charles Inglis argued that England’s cause could be rescued if only a bishop were quickly dispatched to America, though he believed any military action by the colonists would be crushed by England, with the result that more people would eventually turn to the Church of England.
Others feared that religious liberty as well as civil liberty hung upon the outcome of the revolution. In 1768, the Presbyterian William Livingston argued that the effort to impose an Anglican bishop upon Americans posed a threat to liberty and conscience, just as the Stamp Act that had rallied the colonists against taxation without representation. Those who remembered the harsh persecutions caused by England’s bishops could never consent to spiritual lords (or dominating religious authorities) of this type ever coming to America.
No such bishops arrived, and thus the Revolution did not require a direct assault on such leaders. The Revolution required the Church of England to abandon the privileges it enjoyed wherever it had been legally established. In Virginia, the legislature moved quickly to relieve all non-Anglicans from any further taxation for the support of Anglicanism. Laws that tried to enforce conformity of religious belief were dropped as toleration became the norm.
Events in Virginia determined the course that the nation chose to follow. Here dissenters and deists, pietists and rationalists worked together to abolish all signs of an established church, substituting a full and free liberty. In 1777, Thomas Jefferson wrote a Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom that he sent to the legislature. However, the legislature was dominated by members that were not ready to move away from all governmental alliance with religion (given that Virginia had known more than a century and a half of close connection between the church and the state.
One compromise proved attractive to the legislature in Virginia: to establish not any single church or sect but Christianity itself as the official religion. Patrick Henry promoted a bill to provide for teachers of the Christian religion. His proposal was supported by several leading Anglicans and seemed to offer a happy solution, given that it would not discriminate against dissenters while still helping to safeguard the social and moral order that a new state needed even more than before.
Dissenters in the back country of Virginia suspected that this bill might be just a trick to restore the Church of England to its favored position. Many also believed that the combining of civil and ecclesiastical authority, no matter how well intended, was a bad and dangerous idea. Baptists urged the legislature to continue in its push for a full religious liberty. Presbyterians were also wary of Anglican power and its abuses. They questioned whether Virginia legislators had the authority to make laws in the field of religion, suggesting that mere human beings should not presume spiritual authority. Dissenters had been too long discriminated against, persecuted, and jailed to trust a legislature that for so many decades had been the instrument of that mistreatment. However, dissenters alone could not have successfully countered the rhetoric and prestige of Patrick Henry.
James Madison, another member of the Virginia legislature, ensured Henry’s defeat by gathering many signatures against the bill, as well as gathering arguments from history and logic in order to prevail against Henry’s oratory and traditional views of religious establishment. Madison had argued for years that religion is a matter for reason to decide, not a legislature to promote or an army to enforce. Further, legislators simply did not have the right or wisdom to set themselves up as judges of religious truth. He further saw that such an establishment could lead back to the tyranny they had fought a revolution to escape. Madison urged leaving all laws pertaining to religion to God.
Madison prevailed, and Henry lost. Thomas Jefferson also prevailed, as now the Virginia legislature prepared to pass the bill he had written long ago. In 1786, Jefferson’s words were used in the Statute for Religious Freedom, which made Virginia’s disestablishment complete and Virginia’s contribution to the nation’s religious liberty crucial. Jefferson argued that the all-wise God did not coerce human minds; thus, it was absurd for fallible humans to claim the right to exercise dominion over the faith of others. In response to the argument that religious errors and heresies would spread, he said that truth could prevail if left alone.
With his arguments, Jefferson’s statute became law. The first part of the statute defined what citizens would not be required to do. It then added that all people will be free to profess and maintain their opinions in matters of religion, which would in no way affect their citizenship or rights. In short, the statute provided for the freedom of religion and also the freedom from religion.
When delegates gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft an entirely new outline of government, religion was not their main concern. An effective union of the different states took highest priority. Nonetheless, the Constitution did include Article Six, which provided that no religious test would ever be required of those holding federal office, as well as allowing those taking office to affirm rather than swear allegiance (a concession to Quakers and others who believed swearing of oaths was forbidden by the Bible). Other than these exceptions, the Constitution made no reference to religion.
In a mere three months, the delegates, led to a considerable degree by Madison, managed to write a document that has proven remarkably resilient and enduring. When their work was completed, Madison sent a copy to Jefferson (who was in Paris). While complimenting Madison on his work, Jefferson was concerned that the Constitution failed to provide explicit guarantees for human liberties such as freedom of religion.
In the process of winning approval of the Constitution state by state, Madison discovered that many others shared Jefferson’s concern. Therefore, he promised that if the Constitution were ratified, he would make it the first order of business to frame a Bill of Rights in the newly elected Congress. True to his word, Madison helped guide such a bill through Congress in 1789. These first ten amendments to the Constitution gave a solid base to liberty. The First Amendment included the religious freedom that most concerned Jefferson. It offered a double guarantee: first that government would do nothing to give official endorsement to a religion, and second that government would do nothing to inhibit the freedom of religion. For the first time in Western civilization, citizens of a nation could claim as their fundamental right their religious beliefs to be nobody’s business but their very own.
This was a daring experiment in religious freedom that was unprecedented in European history, and no one was entirely sure just what it meant. People wondered if religious freedom extended to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Native Americans, and how the national law would affect states. Not all questions were readily answered in the 1790s. When Jefferson later served as president, he described “a wall of separation between Church and State,” which guided his actions as president, as well as guiding the nation afterward. He understood the American Revolution to have been a struggle equally against all Lords Temporal and Spiritual.
“To Bigotry No Sanction, To Persecution No Assistance”
When George Washington assumed the office of president in 1789, all looked intently to him to learn whether the new nation had merely exchanged a foreign tyranny for a domestic one. Given the long and cruel history of religious persecution, many could hardly believe that the promises of freedom could survive the realities of politics. Americans who had been viewed with suspicion, such as Roman Catholics, had the most to fear. When they wrote to Washington to inquire about their status, he replied to give them the hope that America would be an example of justice and liberality, also noting their efforts in the Revolution and the nation’s assistance by France (a Catholic country).
The Jews in America, an even smaller minority, wondered if the nation would continue to offer asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every nation and religion. Newport’s Jewish congregation expressed its concern to the country’s first president and received from him equally comforting words. Washington noted that liberty of conscience applied to all Americans alike, without distinction or discrimination. He further stated that the government of the United States “gives to bigoty no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” The president envisioned a future of safety and security for all manner of diverse people. For Jews, this post-Revolution framework of religious freedom was an extraordinary moment of emancipation, giving them citizenship, yet raising questions about how traditional community structures and regulations would adapt to this new reality.
To many other religious groups as well, Washington affirmed that America was a country of liberty, and that none should fear. To the Quakers, he declared that liberty in religion was a great blessing and among its citizens’ most certain rights. To the Baptists, he promised that none would be more active than he against spiritual tyranny and religious persecution. With America’s religious freedom, a new era had come.
For many Americans, however, liberty seemed to be a hollow slogan rather than a reality. African Americans continued to labor under the harsh burdens of slavery and indignity. Despite the cries of liberty at the end of the 18th century, few concluded that this liberty extended to all. In 1772 in Philadelphia, the Quaker Anthony Benezet called for an end to the slave trade and the suffering it caused in Africa and America. In Boston, the Baptist John Allen argued for the emancipation of black Americans, just as white Americans had sought freedom from Britain. Given that the Declaration of Independence had not extended freedom to slaves, and the Constitution had contained compromises over dealing with slavery, the nation later confronted major consequences for failing to deliver on the promises of liberty for all.
An African American woman named Sojourner Truth felt the effects of human rights being denied to black Americans, as well as the lack of legal and political rights to women. Abigail Adams had also warned her husband John (the second president) to grant rights to women in the new law codes. Yet only a few lawmakers kept the liberties of women clearly in view. The Deist Elihu Palmer was among them, writing in 1797 of the need for ending prejudices of the sexes as an unfinished work of the Age of Progress. Despite the limitations of the Revolution and the overall intellectual period of Enlightenment, they did hold a grand vision of humankind progressively advancing the causes of freedom, equality, justice, and material welfare. The vision helped lead to the development of feminism and suffragist reformers (who fought for women’s right to vote), including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Women also began to take leadership within the field of religion, bringing innovation and social reform.
The states moved slowly with respect to full religious freedom or failed to perceive the implications of a liberty that they generally embraced. Few states took clear steps for religious freedom as Virginia had done. Delaware’s 1776 constitution required all public officials to swear belief in the Trinity (the Christian belief that God existed in three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Maryland required that officeholders be of the Christian religion and extended religious liberty to Christians alone. Pennsylvania vowed to deny state offices to atheists and anyone who did not believe in an afterlife. Only Protestants could be elected in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Georgia. While all states supported the idea of religious liberty, their application of the concept was gradual and uneven.
In both Connecticut and Massachusetts, a measure of establishment continued well into the nineteenth century. Though the Church of England had become unpopular during the Revolution and experienced quick disestablishment, Congregationalism in New England was seen as a local form of Christianity committed to the revolutionary cause, and it continued to encourage local governments to provide for Protestant churches. In Connecticut, Baptists, Quakers, and Episcopalians joined with Republicans sharing Jefferson’s views in a long struggle to cut the remaining ties between Congregationalism and the state. In 1818, this goal was achieved, though it took several more years for Massachusetts to remove from its constitution all traces of an alliance between church and state that had endured for two hundred years.
“A Government of the Universe”
The founding fathers of America regularly acknowledged God’s providence, which they saw as directing all affairs of people and nations. In 1789, George Washington called for the country to express its gratitude to God, the author of all good. He also referred to such providence in his First Inaugural Address. He spoke of God using terms that were rational and vaguely impersonal, such as the Grand Architect, the superintending power, the Governor of the Universe, and the Great Ruler of Events. He rarely cited the Bible and never spoke of Jesus Christ, but he hardly needed to, since Americans saw him as a Moses-like figure leading them to freedom from submission to Britain to a new Promised Land.
Washington’s successor John Adams grew up in colonial New England, a Congregationalist setting. He shared in the liberalism that eventually resulted in the separation of Unitarianism from its foundation in more orthodox Christianity. He also shared in the views of the European Enlightenment, which sought religious ideas more in Nature and Reason than in biblical revelation or Christian tradition.
Adams had little patience with creeds (summary statements of religious belief) and with those who tried to impose them on others. He thought the mind should be set free from dogmatism and superstition. While he thought Christianity was a good religion, he understood Christianity in terms of its morality, and that conduct was the true measure of faith. He valued Christianity’s teaching of love for one’s neighbor and the Golden Rule of treating others the way one wished to be treated. However, he thought Christianity’s endless disputing about theological issues was pointless and did not affect the way people lived.
Despite his criticisms of traditional Christian orthodoxy, Adams spent much time emphasizing why religion was essential to the welfare of humanity in general and of the United States in particular. He made the point that it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can stand. He also said that people will be free only as long as they are virtuous. Neither nations nor individuals can survive without religion, since religion teaches duty, which makes us responsible and honorable.
Thomas Jefferson, who succeeded Adams in the presidency shared the view that religion often focused on pointless, if not absurd, theological issues. In his retirement, Jefferson spent many hours compiling the Life and Morals of Jesus from a careful examination of the New Testament. He extracted verses that emphasized the ethical content of Jesus’ teaching, hoping to make Christianity appear more like a clear moral code by which people could live, rather than an obscure philosophical system. In his view, the sum of Christianity was to fear God and love one’s neighbor, rather than memorizing elaborate theological teachings or administering initiatory rites.
Jefferson blamed the Platonists for turning the pure morality Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount into jargon that was too difficult to understand and odd ideas that were nonsensical. He argued that clergy, since the fourth century, had preserved their power by promoting mystery over clarity. Jefferson had little sympathy for religious institutions and felt that paid ministers had been far more interested in profit and power than in the moral nature of humanity, essentially keeping their followers in ignorance and servitude through endless theological formulas.
Jefferson’s theme was that Christianity should be kept simple and moral. Like Adams, Jefferson thought morality was essential to the well-being of the country, and that a reasonable Christianity was the best instrument for promoting moral duties. While he believed religion was essential to a system of morality, he also felt the emphasis of religion must be on good works more than declarations of belief. He even argued for a view that we are saved by our works rather than the teaching of traditional Christianity that we are saved by our faith. Such an ethical emphasis was a leading principle of deism (a rational religious view that upheld God as the creator but did not see God as having ongoing involvement with the created world or humanity). Jefferson’s revolutionary companion Thomas Paine shared similar views. Thus, Enlightenment religion left to the world a liberal, humanistic faith, committed to virtue and benevolence, focusing on deeds and charity, rather than theological statements or stories of supernatural occurrences.
Even considered an infidel (meaning someone unfaithful to the Christian religion), an atheist, or even a demon, Jefferson sincerely believed that he had not rejected Christianity, but only purified it. He argued that he was sincerely attached to the teachings of Jesus, which he saw as better than those of the Greeks or ancient Hebrews. Jesus returned us to the Jewish idea of one God but gave us more just notions of God’s attributes and government. Jesus further gathered all into one family, bonded by love, charity, and peace.
Like Washington and Adams, Jefferson also affirmed a government of the Universe. Like other Deists of the time, he found the argument from design to be compelling. To explain a world of pattern, order and causation, one must assume a Creator and Grand Architect. We can know that God exists by trusting our senses and reasons (rather than biblical revelation). Our reason also points to one God, not many. Jefferson emphasized God’s unity, even rejecting the Christian idea of the Trinity.
Jefferson argued that the pure Unitarian view of God was the religion of the earliest Christians and would have remained the religion of all later Christians if it were not for cunning priests who overshadowed the teachings of Jesus in complex theological falsehood. The Enlightenment hostility to religious leaders often portrayed priests as imposters, seducers, and power-hungry manipulators of the people. Jefferson and other American Deists shared in this perspective. This rhetoric would lead to numerous religious revolts in the new nation, even leading common people to turn against the learning so valued by Enlightenment leaders (which they felt made clergymen pretentious and gave them too much control).
In the minds of the nation’s founders, freedom from priestly control was critically important for the worldly welfare of humankind, but equally important was a continuing sense of divine value and immortality. In various speeches, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson asserted that ours was a universe of morality and reason, in which right would ultimately prevail (if not in this life, then in the life beyond). However, American Enlightenment figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson lacked Puritan or evangelical concern about the afterlife (such as fear of hell). Yet none of these figures completely dispensed with ideas of ultimate reward and punishment or the immortality of the soul, holding to such beliefs as a necessity for maintaining a spiritual significance for human lives and to add in an important incentive to moral conduct.
In many ways, the Enlightenment convictions about religious freedom held by the nation’s founders shaped the course of religion in the United States. Jefferson held a private, individualistic view of his deistic religion, seeing himself as a sect of one. Thomas Paine stated that he disagreed with the creeds of all churches, and that his church was his own mind. In a paradoxical way, Enlightenment intellectuals talked of creating a public religion, or orienting religion to civic virtue, but equally they turned religion inward against institutions and organizations. Taken to its logical extreme, this was a religion without churches or collective forms of worship, constituted instead by individual believers all believing their own thing by the light of their own reason. Religious developments in the new republic would soon confirm the potential for individualist anarchy in the realm of religion.
Primary Text 3: A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (by Thomas Jefferson)
82. A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, 18 June 1779 (archives.gov)
Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that1 Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint;2 that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion,3 who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone;4 that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors,4 is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness; and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary5 rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than6 our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also7 to corrupt the principles of that very8 religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;9 that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous falacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact10 that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
And though we well know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act11 irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
Lecture 4
Chapter 7. Freedom and Revival
At the end of the 18th century, freedom of religion was a prize that had been gained by America’s independence. In the early decades of the 19th century, that principle would slowly spread through daily life and the nation’s development. Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), who resisted the disestablishment of the Congregational Church in Connecticut, confessed later that the separation of church and state was a good thing for the state of Connecticut. He discovered that churches cut loose from their dependence on state support found new vigor, as they relied wholly on their own resources and on God and moved forward to meet the challenges on the moving frontier and rapidly expanding population.
Relying on their own resources, the churches and synagogues of America engaged in a voluntary effort of unprecedented magnitude. Voluntarism–action unaided by the state and undirected by any higher church authority–came to be the distinguishing feature of religion in America and was most evident in the early decades of the 19th century. By means of voluntary religious associations, men and women responded to the needs to preach the Gospel, oppose vice, and relieve suffering.
A Second Great Awakening
The challenge seemed enormous, perhaps beyond the resources and will of the religious institutions themselves. First, the American Revolution had removed government from any significant role in religion. Second, the influential French Revolution had attacked churches and clergy with a force and severity that threatened the order of society. Third, Enlightenment rationalism sought to undermine the very foundations of the Christian religion, demeaning biblical revelation and characterizing traditional religion as based on superstition. Fourth, the nation daily received new immigrants, who would alter the 18th century patterns of belief and behavior. Fifth, the new democratic atmosphere stimulated innovation and factions, without sufficient religious authority to judge the debates and new theologies.
What has come to be called the benevolent empire of the Second Great Awakening was the most robust effort to prove that voluntary associations were strong and flexible enough to meet such challenges and address the social and intellectual changes. Through the creation of many new agencies and organizations, the founding of academies and schools, and the development of new techniques for recruitment and commitment, Protestant religious forces fought against indifference, hostility, and fragmentation. The radical deists were overcome, and the larger rationalism of the Enlightenment was tamed for Christian purposes of progress and civilization. American organizations sought to reform, and even harassed, immigrants, while churches found new ways to assert authority and exercise power.
In the early decades of the 19th century, new agencies were formed abundantly. In 1816, the American Bible Society arose out of individual and voluntary concern that the Scriptures be distributed across the country and beyond, in an effort to counter the seductive power of secular philosophy that had served to lead people away from the truths of the Christian faith. Like most of the voluntary agencies that arose in the early 19th century, it saw itself as rising above denominational differences and sectarian divisions to present a united evangelical front in winning over the large United States territory and its rapidly increasing population.
The American Sunday School Union, formed in 1824, helped to organize this new movement so that it might overcome ignorance and faithlessness. At this time, the Sunday school was really a school, often the only school on the frontier, where reading and writing could be taught. Because it did not require an ordained clergy to operate, the Sunday school frequently preceded the organization of a church and could exist for years independent of any church. Laity (or normal church members) took charge of such schools, with women playing an especially active role in their development. While Sunday schools existed before the American Sunday School Union, the union combined the efforts of these schools to make them more successful and their influence more extensive.
The next year, the American Tract Society dedicated itself to the printing and distributing of short instructive tracts (or pamphlets) to assist in the spread of good morals and sound religious teaching. A ten-page tract could be produced for a single penny, and the society saw inexpensive printing as a benefit to the poor, as plans were detailed for how the tracts could be distributed in order to spread the great truths of the Gospel.
Agencies such as the American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society reveal a strong commitment to and confidence in education. Such commitment became even clearer in the establishment of academies and colleges on the east coast and along the frontier, schools that would operate under denominational influence or even control. In the early years of the young nation, states moved to support and supervise their own colleges and universities, such as the University of Virginia (founded in 1816). Under the sway of the Second Great Awakening, however, religious forces continued to dominate even most state institutions until well after America’s Civil War. When the State of New Hampshire sought in 1816 to take control of Dartmouth College, which was under Congregational control, a contest arose between religious and secular interests in higher education. The case reached the U. S. Supreme Court, and the right of the religious and private trustees was upheld to continue their control of the school without interference from the state.
Such a decision provided strong encouragement for denominations to launch their own colleges and maintain their dominance of higher education in America. Congregationalists and Presbyterians together founded such schools as Western Reserve in Ohio, Knox in Illinois, Grinnell in Iowa, and Ripon in Wisconsin. Methodists started early frontier schools such as McKendree and DePauw in Indiana, and Ohio Wesleyan. Baptists started Denison in Ohio, Shurtleff in Illinois, and Baylor in Texas. These four denominations accounted for about half of all institutions of higher learning begun before 1860. Roman Catholics also started St. Louis University, St. Xavier, and Notre Dame. Episcopal schools included Kenyon and University of the South. Even smaller groups such as German Reformed, Quakers, and German Lutherans moved westward in sufficient force to create colleges in Ohio and Indiana.
The Second Great Awakening was benefited by a revivalism that was planned and promoted most effectively by Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875). A professor who served as president of Oberlin College, Finney led revivals in the growing towns of westward migration and also in the major cities of the East. These revivals stressed the importance of individual response to Christian proclamations, while giving spiritual renewal to church members and increasing the membership of churches. Due to voluntarism, churches had to persuade and recruit in order to exist, winning and enlisting multitudes to join and contribute to their budget. Revivalism proved a valuable technique for accomplishing these tasks, and Finney was the expert practitioner in the first half of the 19th century.
Finney also defended conscious effort in promoting revivals. Finney argued that, though revivals are ultimately the gift of God, that does not mean that humans have nothing to do but wait, but rather they should make preparation for the harvest of souls by preaching the word of God. Only if we have done our work properly will we reap a supernatural harvest of converts to Christianity. He declared that now was the time to demonstrate that Christians are eager to gather humans, who would otherwise be spiritually lost, into the church.
The Roman Catholic response to Protestant revivalism was the parish mission. The parish mission, which had its roots in European Catholicism, was adapted as an effective means for recruitment and renewal in the voluntaristic American context, including on the frontier. Joseph Flaget, the bishop of the first frontier diocese (district), made his church government an instrument of vigorous evangelistic activity. During an announced special Jubilee Year for Roman Catholicism in 1825, Flaget encouraged his followers to cover his territory with preaching and calls to greater repentance and dedication for not one, but two years. He joined in the labor himself, and the result was that people came from miles around and crowded into the Catholic Churches, even in the middle of winter. Even those who were known for their wicked lifestyles repented and wept over their sins.
Descriptions of Catholic parish missions parallel accounts of the frontier camp meeting, where members of many denominations (or none) gathered for days at a time to hear sermons delivered with unusual power, offer prayers, sing hymns, and find new strength in the fellowship of many earnest Christians. Francis Asbury, one of the leading Methodist advocates of the camp meeting, estimated in 1811 that 3 to 4 million Americans were attending such events each summer (about a third of the country’s population). The drama and passion of such meetings was impressive. After publicity was circulated for months in advance, coaches and wagons, people on horseback, and multitudes traveling on foot hurried from every direction to the encampment. There tents were pitched, and the camp was set up in a few hours.
People of all ages and classes and backgrounds congregated—including those running for office, those who wished merely to enjoy the spectacle, the young, middle-aged parents with their families, and the elderly. The congregation consisted of thousands. Lamps were hung on trees, eloquent preachers began to speak of eternity, and all assembled in solemn excitement, creating a brilliant atmosphere.
Testimony from these camp meetings demonstrates their potency and capacity to change the direction of lives and the intensity of loyalties. Observers described the hardest hearts being melted into softness, the driest eyes overflowing with tears, and the proudest spirits bowing down, as all sensed the presence of God amidst the scene. Worship began before sunrise, with a blowing of trumpets to awaken everyone. After devotions and breakfast in the family tents, trumpets announced the beginning of public prayer, followed by the first round of public preaching, which lasted until nearly noon. Then after lunch in the tents, another period of prayer and preaching followed in the afternoon.
Evening continued the devotion, and the night itself often became another prayer vigil. The public worship services began again at six in the evening and lasted until nearly ten, when some continued for further prayer and pleading to God. Religious services of this intensity might go on for a week or more, concluding with a solemn feast, after which all tents were taken down as the thousands prepared to depart. The ministers formed themselves into a procession and marched around the camp, as the people joined the rank and followed them. Afterward, everyone stood still while a farewell hymn was sung. The Christians, who had grown dear to each other, then departed to meet no more in this lifetime. The camp meeting was part carnival and country fair, but it was also a time of spiritual regeneration, sustaining hope and joy. In the energies and reform-minded impulses of the camp meeting can be seen differing aspects of this Second Great Awakening, which was both visionary and structured, full of sectarian potential and yet devoted to denomination building.
Utopian Experimentation
While the Second Great Awakening sought to save the whole country, some smaller groups of believers sought to save themselves from the country, or perhaps first to save themselves and then, by example, to save others. In the first half of the 19th century, hopes were high, land was cheap, and numerous people had experimental visions for new communities.
An early utopian community, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, commonly known as the Shakers, arrived in America from England in 1774 under the direction of Mother Ann Lee. Ann Lee taught that procreation was unnecessary since the Kingdom of God was near at hand. Instead, Shaker men and women should live apart, leading celibate lives. If a married couple joined the Shaker community, the marital relationship ended as their life in the community began. Shaker theological reflection also came to see Ann Lee as a female incarnation of the divine essence of God (similar to how Jesus had been the incarnation of God in a male). The movement initially took hold in New England and New York, creating a scandal with its exuberant displays of worship, such as dancing, hand clapping, leaping, groaning, and falling to the knees.
Though some hoped the movement would soon disappear, Shaker communities multiplied in the first half of the 19th century as these ascetic communities swiftly moved into Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. Benefiting from the spreading revivals, Shakers grew to about 6000 by the middle of the century. Like most utopian groups at the time, Shakers held all property in common rather than following the economic principle of private property. Shakers saw themselves as reviving the church of the first century. Due to the distinctive practice of celibacy, the society ultimately declined to the point of near extinction. The growth of the Shakers declined when revivalism and utopian experimentation waned, and the Shakers are now known for their plan style of furniture.
In 1847, John Humphrey Noyes led a small band of followers from Vermont to Oneida in Western New York, pursuing a revolution for spiritual wisdom and life. To bring about a spiritual revolution, a sexual revolution was required as well. Rejecting the celibacy of the Shakers, Noyes advocated a system of complex marriage in which the community itself would determine who should mate with whom in accordance with the best principles of eugenics (or scientific propagation). He argued for the best specimens of the human race to procreate and thereby to lift all humankind up to the level where a truly spiritual revolution could occur. Thus, he rejected the conventional morality of marital monogamy.
Facing harassment and ridicule, the Oneida Community struggled without recruiting many new members, while gaining only in the number and intensity of its enemies. By 1880, this utopian experiment turned to economics and is now best known for its silverware than for its religious vision, social engineering, communism, and its unorthodox sexual practices.
Great Expectations and Bitter Disappointments
Other visions focused on God’s plan for the future or revelation in the past. Millennialism sought to understand biblical prophecies such as the book of Revelation in order to determine just when Christ would come again to usher in 1000 years of peace and virtue, when the devil would be chained, and when the earth would be cleansed of all unrighteousness. Given all the good things happening in and to America in the early decades of the 19th century, many thought God’s Kingdom was arriving soon (including Charles Finney).
William Miller was even more fervent and convinced of Christ’s imminent coming and predicted that Christ would come between March 1843 and March 1844. He referred to a prophecy from the book of Daniel, arguing that a period of 2300 days referred to years that could be dated back to the command of the Persian king Artaxerxes in 457 B.C.E to rebuild Jerusalem. Thus, 1843 was the year when the new Jerusalem would be established, and Christ would descend from the heavens. Miller drew many from among the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists to his expectations.
Miller’s calculation proved to be an error, with the consequence that all those great hopes led to the Great Disappointment, as this period came to be known. Baffled by the prophecy that had failed, many returned to their former denominations, while others turned away from biblical revelation altogether. Still others, convinced that the expectation was right even if the dating was wrong, regrouped to await the second coming of Christ at a later time that was not clearly specified. Among the most significant survivors of the Millerite disappointment were Seventh-Day Adventists, who followed the visions of their new leader, Ellen G. White.
These Adventists moved from their initial New England base to Michigan in 1855. By 1863, they had over 100 churches and 3000 members, and their numbers would grow dramatically during the following century. In addition to their emphasis on the advent (or coming of Jesus), White’s followers believed that the Jewish commandment to honor the Sabbath day meant that the seventh day of the week (Saturday) should be set aside as the Sabbath instead of Sunday. Further, the body should be kept free of the defilement that comes from eating meat, drinking alcoholic or caffeinated beverages, smoking tobacco, or indulging in anything that works against a pure mind in a sound body. An Adventist named W. K. Kellogg created a whole industry of cereals, as health reform popularized diets of cereals, grains, and water, while offering retreats and setting up hospitals and medical staffs. Adventists and other mid-19th century health reformers helped pioneer the link in American culture between the Christian gospel and health programs.
Another group of Christians focused on looking back to the apostolic age (the first century church) that they sought to revive. Restorationism is the term applied to those earnest Christians who wished to restore the New Testament church in its purity and power. In western Pennsylvania, Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) lamented the many divisions within Christianity, most of which he felt, in the 19th century, had no reason for being. Denominations had arisen because of special historical conditions or due to powerful personalities. Campbell argued that it was now time to rise above these largely meaningless separations and return to a Christian origin. In the 1820s, Campbell traveled throughout Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, observing that different denominations did not make that much difference. He concluded that it was time for all churches to become simply Christians—followers or disciples of Christ.
Campbell argued that the Christian world has seen too much fighting and being torn into factions. He especially noted the numerous divisions of Protestantism. Campbell, along with Barton Stone, a leader in Kentucky’s Cane Ridge Revival of 1801, preached the message of restorationism with energy and expectation. They quoted the Scriptures that referred to one body and focused on the need to pray more and dispute less, while looking to the Bible rather than human teachings, following Jesus rather than denominations and other religious organizations. By 1833, most of the followers of Stone and Campbell merged into a single movement known as the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, or Campbellites. This new institution had its earliest successes in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. By the end of the century, members of the group had grown to more than half a million, though they also failed to maintain unity. Not only did the Disciples of Christ fail to heal the divisions of Christianity, but they added to them with their own new denominations, as they divided over issues such as the use of musical instruments in worship. However, the movement’s identity has continued to focus on projects of restored union.
The Post-Revolutionary South
In the early decades of the 19th century, the South had been transformed from Anglican dominance into a center for evangelical religion. Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists created a kind of cultural and religious unity that Campbell and Stone had failed to achieve. While denominational differences remained, they were subsumed into a larger culture of southern evangelicalism. Baptists with their farmer-preachers, Methodists with their circuit riders, and Presbyterians with their local presbyteries managed to move across boundaries of class and race, of gender and political power. The older high-class Anglicanism was overcome by a revivalisic tide of emotional fervor and pietistic conviction. However, many of the same social limits were retained within the new, more democratic religion.
Women were denied formal ordination and largely kept from careers in ministry. Nevertheless, they were still able to take a lead in the spread of evangelicalism. Women testified to their faith, served as deaconesses, raised funds for the support of missionaries at home and abroad, and sometimes undertook the roles of missionary teachers and evangelists. Women helped promote revivals, as many had experienced conversion during that context. Women became missionaries in their own communities, including among the neglected slaves in the South.
Evangelical religion provided a bridge between the religious world of the slaves and that of white southerners. Often it was used by whites to exhort slaves to obedience or offer authoritarian advice on moral improvement, but it was also used by blacks to find stories of exodus, liberation, and the social reordering that would occur at the world’s end, making these stories their own. Slaves in growing numbers turned to a religion that spoke of freedom in Christ, of a God who did not discriminate according to a person’s color or social standing, and of eternal life without sorrow and separation. In secretive meetings away from their suspicious masters, or in their own churches, slaves developed an African American Christianity of revival, song, prayer, and resistance.
The black preacher John Jasper once preached on the Bible text that describes Christians as more than conquerors. Biblical history was filled with examples of how God had taken the lowly and despised and turned them into conquerors, including Moses, Joshua, David, and many more. God’s power had even been made manifest in a lowly Jewish carpenter, executed on a cross like a common criminal. The gospel made its promises not to the rich and mighty, but to the poor and lowly, the oppressed and imprisoned. Christianity was not inherently the religion of the white masters, and it did not provide ideological justifications for slavery. God would one day judge everyone, punishing powerful oppressors and showing mercy to the powerless.
Theology in New England
Theological variety in New England matched the variety of churches on the frontier. The Calvinist theology revived most prominently in the writings of Jonathan Edwards continued into the 19th century and was labeled as the New England theology. However, it was only one theology among many. Reactions against the predominant Calvinism took the form of an entering Arminian force, which emphasized free will and the significance of works. Charles Chauncy (1705-1787), the opponent of Edwards during the first round of awakenings, moved from Arminianism to Universalism, which proclaimed that God’s scheme was ultimately for the salvation of all people. In Chauncy’s view, the love of God was so great that the doctrine of eternal damnation no longer made sense.
Elhanan Winchester moved from a Baptist ministry to a Universalist one by the end of the 1780s. He declared that a careful study of the Scriptures convinced him that a moral and loving God would not rest until all his creatures had been gathered to him. His teaching proved controversial, as former friends forsook him and condemned him as a heretic for having embraced the doctrine of universal restoration. By 1850, Universalism had spread throughout New England and across New York, though it displayed little strength elsewhere in America.
Unitarianism agitated Congregational orthodoxy far more than Universalism. Rejecting the Calvinists’ low view of unredeemed humans–wormlike creatures without the capacity either to do good or think well–the Unitarians spoke of the human moral nature, our rational capacity, our freedom to choose or reject the doctrines taught and the promises offered by the Christian religion. In 1819, a Boston Unitarian minister named William Ellery Channing preached a sermon that laid down the basic presuppositions of this new liberal faith. He stated that the New Testament taught that God was one (a unity), not three (a Trinity). Christ’s mediation and mission were seen to be of great historical importance in terms of bringing a moral or spiritual deliverance to humanity. However, Unitarians did not accept the prevailing Christian belief that human sin was paid for by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Channing argued that this idea, and other Calvinist teachings, were unscriptural and absurd.
New England Unitarianism did not emerge as a new denomination with a charismatic founder or a supplementary revelation, but rather as a movement within Congregationalism, especially in eastern Massachusetts. It rejected traditional theology in favor of greater intellectualism and freedom from the restraints imposed by a system of doctrine. For the first fifty years of its corporate life, Unitarianism scarcely moved beyond the bounds of the Congregational churches. Only around Boston did it have any real authority as a church. But as a system of ideas and as a set of liberal attitudes, its influence grew out of all proportion to its numbers.
Among the famous names associated with Unitarianism is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was ordained a minister of Boston’s Second Church in 1829 but resigned that position three years later to continue a philosophical and religious search that became known as Transcendentalism. Reacting against the overemphasis on sectarian community, as well as against the overcommitment to material goods and worldly prosperity, Emerson called for a self-reliance that affirmed the wisdom found within one’s own soul. He argued that Intuition was more reliable than philosophical reasoning. Emerson further lamented the theological division seen in New England, which he suggested could ultimately lead to each person having their own religion.
In Hartford, Connecticut, the Congregationalist pastor Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) thought that New England had seen enough intellectual warfare to last several lifetimes. He wanted an end to the conflicts between revivalists and anti-revivalists, between Trinitarians and anti-Trinitarians, between moralists and rationalists, between literalists and symbolists. He sought to overcome these debates by advancing a theory of language, in which he explained that a totally accurate and correct theology was simply not possible due to the severe limitations of theological language that moved beyond data gathered by the five senses and used metaphors to hint at the things of God.
Unitarians who rejected the literalism of Calvinism substituted a literalism of their own, and Transcendentalists rejected old metaphors only to introduce new ones. Bushnell felt that the demand for absolute propositions, rather than mere suggestive allegory, leads to divisions and conflict. He saw Christ as the metaphor of God and felt that New England’s practice of theological formulations stripped the life and beauty from theology, comparable to pulling apart a flower petal by petal.
The Romantic religious elements reached their greatest influence outside New England in Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose poetic writings made him a spokesman of religious democracy and spiritual seeking. A Quaker by background who was deeply influenced by Emerson’s Transcendentalism, as well as a system of mysticism, Whitman encouraged Americans to re-examine all they had learned and dismiss whatever they found disagreeable. Undertaking a long journey of religious discovery, Whitman encouraged others to a similar spiritual quest of finding answers for themselves, which would lead to an individuality in religion that no organization or church could achieve. Much of 19th century American religion was torn between such a concept of religious democracy and Protestant desire for building structured religion.
Chapter 8. Redeeming the West
In the early 19th century, the American West both drew people and repelled people. Yale President Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), who visited the western frontier beyond the bounds of New England, did not have a favorable impression. He described an independence bordering on anarchy, idleness, and irresponsible character, as well as an overinflated sense people had of their own knowledge.
In sharp contrast, his fellow Congregationalist Lyman Beecher, who brought his family to Cincinnati in 1832, thought the West would fulfill all the rich promise of America. People were moving all the way to the Mississippi River in tremendous numbers. New states sprang up quickly, and population increased in a single generation from about 150,000 to nearly five million. Beecher recognized that religion and morality were necessary for the West to be glorious, rather than falling into barbarism.
The visions Timothy Dwight and Lyman Beecher had of the West were completely different. Interested Europeans also found it difficult to reconcile reports of visitors to interior America, as some praised the openness of the people and land, while others spoke of its barbarism and bad manners. All agreed, however, that there was a vast amount of new land in the west that the United States added to its domain. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 virtually doubled the territory of the nation, and the territory was further increased in 1846 by the spoils of the Mexican-American War, which included all the Pacific Southwest. A treaty with Great Britain further gave the nation all of the Pacific Northwest. The United States now extended from ocean to ocean, leaving citizens amazed and churches and synagogues struck by the enormity of the tasks before them.
Protestantism
Less than a decade after the Louisiana Purchase, the Missionaries Societies of Massachusetts and Connecticut sent observers westward to report on the state of religion and morality in a territory that remained largely unknown for most easterners. Their observations were that the people were ignorant of true Christian faith, though attending Catholic services and engaging in surface-level religious practices. There was much vice and sin, and people did not even honor Sunday as a holy day.
Another missionary tour, which followed a couple years later, showed little improvement and more urgency. No Bibles in any language could be found in New Orleans, either to be bought or given away. Protestantism was virtually nonexistent, and the small number of Protestant clergy were uneducated or irresponsible. The solution proposed was to apply the proven Protestant instruments of the Second Great Awakening: sending missionaries, distributing Bibles and tracts, teaching people to read and write, promoting revivals, and instilling a sense of duty and character.
One of the missionary observers, John Schermerhorn, reported back to the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians concerning the status of Native Americans in the newly added territories. He expressed amazement at the diversity of tribes, the particularity of their cultures and languages, and their independence from (and occasional hostility toward) one another. He further noted the negative effect that contact with Europeans had on tribal life.
These missionary observers represented the new investigation of Presbyterians and Congregationalists, who determined to combine their resources in order better to meet the challenge of the extensive western territory. Congregational missionaries journeyed past the shores of California to the Hawaiian Islands. One native Hawaiian made his way to Yale College, to be brought into Christianity by a missionary. In 1820, the first group of Connecticut missionaries arrived in the islands, establishing their mission on the largest island, Hawaii, in the village of Kailua. By 1837, over eighty missionaries had been sent to this Pacific outpost, with seventeen churches established, and Hawaii had become the latest setting for the promotion of Protestant forms of revival and education. This missionary activity prepared for the adding of the Hawaiian islands to the American territory before the end of the 19th century.
Also before the end of the century, Protestantism turned toward another western territory, Alaska, purchased by the United States in 1867. A Presbyterian missionary named Sheldon Jackson moved from his work among the natives in Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wyoming, Montana, and elsewhere in the continental West to Alaska, which had been claimed by Russian Orthodoxy as a mission field since 1792. Jackson first visited the area in 1877, where he saw the native Alaskans in great need of medicine, education, a more civilized republican government, and employment. Appointed U. S. General Agent for Education in 1885, he pursued a program of assimilation, seeking to make Alaska an English-speaking Protestant land and minimizing the influences of Russian Orthodoxy, while also fighting lawlessness, exploitation, and starvation. As a missionary, Jackson was a buffer between native peoples and more hostile colonialist forces, as well as a committed reformer of indigenous cultures (in economy, education, language, and religion).
Presbyterians and Congregationalists reached into Oregon Territory, into California, and elsewhere in the West. One northwestern mission, identified with the labors of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, was established near Walla Walla, Washington, part of several missions spread out along the Columbia River. Narcissa wrote of her work in giving Bible instruction, helping with singing, and assisting in other ways. In 1847, the Cayuse Indians, who were angered at the growing pressure of white settlements, attacked the mission, killing Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, along with a dozen other whites present at the time.
Even more important for bringing Protestantism to the West were the Baptists and Methodists. A rapidly expanding nation, with mountains to be crossed and streams to be forded, seemed perfectly suited to circuit-rider Methodists and farmer-preacher Baptists. The Methodists moved out on the postroads leading westward as soon as the roads were laid out or even mounted their horses and made their own trails to remote areas where settlers or isolated families might be found. Bringing the attention of evangelical Christianity to Americans on the move was more important than considering whether a church could be built and sustained. Yet churches were built, and by 1850 Methodists had more churches than any other group in numerous western frontier territories.
By the middle of the century, Methodists had reached all the way to California and Oregon Territory. Jason Lee led the way into Oregon Territory even before it became American soil. Lee argued that the Pacific Northwest should be part of the domain of the United States. Less than a decade later, Oregon had been incorporated into the United States, and Lee’s labors provided a solid foundation for Methodists and other Protestant groups.
Baptists followed, or sometimes led, western migrations, racing with the Methodists toward a membership mark of one million by 1850. Like the Methodists, the Baptists reached all the way to the Pacific Ocean, making efforts to evangelize both the new settlers and natives. A missionary named Isaac McCoy argued for the creation of a native territory in the West, to offer natives some protection from greedy white traders. McCoy worked with and for the federal government, seeking ways to avoid the tragedy of native extermination and to reduce the violent conflicts between the tribes and the U. S. government.
In working with settlers in the West, Baptists relied on local preachers, who were more likely themselves new pioneers and hard-working farmers. While fully employed like their neighbors in clearing land and raising food, these preachers also responded to what they believed was God’s call for them to preach. No hierarchy was needed to approve this ministry, and no advanced education was required. Though lacking qualifications or degrees, these Baptists preachers were there on the scene, ready to preach as the Spirit prompted. Baptists also sent missionaries from the East, such as John Mason Peck, who arrived in St. Louis in 1817 and saw the American West as God’s new promised land as he labored to found schools, distribute tracts, organize denominational life, preach countless sermons, and travel thousands of miles.
Roman Catholicism
Alone among the denominations moving from the East out to the West, Roman Catholicism entered lands that had already known the presence of Catholic missionaries. In the Louisiana territory itself, French Catholics (especially Jesuits) had labored since the seventeenth century. When that territory came under United States control in 1803, Catholicism continued as a feature of the region. When Louis William DuBourg was appointed bishop of the Louisiana and Florida territories in 1815, the area had been without effective oversight by a Catholic bishop for many years. As he was appointed by the American archbishop, his authority was not accepted by the French in New Orleans and the Spanish in Florida.
Though distracted by the internal struggles and defiance of his authority, Bishop DuBourg nonetheless recognized major religious needs that required attention, especially among the natives. He appealed to the Jesuits of Belgium for aid. Pierre Jean DeSmet give him great assistance, taking many trips to visit the natives in the West and becoming the advocate of the tribe of Flatheads. DeSmet described the virtuous character of these natives, claiming they had not learned the vices of the whites.
Like a few other missionaries, DeSmet found his trust in the natives matched by their corresponding trust in him. In 1868, DeSmet persuaded the Sioux tribe to accept a treaty of peace, accomplishing the delicate negotiations with skill and maintaining the respect of both sides. DeSmet maintained high hopes for the American nation. His confidence was shared by many who loaded wagons and set out toward the West. The West was seen not as a mere extension of the nation but its fulfillment.
By 1850, the Roman Catholic Church had become the largest denomination in the country, a status it has retained since that time. Its size came chiefly as the result of massive emigration from Ireland during a potato famine. Of the five million immigrants who settled in America from 1815 to 1860, two million came from Ireland. Many groups challenged the right of Catholics to live freely in the United States, anti-Catholic sentiment led to riots and acts of vandalism against Catholic establishments, and anti-Catholic publications spread. Voluntary associations designed to combat Catholicism were among the most visible organizations of the era, suggesting that not all Protestant mission efforts were benevolent.
In 1835, Samuel F. B. Morse published a tract about the dangers to the United States of foreign immigration. He focused especially on the increasing presence of Irish Catholics, arguing that the Catholic religion (dominated by the pope) is by nature opposed to the democratic republican government of the United States, as well as to civil and religious liberty. Protestants saw Catholicism as joined to priestly tyranny, considering it a threat both to American government and Protestant Christianity.
In 1844, Orestes Brownson, a New England convert to the Catholic Church, offered the counterargument that Roman Catholicism is necessary to sustain popular liberty, because popular liberty requires a religion above popular control in order to speak to the people. Amidst all the discrimination faced by Catholics, Catholic bishops in 1833 encouraged the faithful Catholics to stand against the misrepresentations and criticisms of Catholic beliefs and practices. One bishop also called for an end to all attempts to divide the country due to religious differences.
While defending against both the quiet suspicions and active hostilities of other Americans, Roman Catholics were also busy trying to cope with the enormous ethnic diversity that confronted their own church in America. German Catholics were not happy when placed under the supervision of Irish church leaders, and Irish Catholics were equally unhappy under French church leaders who understood little of Irish culture or the English language. To make matters worse, some Catholic laity, observing the practices of their Protestant neighbors, decided that they, too, should have the right to hire and fire their own pastors, to own their own church property, and to control parish finances. Hispanic Catholicism in the West added to the complexity.
Spain’s labors in North America left a lasting influence in the Southwest, notably in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and much of Texas (as well as in Florida). Spanish missions were one of the most obvious features of the environment. From the Alamo of Texas to the chain of missions in California, Hispanic Catholicism shaped the lasting image of an entire geographic region. The Jesuit Eusebio Kino labored in southern Arizona in the final years of the 17th century and the first years of the 18th centuries, and the San Xavier del Bac Church was built on the site of his first mission in the region. In California, the Franciscan Junipero Serra established missions from San Diego to Ventura, and his successors continued his work until a total of twenty-one missions extended north to Sonoma.
Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821 and a dozen years later passed an act of secularization that turned over the abundant California mission lands to secular ownership, reserving in each area only a single parish to the authority of the church. Monks and nuns were released from their monastic vows, and many religious workers were encouraged to leave for Spain. Then, as a result of the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1847, all of the vast Southwest was seized for the United States. While Californians were assured their religious rights as Catholics would be secure, they faced the influence of easterners who came for gold or trade, as well as those who brought Protestantism.
A growing number of Protestant easterners left behind their familiar religious culture to face the predominantly Mexican, Spanish, and native Southwest. Protestant missionaries in New Mexico, confronted by late medieval Spanish practices that included lashing the body and carrying large crosses by penitents, denounced these barbarous and ignorant superstitions, which they attributed to foreign fanaticism. Attempts of both Catholics and Protestant reformers to end such practices failed.
In California, as elsewhere in the Southwest, easterners generally regarded themselves as superior in both education and religion to the Hispanics they encountered there. However, an English Catholic named Herbert Vaughan, who visited the state in 1864 felt that Spanish Catholic missionaries had done more to establish sacred spaces than American Protestants. Vaughan, like many visitors and settlers, saw the value of the Spanish Catholic origins of the Southwest, and even many Protestants began trying to adopt this fascinating history. Protestants from the era of England’s Queen Victoria, along with their successors, gradually appropriated the missions and their architectural forms for their own cultural, religious, historical, and commercial purposes. In the process, the missions themselves became tourist attractions and civic landmarks.
Despite the admirers of Hispanic Catholic missions, Mexican Catholics found it difficult to find defenders, sometimes even within their own religious institution. Catholicism would continue to be directed from the East (not the West), which meant its hierarchy would be predominantly Irish, French, and German (not Hispanic). Though a large portion of the American Catholic population was now Hispanic (due to the land changes after the war), Mexican Americans would not have much success in gaining higher leadership roles in the Roman Catholic Church until the second half of the 20th century. Despite the challenges it faced, Catholicism dominated the Southwest from the 17th century to present times.
Judaism
Though far smaller in membership than either Catholicism or Protestantism, in the early 19th century, Judaism managed to move well beyond its early centers of worship along the Atlantic Coast. With a significant number of emigrants from Germany arriving, Judaism found increased strength. German Jews saw America, and particularly the West, as a place to find a more thorough freedom. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who moved to the Ohio frontier at the middle of the century, urged his fellow Jews to discard old European ways for new American ones. He also pushed for Judaism itself to reform its outdated rituals and ideas, recognizing that modern times have revolutionized how people think and feel. Hebrew Union College, which was founded in Cincinnati in 1875, helped keep Wise’s vision and give substance to his hopes for a reformed Judaism.
Traveling even more widely throughout the West, Rabbi Isaac Leeser tried to help isolated Jewish communities maintain faithfulness to the Torah (Hebrew law) and to the traditions of their ancestors. He saw the greatest danger for Jews, who numbered so few, as becoming lost in the vast land of America. He further recognized that Jews were reluctant to set up houses of prayer or hire qualified ministers in the West, as they did not plan to settle but merely to acquire wealth in a short period of time. Leeser nonetheless remained optimistic, looking forward to many synagogues being established in the West and to thousands of faithful Jews practicing their religion.
Before the Civil War, Judaism remained of modest size, with probably fewer than fifty synagogues to be found throughout the United States. Partly because of its small numbers, Judaism remained free of denominational divisions. When Jewish immigration sharply increased after the Civil War, bringing millions of East European Jews to the nation, differences arose regarding just what living in America required of or offered to the religiously observant Jew. The issue was to determine what principles remained unchanging, what constituted essential beliefs and practices, and what traditions might be usefully adapted or even abandoned in confronting a new society.
The West as Religious Region
While the South is widely recognized for its features peculiar to that area of the country, the West also has elements that make it distinct within American religion. We will consider Mormonism, the considerable presence of Hispanics and natives, and the growth of pluralism.
Unlike other utopian groups, the Mormons did not fade away. The group’s prophet and founder, Joseph Smith (1805-1844), found no place of comfort in the existing churches. After claiming to have had a vision of an angel named Moroni in 1820, he embarked on a religious quest to restore the true church, which he called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The movement began in New York and dwelled for a time in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, before claiming an area far in the West. Forced by the hostility of neighbors to move again and again, the Mormons thought they had found a safe place in Nauvoo, Illinois, where they arrived in 1839, built a temple, established a government, and readied themselves against attack by outsiders (those who rejected the revelations and authority of Smith, known as Gentiles by the Mormons). Outsiders objected to Mormons holding property in common, adding revelations of their own to the Bible, seeking to be a peculiar people, and practicing polygamy (multiple marriages). In 1844, Smith was arrested on a charge of destroying property and placed in jail when a mob of armed men stormed the jail, broke in, and assassinated Smith and his brother Hyrum. Though utopian colonies typically fade away upon the death of their founder, Mormonism refused to die. It even grew more as it made Smith’s death into a martyrdom.
Under the strong leadership of Brigham Young, Mormons determined to move away from states that would not welcome them and from neighbors that would not tolerate them. They decided to move where there were no states at the time, and where their community could be alone. In 1847, the long march began from Navoo, Illinois to Omaha, Nebraska, and finally to a great Salt Lake Basin. Many came also from Europe and were assured by the church welcome in Utah Territory.
The new movement proved remarkably successful, and there were numerous reasons for its appeal. First, the Mormons promised a return to the pure and primitive church of the New Testament, tapping into a yearning among many Americans for such a restoration. Second, Joseph Smith provided his followers with their own scriptural base in addition to the Bible, namely the Book of Mormon, which described the New World and its native peoples in terms of God’s divine plan and acclaimed America as a land superior to all other lands. Third, successive revelations to Smith created more distinctiveness, making this church not just another frontier variant of Christianity, but a vast renovation of Christianity as a whole (with teaching such as baptism for the dead and an eternal progression of humankind even beyond death). Fourth, Mormons also looked forward to an imminent end of the world, a Second Coming of Christ that Mormons were called to prepare for and help bring about (with a new Jerusalem in America rather than Palestine). Finally, Mormonism, with its certain answers and strong central authority created a sustaining community that would defend and protect, feed and house, and make clear the difference between the Mormon saints and the hostile and godless world.
Mormonism’s success can be measured by its numbers. The Mormons settled in the Great Basin of the Salt Lake Valley, planting, harvesting, and prospering, with the belief that God would make the land fruitful. A century later, Mormons dominated all of Utah and much of the surrounding land. At that point, Mormonism had become a fixed feature of the western landscape.
Hispanics and Native Americans also shaped the culture of the southern deserts, the Great Plains, and the Pacific slopes. Hispanics remained in those regions that had once been Spain’s, then Mexico’s, declining to surrender their culture when the United States quickly moved westward or their religion to Anglo-Protestant missionaries (or even to Irish and French Catholics). Given the sparse resources of Catholic authorities in the East, which were burdened by the large number of immigrants, the predominantly agricultural and rural population of the Southwest had to fend for itself, with little supervision from a hierarchy not yet prepared to accept priests and bishops from among Hispanics. Mexican Americans remained crucial in the region and rose to ever-increasing visibility across the West.
Native Americans remained in the West because that was as far as they could be removed from the more settled areas of the East. Beginning with the removal of the Cherokee tribe in the 1830s from northwest Georgia to Oklahoma through the Trail of Tears, one solution was to keep Native Americans as many steps as possible ahead of westward expansion. When that did not work, extermination and war were the major alternatives. As early as 1828, Congressman Edward Everett lamented that American policy with respect to natives was empty of all integrity and good faith, after numerous treaty violations. Under the numerous pressures faced, the population of Native Americans declined throughout the 19th century, though in the 20th century it had considerable growth.
Finally, the West entered early into a pluralistic age that much of the rest of the nation would follow decades later. The West was Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Russian Orthodox. It was experimental in ways that went far beyond historic Christianity or Judaism. It was more secular than the East (with a lower percentage of people affiliated with religious institutions). It also served as the North for Hispanics who migrated out of Mexico, and as part of a larger Pacific Rim, through which the cultures of Asia first entered the United States.
While most of the country did not encounter Asian religions until the World’s Parliament of Religions met in Chicago in 1893, California knew Chinese immigrants before the Civil War. Migrating Anglo-Americans grew not only to know these other immigrants but to fear them as foreign to the United States and to the nation’s familiar religious patterns. When as many as three million Chinese reached western shores by the early 1880s, political leaders decided the time had come to halt all further immigration of Chinese laborers, passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Similarly, the influx of Japanese along the West Coast and even more in Hawaii, led to sharp restrictions. Japanese immigrants introduced Buddhism and Shinto, while the Chinese brought with them Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, and folk beliefs. Despite the intensity of anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese prejudices, Asian religions established their points of entry all along the Pacific shores. Also with Alaska as its base, Russian Orthodoxy infiltrated the west all the way down to northern California, establishing an outpost and a church in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
The American West, therefore, revealed a rich variety that gave to its religious life a character sharply different from that of any other region in the country. The cultural and religious diversity of the West brought into questions concepts of a Christian America, or America as a Protestant Empire. Protestants set out to extend the institutions and programs of the Second Great Awakening across the land, but their plan struggled where Mormons, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and native peoples met them and drew lines of resistance or made gains for their own cultures and religions.
Primary Text 4: Constitution of the American Bible Society
Constitution of the American Bible Society, 1816, excerpts (nationalhumanitiescenter.org)
Every person of observation has remarked that the times are pregnant with great events. The political world has undergone changes stupendous, unexpected, and calculated to inspire thoughtful men with the most boding anticipations. . . . An excitement, as extraordinary as it is powerful, has roused the nations to the importance of spreading the knowledge of the one living and true God, as revealed in his Son, the Mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus. This excitement is the more worthy of notice, as it has followed a period of philosophy, falsely so called, and has gone in the track of those very schemes which, under the imposing names of reason and liberality, were attempting to seduce mankind from all which can bless the life that is, or shed a cheering radiance on the life that is to come. We hail the re-action, as auspicious to whatever is exquisite in human enjoyment, or precious to human hope. We would fly to the aid of all that is holy, against all that is profane; of the purest interest of the community, the family, and the individual, against the conspiracy of darkness, disaster, and death to help on the mighty work of Christian charity to claim our place in the age of Bibles. . . . In the United States we want nothing but concert to perform achievements astonishing to ourselves, dismaying to the adversaries of truth and piety; and most encouraging to every evangelical effort, on the surface of the globe. No spectacle can be so illustrious in itself, so touching to man, or so grateful to God, as a nation pouring forth its devotion, its talent, and its treasures, for that kingdom of the Saviour which is righteousness and peace.
If there be a single measure which can overrule objection, subdue opposition, and command exertion, this is the measure. That all our voices, all our affections, all our hands, should be joined in the grand design of promoting ìpeace on earth and good will toward manî ó that they should resist the advance of misery ó should carry the light of instruction into the dominions of ignorance; and the balm of joy to the soul of anguish; and all this by diffusing the oracles of God ó addresses to the understanding an argument which cannot be encountered; and to the heart an appeal which its holiest emotions rise up to second. Under such impressions, and with such views, fathers, brethren, fellow-citizens, the American Bible Society has been formed. Local feelings, party prejudices, sectarian jealousies, are excluded by its very nature. Its members are leagued in that, in that alone, which calls up every hallowed, and puts down every unhallowed, principle the dissemination of the Scriptures in the received versions where they exist, and in the most faithful where they may be required. In such a work, whatever is dignified, kind, venerable, true, has ample scope: while sectarian littleness and rivalries can find no avenue of admission. . . . It is true, that the prodigious territory of the United States ó the increase of their population, which is gaining every day upon their moral cultivation ó and the dreadful consequences which will ensue from a peopleís outgrowing the knowledge of eternal life; and reverting to a species of heathenism, which shall have all the address and profligacy of civilized society, without any religious control, present a sphere of action, which may for a long time employ and engross the cares of this Society, and all the local Bible Societies of the land. In the distinct anticipation of such an urgency, one of the main objects of the American Bible Society, is, not merely to provide a sufficiency of well printed and accurate editions of the Scriptures; but also to furnish great districts of the American continent with well executed Stereotype plates, for their cheap and extensive diffusion throughout regions which are now scantily supplied, at a discouraging expense; and which, nevertheless, open a wide and prepared field for the reception of revealed truth. Yet, let it not be supposed, that geographical or political limits are to be the limits of the American Bible Society. That designation is meant to indicate, not the restriction of their labour, but the source of its emanation. They will embrace, with thankfulness and pleasure, every opportunity of raying out, by means of the Bible, according to their ability, the light of life and immorality, to such parts of the world, as are destitute of the blessing, and are within their reach. In this high vocation, their ambition is to be fellow-workers with them who are fellow-workers with God.
Lecture 5
Chapter 9. A House of Faith Divided
In the first half of the 19th century, the voluntaristic energies of the Second Great Awakening, along with the diplomatic and military successes of the nation, created for many Americans a sense of invincibility, assurance, and destiny. Nothing could halt the progress, hinder the movement of reform, or dim the nation’s shine of morality—except slavery. Even for the most triumphalist Christian, slavery was a dark stain on the nation that grew ever larger.
For a time in the 19th century, it seemed believable that the nation would reach a consensus that slavery was wrong, and that it was only a matter of time before it was eliminated from the land. Church leaders of both the North and South condemned the institution of slavery. By a constitutional provision, the slave trade had come to an end in 1808. Yet ending the slave trade did nothing to end the practice of slavery as it was practiced in the United States, and a growing number of African Americans was born into enslavement. Further, there was little agreement on preventing the expansion of slavery into other territories, where it had not existed before.
It was soon clear that no consensus was soon to emerge and that only greater conflict lay ahead. As some pressed for immediate emancipation of all slaves, others offered a strong defense of the institution of slavery. Some focused on the moral issue; others spoke only of the political issue. Some cried out regarding human rights, while others defended their property rights. Abolitionists (who sought to end slavery) and apologists (who defended slavery) took opposing sides, taking even firmer stances and using even harsher rhetoric.
The Abolitionists
With the founding of William Lloyd Garrison’s radical newspaper The Liberator in 1831, criticism of slavery grew stronger and more prominent. The New England Anti-Slavery Society was formed the next year, and two years later the American Anti-Slavery Society was created in Philadelphia. The abolitionists called for complete and immediate emancipation of all slaves and made no offer of compromise. In 1835, the Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing wrote an essay against slavery, arguing from every philosophical, moral, and religious perspective that slavery was wrong. He argued that the brotherhood of all humankind is the essence of Christianity.
Two years after Channing published his writing, the Presbyterian Revered Elijah Lovejoy affirmed his right to speak and publish in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy was a Presbyterian clergyman and newspaper editor who defended the abolitionists for rejecting the view that black men and women were property. Slaves were human beings who had natural and inalienable rights, and they were created and responsible to the same God as whites. Lovejoy declared that God was the only master of human beings, and slavery usurped God’s authority as the rightful owner of all human beings. Thus, slavery was a great political evil that would lead to the downfall of American civil and religious society, if not removed.
Such sentiments were not popular in the South, the North, or on the frontier. As he printed and proclaimed his abolitionist views, Lovejoy had one printing press after another destroyed and dumped into the Mississippi River, and he was forced to flee from place to place. Determined to take a stand at Alton rather than continue to flee, he appealed to his fellow citizens in Alton to assist him in defending his fourth printing press from attack. However, he was shot and killed in 1837, as the matter of slavery had ceased being a matter for civil or rational debate.
African Americans also became active in arousing public opinion against slavery. The most famous black abolitionist was a former slave named Frederick Douglass. Douglass spoke not only throughout much of America but also abroad, expressing the great evil inherent in slavery. In 1846, Douglass addressed a large gathering in London, in which he criticized both slavery and a Christianity that allowed and even encouraged the continuance of slavery (and even benefited financially from the buying and selling of slaves).
Daniel Payne, who was ordained as a Lutheran clergyman in 1839 and later became a Presbyterian minister for a time, found his lasting home as a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Dedicated to the cause of black churches and a major figure in improving their institutional fortunes, Payne joined Douglass and other African Americans in the call for the abolition of slavery. He recognized that slavery corrupted the master as much as it harmed the slave. It further destroys the allegiance of people to the Bible, which is used to justify slavery by its instructions for 1st-century slaves to obey their masters.
Thus, abolitionists (both black and white), spread across the land. Preachers in churches called for slavery’s quick end, newspapers printed opinions on the need for immediate action to end slavery, and books detailing the evils of slavery reached a wide and increasingly agitated audience. Addresses were delivered, public protest meetings held, and revival meetings turned into anti-slavery crusades. Wendell Phillips addressed the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, declaring that abolitionists must use every means possible in the cause, given the increasingly severe situation for the slaves. Those with opposing positions joined in the conflict in ever-increasing numbers.
The Apologists
As the rhetoric of abolitionism grew more uncompromising, so did the language of those now prepared to defend slavery on political, moral, or religious grounds. The frontier Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright (1785-1872) described the deceptive process by which many came to see slavery as something to praise rather than condemn, detailing the way that Methodist preachers started out poor and preaching against slavery, but later defending the practice once their economic circumstances improved or as many of them married into slaveholding families.
Just as abolitionism was not limited to the North, so defenses for slavery did not only come from the South. In New Jersey, a Dutch Reformed minister named Samuel B. How argued in 1855 that the Bible’s record demonstrated that slavery was not a sin. Both the Old Testament and New Testament agreed that slavery was a legitimate social institution. How emphasized the significance of property rights in the dispute, arguing that the attempt to deprive others of lawful property was to attack the very existence of civilization and Christianity.
In Charleston, South Carolina, the Roman Catholic bishop, John England (1786-1842), also defended slavery as an institution approved by both God and humans. He argued that, while natural law may not establish slavery, it does not prohibit it. Slaves voluntarily surrendered their freedom in order to receive protection and care from their human masters, a situation that ensured them food, clothing, and shelter, with even a small amount of comforts. Slaves are also freed from the fear of neglect in sickness and from anxiety over supporting their families, in return for faithfulness and moderate labor. England concluded that many slaves would not wish for freedom, as the arrangement offered mutual benefit to them as well as their masters.
Similarly, the Baptist spokesman Richard Furman (1755-1825) explained that the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Scriptures, both by principle and example. Furthermore, the Golden Rule (to treat others the way one wants to be treated) cannot be applied without considering the context of having due regard for justice, propriety, and the general good. Social relationships, as well as family relationships, require reason to be applied when implementing the Golden Rule. Just as a father would not obey a son’s orders to make the son obey the father’s order due to the inherent social order of the father-son relationship, so the social order of the slave-master relationship must be respected.
Some apologists argued that abolitionists had turned from the Bible and religion, instead embracing foreign philosophies and radical thinkers. Such people could not be persuaded that they were reading into Scripture what simply was not there. Meanwhile, those who saw slavery as being in harmony with the Bible held closely to the Scriptures and religion, even seeing slavery as a means to the development of African Americans to their God-ordained destiny.
If slavery could not be defended as a good, it could perhaps be justified as a political and economic given with which the churches should not interfere. In 1836, South Carolina Lutherans protested that it was improper and unjust for religious bodies to interfere or meddle with the subject of slavery and abolitionism. Others were willing to discuss it only in terms of their own choosing: Christianity against atheism. The Presbyterian James Thornwell argued that abolitionists had a common cause with atheists and communists, considering the duties of all people the same. On the other side were the friends of order, who saw the workings of society as the command of God. Thus, the social order (including slavery) must be maintained, and we must recognize that humans naturally have diverse circumstances.
Thus, the Bible was used both to attack and defend slavery. The Christian religion was both upheld as a friend to the slaves and seen as a force that betrayed and deceived them. The church was a place for runaway slaves to find refuge on their way to escaping slavery and gaining freedom, as well as a place to send out patrols or to find and recapture runaway slaves, or to break up their religious meetings. Abraham Lincoln recognized that both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God; however, the prayers of both could not be answered.
The Churches
While some churches managed to avoid accusations and lasting division, churches with the largest following in the South could not escape being torn apart. Refusing to talk about the issue did not resolve it; merely praying about the matter did not alleviate it; loyalty to creed did not help; and common denominational bonds did not prove strong enough to hold. In the last two decades immediately prior to the Civil War, the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian fellowships all divided.
In 1844, the youngest of the three denominations–the Methodist Church–was the first to suffer division. The division could be anticipated in the sharply contrasting statements regarding slavery that came from the North and the South. In 1836, Bishop William Capers of South Carolina criticized the abolitionists, charging them with being loyal to a false philosophy and setting aside the Scriptures. Whatever the motives of northern radicals, the conclusions reached were harmful and in error.
A Methodist Anti-Slavery Convention, meeting in Boston in 1843, proclaimed views that were unacceptable to Methodists in the South, as it proclaimed that it was a sin and violation of the law of God to hold slaves–treating human beings as property rather than persons. The Boston Methodists further declared that neither unity nor harmony could exist within their church as long as slavery continued to flourish there, and thus slavery within the church must be abolished.
The next year, the Methodist Church (the largest Protestant body in the nation despite being founded only sixty years before) ceased to be a single church. It split into two branches closely following the line dividing the North and South. These two churches were predominantly white in membership. Two predominantly black Methodist bodies, the African Methodist Episcopal (formed in 1816) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (formed in 1821), continued their independent existence, operating initially in the North but eventually throughout the country. Active Methodist abolitionists, who were impatient with their whole church to take action on slavery, had formed the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1843, but that separation was much smaller than the schism of 1844.
The immediate cause of the separation was the question of whether a slaveholding clergyman could be appointed a bishop in the national Methodist Episcopal Church. As early as 1836, when the General Conference of the Church met in Cincinnati, the issue was raised, with Southern delegates arguing that it was inappropriate to make holding slaves a bar to being a bishop. Northern delegates, on the other hand, contended that the Methodist Book of Discipline, which followed the lead of John Wesley, had taken a strong stand against slavery and condemned it as a great evil. Northerners argued that the church never approved of slavery, though it had gradually relaxed its position to the extent that it did not expel members who held slaves. Southerners, in contrast, reasoned that if it was permissible for members of a Methodist church to hold slaves, then why not a bishop?
If, however, slavery were to be outlawed by the proclamation of a president (as it was in 1863), then it seemed nothing would prevent northern and southern Methodists from reuniting. By that time, however, twenty years of bitter accusations on both sides had only widened the division between the two branches. Southern bishops in 1865 indicated that a majority of the northern branch had become incurably radical, substituting politics for theology and social teaching for church creeds. The Supreme Court earlier had even had to settle property disputes between the two great branches of Methodism, further aggravating the wounds and postponing reconciliation. The northern and southern branches did not come together again until 1939.
In 1845, the Baptists, operating as a national entity only since 1814, similarly separated into northern and southern bodies, though the Southern Baptist Convention was much larger than its northern counterpart in both membership and expansion. Slavery once again was the cause of division, with the appointment of a slaveholding missionary raising the issue. In 1844, Alabama Baptists had put to the Boston-based board of missions a question concerning its willingness to appoint a missionary who held slaves. The board indicated that the question had never been raised, but if it should the board could not appoint anyone who insisted on retaining slaves. Southerners felt excluded by this statement, since they contributed to missionary support but had no effective voice in missionary appointments.
Although denominational structures among black Baptists developed after the Civil War rather than before, many African American Baptists took active roles in resisting and condemning slavery long before the war. Baptist churches provided opportunities for such leadership and audiences for such sentiments, as Nathaniel Paul demonstrated in the Hamilton Baptist Church of Albany, New York. Paul denounced slavery as blocking the path to salvation and to God’s otherwise freely available mercies.
In even more compelling rhetoric, another black Christian activist, David Walker of Boston, issued a writing in 1829 that warned that the continued toleration of slavery would bring ruin to the entire country. Walker’s warning seemed to be fulfilled two years later when a black Baptist preacher and visionary, Nat Turner of Virginia, led a slave rebellion that resulted in hundreds of deaths, of both blacks and whites. Turner had seen himself as an instrument of God’s justice made manifest on earth.
Apocalyptic judgments (warnings of God’s impending judgment or the end of the world) came in sermons, in rebellions, and at last in a long and costly war. Despite all the separations, both black and white Baptists continued to grow before, during, and after the Civil War. Black Baptists reached one million before 1890. African Americans turned to the Baptist denomination in greater force than to any other church, attracted by the relaxed polity (church structure) that allowed them full independence in their own institutions and by an informal worship that permitted their own free and full expression. Meanwhile, the white branches of the denomination, with over 9000 churches in 1850, increased fourfold in the following century. Yet there was no reconciliation; the Baptist movement remained divided long after the issue of slavery had been finally ended.
Presbyterians, the last of the three major denominations to divide, took this fateful step in 1857. Decades before, church members of the North and South found their disagreements over slavery firmly set. In 1835, South Carolina Presbyterians affirmed that slavery was far from being a sin in God’s sight. It was not condemned in Scripture, but rather was in harmony with the examples of faithful people in both the Old and New Testament, as well as being consistent with regard for the best good of the slaves that God had entrusted to the care of slaveowners. But in the same year, Michigan Presbyterians declared that slavery was certainly a sin before God and humanity, an evil from every conceivable point of view–moral, political, physical, and social. Presbyterians of the North affirmed that they must work to bring about universal emancipation. None of the events of the next twenty years would soften the disagreements of these Presbyterians or reveal any common ground.
Presbyterian abolitionists believed that to use the Bible to defend slavery would surely bring down disaster on the religious organization, as well as to defame and possibly even destroy all effectiveness of the Christian religion in America. Apologists for slavery, by contrast, argued that the Bible had little to do with the matter, but that abolitionists drew instead from radical French philosophy or acted as though the words of Thomas Jefferson had been divinely inspired. While southern Presbyterians believed that the argument was between orthodox believers (who accepted slavery) and foreign radicals (who opposed slavery), northerners believed that the idea that slavery was always wrong was being firmly established and that time and history were on their side.
After the separation, Presbyterians grew more rapidly in the North and West. Approximately four times the size of the southern branch of Presbyterianism, the northern branch grew from about 500,000 in 1870 to around 4 million a century later. By that time, proposals for reunion between the two sections grew more serious, and a merger was accomplished in 1983.
The cost to American Protestantism of these major denominational divisions can hardly be overestimated. The campaigning spirit of voluntaristic reform suffered enormously, as church leadership now spoke for regional bodies more than for national ones and reflected sectional differences more obviously than ever before. With the three major Protestant denominations ruptured, the evangelical hope for a Christian republic that rallied together around revivals, missions, and benevolence (or charitable causes) would never be the same. And the Civil War caused even greater division.
The Nation
In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a famous novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin that depicted slavery. The novel ended with a plea to both North and South to repent of their respective injustices and cruelties while there was still time. She hoped to turn aside God’s wrath, which she argued would be visited on the unjust and could only be escaped with repentance, justice, and mercy.
Revivalism had proven before to be a powerful instrument for healing differences and solving critical social or moral problems. Some thought that revivalism could also solve the challenges of the 1850s. In 1858, revivalism spread swiftly from city to city. Starting out in Boston and New York, the revival moved quickly beyond those centers to other towns and villages that anticipated another Great Awakening. The number of meetings increased rapidly, and all classes of people were drawn, leading to a number of conversions that was difficult to determine. The revival leader Charles Finney declared that the South was not affected by the revival due to its practice of slavery.
Stowe hoped that the revival of 1858 would become a reformation, leading men and women to draw closer to God and become more like Christ in all their ways, repenting of slavery and avoiding tragic bloodshed. However, despite the power of the revival and the numerous conversions, it failed to bring both North and South together. Hostilities turned into violence, which became a war that tried the nation more than any event in American history. Early in the course of the struggle, President Abraham Lincoln, refused to describe the cause of either side as being the side of righteousness and truth, instead recognizing that God’s purpose was different from that of either party. Recognizing that Americans had grown too accustomed to success and self-sufficient, Lincoln stated that it was time for humility, confession, and pleas for divine forgiveness.
The moral (though not military) climax of the Civil War came on the first of January 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves wherever federal authority could make that possible. While this was only a beginning in the achievement of racial justice, it was a necessary and crucial beginning. In the District of Columbia, where emancipation was immediate, black Methodist Daniel Payne preached a sermon urging that a responsible and disciplined freedom be pursued by those now set free and stating that the freest person was the one free in Christ.
When the war ended in 1865, there were enormous losses in both body and spirit. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln had called for binding up the nation’s wounds. However, his assassination in 1865 meant that he would be unable to assist in this effort. Nor would he able to help assure that his vision of reconciliation was pursued with charity for all and malice toward none. Horace Bushnell described how, due to the great sacrifice and suffering, a great achievement had been gained, namely the rebirth of the nation.
Abraham Lincoln’s Journey
Abraham Lincoln has been called “the spiritual center of American history.” His influence affected many of the era’s religious movements. It would be worthwhile for us to examine his own religious journey. Lincoln grew up in a separatistic Baptist family in Kentucky with strict views regarding predestination. It was believed that God saved who he willed to save, and human actions (such as missions) were weak and of little consequence. Lincoln’s speeches were often filled with hints of this Calvinist theology, as well as references to Scripture.
However, Lincoln, like Thomas Jefferson, did not become connected to institutional Christianity. He further had a restorationist sense that all the existing churches were flawed, and he longed for a church that focused simply on Jesus’ Great Commandment to love God and love other people. As a young man, Lincoln had read deistic works such as the writings of Tom Paine. Throughout his life, Lincoln seemed to occupy a place between evangelical Protestantism and Enlightenment skepticism. Lincoln was a free thinker who questioned the standard creeds and institutional traditions of Christianity. At the same time, he was an orator and storyteller who had learned much from the preaching of Methodists and Baptists.
Lincoln was also a seeking spirit, open to the religious experimentation that characterized the period’s lively religious democracy. He and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, took an interest in spiritualism, a movement in which people sought to communicate with the spirits of the dead. The movement began in New York in the late 1840s with a series of mysterious knockings that many interpreted to be ghostly communications. Through the 1850s and 1860s, it became a mass movement, attracting numerous followers and interested people. Grief-stricken over the death of two sons, Mary Lincoln turned to mediums for some way to reconnect with her dead sons. During Lincoln’s presidency, mediums visited the White House at least eight times to hold seances, and the president (who was both skeptical and open to supernatural signs) attended several of these meetings. The violence and destruction caused by the Civil War only deepened the American fascination with spiritualism as the number of bereaved multiplied with each new casualty. Sorrowing widows, parents, and children sought comfort in supposed messages from spirits, and even apparent photographs of spirits.
Spiritualism was more than a movement connecting the visible and invisible worlds. It was also another reform movement in which female mediums received messages about the cause of women’s rights and abolition. One of the mediums who ministered to the Lincolns in the White House, Nettie Colburn, later claimed that messages from the spirit world had urged the president fearlessly to pursue emancipation for the slaves. Thus, Lincoln represented another dimension of the religious life of the period, the ways in which religious innovation and social reform joined together.
Lincoln’s theological grappling with the Civil War and with slavery made his journey characteristic of the age. In his reflection, he saw the punishment of war as a national atonement for the offense of slavery that had been committed in the life of America.
Part 3. Modern Prospects from Cityscapes to Bible Battles
Chapter 10. Immigration and Diversity
The United States is a history of immigration, and the period after the Civil War illustrates this fact in a powerful way. Between 1860, (when the population of the whole country was 31 million) and 1890, newly arrived immigrants numbered about 10 million. In the briefer period from 1890 to 1914, the number grew to 15 million. This great movement of peoples, largely from southern and eastern Europe, was further increased by migrations across the Mexico-U.S. border and by an influx of Chinese and Japanese along the Pacific Coast. Diverse cultural patterns were accompanied by new displays of religion, though such diversity also raised anxieties regarding national unity and the nation’s religious direction.
In the chaos of transplanting, religion often provided both personal security and ethnic cohesion. Faced with a new land and a new language, far removed from ancestral homes and former national identities, immigrants turned eagerly toward synagogue, church, temple, and shrine for the comfort of the familiar. When so much had been interrupted, religion offered the assurance of some form of continuity. In communities of faith, those who had been uprooted found stability that empowered them to begin again and find direction in a new land.
Ethnicity and Religion
While religion often reinforced ethnic cohesiveness (or unity of an ethnic group), ethnicity sometimes challenged the unifying dimensions of religion. Ethnic loyalty created social community at the same time that it threatened or destroyed religious community. America’s rapidly increasing Roman Catholics faced especially dramatic challenges. Before the Civil War, the massive amount of Irish immigration gave the Irish much influence and control over the Catholic Church in America. The Irish proved reluctant to share this power.
German Catholics, who in many cases had arrived long before the Irish newcomers, especially resented the domination of the Catholic Church exercised by the Irish. In 1886, a Milwaukee priest named P. M. Abbelen protested to the Vatican, asking that German parishes be entirely independent of Irish parishes, and that Irish church leaders be unable to exercise authority over German churches. In addition to language, the style of worship was at stake, since the Irish preferred simplicity while Germans loved the splendor of elaborate ceremonies, music, and architecture.
Abbelen further noted that German laity (normal church members) tend to exercise much more control of the administrative structure of the parish, while the Irish seem inclined to leave everything to the control of the priests. Finally, social customs of the two nationalities differed considerably, illustrated by the rarity of intermarriage between Irish and Germans. While not arguing for the superiority of one group over the other, Abbelen merely wished the Catholic church to respect the cultural differences rather than trying to suppress them.
Similarly, the Italians, Portuguese, Austrians, and Czechs found themselves ruled over by the Irish, who were unfamiliar with their customs and language, and sometimes unsympathetic to their differences and concerns. An Italian Catholic, recalling his boyhood in New York early in the 20th century, indicated that the Irish leadership was often responsible for driving Italians away from institutional Catholicism, as they especially despised American clergy. Italian Catholics were treated with indignities such as being consigned to the basement of the church during worship despite their growing numerical dominance of the church, as well as being treated with scorn by other Catholics for practices such as their grand street festivals and even their way of collecting church offerings.
Polish Catholics also found the adjustment to the United States to be extraordinarily difficult to make. To some, it appeared so difficult that separation from the church of their birth proved to be the only possible path. In the 1880s and 1890s, Polish Catholics in Scranton, Pennsylvania found themselves ruled by an Irish bishop rather than a Polish one, being outvoted in their own parish. When riots erupted, concerned laymen looked for assistance. A Polish priest, who formerly led a church in Scranton, advised those who were dissatisfied to organize and build a new church of their own. Similar situations also led to ecclesiastical independence in other cities such as Buffalo and Chicago. The worship service was celebrated in Polish, religious journals were published in Polish, and Polish festivals were celebrated. This ethnic church continued to survive and prosper as one symbol of the persevering power of ethnicity.
Despite these occurrences, the Catholic Church largely was successful in resisting the natural tendency of ethnic groups to run their own church affairs and establish competing hierarchies. The Catholic Church remained catholic (in the sense of universal). On the other hand, the failure to assure some kind of proportional representation in the American hierarchy to the diverse ethnic groups led to continued tensions and struggles within the Catholic Church, which was striving against great odds to prove its universality and inclusiveness.
In the period after the Civil War, the ethnic composition of Judaism underwent radical transformation. Before the war, American Judaism was made up predominantly of Germans, but in the following decades it acquired many more members from Eastern Europe (especially from Russia, in response to the massacres that took place in 1881, 1891, and 1905). Jews by the hundreds of thousands left a hostile Europe for a welcoming America. The United States became the major center of population in the world.
The ethnic shift also led to a religious shift. German Jews, represented by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, saw the reforming and Americanizing of Judaism as going together. In this view, Judaism in America did not need to live in isolation from or terror of the prevailing culture. Jews were free to worship as they chose, as well as to modernize their religion. Wise believed that Judaism should free itself of ancient laws and ethnic limitation to become a universal and ethically focused monotheism that appealed to all humanity. To do this, Jews had to become totally American and get rid of all foreignness, rather than merely existing as an ethnic or religious refugee.
Many Eastern European Jews, however, wished to practice their ancient religion without hindrance or limitation. Arriving in New York City or other eastern ports, they quickly worked to create a synagogue that was free and orthodox. These Jews did not want to reform the ancient law, only to obey it. Becoming American was not as important as being faithful Jews. For decades, they had faced persecution for their faith or obstacles to their worship and ritual purity. Now that they had come to a land where they could worship without fear, they wanted to exercise the freedom to be observant to their traditional religion rather than to reform it.
Among America’s newly arriving Jews, ethnicity represented more than just the competing allegiances found among America’s newly arriving Catholics. Instead it involved a completely different stance with regard to culture. Reform Judaism argued for change and transformation as an organizing principle within Judaism; Orthodox Judaism consistently argued against change. In between these two groups, Conservative Judaism arose as another alternative, arguing for a limited openness to change amid a steadfast traditionalism. Solomon Schechter, who arrived in America in 1902 to become president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, defended the Conservative approach. He saw that in the free country of America, unlike Europe, changes were not forced upon Jews.
Ethnicity, along with historical circumstances, introduced sectarian or denominational differences among America’s religious Jews. Many of the new immigrants, however, found their interests to be more political or economic than religious, and only about half of the nation’s Jews now belong to the Reform, Orthodox, and Conservative synagogues. Synagogue government is local and democratic, which enables Jewish ethnic groups in the large urban centers to survive with their own leadership, traditions, and enduring sense of community.
Protestantism was also enriched by ethnic diversity in the period following the Civil War. In Lutheranism, ethnic loyalties prevented the creation of any single Lutheran church. The large Scandinavian immigrations (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic) of the second half of the 19th century led to separate church bodies whose reason for being was ethnic more than theological. Rather than joining together to find potential commonalities, each group wanted its own language, its own festivals, and its own familiar patterns of life. The 20th century opened up with twenty-four separate Lutheran groups in America, but gradually Old World distinctions gave way to a new Lutheran identity that was more specifically American.
Ethnicity did not always prove more important than theology and church structure. In the case of the Dutch Reformed, merely being Dutch was not enough to maintain unity between Dutch who arrived in the 19th century and those who had arrived two centuries earlier. The newer immigrants found their compatriots who had already been in America for generations to be too Americanized; their theology had also lost some of its strict Calvinist precision and fidelity to the church’s formal statement of faith. Thus, the Christian Reformed Church in North America, organized in 1857, declined to be identified with the older Reformed church.
In the 20th century, the close tie between ethnicity and religion was best illustrated in the several branches of Eastern Orthodoxy. Russian, Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Syrian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and more ethnic labels defined not just parish boundaries, but all social relationships and family alliances as well. Part of the reason for the low profile of Eastern Orthodoxy in America is due to its fragmentation by ethnicity into small, self-governing national or ethnic bodies. These churches, interwoven with distinct cultures, have become anchors of both social and religious life for their members.
Religion and Race
The power of race was evident by the deep national wounds that had been caused by the Civil War. These divisions also extended to the churches long after the war. Black Methodists in the North already had created their separate institutions, but black Methodists in the South did not create a denomination of their own until 1870. At that time, about 100,000 blacks withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to form what was then called the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, later renamed the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Growth among black Baptists following the war was even more impressive.
As early as 1880, black Baptists had formed their own missionary organization. Several years later, a fully developed denomination, the National Baptist Convention, came into being, partially the result of African Americans feeling unwelcome in the white-dominated established bodies. A black pastor in Savannah, Georgia named E. K. Love noted that blacks were unable to enjoy equal rights in institutions controlled by whites, believing that a bright future awaited America’s blacks in their own institutions.
As black institutions were formed, more black leaders emerged. Black Baptists created their own publishing house in 1898, their own tools for educating missionaries to Africa, and their own method of lobbying designed to improve the condition and future of the nation’s black population. With about 2 million members by 1900, these Baptists felt strong enough to take the gospel message back to Africa. While recognizing the need for all the world to receive missionaries, they focused especially on Africa as the original home of the race. The National Baptist Convention suffered a split in 1915, which led to two major denominations that both grew and bore influence across the continent.
Though black Christians could frequently be found in largely white institutions such as the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic Churches, the majority belonged to denominations where the leadership was entirely theirs, where the worship better reflected their own practices of music and preaching, and where their contribution to the total Christian community could be more freely rendered. While the tragedy of segregation remained, black denominations were able to empower their people by having their own religious bodies.
In the generation or two following the Civil War, prejudice in the United States was directed at many convenient targets. As immigration increased, some felt the growing number of Catholics and Jews, and the growing foreignness in general, to be a threat. Though they were not a part of this surge in immigration, blacks encountered prejudice and violence for many other reasons. Asians that came into the West created even more unease, and they often found obstacles to their acceptance. Bringing with them foreign religions such a s Confucianism and Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese emigrants also posed an economic threat as they offered their labor for cheaper rates. With over 3 million emigrants from China by 1882, public pressure led to the adoption of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended all immigration from China for ten years. The act was then renewed for another ten years, before Chinese immigration was suspended indefinitely. The increased Japanese influx also led to similar anxieties. In 19th 1907 and 1908, an agreement between Japan and the United States effectively halted the flow of the Japanese into the West Coast states.
The nation’s religious forces proved ineffective in developing inclusive institutions with respect to Asian immigrants, just as they had been with African Americans. Missionaries and schools were charged with the responsibility of Christianizing and Americanizing these immigrants, but initial successes were minimal. In addition, converts to Christianity tended to be placed in ethnically restricted churches such as the Korean Baptist Church, the Chinese Methodist Church, and the Japanese Presbyterian Church. Though ethnic diversity was sometimes seen as enriching American society, it could also be regarded as harmful to the social cohesion and religious destiny of the nation. The growing Asian presence, especially in the West, was a major factor in the nation’s choosing to restrict immigration more severely in the early decades of the 20th century.
Religion and Gender
After the Emancipation Proclamation and the gradual extension of voting rights to a wider segment of the population, women began to participate more broadly in public affairs. Leadership by women of religious groups (such as in the Shakers and Christian Science movements) drew attention. Female ministers were also common in the rapidly multiplying Holiness and Pentecostal bodies. In more traditional religious groups, however, the movement for equality (especially for women in roles of ministry leadership) was slow and difficult, given the role of tradition and selective biblical texts that kept women from sharing in leadership.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell had no difficulty being admitted to Oberlin College, a school founded jointly by Presbyterians and Congregationalists that had taken an early stand in favor of educating female students as well as males. But after her undergraduate studies, Blackwell applied for admission to the theological department (being the first female student to do so), where advanced studies normally resulted in ordination to the ministry. After much discussion, the faculty decided that Blackwell would be admitted to advanced study but would not be granted a degree (and presumably not ordained). However, Blackwell was determined, and she finally won her ordination in 1853, being the first woman set apart for ministry by a major denomination (Congregational). Throughout her life, she promoted equity with respect to women’s rights in general and women’s ministry in particular.
Many were not persuaded by Blackwell’s argument or example, including Professor Robert Dabney, a Presbyterian minister and theologian in Virginia. In 1879, he explained that not all social innovations or progressive developments were healthy or biblical. He argued that there was no scriptural foundation or socially redeeming quality for ordaining women. He explained that neither the Old Testament nor New Testament allowed women to serve in roles of religious leadership. He felt the movement for women’s rights threatened biblical authority and undermined the foundation of Christian marriage, stating that good Presbyterians should not support the general trend or the specific effort to allow women preachers.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that much of the difficulty facing women had to do with the Bible, noting the Bible’s depiction of women being responsible for sin and the fall of the human race, being judged by God and consigned to marriage, childbearing, and intellectual dependence on men. In her book The Woman’s Bible, Stanton promoted a new critical understanding of those scriptures that were used to justify centuries of patriarchy and female submission. Stanton noted in distress the very slow movement for women’s equality in the religious world despite the growing equality in education, political participation, and career opportunity.
National Unity and Mounting Diversity
With millions of new immigrants, dozens of new ethnic tensions, and concerns about both race and gender, many in the 19th century worried about the oneness of the nation. Americanization became the great cause of many native-born whites: to take all the foreignness in language, custom, dress, and religion and somehow make it American–culturally familiar, English-speaking, and preferably Protestant in religion (or at least Bible-believing and informed by a moral code that could be seen as essentially biblical). Public schools would serve as a major instrument of the Americanization process, while private or religious (particularly Catholic) schools were often regarded as divisive and even un-American.
These uneasy anxieties informed and gave momentum to the revivalism identified with Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899). A Boston shoe clerk, Moody was impressed by the earnestness of his Sunday school teacher and joined the Congregational Church when he was eighteen years old. He then left for Chicago to make his own way in the world of business but later decided to focus on preaching the gospel. He spent his after-business hours organizing Sunday schools, distributing tracts, raising money for the builders of churches, and ministering in a dozen ways to Chicago’s poor and distressed. By 1860, he decided to give himself totally to the cause of religion.
During the Civil War, he worked in army camps, offering aid to the wounded and counsel to those uprooted from family and home. After that conflict, he returned to the slums of Chicago to direct relief, establish missions, and acquire a reputation as a Christian leader who repeatedly managed to get things done. He won his greatest fame as a revivalist, with early evangelistic successes in Great Britain. Upon returning to America in 1875, he became a popular hero. His revival meetings gained even greater acceptance when he joined forces with a popular song leader and hymn writer.
Unordained and uneducated, Moody preached simple sermons. Stressing the need for personal redemption, he called upon his hearers to respond to clear and compelling divine initiatives and invited them to open their hearts to the love of God. He used straightforward language spoken earnestly, without dramatic or emotional display. The heart of Dwight L. Moody was a simple gospel simply presented.
Moody’s formula worked in the last part of the 19th century. In 1875, crowds gathered in abundance in New York City’s Madison Hall. Hundreds had to stand outside, straining to hear what went on within. A reporter covering the meeting noted the great expectancy and eagerness with which the 5000 people inside joined in the singing of hymns and focusing their attention during the sermon. The scene was repeated in city after city in auditoriums, public parks, and large churches. Once again, as in the First and Second Great Awakenings, revivalism swept over much of the land, encouraging Protestants who saw revival as essential to the cohesion of the American republic.
However, the heightened excitement of revivalism proved temporary and was inevitably followed by a time of decline. Recognizing the short-lived nature of revivalist excitement, Moody turned much of his attention to creating longer-lasting institutions, especially in the area of education. In 1879, he founded a school for girls near his old home in Northfield, Massachusetts; the Mount Hermon school for boys opened two years later. In 1889, he transformed Chicago’s Evangelization Society into a coeducational religious school that later came to be known as the Moody Bible Institute. From these centers, Moody’s fame spread throughout North America and far beyond.
Moody was not a radical reformer with respect to the larger social and political issues of his day. He argued that the primary business of religion was to change hearts and see that Christianity met personal needs. Clergy who supported him followed a similar practice. For example, Phillips Brooks, rector of Boston’s Trinity Church, maintained that the only way to a better world was through patience, prayer, Bible reading, and going to church. Moody and Phillips argued that the heart must be made right before society can be made right and encouraged working people to sobriety, intelligence, industry, skill, and thrift.
A fellow Congregationalist named Josiah Strong saw the need for social reform but worried about the increasing diversity in America and religion, as well as the secularism of the culture. He was not content with a simple call to repentance or to changing one’s heart, but instead presented data about the economic problems of capitalism, the exploitation of labor, the growing self-indulgence in money making and pleasure seeking, and the delusions of a socialism that did not recognize the fatherhood of God was needed to achieve the brotherhood of man. He saw a crisis to Anglo-American civilization and the pure Christian religion, arguing that those of the Anglo-Saxon (English) race had made two great contributions to the world–the love of liberty and a pure spiritual Christianity.
However, emigration to America had threatened to divide the country into small provinces of diverse ethnic groups, with practices that distort pure Christianity and divide the political vote by their various factions. He argued that the Protestant consensus was challenged, especially by the great surge of Catholic immigrants and the rapid rise of the Mormons. He declared that Catholicism threatened America’s free speech, free press, and free public education, as the Catholic Church (in lands where it has full power) totally dominates the educational system and limits educational opportunity to an elite minority of the population. He further raised the question of the dual loyalty of Catholics in America, to both the United States and to the pope (a foreign prince). He worried especially about the American West, where Jesuits had sought to build empires.
He also worried about the strength of Mormonism in the American West. He saw the strong Mormon establishment as both a disgrace and a danger. While the Mormon practice of polygamy was already being ended in 1885, Strong felt that despotism was an ongoing problem within Mormonism; in other words, he felt threatened by the Mormon Church’s political power. He argued that Mormonism was not a church but a state that exercised total control over the moral, industrial, and religious life of its people. Much of Mormon growth resulted directly from immigration, achieved by sending out missionaries and importing a steadily increasing number of converts from abroad. This action threatened the destiny not only of pure Christianity, but also of America, which in Strong’s view would shape the destiny of the world.
Within a few decades, opponents of unlimited immigration won their debate, but proponents of a religious uniformity lost theirs. Diversity in religion increased due to large-scale immigration and repeated innovation. In 1872, a small Bible study group led by Charles Taze Russell began what became the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Russell guided his group in a close study of passages of scripture relating to Christ’s second coming. Convinced that a great, cosmic contest between Satan and Jehovah (a name for God) would end with a physical and visible return of Christ to earth, and convinced that this event was near, Jehovah’s Witnesses proclaimed that millions of people alive at the time would never die. By 1879, they had developed their own Publication (the Watch Tower Magazine), and by 1909 their world headquarters in Brooklyn. Numbering only a few hundred in the 1870s, Jehovah’s Witnesses in America and beyond grew to millions within the next century.
Also in the 1870s, Christian Science began in Massachusetts under the leadership of Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910). As a young woman, Eddy suffered much ill health, and traditional remedies offered little relief. In the 1860s, she was led to a discovery of science and health through association with Phineas Quimby and later began her own movement. Her important book, Science and Health, first appeared in 1875, and the first Church of Christ, Scientist, was chartered four years later. Eddy explained that healing could not be accomplished by science alone; it required a specific religious understanding as well. There was a direct correlation between false belief and ill health. Disease had no independent reality of its own but was a mental error that could be corrected through spiritual understanding. Thus, mind controls matter. She claimed that Jesus was the first Scientist, who recognized that only God was real and all else was illusion. The Bible properly understood gives us all the recipes for healing. Eddy later added a “Key to the Scriptures” to Science and Health. By the time of her death in 1910, Christian Science was firmly established with more than 100 churches spread across the American continent. Its message was presented to the public through reading rooms, public lectures, and carefully centralized organization.
In 1875, Madame H. P. Blavastky organized the Theosophical Society, which was dedicated to blending the ancient wisdom of Christianity with the occultist traditions of the West, for the sake of religious reawakening and enlightenment. In the 1880s and 1890s, mind-cure institutes, metaphysical clubs, and New Thought advocates multiplied the religious options in America (many of which also involved a philosophy of mind over matter). Getting in tune with the infinite and tapping into a cosmic spirit of plenty became a pressing pursuit for many American seekers, who found a multiplying number of guides and teachers, including Madame Blavatsky, Ralph Waldo Trine, and Horatio Dresser. Trine and Dresser provided Americans with an open, optimistic goal of self-affirmation to guide them in their search for emotional peace and religious harmony. Such spiritual quests resonated greatly with Transcendentalist ideas, but not with Protestant hopes for a Christian America. America’s purchase of Alaska in 1867 (with its Russian Orthodox and native populations) and annexation of Hawaii in 1898 (with its mix of Asian and indigenous communities) further widened the American religious alternatives.
In 1893, the World’s Parliament of Religions opened in Chicago, providing a dramatic staging of religious variety. For the first time on such scale, Americans saw and heard about the religions of the world and the actual devotees of those religions. Buddhist, Hindu, and Baha’i representatives arrived with earnest testimony and persuasive power. The parliament, which had been envisioned by the Congregationalist John Henry Barrows, provided a hearing for Asian religions and a common platform for the related religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The parliament preached a message of universalism–that out of all these religious differences, a recognizable core of common truths would clearly emerge. It also provided evidence that the United States was heading in the direction of greater religious diversity through its ongoing immigration and innovation. The question remained at the end of the 19th century whether to embrace or renounce and fear this variety of religious expression.
Primary Text 5: From “Second Inaugural Address (by Abraham Lincoln)
Second Inaugural Address Full Text – Text of Lincoln’s Speech – Owl Eyes
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
Lecture 6
Chapter 11. Cities and Social Gospels
The face of the United States altered radically between 1850 and 1900, due especially to two forces: the massive growth of cities and the increasing industrialization of the economy and the workplace (seen in the increase of factories). These transformations of the modern order were made difficult by growing antagonism between capitalist owners and wage laborers, as well as by cultural uncertainty over both urbanization and industrialization. The social stress was illustrated by worker strikes, financial panics, riots, slums, sweatshops, poverty, bribery, and transplantation of people. Rural America was rapidly disappearing, and people felt unsure about the modern city and factory systems.
Immigration doubled or tripled the population of the coastal cities, but urbanization occurred elsewhere besides on the coast. Americans in the Midwest and elsewhere left villages and farms for the city. By 1900, Chicago had become the nation’s second largest city, growing to 1.7 million at the end of the century. Sharp growth was also evident in Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Kansas City, Denver, and Omaha. The city lured newcomers with promises of economic opportunity and freedom, with the bright colors of department stores and the street display, with grand churches and hotels, and with the latest entertainment and night life. However, in the city they faced scams, poverty, exploitation, race hatred, and ill-developed public services.
In this half century, the Industrial Revolution reshaped the nation, especially in the North. Many areas of life were transformed by new technology: transportation, communication, agriculture, and domestic life. In the labor market, thousands of men and women without property had nothing to barter but their own toil. They became workers in an economy of grinding hours and brutal sweatshop conditions.
Institutional religion could not long remain indifferent to all the ills of social dislocation and change. Though many continued to believe that changing the individual heart was sufficient cure for all troubles, others found social illness in the very character of the city itself, in the impersonal nature of the factory, and even in the greed and indifference of the capitalist order. People debated if religion should involve itself in political, economic, and social issues or merely focus on its own specialty of saving souls.
The City
The city presented to religious institutions many pressing problems in terms of health, housing, and education. The immigrant journalist Jacob Riis observed and reported on the poorer neighborhoods in New York City. In 1890, he shocked the nation by his observations of the tenements as dark and deadly dens, with a much greater population frequenting the saloons than churches.
John Lancaster Spalding, a Roman Catholic bishop in Illinois, worried most about the city’s effect upon the family, the social unit Americans have regarded as fundamental to all human relationships and moral development. What he found in the city was moral degradation rather than development, with the conditions of life in the city unfavorable to morality. The city shattered the ideal of the American home, in which mother and father brought up healthy, happy children in love and religious instruction, nurtured by traditions of virtue. He found the city to offer not true homes, but mere lodging houses occupied on a very temporary basis, which proved more destructive than formative to families.
City leaders were often part of (or even agents of) the problem, rather than benevolent figures who could correct the terrible housing, intolerable levels of sanitation, high rate of infant mortality, and explosive growth of prostitution, drunkenness, and major crime. Municipal corruption was widespread and seemingly built into the very structure of city government itself. Transplantation, greed, and partnership with crime afflicted local political organizations and their agencies, and these realities drove religious leaders to assert whatever moral authority they could.
Washington Gladden, a Congregationalist pastor, realized that he could prove more effective on the city council of Columbus, Ohio than merely preaching in the church pulpit. He ran for office in 1900, was elected, and served for two years, both educating himself and bringing moral commitment to bear on the many problems of the city. He argued for public ownership of such utilities as water, lights, and gas, rather than allowing these monopolies to a private corporation.
Gladden identified two fundamental problems at the base of municipal corruption. First, responsible citizens felt it was improper for them to get involved in local politics. Second, city authorities were not so much corrupt as simply incompetent, with major policy decisions in the hands of men unfit to deal with them. In addition to serving on the city council, Gladden wrote books that applied Christianity to the social issues he faced. In his books, he helped create a new style of Christian witness, a social gospel aimed at confronting modern social and economic ills at an institutional, systemic level.
In Kansas City, Missouri, the tightly organized political organization (controlled by the political boss Thomas Pendergast) led to a bad reputation for city government. On the other hand, Rabbi Samuel Mayerberg tried to give a good reputation to the forces of religion as he urged his own members and other religiously motivated people into confronting the political organization and its violations of the principles of dignity, equity, and honesty. All of municipal life was dominated, with a close alliance between the affairs of the city and the underworld bosses of organized crime. Despite facing extensive opposition and threats, Mayerberg continued in his effort to bring reform. He concluded that the only solution to such problems across the country was for honorable people, driven by conscience and the power of religious conviction, to join in the fight against all forms of municipal corruption and greed.
In Topeka, Kansas, a Congregationalist pastor named Charles Sheldon addressed the problem of the city’s sins through his 1897 novel In His Steps. An all-time best-seller, the story encouraged modern Christians to ask, “What would Jesus do?” While Sheldon’s approach could have led to a mere repetition of the calls to private piety, he demonstrated a full awareness of the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the irrelevance of usual American Christianity for those whose basic needs remained unmet, and the unwillingness of most religious folks to confront directly the problems of their own neighborhoods. He believed that God would bring about wonderful results in the social and political life of the world as God used Christians as instruments to do his will.
In Chicago, Jane Addams founded Hull House in 1889, becoming the centerpiece of the settlement house movement. She felt being a steady presence in the city slum was more helpful than only entering the slum as a missionary, and that being an actual neighbor was essential to showing neighborly love. Thus, the settlement house arose in the midst of the tenements, among the neediest, where it became a school, a church, a library, a theater, an art gallery, a bank, a hospital, and a refuge. By 1910, hundreds of settlement houses existed in America’s cityscapes.
In Hull House, Jane Addams determined to recognize the good in all persons, even the meanest. She entered the struggle for social justice on a broad front, fighting for both women’s rights and civil liberties, for child labor and international peace. But the settlement house in general and the Hull House in particular remained her most influential commitment. With a firm belief in the oneness of all humankind, Addams argued that improved and fulfilled lives must be a vision not only for the affluent but for all.
If for some the city was primarily an object of reform, for many others it was an object of consuming desire. This allure was embodied especially in the new department stores (such as Macy’s) that were developed in the period after 1850. Transformed means of production led to an abundance of goods. By 1900, an urban consumer culture had arisen in which advertising, show windows, and colorful displays increased, and it became a common habit to satisfy desire through shopping and buying. This growing commercialism (with its inherent message of selfishness rather than sacrifice) also had an impact on religion, and religious leaders found it as hard to confront as urban corruption and poverty.
While some religious figures, including Gladden, offered critiques of this new consumerist mentality, many others offered new gospels of wealth and material well-being to bless the growing abundance of the urban marketplace. One such spokesman was Bruce Barton, the son of a Congregationalist pastor who decided against the pastorate in favor of the corporate world of advertising in New York City. He also wrote religious books, including a biographical study of Jesus in which he presented Jesus as a leader with great personality who was able to motivate others and achieve where others would have failed for lack of confidence. Barton further described Jesus as a storyteller with an intuitive grasp of modern advertising principles, who was able to create a demand for his religious message in the same way modern advertising agents were able to create new needs and desires.
In this atmosphere of advertising and consumerism, religion often became one more blessing upon this great American abundance. Daily prayers or affirmations were made available for the aspiring to offer up in order to align themselves with the “Spirit of Infinite Plenty.” The faithful were encouraged to repeat to themselves encouraging sayings, claiming that they were children of God and heirs to his abundance, and thus were assured of prosperity. Figures such as Russell Conwell, Bruce Barton, and Charles Fillmore pioneered the gospel of prosperity, and that message has continued into recent times (in the writings of Bruce Wilkinson, for example).
In addition to being an object of social reform and a place of consumer longing, the city was primarily a place to live. It was a place to build families and home altars, to celebrate Passover, to hold street festivals for religious celebration, and to parade in fine Easter clothing and carry holiday flowers to those who were homebound. It was a place to set up monasteries and convents, to open storefront chapels and healing shrines, as well as to create giant institutional church complexes with gyms, libraries, Sunday schools, and even hospitals. It was also a place of interracial encounter and boundaries, where African American Protestants from the rural South took up residence alongside Polish Catholics and Russian Jews. Immigrants from abroad, along with migrants from villages, built lives for themselves within these multi-faceted urban environments.
The Factory
In the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution, class struggle and consciousness were born. Karl Marx’s book Das Capital, written over the period from 1867 to 1895, was one kind of response to the revolution. The social gospel, or social action of American religious institutions, was another kind of response. Theologians and religiously motivated reformers–Protestants, Catholics, and Jews–joined in the effort to bring justice into the marketplace and mill, to soften the conflicts between capital and labor, and to relieve the cruelties of unemployment and poverty. The Episcopal bishop Frederic Huntington argued that brotherhood, rather than merely an ideal, had become a necessary condition for survival in an industrialized world. He further noted that the church had a clear duty toward the poor, and that in the New Testament, the rich and prosperous face the most severe judgment of God.
With so many of the nation’s Roman Catholics being recent immigrants, Catholics constituted a large proportion of the laboring class. James Cardinal Gibbons defended the laborers against the managerial classes in America and against the attitudes of European Catholics and the Vatican. When organized, laborers gave the impression of radicalism and revolution–socialist and communist–to the conservative Catholic community abroad. Gibbons defended the Knight of Labor union, which was predominantly Catholic in membership, when it organized in 1869. He noted the evident exploitation not only of men, but also of women and children. He described how entire families had to work fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, to earn a barely living wage. Unsafe working conditions went uninspected and unrestrained. Workers injured on the job were not covered by insurance and did not have any compensation when unemployed. No independent arbitrator helped to determine a just or living wage.
Gibbons argued that, under such deplorable conditions, Catholic laborers had a right to unite and organize, given that association and organization are the most effective means by which to attain any worthy end. In response to the criticism that the union made Catholics associate with those not of their faith (including Protestants, atheists, and communists) Gibbons argued that citizens needed to work with and understand one another, not isolate themselves from others. Gibbons further noted that if the Catholic Church condemned this union, it risked driving laborers into rebellion against the church. While Catholic laborers loved the Church, they also had to earn a living, which required the appropriate means of affiliating with a labor union.
In Rochester, New York, a Baptist seminary professor named Walter Rauschenbusch agreed that labor unions were legitimate and necessary for the worker to achieve any means of economic justice. While these unions exist to serve their members, Rauschenbusch argued that few people managed to pursue interests that transcend all limits of race or class, country or creed. The unions stand for human life against profits, while capitalism seeks to maximize profits at the cost of full human life. He argued that the time had come to turn the spiritual force of Christianity against the materialism and worship of money seen in the industrial and social order, to stop treating human beings as things put to the task of producing more things.
Rauschenbusch was not encouraged by what appeared to him to be the indifference of many in the religious community to the fundamental problem. He noted that modern-day revivalists only produce surface-level changes in people’s lives, but a fractured society and exploited working class needed more than that. While the function of religion is to teach individuals to value their souls more than their bodies and integrity more than income, it is also to teach society to value human life more than property and value property only as the basis for the higher development of human life. He urged people to use the courage of religious faith to teach the nation that true life consists not in the abundance of things it produces but in the way people live justly with one another and humbly with their God.
From Baltimore’s Catholic Gibbons to Rochester’s Baptist Rauschenbusch and across an entire spectrum of denominational life in between, advocates of social and economic justice dedicated themselves to shaming the nation into a greater faithfulness to both its religious heritage and its democratic promises. These advocates dedicated themselves to speaking with a united voice. Though American religion did not have a unified voice, early in the twentieth century it had begun to move away from ever-increasing division and separation. In 1908, approximately 12 million Protestants came together to form the Federal Council of Churches, which took as one of its first orders of business the adoption of a social creed that would emphasize justice and infusing conscience and love within a Christian civilization. The council followed Methodists, who had often assumed the lead in matters of social action–such as in calling for the abolition of child labor, the careful regulation of work for women to protect the health of the community, release from employment one day per week, and arbitration in industrial conflicts. These ideas were radical then, though they are commonplace now.
In 1918, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform Judaism) also confronted the same task of implementing conscience, justice, and love into society. The conference argued for a fundamental reconstruction of economic organization, declaring that the dignity of the individual soul before God should not be forgotten. Not content with generalities, the rabbis proceeded to be specific in their call for reform, also advocating the abolition of child labor and adjusting age restrictions to be consistent with moral and physical health. They proposed the idea of workmen’s compensation in the case of accidents and diseases associated with a worker’s occupation. They recognized laborers’ right to organize and bargain collectively and further argued for establishing a minimum wage that would insure for all workers a fair standard of living. The government should concern itself with proper housing, constructive care of dependents, and social insurance for the contingencies of unemployment and old age (also commonplace ideas now, but radical then).
World War I had helped to encourage united and responsible social responses on the part of Roman Catholics, as it had among all the nation’s religious communities. A National Catholic War Council had been formed in 1917 in response to the war and proved useful enough to continue its operation once the war was over. Later renamed the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the organization gave Catholicism a unity and public voice it had lacked before in America. In 1919, the conference adopted a program of social reconstruction, opposing child labor, advocating a minimum wage and vocational training, urging controls on the rapidly rising cost of living, and promoting a Christian view of work and wealth to relieve the ills associated with industrialism.
Because these ideas were perceived as radical, they aroused strong opposition among people of all religious persuasions (and people of no religion), who thought that churches should confine themselves to preaching the gospel; they should stick to the Bible and obey the authorities in society regarding social issues. But Protestants, Jews, and Catholics dedicated to reform were not readily turned aside or easily silenced. Their collective and courageous voices continued to be heard, so that what was radical then has become commonplace now.
Women and Reform
After the Civil War, women played an increasingly public role in social reform. Much of their efforts were aimed at increasing voting privileges for women (leading to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919 that granted women the right to vote). But often joined to the suffrage movement were such reformist matters as temperance (outlawing alcohol), world peace, and civil liberties. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), organized in 1874, is one of the best-known examples of public reform directed by women. Frances Willard led the movement for nearly twenty years. Both nicotine and alcohol were opposed, being seen as enemies to a purer and nobler spirituality.
By the second half of the 19th century, more Americans realized the need for organization for successful social reform. Therefore, the WCTU offered a plan to bring focus to its efforts. Public sentiment would be reshaped by such techniques as mass meetings, wide circulation of temperance literature, school prizes for essays on the evil effects of alcoholic indulgence, and glee clubs of young people who sang temperance messages.
In the Salvation Army, women assumed major leadership roles early on. They were as prominent as men, often even more prominent, as they played tambourines and trumpets, collected coins in kettles, and spoke as freely and frequently as men. The Salvation Army was organized in England in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth as a movement of both evangelical revival and social witness. The movement quickly spread to North America. Evangeline Booth, daughter of the founders, served as field commissioner in the United States from 1904 to 1934 and as general of the whole international movement for some years thereafter. During her leadership role in America, she helped the movement win a reputation for social service, especially in serving the most neglected and lowest class of people. Soldiers visited the sick, fed the hungry, and clothed the naked, employing organized charity to relieve the hardships brought by industrialization and urbanization.
Slum brigades fought filth and disease, while rescue homes for prostitutes were formed all across the nation. Social services such as legal advice, first aid, life insurance, and even a missing persons department—all of which were provided by no other agency at that time—were extended to all and eagerly accepted by those in desperate circumstances. The destitute could sleep in a Salvation Army shelter for a low cost or its equivalent in work. One Salvation Army leader noted that, while revivals were fine for meeting middle-class churchgoers, other methods were required for the multitudes that drifted past church doors, and the Salvation Army had shown its capacity to develop such methods. The effective ministry of women was a vital ingredient in those new methods. The deeds and words of women in the Salvation Army went to the hearts of their hearers and resulted in wonderful personal reformation.
In the Roman Catholic community, emphasis upon women’s domestic role and submission to male authority made participation in public social reform more difficult. While the many orders of nuns practiced great social service to the ill, the poor, the illiterate, and the orphaned, the demands of teaching in parish schools absorbed an increasing amount of the nuns’ effort. Nuns labored in nearly 4000 parochial schools, which had been established by 1900, and to a lesser extent in private academies attended by both Catholic and non-Catholic children. They also served in over 200 hospitals, frequently having full administrative responsibility. During epidemics such as cholera or yellow fever, as well as in times of war, the work of Catholic women helped enormously, not only the people they served, but also the reputation of the Catholic Church for charity and social commitment.
Catholic laywomen had a more difficult path than nuns when it came to public service. After Alice Toomy, in 1893, described a legitimate public sphere for Catholic women, a Catholic Women’s Congress was held in Chicago to enable an organized effort on behalf of day nurseries and free kindergartens, protective and employment agencies for women, and clubs and homes for working girls.
Also in 1893, as part of the World’s Parliament of Religions, a Congress of Jewish Women was formed, permitting a more collaborative participation of Jewish women in social and public reforms. Though largely attended by German American Jews and largely identified with Reform Judaism, the congress identified many social services needed by Russians and Orthodox Jews. One speaker noted that, given the history of Jewish women rendering great service in the home and beyond, America’s Jewish women should not hesitate to play significant public roles. Women in the later National Council of Reform Judaism established schools, provided for manual and vocational training, established summer camps, encouraged philanthropy, and in a host of other ways influenced the public sphere. While solving the problems of the city and factory was the task of everyone, the magnitude of the problems became apparent at the same time that women were beginning to voice their opinions and soon to gain the right to vote. Thus, a deep partnership between women and reform accelerated a process that often seemed to move slowly.
Extending Religion’s Reach
Since the earliest years of the 18th century, religion had made a virtue out of voluntarism—the necessity for the churches and synagogues to advance religion and morality, offering human help. Ecclesiastical institutions did much more than just look after their own survival, pay their own bills, and care for their own members. Churches saw themselves as bearing the responsibility for the needs of all those passing hurriedly by their doors. To serve those needs, ever more organization and initiative were required.
A distinctly American enterprise, the Knights of Columbus, began in 1882 as a kind of group insurance venture and soon turned its attention also to education, charity, and social service. Under the leadership of Patrick Callahan, the knights during World War I operated over 300 recreational centers for servicemen in the United States, as well as a similar number abroad. As a Roman Catholic layman, Callahan encouraged other laymen to experiment with profit sharing between management and labor. He served on the National Child Labor Commission and worked for greater racial understanding and better relationships between Catholics and the nation’s other religious groups. The Knights of Columbus grew to over 300,000 members by the time of World War I, and a parallel women’s society known as the Daughters of Isabella spun off of this organization.
The Catholic Young Men’s National Union, formed in 1875, offered acceptable recreations, night school education, and vocational training, arguing that it made more sense to assist the young before problems developed rather than to wait until afterward. Similar ministries to young women were provided by the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Sisters of St. Joseph, among others. Finally, a National Conference of Catholic Charities was founded in 1910 and coordinated many of the scattered efforts to better society and improve the lives of those trapped by the impersonal cruelties of society. The conference also represented a growing professionalism in the area of religious philanthropy.
Such professionalism had been encouraged shortly after the Civil War, when Catholic leaders had issued a letter encouraging the great increase of societies and associations, and bishops anticipated that these groups would have beneficial results for the cause of religion and morality. They commended in particular the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a lay organization that began in France but moved to the United States in 1845. By 1865, the organization had seventy-five chapters or conferences in the country, which indicated both the strength of motivation as well as the size of society’s needs. Industrial schools and boarding homes gave the youth the security, training, and religious discipline that would enable them to live productive and fulfilling lives.
Protestant agencies also sometimes originated abroad, frequently finding in America the greatest reception for their work. The Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations (popularly known as the YMCA and YWCA, or simply the Y) had their beginnings in England before the Civil War but enjoyed their most dramatic development later in the United States. Working first among the very poor, these organizations offered housing and job training, help in finding employment, recreation, and reading material for the lonely and bored. Evangelism (sharing the gospel message) was part of early Y activities, as efforts to win converts were made in jails, hospitals, poorhouses, rescue missions, and even among the sailors temporarily in port. Religious tracts were scattered in the hope of enlisting young people. In addition to sharing the gospel message, the Y recognized the need to help young people, whatever the problem and means for its solution. One YMCA director even invented the game of basketball in order to provide some indoor activity for his youth during the long winter months.
Similarly, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Associations were formed in the 19th century, working at first with German Jewish youth but soon called upon to meet growing needs as numbers of immigrants increased. The YMHA and YWHA assisted newcomers in adjusting and assimilating, always showing special concern for the young. The Jewish Welfare Board was also created to help advise the government on the choice of Jewish chaplains for the army, as well as speak for all American Jews in matters of public interest.
The issue of temperance, highlighted by the WCTU but shared by many others, reached a political climax with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917. It was made possible by the organization of the Anti-Saloon League in 1895. For over twenty years, the organization would support politicians who voted for anti-alcohol laws and oppose those who favored the legalization of alcohol. For decades, individual churches had been engaged in gathering pledges from those who would abstain from drinking any alcohol. Attempts had been made to shut down saloons, but these had proven unsuccessful. The league was formed to organize anti-saloon votes to break the power of the saloon in politics. The league began its recruitment with the churches, especially the Methodists, arguing that the church must conquer the saloon or else be conquered by it. The Eighteenth Amendment was passed at the end of 1917 and ratified by early 1919. Fourteen years later, the Twenty-First Amendment reversed this decision and brought the prohibition experiment to an end.
By that time, religion was heavily involved in many other experiments of more enduring effect. Municipal corruptions had been cleaned up in city after city. Many reformers recognized the critical assistance in this effort that was offered by priests, ministers, and rabbis, as well as laymen and laywomen from many communities of faith. Also by that time, many of the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution had been curbed and a legitimate role for government recognized. Ecclesiastical bodies now routinely had Departments of Social Justice, Social Action Committees, or Welfare Councils and Conferences. Many problems, however, could not be solved, or even arose again later in a somewhat altered form. War did not vanish. Racism and sexism did not disappear. Equitable distribution of wealth proved impractical. Moral progress became harder to demonstrate or even define. Churches and synagogues achieved some measures of success only to discover further needs.
Chapter 12. The Church and the World
In the last two decades of the 19th century and the first four decades of the twentieth century, the United States of America entered more fully into global affairs. The country engaged in war beyond its own borders, participated in international congresses and conferences, acquired territories and new responsibilities in the Pacific Ocean, and rediscovered and reaffirmed the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the entire Western Hemisphere to be uniquely an American concern. The United States became a global power.
So had its churches and synagogues. The boundaries of the parish now extended to the whole world, as missionary movements stretched around the globe. Municipal reform and factory safety continued as legitimate concerns, but religious institutions began to take concern for the whole continent, still being explored and settled, as well as the whole world, which it now sought to embrace and evangelize. In the closing years of the 19th century, Jesus’ instructions to go to all the world gained special attention.
Empire or Republic?
In 1898, the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands, for the first time adding to its domain territory far removed from the North American continent. The annexation resulted from a combination of national and commercial interests, but it also represented a culmination of religious and cultural ties dating back to the 1820s, when New England sent Congregational missionaries to this Pacific outpost. Once added to America, Hawaii contributed dramatically to a religious pluralism that moved well beyond the familiar Judaism and Christianity. As the country gained territory in the Pacific, the religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto gained a port to enter mainland America.
Even more dramatic was the Spanish-American War of 1898, which was entered into partially to rescue Cuba from the inhumane treatment of a harsh Spanish regime. Imperialism joined with higher motivations to create a public mood ready for war. Social gospel advocates, who had resisted cruelty and exploitation at home, saw no reason to ignore these realities abroad, especially when it occurred so nearby. It was argued that America had a duty and destiny to grant Cubans the same right of self-governance that Americans had achieved. When Spain declared war, the United States responded with its own declaration of war and moved its navy with surprising effectiveness against Spain, both in Cuba and in the distant Philippine Islands. In a few months, the war was over, and the United States entered a new phase of its existence.
Controversy ensued over whether the nation was moving away from the virtues of its years as a republic to become a greedy empire, grasping for more territory, and ultimately proving unvirtuous. Religious leaders joined in the debate. In addition to the question of whether America should become a conquering power, the question was raised as to whether the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines should be subject to Protestant missionaries, encouraging the people to turn away from their old religious loyalty at the same time they were being encouraged to abandon their old political loyalty to Spain.
President William McKinely, a devout Methodist, added religious sentiment to the public debate when he declared that, through prayer, he came to see that it was the nation’s duty to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos. Many churches saw the American victory as an opportunity to spread American Protestantism, whether in the Pacific or Atlantic. Congregational editor and clergyman Lyman Abbott viewed the Spanish-American War as a purely noble cause that required no apology or defense, since it was fought based on the duty to help an oppressed neighbor.
Another possible duty was seen in rescuing the people from the oppressions of Catholicism at the same time that they were rescued from the cruelties of Spain. Presbyterian missionary executive Arthur Brown argued that the old regime of the Philippines involved the whole system of the government, the educational system, and the imposed national religion of Spain. To overthrow one was to overthrow all. He further noted the voluntary nature of Protestantism, which relied on moral persuasion rather than being forced on the people or depending on taxation or government enforcement.
Roman Catholics objected, both due to the nation’s moral posture during the war itself and due to concern for genuine religious liberty for the Filipinos. Bishop John Lancaster Spalding cautioned against allowing desire for expansion and empire alter the fundamental character of the nation. While the example of America’s liberty may encourage others to seek liberty for themselves, America should not seek to subdue the earth or rule over other nations.
Other Catholics also rejected the notion that the Philippine Islands were now proper missionary fields for American Protestants. Archbishop John Ireland took issue with action that seemed to him contrary to the spirit of the nation’s commitment to freedom of religion. He asked Protestants to imagine their reaction if the situation were reversed, with Catholic missionaries being sent to a land that was predominantly Protestant. He further noted that Spain would tell their former subjects that America was taking away their religion in addition to their government, which would surely turn the Philippine population against the United States and even make them see the American flag as a symbol of oppression and religious tyranny.
In response to the increasing control of territory by the United States, religious and political leaders questioned the certainty of this new direction. Did they represent points of no return in the transformation of an agrarian republic into a military-industrial imperial power? In less than a generation the nation was plunged into another war, which was far larger in scale. The war was another step for the United States onto the far wider stage of global affairs.
A World at War
In August of 1914, England and France, along with their allies, declared war against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their allies. Americans initially took comfort in feeling that this war was far away and in the promise, under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson (who was a Presbyterian) of a neutrality that would give the United States a special role in helping to negotiate a lasting peace after the war had ceased. Given the diversity of the United States, partisans on both sides of the conflict had American supporters. Gradually, however, public sentiment shifted to the side of Great Britain. By 1917, American interest in the war increased.
Religious leaders in 1917 were divided in the manner and degree of their support for the war effort. Lines were drawn between those who believed in the moral worth of the war and those who were horrified by its long-term consequences. Some religious leaders, especially those involved in the moral crusades of the social gospel movement, could be persuaded that war was an even more glorious crusade designed to make the world safe for democracy. Wilson promoted this sentiment by declaring that the United States had no selfish interest in going to war since it sought no new territory or compensation for losses it suffered; rather, it fought for the rights of all humanity. Such a high purpose made it necessary to surrender its traditional principles of neutrality and pacificism in response to the affairs of other nations.
The abandonment of pacifism did not come easily for religious institutions. In 1915, Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes denounced all war, given that its sole purpose was to destroy. Rabbi Stephen Wise shared the views of Holmes and wrote to President Wilson in 1915 to condemn the apparent buildup of a war mentality. He argued that America needed to prepare for peace, not war.
The description of the wholesale destruction entailed by modern warfare, offered by Homes, proved accurate, as those closest to the conflict quickly discovered. Submarine warfare had indiscriminately killed men, women, and children (combatant and noncombatant alike). Poison gas introduced new levels of horror, both destroying and maiming for life. Trench warfare proved costly in the number of lives lost and turned war into a ditch of filth, stench, disease, terror, and death. The New York clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick opposed idealistic descriptions of war as a righteous crusade, instead describing more accurately the realities of dropping bombs that kill women and children, shooting at unseen places and slaughtering unseen men, and murdering innocent travelers on merchant ships with torpedoes from submarines.
Even greater numbers of clergy, along with the public at large, supported America’s participation in the first world war. Some abandoned idealism, and demonized (or dehumanized) the enemy (especially the Germans). Lyman Abbott felt the German people were beyond reform and fit only to be exterminated. Another Protestant clergyman claimed to hate the German people as an enemy, calling them robbers, murderers, destroyers of homes, pillagers of churches, and violators of women. The majority of church members also came to support the war.
Historic peace churches (who had throughout their history made pacifism an article of faith) continued to oppose the war, but their numbers were small. The Church of the Brethren, the Moravian Church in America, Adventists, Quakers, Mennonites, and others were chiefly responsible for the fact that over 60,000 young men claimed exemption from the Selective Service Act of 1917 for reasons of conscience. Not all were granted conscientious objector status, and many of those who did were encouraged to accept some position in the armed services that did not require taking or threatening human life (such as medical, engineering, or quartermaster agencies). In 1917, the Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones, helped to form the American Friends Service Committee, which supported Quakers and others in their stance for peace, while also encouraging humanitarian relief efforts.
More than at any previous time, American religious groups found it necessary during the First World War to speak and act with some degree of unity. Roman Catholics gathered in Washington, D.C. in 1917 in a general convention. This gathering led to the National Catholic War Council, designed to supervise the recruitment and training of Catholic chaplains as well as oversee informal ministries to Catholics in the military. After the war was over, the newly named National Catholic Welfare Council took on tasks such as supervising Catholic education, improving social conditions, developing additional agencies among the laity, and promoting a stronger missionary program.
Similarly, American Judaism, which had been divided into varying theological orientations and among hundreds of largely self-ruled congregations, moved toward closer cooperation during World War I. Formal organization did not occur until 1926, when the Synagogue Council of America was created, with the purpose of promoting in a united manner in furthering common religious interests. Within a few years, the Synagogue Council estimated that its membership contained about 65 percent of all Jewish ministers in America.
A large number of Protestants had developed a united public witness a decade or two earlier. In 1908, thirty Protestant denominations created the Federal Council of Churches in order to bring the different Christian bodies in America into united service for Christ. Protestants had the largest task, given the obvious separations and divisions within their tradition. Increasing pressures for unity on the political level led to desire for larger unity at the ecclesiastical level. Over 12 million Protestants coming together for common tasks represented a first step toward unity, or at least a reversal of the trend toward separation. This Protestant organization saw its role not so much as influencing the affairs of local congregations as confronting the challenges before the nation as a whole: war and peace, labor and capital, rich and poor, and equal rights and complete justice for all.
National life, especially during wartime, dramatized the need for greater unity among the many scattered synagogues and churches. Once that unity was achieved in ecclesiastical terms, it managed to endure well beyond the war that motivated its creation. On the other hand, the idealism that had been bestowed upon World War I did not endure, and the 1920s proved, in many ways, a time of discouragement and disillusionment for the grand dreams that had accompanied the war effort. President Wilson’s vision of a League of Nations came into being in 1919, as part of the treaty that brought the war to an end. However, the league ultimately proved unable to fulfill its design to preserve peace, and more immediately it failed in winning the support of the U.S. Congress and American public. Despite the support for the league given by the influential Church Peace Union and the Federal Council of Churches, many others saw the league as a way of perpetuating American involvement in foreign alliances (which George Washington had warned against).
Among the other disappointments that followed World War I, the war failed to improve the moral reputation of war. In the years that followed the Treaty of Versailles, pacificism became increasingly respectable and popular, even outside the small group of peace churches. Now large numbers of mainline Protestants, along with many Catholics and Jews, saw war as an unacceptable means for settling conflicts and competition among nations. In 1921, a Disciples of Christ minister named Kirby Page helped create the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, designed to promote peace. More than 20,000 clergy in America petitioned President Warren Harding to call a conference on international disarmament, and such a conference convened in Washington in 1921.
Under the leadership of a Baptist layman named Charles Evans Hughes, the conference proposed actual disarmament according to a specific schedule, with the destruction of specific weapons and the sinking of a stated number of ships. The nation’s religious membership maintained a keen interest until the U.S. Senate ratified the resolutions of the conference. Religious forces continued to promote the pacificist effort, with hopes increased by the 1928 Pact of Paris peace treaty that resulted in fifteen nations renouncing war as an instrument of national policy.
In 1936, the General Conference of the Methodist Church officially pronounced war as the greatest social sin of modern times, declaring that the church would not endorse or support war. The Northern Baptist Convention agreed that war was the supreme social sin, which both prevented the achievement of safety for homes and the realization of God’s kingdom on earth. A worldwide Anglican conference in London, which included America’s Episcopalians, declared that Christian conscience is now called to condemn war as an outrage to the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of mankind. Congregationalists proclaimed that the church was finished with war. Universalists declared that it was now time for all the other churches to join in the pacifism of the Quakers, who had been right all along. Disciples of Christ members pronounced war to be destructive of the church’s values, and that they would never again bless or sanction war.
Without question, the First World War had done little to nothing to redeem the notion of war, even as a sometimes necessary instrument for warding off an unjust political order. Instead, it had given new intellectual and organizational energy to the peace movement. Rufus Jones argued that pacificism was not passivity, but activism and nonviolent engagement with the world.
Missions Abroad
Even with all their pursuits on the home front, Protestants in the 19th century found energy and resources to send missionaries abroad. The Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) originated in 1896 as a device for recruiting missionary volunteers on college campuses. It grew to prominence and gained surprising strength by the early decades of the 20th century. John Mott, a Methodist layman, assumed leadership of this organization, while also creating the World’s Student Christian Federation and helping to prepare for the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910.
Mott saw some of his organizational structure duplicated in Britain, Holland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, and South Africa. By the time of World War I, the SVM had sent out more than 5000 volunteers. Mott also had the pleasure of seeing that his optimism was shared widely in the Western world. Mott believed that it was more important to change inner motivations than external structures and felt that the worldwide spread of pure Christianity was the only means for ending the hostility between nations and races that was growing in 1914.
Protestant missions were broader than the inspired labors of a single man like John Mott. Protestant women had been active in this area for at least as long as the SVM. In the second half of the 19th century, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist women had organized their own foreign missionary societies, with women’s involvement steadily increasing so that by 1914 more than 3 million American women were actively supporting the effort. Women raised money and raised consciousness about the world’s needs. They were also dispatched to foreign fields as doctors, nurses, teachers, and spouses of clergy who worked alongside their husbands to provide service of virtually every sort.
Organizational unity both before and after World War I gave even greater efficiency to the massive logistical effort. In 1919, Presbyterian Robert Speer found one of the justifications for the war to be that moral ideals prevailed over material struggles. The war clarified and confirmed Americans’ religious ideals, revealing the power of their appeal. Speer argued that, with such assurance, missionaries should now go forward in greater numbers and with greater boldness to help heal the wounds of war and counteract political imperialism.
In the 1920s, China especially received a major share of Protestant missionary attention and funds. In 1922, about 750,000 dollars in voluntary offerings left the United States for China. At that time, Protestants operated 210 kindergartens, 700 elementary schools, over 300 high schools, and more than 40 teacher-training institutes in this country alone, in addition to the colleges, seminaries, medical schools, orphanages, leper colonies, and a dozen institutes for the deaf and blind that resulted from Protestant endeavors. By 1923, the American Bible Society had sent nearly 20,000 Bibles to China, along with more than 2 million publications containing some portion of the Bible. Similar efforts also took place in Korea, Japan, Burma, Thailand, much of Africa, and throughout the South Pacific.
Roman Catholics in America continued to be active, though they were prevented from active missionary efforts before the 20th century. The Catholic Church in America was itself regarded by the Vatican as a missionary field until 1908, and the 19th century American Catholic Church needed all the help it could get. As the Vatican came to declare the church in the United States no longer a missionary dependent, 15 million Roman Catholics assumed responsibilities around the world. Archbishop James Edward Quigley opened a Missionary Conference in Chicago in 1908, with the purpose of encouraging missionary sentiment so that all may realize their common duty of preserving and extending the Church. Archbishop William O’Connell envisioned that it was now time for the United States to become the major vehicle of Catholic missions, as France had once been.
The Catholic Foreign Missionary Society of America was created in 1911 in Maryknoll, New York. Priests and nuns from Maryknoll carried on especially effective work in the Roman Catholic countries of Central and South America. After World War I, the National Catholic Welfare Conference coordinated the missionary efforts of the nation’s dioceses (or districts), giving them greater effectiveness and wider visibility. Catholic missions saw their task as meeting whatever human need they encountered. The more narrowly defined roles of offering spiritual counsel and conducting worship were often accompanied by building and operating schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Like Protestants, Catholics also gave much attention to recruiting and developing a native clergy, in order to decrease the need to import ecclesiastical leadership from abroad.
Other and newer groups in America–including Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses–carried on vigorous missionary effort and attracted almost as much attention as the religious bodies that were much larger. Mormons made missionary activity an obligation for every young male Mormon, which led to a large commitment in language training and to a broad membership around the world. Adventists put great emphasis upon health and education, both at home and abroad, creating a missionary program in which doctors, dentists, nurses, and teachers played an even larger role than the clergy. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who expected all their members to be vigorously engaged in missions around the world, soon found their membership abroad growing greater than their membership at home. Other American religious groups also exported themselves so successfully that they gained larger global identities greater than their American identity.
The success of these groups often led to sharp resistance. The hostility of host nations to the missionary enterprise sometimes led to a sharp downturn of activity in specific geographical areas. In China, for example, the foreignness of foreign missions became an argument against tolerating these emissaries from abroad. In the 1930s, anti-Christian and anti-Western sentiment spread across China. As the situation grew worse, barely any foreign missionaries were permitted to stay in China. At the same time, the Great Depression in the United States undermined the financial base that had supported worldwide missions, and tension grew between conservative and liberal forces within American Protestantism.
On the mission field, tensions appeared in the form of a contest between how much the missionary movement should be allowed to move toward the direction of general social service and how much it should remain focused on evangelism (presenting the gospel) and conversion. Early in the 20th century, mission boards and commissions defended both approaches–meeting the needs of the body as well as the soul, having concern about life on earth as well as life hereafter. By the 1930s, much mainstream Protestantism (which was more liberal) came under attack from evangelicals (which were more conservative). Many of these mainstream Protestants also began questioning some of the culturally imperialist assumptions that often lay behind the missionary movement.
Many questioned the effect of asking people to forsake cultural and tribal patterns, isolating them from centuries of tradition or communal bonds. Others wondered if the primary purpose of missions had not now become something quite different, namely improving the bodies and minds of people and improving social life through educational interests, rather than the original purpose of saving souls. William Ernest Hocking, a Congregational churchman and professor of philosophy at Harvard, undertook a major assessment of Protestant missions around the world to determine if the missionary enterprise should continue, and if so, what revisions or alterations were needed.
The very fact of such an inquiry pointed to the doubts about Christianity’s proper relationship to other religions of the world and America’s role in imposing its culture and will upon less powerful peoples. If missions had become largely social service, then it seemed time to let other agencies (most likely governmental agencies) carry on that service. On the other hand, if Christian missions had ceased their primary business of saving souls, then it seemed time for other Christian bodies to assume that task.
In the 1930s, conservative evangelical forces, including many Pentecostal and Holiness bodies, began to take up the role neglected by the missionary efforts of liberal Protestants. The National Association of Evangelicals was created in 1942, and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship was introduced a few years earlier. In the 1930s and 1940s, Protestant missions took on a different form, with a different group of denominational supporters. Foreign missions became less a feature of concern by the liberal Protestant establishment and more a subculture of evangelization. Meanwhile, religious people in American found themselves challenged to solve pressing problems closer at hand.
Missions at Home
In the two decades between the great wars, social ills and dislocations commanded the attention of organized religion. Immigration had effectively halted in 1924, but the task of Americanizing and Christianizing recent arrivals continued to preoccupy many religious leaders. Many church groups felt the concern to reach immigrants, and missions to immigrants occupied many who saw the tasks at home as important as those abroad. Churches tended to see themselves as major partners in the process of assimilation.
Though some viewed aggressive evangelical efforts among the immigrants in an unfavorable light, others adopted attitudes toward the new arrivals that won even less approval. Catholics and Jews found many Americans turned against them, as the Ku Klux Klan tried to make its case for an America that would be ruled by white Protestants only. Other religious voices protested this narrow-minded view of America. In 1926, a rabbi in New York City asked for justification for 20th-century religious persecution on American soil. Finding none, he argued that the ideal of Americanism held by the Ku Klux Klan was the most un-American feature in all the land.
The presidential election of 1928 gave a sudden surge to anti-Catholicism in the country, since it was the first time that one of the major political parties had nominated a Roman Catholic to be president of the United States (Alfred Smith). Though Smith had been a member of the New York legislature for many years and had been the state’s governor for four terms, many Americans focused their concern on his religious affiliation. Many publications and sermons explained the dangers to American liberty if a Catholic were to be elected president, despite Smith’s protests that such an attitude was both un-American and un-Christian. Smith was defeated (due to other issues than merely religion), yet the campaign showed that mission at home had much work to do in eradicating religion-based prejudice.
Similar prejudice was aimed at Jews, whose numbers grew rapidly in the closing years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th century. By 1913, Jews had created the Anti-Defamation League with the purpose of identifying sources of religious and racial prejudice, and then trying to alter these attitudes through a program of education and persuasion. In the 1920s, the situation worsened, as quota systems were applied to limit the enrollment of Jews in major universities, housing covenants excluded Jews from many neighborhoods, and gentleman’s agreements regularized harassment and discrimination toward Jews. Both Catholics and Protestants expressed anti-Semitism, at the same time that powerful forces in Germany were being raised against Jews.
In this same period, African Americans suffered from persecution, including segregation and repeated instances of public murder called lynching (ritualized hangings). From 1882 to 1927, nearly 5000 lynchings took place, with the majority being of African Americans. Racial discrimination was so much the norm that church bodies could neither ignore it or dispute its occurrence throughout the United States. Though church leaders did little in terms of definite action to solve the problem, public disgust against lynchings resulted in a steady decline in the 1920s and 1930s, so that by the 1940s lynchings had virtually ceased. Other forms of racial injustice continued, however.
The Great Depression of the 1930s stimulated the forces of religion in a way that nothing had done since the First World War. In 1931, the Federal Council of Churches, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis gathered together to work toward unemployment prevention. Pope Pius XI also issued an important publication, which addressed depression-related problems that by that time had spread worldwide. The pope called upon the cooperation of governments to make all human society conform to the needs of the common good and norm of social justice.
Such pronouncements, however, often failed to satisfy urgent human needs. Roman Catholic activist Dorothy Day took practical actions to meet needs. She founded her Catholic Worker movement in 1933, which featured Hospitality Houses and farm communes designed simply to feed the hungry and provide clothing and shelter for the poor. With its radical economic critique of American society, the Catholic Worker movement embraced Marxist forms of class analysis, while continuing to see religion as the source of both social and spiritual salvation. In the 1930s, established groups such as the Society of Vincent de Paul, the Salvation Army, the YMCA and YWCA, and the Jewish Welfare Board encountered more demands than they could meet for the bare necessities of life.
The 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt, an Episcopalian, seemed to offer hope. His New Deal plan responded to the Great Depression, but it took many years to rescue large numbers of people from poverty. Early in his presidency, Roosevelt repealed prohibition, which made him unpopular with some church people. He won back some of his detractors by using the power of the government more actively and aggressively to deal with fundamental sufferings caused by the Depression. As Roosevelt worked to improve American life, it became increasingly clear by the 1940s that America and the wider world were mutually independent. America’s religious and political expressions extended beyond the nation.
For a half century or more from the end of the 1880s to the beginning of the 1940s, the churches and synagogues recognized that they had large tasks to perform: in war and peace, and in both domestic and international matters. While these were busy years for American religious groups, religious institutions could not ignore even more immediate concerns. While pursuing aggressive agendas at home and abroad, churches suffered great inner turmoil and dissension.
Primary Text 6: From In His Steps (by Charles Sheldon)
The Project Gutenberg E-text of In His Steps, by Charles M. Sheldon
Sunday morning the great church was filled to its utmost. Henry Maxwell, coming into the pulpit from that all-night vigil, felt the pressure of a great curiosity on the part of the people. They had heard of the Raymond movement, as all the churches had, and the recent action of Dr. Bruce had added to the general interest in the pledge. With this curiosity was something deeper, more serious. Mr. Maxwell felt that also. And in the knowledge that the Spirit’s presence was his living strength, he brought his message and gave it to that church that day.
He had never been what would be called a great preacher. He had not the force nor the quality that makes remarkable preachers. But ever since he had promised to do as Jesus would do, he had grown in a certain quality of persuasiveness that had all the essentials of true eloquence. This morning the people felt the complete sincerity and humility of a man who had gone deep into the heart of a great truth.
After telling briefly of some results in his own church in Raymond since the pledge was taken, he went on to ask the question he had been asking since the Settlement meeting. He had taken for his theme the story of the young man who came to Jesus asking what he must do to obtain eternal life. Jesus had tested him. “Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come follow me.” But the young man was not willing to suffer to that extent. If following Jesus meant suffering in that way, he was not willing. He would like to follow Jesus, but not if he had to give so much.
“Is it true,” continued Henry Maxwell, and his fine, thoughtful face glowed with a passion of appeal that stirred the people as they had seldom been stirred, “is it true that the church of today, the church that is called after Christ’s own name, would refuse to follow Him at the expense of suffering, of physical loss, of temporary gain? The statement was made at a large gathering in the Settlement last week by a leader of workingmen that it was hopeless to look to the church for any reform or redemption of society. On what was that statement based? Plainly on the assumption that the church contains for the most part men and women who think more ‘of their own ease and luxury’ than of the sufferings and needs and sins of humanity. How far is that true? Are the Christians of America ready to have their discipleship tested? How about the men who possess large wealth? Are they ready to take that wealth and use it as Jesus would? How about the men and women of great talent? Are they ready to consecrate that talent to humanity as Jesus undoubtedly would do?
“Is it not true that the call has come in this age for a new exhibition of Christian discipleship? You who live in this great sinful city must know that better than I do. Is it possible you can go your ways careless or thoughtless of the awful condition of men and women and children who are dying, body and soul, for need of Christian help? Is it not a matter of concern to you personally that the saloon kills its thousands more surely than war? Is it not a matter of personal suffering in some form for you that thousands of able-bodied, willing men tramp the streets of this city and all cities, crying for work and drifting into crime and suicide because they cannot find it? Can you say that this is none of your business? Let each man look after himself? Would it not be true, think you, that if every Christian in America did as Jesus would do, society itself, the business world, yes, the very political system under which our commercial and governmental activity is carried on, would be so changed that human suffering would be reduced to a minimum? . . .
“What would be the result if in this city every church member should begin to do as Jesus would do? It is not easy to go into details of the result. But we all know that certain things would be impossible that are now practiced by church members.
“What would Jesus do in the matter of wealth? How would He spend it? What principle would regulate His use of money? Would He be likely to live in great luxury and spend ten times as much on personal adornment and entertainment as He spent to relieve the needs of suffering humanity? How would Jesus be governed in the making of money? Would He take rentals from saloons and other disreputable property, or even from tenement property that was so constructed that the inmates had no such things as a home and no such possibility as privacy or cleanliness?
“What would Jesus do about the great army of unemployed and desperate who tramp the streets and curse the church, or are indifferent to it, lost in the bitter struggle for the bread that tastes bitter when it is earned on account of the desperate conflict to get it? Would Jesus care nothing for them? Would He go His way in comparative ease and comfort? Would He say that it was none of His business? Would He excuse Himself from all responsibility to remove the causes of such a condition?
“What would Jesus do in the center of a civilization that hurries so fast after money that the very girls employed in great business houses are not paid enough to keep soul and body together without fearful temptations so great that scores of them fall and are swept over the great boiling abyss; where the demands of trade sacrifice hundreds of lads in a business that ignores all Christian duties toward them in the way of education and moral training and personal affection? Would Jesus, if He were here today as a part of our age and commercial industry, feel nothing, do nothing, say nothing, in the face of these facts which every business man knows? . . .
“Are we ready to make and live a new discipleship? Are we ready to reconsider our definition of a Christian? What is it to be a Christian? It is to imitate Jesus. It is to do as He would do. It is to walk in His steps.”
When Henry Maxwell finished his sermon, he paused and looked at the people with a look they never forgot and, at the moment, did not understand. Crowded into that fashionable church that day were hundreds of men and women who had for years lived the easy, satisfied life of a nominal Christianity. A great silence fell over the congregation. Through the silence there came to the consciousness of all the souls there present a knowledge, stranger to them now for years, of a Divine Power. Every one expected the preacher to call for volunteers who would do as Jesus would do. But Maxwell had been led by the Spirit to deliver his message this time and wait for results to come.
Lecture 7
Chapter 13. Growth and Schism
In the final decade of the 19th century, Christianity still dominated the religious life of the United States. The eight largest denominational families were Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, Episcopalian, and Congregational. These groups were given a great deal of cultural recognition throughout the public sphere of America. However, they did not have a complete hold of the American religious world.
American Catholicism, with about 8 million members, had survived the resentments of Protestant neighbors, the tensions of the Civil War, the strains of ethnic jealousy, and the suspicions of European Catholics—all while maintaining organizational unity. This was a remarkable achievement, considering the enormous stresses the church faced in 19th century America: the continuous waves of immigration accompanied by nativist attack (discrimination from American-born citizens), and territorial assimilation. No other church confronted so great a challenge or emerged as strong and well positioned for further growth in the 20th century.
Methodism ended the 19th century with no conspicuous unity in organization. The Methodist family of about 5.5 million members was divided by race, sectional sentiment, arguments over the authority of their bishops or superintendents, and disagreements over the pursuit of John Wesley’s ideal of Christian perfection. However, the Methodist family as a whole continued to flourish with such zest that it more than offset the divisions and spin-off of new religious bodies.
The Baptists also had no structural oneness. They, too, had been divided by the Civil War and witnessed the creation of separate entities for their black members. They also had other issues that led to further separations, including their own history, the uniqueness of their mode of baptism, the terms by which one might be invited to share in the Lord’s Supper, the authority of the congregation, and the precise wording of the Lord’s Prayer (the model prayer of Jesus). Yet Baptists still constituted a family of about 4 million strong in the closing years of the 19th century.
Presbyterians, who were also successful on the frontier, elevated their quarrels to a higher judicial level. With a more closely knit system of church governance, Presbyterians made a bold effort to maintain unity in doctrine, practice, and organization. But in the environment of the open-ended American experiment, the effort often failed. Divided over the new measures of revivalism, Presbyterians split up just prior to the Civil War. They, too, saw black members create their own organization, while they also struggled with the question of proper ordination and education requirements for all Presbyterian clergy. The family had about 1.5 million members near the end of the century and moved with some ease into all sections of the country.
Immigration in the second half of the 19th century gave Lutheranism significant numerical standing by 1895. However, Lutherans found reasons for division and separation even before they arrived in America. As previously noted, ethnic and national distinctions were numerous. Lutherans from Sweden found it necessary in America to be identified as Swedish Lutherans. Separate organizations existed for Norwegian Lutherans, Finnish Lutherans, Danish Lutherans, and German Lutherans. Conflicts also occurred over theology, creedal loyalty, personal piety, and many other matters. At the beginning of the 20th century, Lutheranism was separated into two dozen distinct ecclesiastical bodies.
The Disciples of Christ denomination was unique in that it did not originate in Europe, but on the American frontier of the period before the Civil War. Though the movement was young, it grew vigorously enough to claim nearly a million members by 1895, overtaking groups such as Dutch Reformed and Quakers, who had been established in America much earlier. Despite the movement’s youth, however, it still suffered internal tension and ultimate division.
The seventh and eighth largest denominations in the 1890s were the two that were at the top in the colonial period: the Episcopalians and the Congregationalists. Though they were still strong movements, they had fallen far behind their competitors. Neither group proved to be sufficiently effective on the frontier or adjusted readily enough to the new realities of the open market in religion. With around 600,000 members apiece, these two churches entered the 20th century with the assurance provided by their earlier privilege and prestige. However, their reduced numbers suggested some declining of both of these historic churches.
In 1900, the population of the country stood at 76 million and church membership at around 26 million. More than eighty percent of those church members could be found in the eight church families noted above. No other religious body had as many as a half million members (as far as official census takers were able to determine). However, much of American religion (then and now) escapes wide public notice. Religious and ethnic groups often exist on the edges of society, with their numbers concealed and their public presence reduced. At the turn of the twentieth century, religious diversity was growing, and new religious movements continued to thrive. In the first half of the twentieth century, these prevailing religious denominations would no longer maintain the clear dominance they had earlier had.
Era of Church Growth
At the beginning of the 20th century, about one third of the nation’s population were members of churches and synagogues. By the middle of that century, membership had increased to well over fifty percent. In the same period, the population as a whole doubled, from around 76 million to over 150 million. The eight major denominations all participated dramatically in that growth. But these churches did not have a monopoly on church grow. Others were growing fast also.
Mormon growth was as sharp as it was surprising. There are several reasons the growth was surprising. First, utopian communities in 19th century America had a way of quietly shrinking from public consciousness, if not disappearing altogether from existence. Second, movements tended to split into countless insignificant smaller groups once they lost their original charismatic leader. Third, Mormons had been exiled to a barren wasteland. Yet the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints survived, suffering no decline even with the abandonment of polygamy in 1890. The admission of Utah as a state in 1896 led not to greater conflict with the United States, but to a stronger embrace of the nation’s pervading cultural values and even to patriotism. Furthermore, the slow acceptance of Mormonism into the wider American culture led not to complacency, but to an increasingly fervent missionary enterprise at home and abroad.
One direct consequence of 20th century Mormonism’s missions was an extensive level of growth, which older religious bodies could only regard with envy and wonder. With a membership of a mere quarter million in the 1890s, Mormons by 1950 had more than twice that number in the state of Utah alone. Mormonism has a power base in the United States that is rural and western. The Utah branch is larger than its offshoot, which is now known as the Community of Christ and has its strongest numbers around Independence, Missouri. The Utah group has spread across state boundaries into southern Idaho and Montana, northern Arizona and New Mexico, western Wyoming, and eastern Washington, Oregon, and California.
Methodism helped to spawn a host of new denominations that quickly overtook the parent group in terms of growth rates. John Wesley had stressed the necessity for all Christians to move beyond the stage of mere justification by faith to a higher level, a loftier goal of entire sanctification (being made completely holy). Wesley and many of his followers pursued the ideal of Christian perfection in one’s earthly life, following the New Testament command to be perfect. Such striving for sanctification was personal, but it also became characteristic of whole churches and entire denominations.
After the Civil War, a National Camp Meeting for the Promotion of Christian Holiness was formed to inspire greater commitment on the part of Christians of various denominations to the steady pursuit of holiness. Though Methodists led in this early organization, the movement went beyond a single religious institution. In the 1880s and beyond, dozens of new denominations were formed, all pursuing the high goal of Christian perfection. The Church of God came into being in 1880, followed by the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1887, then by the Fire Baptized Holiness Church in 1895, then by the Pilgrim Holiness Church in 1897. The Church of God in Christ was also formed in 1897, eventually becoming one of the largest Holiness and Pentecostal groups. Predominantly an African American group, it was founded by Charles Mason, who eventually led the body from its Holiness roots into the Pentecostal movement. In 1914, a half dozen smaller groups joined together to form the Church of the Nazarene, another body that grew from a base of a few thousand to a quarter of a million by 1950.
Also thriving were distinct Pentecostal bodies, named from the description of the Day of Pentecost in the biblical book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit came in power upon the Apostles. One manifestation of that power was that those present began to speak in other tongues (or languages) as the Spirit enabled them. Speaking in tongues as well as practicing spiritual healing of physical infirmities became the chief distinguishing features of this group of rapidly growing denominations in America. The Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, which began in 1906 and grew for the next several years, helped launch these new Pentecostal churches. Though the Holiness and Pentecostal movements were initially closely associated, the two gradually moved further apart. The Holiness movement concentrated on the experience of entire sanctification, while Pentecostals saw the spiritual gifts surrounded by the Holy Spirit’s empowerment as central to the Christian life. In 1914, the Assemblies of God denomination gathered many Pentecostal churches into a single organization. This group, along with the Church of God in Christ, was destined to become a leading representative of the whole Pentecostal movement. It had fewer than 50,000 adherents in the 1920s, but by the end of the century it grew to well over 2 million in the United States and abroad.
In general, Pentecostal churches grew faster in the South than Holiness churches did, partially because the Holiness churches emphasized social reform, to which the South had tended to be resistant since the days of slavery. Pentecostal churches attracted both black and white members, sometimes in the same church. In the early days of the movement, many of the revival meetings were interracial; the racial and ethnic complexity of Pentecostalism was especially pronounced at the Azusa Street Revival. In addition, many of the major leaders were black, including Charles Mason and William Seymour (the key leader in the Los Angeles movement). Gradually, the patterns of the surrounding culture led to mainly segregated churches for these denominational groups, though Pentecostalism proved popular among both white and black segments of the population, as well as to Latinos.
The Jewish population in America increased sharply from about 1 million in 1900 to 5 million a half century later. Most of that increase resulted from immigration, and some came from European refugees in the 1930s and 1940s. Not all Jews emigrating to America were conspicuously religious in behavior or institutional affiliation, though it is difficult to distinguish religious and cultural aspects of what it meant to be Jewish in America. The synagogue provided the greatest sense of community and continuity for the majority of newly arrived Jews, and many synagogues (particularly in New York City) held together people from the same European towns.
Jews proved their Americanness by duplicating the tendency toward schism and separation that had characterized non-Jewish groups for years. Jews disagreed on the degree of accommodation to the wider culture that was required or desired, on the degree of loyalty demanded to ancient customs and laws, on the need for a single Jewish voice to speak for all, on the meaning of chosenness as a people, on the centrality of their faith tradition and culture in defining the essence of Jewishness, and on the question of a Jewish homeland under Jewish rule as essential to a secure Jewish future.
A Hungarian Jew named Theodor Herzl gave leadership to Zionism (the program for a Jewish homeland) through a book he published in 1896. Dismayed by the continued outbursts of violent anti-Semitism in Europe, Herzl argued that Jews would have no peace or freedom from persecution until they had a land of their own. Soon after Herzl’s book appeared, Jews in America began to organize on behalf of the Zionist idea, which they were determined to turn into a reality. In 1912, Henrietta Szold founded the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and six years later an even broader Zionist group was born. Conservative Judaism, represented by Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, became a major recruiting center and training ground for American Zionists as the movement steadily gained force in the 1920s and 1930s. Then in 1948, following World War II, the state of Israel at last came into being, the culmination of countless dreams and a haven for thousands of homeless Jews from all around the world. From that point on, the existence of a Jewish homeland would play a determinative role in America’s large Jewish community, arousing its moral passion and calling upon its spiritual and financial resources.
Despite the early presence of Eastern Orthodoxy in Alaska, its spread throughout the United States is more a feature of 20th century America than of an earlier period. In the last decades of the 19th century, one Christian group from the region around the Hungarian-Russian borders, known as the Uniates, emigrated to the United States in significant numbers. This group for a time enjoyed a special relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, but ultimately preferred renewed ties with Eastern Orthodoxy. Despite the fact that this body numbered as many as a quarter of a million by 1900, they remained little known beyond their own community of believers. The story of Eastern Orthodoxy has repeatedly involved separate immigration of closely knit ethnic peoples taking up residence in America in communities that resisted acculturation and escaped widespread public attention.
The Russian Revolution in 1917 drew wide public notice, but the many emigrations resulting from it attracted little concern beyond the confines of the churches. Even among these churches, conflict and factions kept Russian Orthodoxy from becoming a recognizable force in American religion. In 1919, a convention declared that Russian Orthodoxy in America would be independent of Russian Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, though this proclamation was not easily enforced (as seen in a legal battle over the title to Saint Nicholas Cathedral in New York City).
By 1952, Orthodoxy in America had many more representatives than just those who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution. Syrians, Serbians, Rumanians, Albanians, Bulgarians, and others arrived in the United States in the period between World Wars I and II. Greeks most conspicuously grew the membership of ancient Orthodoxy (in which allegiance was given not to the Roman papacy but to a national patriarch, seen as the true spiritual father). However, Orthodoxy’s constituents in America found their loyalties tested as they tried to balance Old World ties against New World realities.
In 1918, the archbishop of Athens (who was historically under the patriarch who ruled from Constantinople) came to the United States to form an all-Greek church where unity and love would prevail. However, disorder and faction prevailed, frustrating his plans. But Archbishop Meletios persisted, and his authority increased when he was named Patriarch of Constantinople. On a second visit to the United States, he created the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, which now serves as the ecclesiastical home for about two million members. Successive leaders also struggled to promote unity, at least among the Greeks if not among all the Orthodox. Archbishop Athenagoras, who held the highest American office from 1930 to 1949 before also being named Patriarch of Constantinople, was especially successful in this effort.
By 1950, most Americans still did not regularly acknowledge the significant presence of Eastern Orthodoxy in the nation, while continuing to speak of the categories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew as encompassing virtually all of American religion (and Catholic was understood to mean Roman Catholic, while the Eastern Church was largely ignored). Given the Eastern Church’s ancient history, dramatic liturgy, use of colorful icons (sacred pictures of religious figures), and rich cultural diversity, such lack of awareness became increasingly difficult to maintain (especially with regards to the two largest branches–Greek and Russian). National and world events then helped to bring greater attention to Eastern Orthodoxy. First, the public embrace in 1965 between Rome’s Pope Paul VI and Constantinople’s Patriarch Athenagoras I represented a step toward healing the 900-year old division between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Second, the nomination of Michael Dukakis for president in 1988 was the first time an Eastern Orthodox member had received this nomination.
By 1950, the United States had also become better acquainted with traditions beyond the confines of Judaism and Christianity. The World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, had widened cultural knowledge about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto. The annexation of Hawaii in 1898 increased this knowledge further. Immigration to the mainland continued to increase this knowledge, both in the late nineteenth century and in the twentieth. Before 1900 Japanese Buddhism had become a major religion in Hawaii, and the religious heritage of both China and Japan had been represented in California. Buddhism emerged as the most vigorous and adaptable of the Asian religions, with the United States being seen in the 20th century as an important mission field for Buddhism.
The Buddhist Mission of North America was formally established in San Francisco in 1899, growing out of the labors of two priests sent from Japan. By 1942, the mission was sufficiently well established, and the name was changed to Buddhist Churches of America. Churches and temples had been established in large enough numbers to suggest that Buddhism had found a permanent home in America, despite efforts to restrict immigration and the relocation of about 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps at the outbreak of World War II (which was claimed to be based on grounds of national security considerations but was also due to resentment over Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941).
Buddhism represents not a single strand or denomination, but several liturgical and national traditions. Japanese Zen Buddhism, with its focus on meditation and artistic simplicity, demonstrated an appeal as part of a philosophical and religious counterculture in the West. The Japanese Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki moved from Japan to Illinois in 1897, becoming a leading translator and popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the English-speaking world over the next half century. Many other schools of Japanese Buddhism also flourished in the Hawaiian Islands and along the West Coast of the United States. Buddhist traditions from China, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, and other Asian countries also appeared in America, becoming more obvious in the decades after World War II.
Hinduism, closely identified with the culture of India, did not prove as exportable or missionary minded as Buddhism. Nevertheless, a kind of universalistic or Westernized Hinduism entered the United States following the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. Swami Vivekananda established a local chapter of the Vedanta Society in New York City, and Swami Yogananda moved to the United States and began a ministry that led to the establishment of Self-Realization groups around the country. This kind of Hinduism, which combined Indian philosophy and American self-help, appealed to Euro-Americans intrigued by the wisdom of Hindu literature. On a smaller scale, Confucianism and Taoism from China, as well as Shinto from Japan, gained footholds in the United States (predominantly on the West Coast). As racism diminished and Asian groups assertively claimed religious liberty, religious pluralism grew broader and became a reality after 1965.
Religious organizations of all kinds and from all countries generally enjoyed a period of steady growth from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the twentieth, as a result of immigration, population increase throughout the nation, and a growing cultural eagerness to identify with a religious body. However, strife weakened the public voice of religion, due to the confusion of many competing religious voices.
Struggles and Schisms
A dramatic heresy trial held in the final decade of the 19th century pointed to troubled decades ahead in the 20th century. Charles Briggs, who was appointed in 1891 as professor of biblical theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, was charged by the Presbyterian Church with teaching that there may have been errors in the original text of the Bible (thus teaching against the notion of biblical inerrancy). Though Briggs (who was Presbyterian) answered that the errors he claimed to discover in the Bible did not involve faith and practice, and thus did not impair the infallibility of the Bible), his answer was deemed unsatisfactory. Found guilty of violating the essential standards of the Presbyterian Church, he was dismissed from the New York Presbytery, though he continued to teach at the seminary until his death in 1912.
What happened in the Presbyterian denomination was duplicated many times in other denominations, and again in Presbyterianism. The struggle is commonly identified through the descriptions of fundamentalism on one side and modernism on the other. The debate between the two sides often revolved around attitudes toward the Bible, but the questions more broadly related to the overall attitudes toward the modern world. In this broader sense, the controversy was reflected in Catholicism and Judaism as well as in Protestantism.
In the 16th century Reformation, Martin Luther and other Protestant leaders regarded the role of tradition as being less significant than Scripture, declaring that Scripture must be used to correct tradition and purify faith. “Scripture alone” became a motto of Protestantism. Thus, it is not surprising that, when Scripture came under scrutiny through new manuscript and archaeological discoveries and through new historical and literary techniques, Protestantism suffered severely—as seen in heresy trials, church quarrels, seminary struggles for survival, and denominational divisions.
In the first third of the 20th century, the three Protestant groups that were most severely divided by fundamentalist-modernist issues were the Presbyterians, the Northern Baptists, and the Disciples of Christ. Other bodies also faced conflicts (including Episcopalians and Methodists) but did not suffer splits. The Dutch Reformed suffered schism in the late 19th century related to other issues, such as immigration patterns. Lutherans, still dispersed in many ethnic communities, escaped the harshest aspect of the conflicts until much later in the 20th century.
The Briggs trial settled very little for Presbyterians. Other trials followed, as did other attempts to define the boundaries of correct Presbyterian theology. In 1910, the General Assembly emphasized five fundamentals that should not be compromised: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement achieved by Christ’s death, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and the reality of his biblically recorded miracles. Though leading liberals came under heavy criticism, the denomination as a whole rejected the fundamentalist stance. In 1929, leaders pulled Princeton Theological Seminary away from the control of the most conservative elements. In the 1930s, some conservatives (including J. Gresham Machen) responded by withdrawing from the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to create smaller denominations.
Northern Baptists were even more affected by dissension and strife, as the opposing sides struggled for control within the denomination. In the 1920s, fundamentalists and conservatives sought to impose unity in creed upon all those identified with the Northern Baptist Convention, while modernists and liberals resisted such efforts as contrary to the Baptist tradition of having no creed other than the Bible. Liberals maintained control of the denominational boards, seminaries, and agencies. Yet divisions weakened the larger body, and the energies of evangelicals were drawn to other causes. In 1933, fifty congregations withdrew from the larger group to form the General Association of Regular Baptists; fifteen years later more dissatisfied members separated to form the Conservative Baptist Association of America.
The Disciples of Christ, a frontier church that longed to reduce denominational divisions, ironically added even more denominational labels to the situation. Early in the 20th century, the conservatives, who resisted aspects of perceived liberalism, withdrew to create a new denomination, the Churches of Christ. These churches maintained a fiercely independent congregational polity, held to the authority of the Bible in such a way as to resist any of the new interpretations that were becoming familiar in the fundamentalist-modernist debate. The Churches of Christ found their centers of strength in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas, while the Disciples of Christ continued to be the major faction in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. In 1927, another division occurred within the movement, which took the name of the North American Christian Connection. The new group argued that the older Disciples of Christ group had grown too fond of scholarship and too ready to surrender its denominational distinctives to a general Protestantism.
Protestants were not alone in their concern about where the modern world was leading traditional and historic religion. Roman Catholic authorities in the Vatican found much of European biblical scholarship extremely problematic. In 1893, Pope Leo XIII condemned the higher criticism form of biblical study as a useless method, arguing it pretended to judge each biblical book from internal indications alone, without paying attention to the views of the early church fathers or the teaching authority of the Roman church. In 1907, Pope Pius X made clear that modernism was heretical and dangerous. While modernists talk of progress, what they call progress is, in fact, corruption. He further argued that modernists question everyone’s wisdom but their own, assuming they have understood Scripture where all previous church teachers have failed.
This condemnation was comprehensive and allowed no reinterpretation. The pope further directed all bishops to get rid of any hint of modernism in their jurisdictions, especially their universities and seminaries. While some European scholars were disciplined, no threat of division emerged. However, Catholic scholarship, in particular biblical scholarship, was hindered for more than a generation.
The situation changed in 1943, when a later pope named Pius XII promoted responsible biblical scholarship. He specifically encouraged a study of the original biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek, along with associated ancient languages and attention to archaeological, philological, and additional sciences. He argued that it was wrong to assume all truth was known, noting that current times had brought to light many things that called for fresh investigation.
Judaism also divided in this period. Immigration patterns shaped some of the disagreements. But many similar issued were also involved—attitudes toward the Bible, attitudes toward history and tradition, and attitudes toward modern civilization and the notion of progress. In 1885, Reform Judaism adopted a platform that could be considered modernist, asserting that modern scientific discoveries are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, and that the Bible reflects the primitive ideas of its own age. Further, this movement accepted as binding only the moral laws and maintained only the ceremonies that enhanced modern life, while seeing the old Mosaic laws as a system of training for Jews in ancient Palestine. It argued that Judaism, to survive, must be progressive, and in accordance with reason.
According to Orthodox Judaism and much Conservative Judaism in the early 20th century, those who wished to choose which demands of biblical law to follow showed that they loved the modern world too much. In 1901, Solomon Schechter, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, argued that Judaism was a revealed religion, not primarily a progressive religion. Thus, it must continue to take the Bible very seriously. He noted the Jewish heritage of receiving the Bible from God and seeing it as such a great gift that Jews were willing to be slain by the thousands rather than becoming unfaithful to it. Schechter dedicated himself to drawing boundaries for accommodating traditional Jewish faith to modern culture.
Most religious bodies in America suffered severe strain, if not actual breaks, during those decades, for constant evaluation was needed to determine the value of tradition in relation to the modern world. Some groups, such as the Eastern Orthodox communions, escaped the struggle only because they had not yet accepted enough of modernity’s progressive assumptions to be challenged or threatened by them. Others, such as the Unitarians, had long before made the critical choices about embracing the changes of modernity. For the vast majority, however, the chaos faced during this period prevented much rejoicing over the growth in numbers that was taking place at the same time. Religion in the first half of the 20th century was forced to concentrate more and more on the damage within its own internal affairs.
Ecclesiastical Aftermath
In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached an influential sermon called “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” In the sermon, he sharpened the terms of the debate and tried to provide a historical perspective for the decades of conflict. He argued against the virgin birth of Christ, the literal inerrancy of the Scriptures, and the second coming of Christ from the skies. While he pleaded for good will, what he received was an explosion of ill will.
The fundamentalists gained a token victory in 1925 when a high school biology teacher named John Thomas Scopes was brought to trial in Dayton, Tennessee. In this famous trial, the civil courts took up the question of whether Scopes had violated a Tennessee law that prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools that were supported by state funds. The drama raised by the issue was increased in the courtroom, since the attorney for the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan (a three-time candidate for president). The defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, though not such a public figure, was also widely known as an outstanding trial lawyer.
Though the courtroom was an odd place to settle an issue of the science curriculum in the schools, the issue was far broader since for many the question was not state law, but the authority of the Bible and of the churches across the nation. The national press and new radio industry gave much publicity to the case. Bryan clearly identified the case as a grand battle between unbelief attempting to speak through science and the defenders of the Christian faith speaking through the legislators of Tennessee. He argued that to nullify the law and acquit Scopes was to ridicule the Bible and renounce God, whereas to uphold the law would gain the favor of Christians.
The law was upheld, Scopes was fined a hundred dollars, and a nominal victory was won for fundamentalism. However, in much of the national press the town of Dayton was portrayed as backward and uneducated, fundamentalism as absurd, and the trial a sham. In the cultural struggle for the hearts and minds of Americans, fundamentalism’s victory was not as clear. Liberalism retained control of most denominational colleges and seminaries, most publishing boards, prestigious pulpits, and endowed funds. In a longer struggle with modernism, fundamentalist forces moved on to engage the next battle for the Bible against scientific materialism and unbelief. Leaders in evangelical groups gathered new institutional resources for renewed campaigns, while liberalism seemed to grow weaker in the 1930s and 1940s.
Chapter 14. Faith and Reason
In the first half of the 20th century, broad cultural shifts gradually moved Christianity away from its position of intellectual and ethical leadership in the nation. Increasingly, cultural rewards went to artists, novelists, and journalists, while bureaucratic expertise was bestowed upon politicians, engineers, and social planners. Despite the growing professionalization within religion, the clergy as a profession steadily lost status, while physicians, lawyers, and scientists gained status. The salaries of clergy fell far behind those of other professionals, and even behind those of business and labor leaders, as well as of many civil servants and academic professionals. This loss in the professional standing of the clergy only symbolized far more significant losses in cultural authority at large, which resulted in part from the growing institutional power of many other intellectual disciplines, as well as from internal crises within modern religious thought.
Philosophy and Religion
Though they were traditionally close allies, philosophers and theologians found themselves drawing apart in the 20th century, as each group pursued its own agenda. Many philosophers turned away from the larger metaphysical questions (relating to ultimate reality) that were a focus of religion to narrower issues of linguistic analysis or symbolic logic that seemed irrelevant to theologians. Many theologians also continued to be bound by loyalty to creed and biblical standards in a way that hindered fruitful dialogue with philosophy.
John Dewey, the most influential American philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century, took as his goal the reconstruction of American society. In art, logic, politics, science, and education, he influenced and reshaped intellectual debates to an immeasurable degree. He accomplished this reconstruction without much reference to religion except to explain how irrelevant most ancient religious answers had become to the newer ways of investigation and discovery. He argued that discoveries made in history, literary criticism, and the sciences had offered new accounts of historic events and challenged traditional religious points of view. He further argued that the method for arriving at the truth must involve rational investigation and observable experimentation leading to fresh understanding, rather than consulting sacred writings or ancient religious teachings.
As a follower of pragmatism, Dewey saw the universe as open-ended rather than closed, and he saw truth as something that is discovered rather than given, and ever unfolding rather than fixed. Dewey saw the current shift from religious ways of looking at the world to scientific methods of investigation and verification as a revolution. He believed the universe was full of possibilities that could be discovered as people left their outdated ways of thinking and worked toward a better future for the world.
Dewey saw institutional religion as an outdated way thinking, which seemed more interested in defending truths already known than in seeking truths yet to be found. Instead of these old and outdated ideas, religious people should dedicate themselves to cooperative inquiry by means of observation, experiment, recording, and reflection. Though Dewey did not think he was asking religion to give up much that mattered, most theologians believed that what he called for was a total surrender of religion to the demands of modernity.
Other popular writers carried similar messages in this same period of time. An influential journalist and widely read author named Walter Lippman convinced much of the literate American public that traditional religion was becoming obsolete and that the old cultural cohesion had been dissolved by modernity. Religious certainty had given way to the momentous shift, and some other ground for moral choices than God’s revelation was needed.
However, not all philosophers dismissed traditional religion. Harvard professor William James, though also a pragmatist, found religious questions and answers to be significant and relevant. Such questions and answers had consequences for human behavior that pragmatists could not ignore. James argued that faith is a necessary condition for reaching some goal. In addition, Alfred North Whitehead did not dismiss the idea of God, but he altered it to emphasize the elements in the world that operate by love. Whitehead argued that God moved by persuasion rather than coercion, which explains why the work of God occurred so slowly.
Despite the counterarguments offered by Whitehead’s process philosophy, by midcentury professional philosophizing had distanced itself from any alliance with theology. Liberal religious thinkers tried to keep connections between faith and reason, but often in the process they yielded so much to modern rationality and critical inquiry that only minimal claims remained for a unique perspective of religion. On the other hand, conservative religious thinkers pointed out the idolatry of modern thought and the liberal disparagement of religious authority, though in doing so they all but forfeited the hope of exercising intellectual leadership in wider areas of culture. A serious breach formed between faith and reason.
Science and Religion
Far better known in this period were the contests and conflicts between scientists and theologians (the Scopes trial was only one example). From the point of view of theologians, science kept invading their territory by answering questions about the origin and purpose of the world and about the nature and destiny of humanity—questions that were fundamentally religious rather than scientific. From the point of view of scientists, theology blocked the pathway to knowledge by hindering scientific experiments. Each side saw the other as overly ambitious and uncompromising.
In the closing years of the 19th century, leading theologians searched for accommodations with the growing authority and prestige of science. But in this search, they were often limited by their own religious convictions and by church authorities. Roman Catholics found their church’s position to be against Darwin’s theory of evolution. One Catholic cardinal called this theory false science, while arguing that there is no conflict between religion and true science.
A few years later, John Augustus Zahm, a Roman Catholic professor of physics at Notre Dame, tried to suggest that Darwinism was compatible with Catholic teaching. In a book published in 1896, he explained that there can be theistic evolution, just as well as atheistic or agnostic evolution (in other words, that there was a God who created humanity using evolution). But Catholicism was not yet ready for this synthesis of new biology with theology, and Zahm’s book was denounced and withdrawn from publication and circulation.
Protestants, likewise, were not ready to fully embrace evolution. The popular Brooklyn preacher T. DeWitt Talmage denounced the idea of evolution as atheistic and absurd. The argument that humans came from beasts made humanity more bestial, and the argument against immortality destroyed all foundation of morality and purpose. Instead, Talmage taught a redefined concept of evolution—evolution out of sin into holiness, out of grief into gladness, out of mortality into immortality, and out of earth into heaven.
Another Brooklyn Protestant named Henry Ward Beecher contended that the whole history of Christianity was itself an instance of natural evolution. In a series of sermons preached in 1885, he argued that evolution was another example of the diversified unfolding of God’s plans on earth. The idea of evolution affected religion for good rather than ill, weeding out the inferior and making room for the strong. Beecher asserted that theology and the Church were undergoing a process of evolution toward perfection.
Conflict erupted in Brooklyn over these diverse ideas, spreading across the country and across the denominations. The popular revivalist Billy Sunday denounced and ridiculed the theory of evolution well into the 20th century, winning wide approval from audiences and even from several state legislatures. However, Lyman Abbott reached even wider audiences through his editorial work and many books designed to reconcile the teachings of Christianity with the ideas of Darwin. He argued that humanity was gradually emerging from an animal nature into spiritual maturity.
Psychology, sociology, and anthropology also contributed to intellectual and theological controversy. The theories of Sigmund Freud challenged traditional doctrines of sin and salvation, guilt and repentance, innocence and depravity. Freud saw religion as a wishful illusion, as Karl Marx considered it a drug that numbed the suffering of the masses. Neither saw religion as a legitimate or effective means for dealing with the ills of the individual or society, but instead argued that religion was responsible for many of these ills. The sociology of the time was based on a positivist philosophy that dismissed all ideas not immediately derived from sense experience, with theology often viewed as a stage that humankind would inevitably outgrow. Anthropology raised questions of cultural relativism and openness to religious difference—questions that seemed to threaten the very truth, goodness, and superiority of Christian civilization. Both sociology and anthropology seemed to suggest that gods were little more than social productions that functioned to order and maintain communities.
Once again, religious leaders who tried to keep open a dialogue between theologians on the one hand, and scientists and social scientists on the other, often appeared all too ready to surrender the distinctiveness of their own traditions. And those who declared that no reconciliation between science and religion was ever possible abandoned any claim to cultural authority and became objects of ridicule by those who had come to see religion as ignorant. There were also middle-ground institutions (such as the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion), but such voices were largely drowned out in the theological conflict.
Theological Battle Stations
Modernists and fundamentalists fought about more than who would run what agency, who would control what college, and who would preach from what pulpit. They also argued about ideas. In one form or another, the contest over ideas affected Catholicism and Judaism no less than Protestantism, and the contest continues to the present day.
Protestants debated the future as well as the past: the future with respect to the second coming of Christ, the past with respect to biblical history and command. In the 19th century, large numbers of Protestants from time to time had been caught up in expectations that the world would soon come to an end and that Christ would dramatically and visibly appear to establish the Kingdom of God on earth in a new Jerusalem. In the early 20th century, such views seemed outdated to many who believed the future was one of peace and progress, not coming war and catastrophe. These modernists believed the Kingdom of God might come through the efforts of people working together for the greater good of the social whole, and that God would look with pleasure on what his children had managed to accomplish rather than giving up on an evil and warring world.
As many backed away from the notion of a visible second coming of Christ, other Protestants defended that position even more vigorously and sometimes with strange detail. Though few were willing to name a specific time or day for the second coming, the notion that it would be soon became common. Premillennialists believed that Christ’s coming would precede the thousand years of peace foretold in the book of Revelation, though they did not agree on all the details. One of the more pervasive versions of this point of view was known as dispensationalism and associated with the Plymouth Brethren in England, as well as the American Cyrus Scofield (who published the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909). Dispensationalism divided the world’s history into seven ages (or dispensations), claiming that humankind was now in the sixth age. This age would end with Jesus’ descent from heaven, when dead saints would return to life and, along with living believers, rise to meet Jesus in the air. Then the seventh and final dispensation would follow—the period known as the millennium, when Christ would reign over a restored Israel and over the earth for one thousand years.
Premillennialism (whether dispensationalism or another type) was enormously popular in much of American Protestantism. This theology was emphasized by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1927), Plymouth Brethren, and many more. It was also present in much of more mainstream Protestantism, where debates about the future became more intense and divisive.
Shailer Mathews, Baptist professor at the University of Chicago and a leading modernist spokesman, confronted the issue directly and forcefully in 1917 with a brief tract, in which he argued that Christ would not return physically to earth, as the premillennialists expected, but would save the world by spiritual means. Mathews further argued that premillennial views could not be found in the early church fathers or the leaders of the Reformation, and that this theology demanded the sacrifice of intelligence and education for the life of faith. Mathews argued that Christ will come as a spiritual presence, leading us through the Holy Spirit into all truth, regenerating people and institutions. The real Kingdom of God on earth was the triumph of the ideals of Jesus that would come when the spirit of Jesus came into human hearts.
Many saw the spiritualized millennium suggested by Mathews as wholly unacceptable. Another Baptist named Isaac Haldeman criticized the tract written by Mathews, calling it a grotesque and dishonoring caricature of one of the most sacred subjects of Scripture. Arguing carefully from the biblical text, Haldeman declared that Mathews contradicted the plain sense of Scripture. He further replied that Christian history (especially in its earliest years) was full of testimony of expectation regarding Christ’s second coming. He noted the growth of evil and wrong theology over time, and that spiritual and moral character tends to deteriorate rather than to evolve. Thus, he pitied those who believed both that the world was getting better without direct intervention and that the Kingdom of God was soon to come spiritually. In the midst of World War I, Haldeman prayed that Jesus would return soon to put an end to the global chaos.
Similarly, Presbyterians, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and others held strongly opposing views about the second coming. Some saw belief in the visible return of Christ as a single-issue theological test of one’s faithfulness as a Christian and loyalty as a church member. It became a leading fundamental within fundamentalism, and a question to be pressed when ordaining new clergy, calling a new pastor, or hiring a new professor. In many religious bodies, this concern has continued to the present day, and the premillennial view has remained popular.
Underlying this apparently rather narrow or specifically limited item of belief was a far broader concern: the authority of the Bible for this and all other matters of faith and morals. The Bible could even be considered a book of history, telling us when the world was created, or a book of science, telling us of the origins of humanity and races and of supernatural suspensions of natural law. While first-century Christians considered correct belief about Christ to be the essential test of Christian faith, twentieth-century Christians focused on correct belief about the Bible.
The test can be clearly seen in the debate between Mathews and Haldeman. Mathews said that premillennialists misused and misunderstood the Bible, regarding all the beliefs of early Christians as the teaching of the Bible, which he argued must logically include a flat earth, the continuation of slavery, and submission to unjust rulers like Nero. Mathews instead argued for a better, common-sense way to use the Bible, which involves progressive inspiration fitted to successive periods of human intelligence. For example, beliefs of early Christians can be understood only as they are studied in the light of the thought habits prevalent in their times.
Haldeman considered the arguments for the common-sense view of Mathews to be nonsense. He argued that modern theologians accept only the part of the Bible that agrees with their theory of world progress, while denying that the Bible was and is the complete and perfect Word of God. He further suggested that modernist ministers had essentially lost the uniquely Christian aspect of their service and might as well preach in the name of Buddha or Confucius as Christ.
While Mathews and Haldeman were only single opponents, each represented a constituency that was far broader. For Protestantism throughout the 20th century, the issue of biblical authority was the major subject of debate. In 1924, Fosdick published a book that sought to summarize the results of modern biblical scholarship in a way that the average Protestant churchgoer could understand and perhaps even welcome. He argued that the Bible became more meaningful and uplifting, rather than less so, when one understood its different periods of development and gradually accumulated insights. As a result of the new learning, we can trace the ideas of Scripture through their development from simple initial forms to full maturity in the later Scriptures.
Fosdick had both admirers and detractors, the latter of whom saw his argument for modernity as another attempt to evade clear biblical demands. These critics considered the very foundation of Protestant Christianity to be undermined by any questioning of the Bible’s sufficiency and validity. Congregationalist Reuben A. Torrey published a book in 1898, in which he explained thousands of biblical propositions as scientifically precise and authoritatively required. He argued that modernists set aside the Bible in favor of modern thought; they really did not believe in the Bible at all but did not have the intellectual honesty or moral courage to say so.
Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen agreed that modernism, rather than being a more sophisticated version of Christianity, was no Christianity at all. By making the concessions most required by modernism, modern theologians have really abandoned Christianity, which they started out to defend. Machen argued that biblical critics and the modern liberal church were primarily interested in defending contemporary culture, under the guise of reforming and refining New Testament religion. In actuality, they were undermining and destroying the true Christian faith.
Protestants were not alone in being torn by the tensions and new ideas that modern scholarship had introduced into institutional religion. Roman Catholics in both Europe and America confronted similar conflicts. Questions of progress, history, theology, the Bible’s authority, and the church’s teaching authority overwhelmed Catholics. For a hundred years or more, the Roman Catholic Church in Europe had been thrown on the defensive–suffering through historical events such as the French Revolution, Napoleon’s reign, the weakening of monarchies, and the repeated loss of political power. In 1864, Pope Pius IX declared that modernity was a major mistake. After continuing to face political sufferings into the 20th century, followed by the additional challenges to the church’s theology offered by modern scholarship, Pope Pius X in 1907 dismissed modernism as horribly misguided secular learning. He argued that the modernists saw the Bible as only a summary of human experiences, losing sight of its special inspiration. Further, the church in the modernist view is nothing more than collective conscience. He noted how the modernists promoted the ideas that the Catholic Church should become more democratic, and the state should be separated from the Church. In fact, the pope asserted, modernist Catholics can hardly be distinguished from liberal Protestants.
However, one difference between Catholics and Protestants, whether liberal or conservative was the Vatican’s powerful authority to scorn and officially condemn modernism. In stern and explicit language, the pope announced that all bishops, heads of religious orders, and directors of schools and seminaries were to exercise the greatest vigilance in blotting out modernism. At Catholic universities, administrators and professors who expressed modernist ideas were to be excluded from their offices, and those who already occupy such offices were to be removed. He urged special caution concerning those who love new ideas in history, archaeology, and biblical interpretation, as well as those who tended to abandon or criticize the teachings of traditional Catholic theologians (specifically naming the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas). Dioceses were also to have councils with appointed clergy to watch carefully for modernism in publications and teachings. The Vatican saw modernism as heresy to be fought against, not an innocent new idea to be tolerated.
In his 1907 anti-modernist writing, the pope was focused more on Europe than America, since full-fledged modernists were rare in the Catholic Church in America. However, there were numerous debates among American Catholics, as liberal Catholics argued with conservative Catholics. Catholic bishops such as John Ireland and John Lancaster Spalding led the liberal side, while bishops such as Michael Corrigan and Bernard McQuaid led the opposing conservative side. The pope’s writing gave strong support to the side of the conservatives, achieving an artificial and enforced unity against modernism at the cost of a renewal of Catholic theology.
Within Judaism, concerns were similar but not identical. While there was no obsession with the second coming of Christ or anxiety about the final authority of a centralized religious hierarchy, broader underlying questions about science, cultural evolution, revelation, tradition, and the uneasy relationship between sacred and secular divided the religious community of Jews. The place of honor given to the Torah (or Laws of Moses) prevented a full embrace of biblical criticism by observant Jews, though Jews argued about interpretations or commentaries on that law. Under the sponsorship of the Jewish Publication Society, and after many years of labor, a new translation of Hebrew Scriptures appeared in 1917. The American Jewish community now had its own official Bible (rather than being dependent on a Christian translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into English), which testified to the growing importance of the Jewish presence in the United States as well as to the maturing biblical scholarship of the nation’s Jews.
Over the next several decades, Jewish scholars were busy with another translation that would take advantage of the newest manuscript discoveries and other developments in biblical scholarship. In 1962, a fresh translation of the Books of Moses was published. Twenty years later, the complete Hebrew Scriptures appeared in a translation that revealed the mature scholarship of American Judaism (in which Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox scholars cooperated and worked closely with biblical scholars in Israel).
Despite this cooperation, institutional divisions persisted within Judaism. Reform Judaism continued to be the group most comfortable with modernity. Conservative Judaism, stressing the continued importance of a moderate traditionalism, persisted as a kind of middle ground between Reform and Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Judaism viewed itself as the uncompromising continuation of Jewish practice and belief across the centuries. It intentionally isolated itself from acculturation and modernity, and it remained far less visible outside major centers of Jewish population.
America in the 20th century introduced yet another stream into the Jewish landscape: Reconstructionism. The work chiefly of Mordecai Kaplan, Reconstructionism argued that Judaism was more a form of community than it was a revealed religion. Thus, the peoplehood of Israel was more important than the supernatural emphases of the Torah, and the function of religion was more a matter of historical identity than beliefs about God. Kaplan sought to appeal to the many Jews in America who were not affiliated with any temple or synagogue yet who still found support in their sense of belonging to an ancient tradition and identifiable people.
The peculiarly American character of Reconstructionism is evident in its first platform statement, issued in 1935, which describes the call to develop the Jewish heritage within American life. The statement reflected Kaplan’s concern, which focused more on the common purpose of Jews than with their ideas about God. While remaining a relatively small movement in comparison with the other three branches of Judaism, Reconstructionism was a notable parallel to the modernism found among both Protestants and Catholics. It imagined a Judaism thoroughly at home in the scientific, pluralistic, and free society of the United States, while celebrating the vibrancy of its ethnic particularity.
Theological Aftermath
It should be kept in mind that the labels modernist and fundamentalist represent special types more than the full reality that is American religion. At no time within the 20th century was it possible to classify the majority of church and synagogue members as belonging to either one or the other of these categories. Most people fit somewhere in the middle, attracted to aspects of both positions but never wholly aligned with either. The two movements also underwent shifting emphases and internal divisions. Modernists gradually lost their confidence in progress and their uncritical fondness for the surrounding culture. Similarly, fundamentalists lost their antagonism with respect to other Christians and hostility to efforts to apply Christianity to the social dimension (such as the social gospel).
Within Protestantism, a broad coalition of conservatives, preferring to call themselves evangelicals, joined together in 1942 to form the National Association of Evangelicals. They sought to promote a greater degree of cooperation and fellowship among conservative church groups, while recognizing that there were theological differences among the groups that were unlikely to be resolved. In the following decade, a leading evangelical scholar named Car. F. H. Henry called for abandoning the narrow legalism that had often characterized fundamentalism and at the same time embracing the social implications of Christianity.
On the liberal side, Reinhold Niebuhr pulled away from the naïve optimism of an earlier generation. He argued that belief in the steady progress of humankind can be maintained only by ignoring reality. The reality is that human nature is perverse, and that society tends toward evil. He asserted that science and education will not produce a perfect world, and neither will a sentimental Protestantism that refuses to confront the undeniable realities of war, greed, exploitation, prejudice, poverty, cruelty, injustice, and lust. He called for a kind of Christian realism that recognizes the highest goal among nations is justice rather than love, and that the means to achieve justice sometimes require force and violence. By midcentury, both modernism and fundamentalism were much different than they had been a generation earlier.
Niebuhr was a member of a small Protestant denomination called the Evangelical and Reformed Church (which later merged into the United Church of Christ), yet he transcended denominationalism, Protestantism, and even the whole field of religion as he shaped the thinking of political scientists, statesmen, journalists, diplomats, and many others. Similarly, a Jewish refugee from Germany and Poland named Abraham Joshua Heschel moved beyond the confines of organized Judaism to offer both comfort and rebuke to modern civilization as a whole. He arrived in the United States in 1940 and became a professor at Jewish Theological Seminary, but he soon found himself speaking to audiences extending well beyond his own students. Lecturing across the country, he argued that the fate of humankind depends upon realizing that the most important distinction is between good and evil (or right and wrong) and that religion can assist humanity in making those critical distinctions. He further noted that modern civilization had lost a vision of the sacred (or focus on God).
Heschel was an activist in the battle against evil. He fought for the cause of civil rights and protested the folly of America’s imperial ambitions. He was concerned with the soul of the individual as well as of the nation and of the world, arguing that spiritual well-being and faithfulness to God were essential to the fate of the world and human life. Everything worthwhile in civilization, as opposed to barbarism and chaos, depends on the human sense for the sacredness of life, which he compared to a spark of light in the darkness of selfishness. In his lifetime, Heschel contributed to many causes, including the reuniting of theology and philosophy—religious practice and serious scholarship—in modern American society. In the process, he renewed the passion of many for attaining a life of both learning and prayer.
The secularism that seemed to weaken religion’s viability in the modern world did not cause similar damage to American culture as a whole. The modern crisis of belief did not affect that many Americans, as noted by the critic H. L. Mencken. Though, as a non-religious person, he had resigned himself to life without meaning and to a death without hope of an afterlife, he concluded that the great masses of people in American society were deceived by religion’s false hopes and the fraud of religious leaders. Though Enlightenment skepticism was continually advocated by such modernist thinkers in the early to mid-twentieth century, religious bodies kept renewing and multiplying themselves, much to the irritation of those who were critical of religion. After World War II, the membership rolls of churches and synagogues reached new highs.
Primary Text 7
A. From Christianity and Liberalism (by J. Gresham Machen)
Machen Liberalism (extremetheology.com)
What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture; may Christianity be maintained in a scientific age?
It is this problem which modern liberalism attempts to solve. Admitting that scientific objections may arise against the particularities of the Christian religion– against the Christian doctrines of the person of Christ, and of redemption through His death and resurrection–the liberal theologian seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting “the essence of Christianity.”
It may well be questioned, however, whether this method of defense will really prove to be efficacious; for after the apologist has abandoned his outer defenses to the enemy and withdrawn into some inner citadel, he will probably discover that the enemy pursues him even there. Modern materialism, especially in the realm of psychology, is not content with occupying the lower quarters of the Christian city, but pushes its way into all the higher reaches of life; it is just as much opposed to the philosophical idealism of the liberal preacher as to the Biblical doctrines that the liberal preacher has abandoned in the interests of peace. Mere concessiveness, therefore, will never succeed in avoiding the intellectual conflict. In the intellectual battle of the present day there can be no “peace without victory”; one side or the other must win.
As a matter of fact, however, it may appear that the figure which has just been used is altogether misleading; it may appear that what the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to be long in a distinct category. It may appear further that the fears of the modern man as to Christianity were entirely ungrounded, and that in abandoning the embattled walls of the city of God he has fled in needless panic into the open plains of a vague natural religion only to fall an easy victim to the enemy who ever lies in ambush there.
Two lines of criticism, then, are possible with respect to the liberal attempt at reconciling science and Christianity. Modern liberalism may be criticized (1) on the ground that it is un-Christian and (2) on the ground that it is unscientific. We shall concern ourselves here chiefly with the former line of criticism; we shall be interested in showing that despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions. But in showing that the liberal attempt at rescuing Christianity is false we are not showing that there is no way of rescuing Christianity at all; on the contrary, it may appear incidentally, even in the present little book, that it is not the Christianity of the New Testament which is in conflict with science, but the supposed Christianity of the modern liberal Church, and that the real city of God, and that city alone, has defenses which are capable of warding of the assaults of modern unbelief. However, our immediate concern is with the other side of the problem; our principal concern just now is to show that the liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene. In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend. Here as in many other departments of life it appears that the things that are sometimes thought to be hardest to defend are also the things that are most worth defending.
B. From The Faith of Modernism (by Shailer Mathews)
Shailer Mathews (cuny.edu)
What then is Modernism? A heresy? An infidelity? A denial of truth? A new religion? So its ecclesiastical opponents have called it. But it is none of these. To describe it is like describing that science which has made our modern intellectual world so creative. It is not a denomination or a theology. It is the use of the methods of modern science to find, state and use the permanent and central values of inherited orthodoxy in meeting the needs of a modern world. The needs themselves point the way to formulas. Modernists endeavor to reach beliefs and their application in the same way that chemists or historians reach and apply their conclusions. They do not vote in convention and do not enforce beliefs by discipline. Modernism has no Confession. Its theological affirmations are the formulation of results of investigation both of human needs and the Christian religion. The Dogmatist starts with doctrines, the Modernist with the religion that gave rise to doctrines. The Dogmatist relies on conformity through group authority; the Modernist, upon inductive method and action in accord with group loyalty . . . .
While by its very nature the Modernist movement will never have a creed or authoritative confession, it does have its beliefs. And these beliefs are those attitudes and convictions which gave rise to the Christian religion and have determined the development of the century long Christian movement. No formula can altogether express the depths of a man’s religious faith or hope to express the general beliefs of a movement in which individuals share. Every man will shape his own credo. But since he is loyal to the ongoing Christian community with its dominant convictions, a Modernist in his own words and with his own patterns can make affirmations which will not be unlike the following:
I believe in God, immanent in the forces and processes of nature, revealed in Jesus Christ and human history as Love.
I believe in Jesus Christ, who by his teaching, life, death and resurrection, revealed God as Savior.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the God of love experienced in human life.
I believe in the Bible, when interpreted historically, as the product and the trustworthy record of the progressive revelation of God through a developing religious experience.
I believe that humanity without God is incapable of full moral life and liable to suffering because of its sin and weakness.
I believe in prayer as a means of gaining help from God in every need and in every intelligent effort to establish and give justice in human relations.
I believe in freely forgiving those who trespass against me, and in good will rather than acquisitiveness, coercion, and war as the divinely established law of human relations.
I believe in the need and the reality of God’s forgiveness of sins, that is, the transformation of human lives by fellowship with God from subjection to outgrown goods to the practice of the love exemplified in Jesus Christ.
I believe in the practicability of the teaching of Jesus in social life.
I believe in the continuance of individual personality beyond death; and that the future life will be one of growth and joy in proportion to its fellowship with God and its moral likeness to Jesus Christ.
I believe in the church as the community of those who in different conditions and ages loyally further the religion of Jesus Christ.
I believe that all things work together for good to those who love God and in their lives express the sacrificial good will of Jesus Christ.
I believe in the ultimate triumph of love and justice because I believe in the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Such affirmations are more than the acceptance of biblical records, ancient facts or the successive doctrinal patterns of the Christian church. They are the substance of a faith that will move mountains. Under their control no man can deliberately seek to injure his neighbor or distrust his God. They are moral motive and direction for social action.
To trust God who is good will is to find a cure for the cynical doubt born of war and its aftermath.
To be loyal to the sinless Son of Man is to gain new confidence in the possibility of transforming human nature and society from selfishness to brotherliness.
To discover in the death of Jesus that God himself shares in sacrifice for the good of others is to gain confidence in the struggle for the rights of others.
To know that the God of law and love has made good will the only source of permanent happiness is to possess a standard of moral judgment.
To follow Jesus in international affairs is to end war.
To find God in natural law and evolution is an assurance that love is as final as any other cosmic expression of the divine will.
To embody the spirit of Jesus Christ in all action is to enjoy the peace which can come only to those who are at one with the cosmic God.
To experience the regenerating power of God is to have new hope for the ultimate completion of the human personality through death as well as life.
The final test of such generic Christianity is the ability of the Christian movement to meet human needs. And of this we have no doubt. Whoever does the will of God will know that the gospel of and about Jesus Christ is not the dream of a noble though impracticable victim of circumstance, but the revelation of the good will of the God of nature, the Father of our spirits, the Savior of His world. And through that knowledge he will gain the fruit of the Spiritlove, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, selfcontrol.
Lecture 8
Part 4. Religious Transformation from World War II to the New Millennium
Chapter 15. War, Peace, and Religious Renewal
In the 1940s and 1950s, both the nation and its religious institutions endured the trials of war and the fears of fascism and communism. Churches, synagogues, and other religious organizations were tested by the brutal realization of humanity’s inhumanity, by new technological powers of destruction, and by temptations to become instruments or pawns in the Cold War. Amidst the darkness, however, signs of renewal could be seen, such as Billy Graham’s crusades, the feel-good messages of post-war suburbia, and innovative movements of liturgical reform. Renewal and transformation became especially powerful elements among America’s Roman Catholics in the early 1960s.
Wars Around the World
Immediately following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered a war that had engaged most of Europe since 1939 and much of Asia since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In the midst of America’s involvement in the war, organized religion followed two broad approaches. In the first, ministries offered consolation, guidance, inspiration, and a wide variety of war-related services.
More than 8000 ministers, rabbis, and priests served as chaplains in World War II. Confessions were heard within earshot of the noise of battle, hymns were sung above the roar of battleship engines, sermons were heard in arctic snow and tropical heat, communion was offered in frontline hospitals and last rites within frontline trenches. Chaplains lived in tents, trailers, troop ships, and open fields. Wherever combat soldiers and sailors moved, the uniformed clergy lived or died alongside them. The often heroic sacrifice of military chaplains during the war was illustrated by four chaplains (two Protestants, a Catholic, and a Jew) who died on the Dorchester ship when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1943. The four men stood arm in arm as the ship sank into the Atlantic Ocean, dying along with nearly 700 American soldiers after giving up their own life jackets in an attempt to save others.
A second approach of religion to the war sought to ease war’s inevitable cruelties and severe dislocations. Even before the United States entered the conflict, Quakers and others supported humanitarian efforts abroad in an endeavor to clothe the needy, feed the hungry, and minister to the sick. Quaker representatives in France in 1940 reported the heartbreaking challenges of having to decide life-and death matters such as who should receive the limited supplies of food and clothing. In 1947, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee agreed that the American Friends Service Committee itself should be honored for service rendered all over Europe, as well as in China and India.
The global refugee problem was more severe than any had anticipated or than any could deal with satisfactorily. But the United States had its own refugee problem following Pearl Harbor. On the stated grounds of national security, though the unstated grounds involved racism, the nation decided that most of the Japanese on the West Coast needed to be moved to relocation centers in Idaho, Arizona, or elsewhere in the inland West. More than 100,000 Japanese, the majority of whom were American citizens, spent the war years behind barbed wire and under armed guard, wondering about the worth of their citizenship in a country that continued to view so much through the perspective of race. The help churches were able to provide to these Japanese Americans was not much. (Forty years later, the nation issued an official apology and financial reparations to the Japanese Americans whose lives had been devastated by this policy).
Pacifism, too, had been sacrificed in the course of World War II. Although the 1930s had seen an unprecedented growth in pacifist sentiment among the churches, these views (along with isolationist campaigns to keep America out of wars) quickly faded away after 1941. Yet many religious groups were determined not to be as uncritically supportive of this war (or any other war) as they had been of World War I. War was evil, though sometimes a necessary evil. Many church members agreed that the war could be supported only on the grounds that the injustices that accompanied it might be brought more quickly to an end.
Pacifism did not wholly disappear. Mennonites, members of the Church of the Brethren, and Quakers helped to run Civilian Public Service camps where conscientious objectors could render alternative service, especially in forestry, agriculture, and environmental protection. Even within historic peace churches, claims of conscience were not exercised uniformly. Many chose alternative service, while others agreed to serve in the armed forces. Seventh-day Adventists provided a significant number of objectors during the war, as did some mainline Protestants. While not technically pacifists (since they believed they would participate in God’s future war), Jehovah’s Witnesses declined to participate in this human war and often ended up imprisoned for their refusal.
The vast majority of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews joined in the war in an effort to see that a just and durable peace followed the end of the war. While the Allied forces spoke chiefly in terms of unconditional surrender, many religious and political leaders argued for a higher moral solution. A Presbyterian layman named John Foster Dulles (later secretary of state) headed a group of church leaders in considering the proper grounds for an enduring peace. The World Council of Churches, organized in Amsterdam in 1948, gave support to international relief for refugees and prisoners of war, along with assistance to European churches devastated by the bombings and military occupations. A host of church-related entities also worked tirelessly all around the world, trying to alleviate the harms caused by war as well the conditions that tended to lead to war.
Sometimes the service rendered was personal and immediate, for example a cup of cold milk to a starving child at the edge of the Sahara Desert. Other times the service was more impersonal but more far-reaching, such as demonstrations to farmers in India of fertilizers that could increase food production by over 300 percent. Smallpox inoculations were administered in North Africa, and penicillin protection was provided in the Middle East. The creation of the United Nations in 1945 soon led to other worldwide humanitarian efforts such as the World Health Organization, the Children’s Emergency Fund, and the Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
Not all harms resulted from the military might of nations at war. The extermination in Germany of millions of Jews and others in concentration campus was the product of coldly calculated policies of state. During the war, some warned of Adolf Hitler’s genocidal killing. Between 1936 and 1943, about 150,000 Jewish refugees were settled in the United States (a far smaller number than those who suffered and died in the concentration camps).
Only when allied troops liberated those camps did the full horror of gas chambers and mass burials become evident. The Holocaust sickened the souls of modern men and women, even as it challenged the traditional efforts of theology to account for evil, embodied in such a real-life manner that mocked the very concept of civilization. Elie Wiesel, a childhood survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp who came to the United States in 1956, expressed the idea of God’s silence in the face of such evil. Wiesel argued that, rather than losing faith, we must continue to believe in God as wequestion him. Wiesel further noted that the whole rabbinical tradition of Judaism involved questioning. Other Holocaust survivors insisted that Hitler’s campaign against the Jews must not be allowed any postwar triumphs over Jewish identity and determination.
In 1945, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tested faith and challenged humanity to find a moral power equal to the awesome might of atomic power. With the single bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the United States wrought destruction on a scale that was beyond imagining up until then: 100,000 Japanese killed and another 100,000 mortally wounded. Though an indeterminate number of lives were saved by this power that brought World War II quickly to an end, it also put in the hands of human beings, and many nations, a force that took on a life of its own. Some saw religion as the only possible restraining counterforce that was capable of instructing men and women in the art (and necessity) of peacemaking and arms control.
Richard Fagley, a member in 1945 of the Federal Council of Churches’ Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, wrote after the bombs were dropped on Japan that the only alternative to total world disaster was repentance and regeneration. The oneness of all humankind, rather than the competitiveness among all, must become the guiding principle by which the world is safeguarded and civilization saved. Fagley’s call for a religious solution came as the world entered the atomic age, but questions related to nuclear weapons would become more important in the decades ahead.
Warring for the Hearts and Minds
In the years 1953-1961, a measure of peace and prosperity settled upon the land. During those years, Billy Graham came to prominence, becoming the leading revivalist in the second half of the twentieth century. Emphasizing a gospel of individual repentance and conversion, Graham saw himself as an evangelist above all else–a proclaimer of the good news that Christ died for all and was prepared to redeem or save those that believed. He acknowledged that an evangelist was not primarily a theologian or a social reformer, and that the evangelist’s message was not the whole message of religion to a modern world. But the evangelist’s task and message were excellent places to begin in promoting spiritual matters; after changing the hearts of people, one may proceed to transform the world.
Over the years, Graham grew in his understanding of how much responsibility individual Christians bore for applying religion to large social and political problems. In 1960, he pointed out that faith must express itself in action. While he recognized the social dimension of religion, he argued that reform must begin with the individual. The experience of conversion does not take men or women out of society, but rather it enables them to work as partners with God more powerfully than ever before to reform social ills.
As an adviser to presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, Graham enjoyed an unusual degree of public visibility. His many big-city crusades (or gatherings) drew thousands of people to football stadiums and civic auditoriums They also received great attention as radio and television carried the revival meetings into millions of homes across the country. In addition to being a public representative of religion, Graham was the leader of a new religious conservatism or neo-evangelicalism that was to play an increasingly prominent place in the affairs of the nation. With Graham’s support, the magazine Christianity Today was launched in 1956, which gave his movement visibility and respectability. Neo-evangelicals were no longer perceived as fringe critics of culture but were now regarded as responsible defenders of revivalism, and religion itself, to enhance personal and corporate life. Through a network of activities and agencies, Graham helped create an alternative between the older versions of fundamentalism and liberalism.
No other revivalist enjoyed the popularity that Graham did in the 1950s and 1960s. But some preachers, in their own churches or in television studios, won audiences of enormous dimension. They did so by proclaiming a message of self-confidence, returning to and extending the messages of inner peace and outward prosperity that had developed at the turn of the twentieth century. Norman Vincent Peale, a Dutch Reformed pastor in New York City, astounded many with the success of his 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking, which gave the advice to “believe in yourself.” Peale argued that developed habits of self-affirmation can lead to successful achievement–to health, wealth, and happiness.
In a similar way, Monsignor Fulton Sheen declared that the conversion experience makes “somebodies” out of “nobodies” and improves health by curing the ills of a disordered and restless mind. Conversion cures depression and enables the soul to live in constant consciousness of God’s presence. In his popular television programs, Sheen inspired confidence by his mere presence and steady assurance, promising a kind of calm that could only come from faith.
In a great deal of the teaching of Peale and Sheen, as well as in inspirational writing such as that of Rabbi Joshua Liebman, the emphasis lay more on changing one’s internal attitude than on changing the external world. Emphasis often rested upon what religion can do for the individual (for comfort and healing), rather than civic engagement and social service. Other religious bodies in this same period approached religion much more in terms of criticizing and reshaping political and social structures, as well as dedication to causes beyond individual lives and even beyond the community or country.
In the 1950s, many liberal church members found themselves under attack as communists, or at least communist sympathizers or those deceived by communists. While some anti-communists sincerely feared the overthrow of the American system, others used that fear to weaken the forces of political and religious liberalism. Best known is Joseph McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin, who fostered exaggerated anxieties of a communist takeover and created an atmosphere where accusations against suspected subversives were rampant.
In 1953, J. B. Matthews, chief investigator for the House of Representatives Committee Probing Un-American Activities, publicly charged that since World War II the Communist Party had enlisted the support of at least seven thousand clergymen as either party members or sympathizers. Without trying to prove the validity of his claim, he declared that the social gospel in Protestant theological seminaries had drawn clergymen to defect to communism. His claim suggested that passion for social justice must be put in check, and patriotism must be the highest concern, in order for accusations of communism to be avoided.
One person who was frequently accused was Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, who served as president of the Federal Council of Churches from 1944 to 1946 and president of the World Council of Churches for six years after that. The Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives repeatedly implied that Oxnam was either a communist, or someone who was deceived into allowing the communists to use him for their causes. Finally, in 1953, Bishop Oxnam demanded to be heard before the committee.
After affirming his unwavering Christian faith and complete rejection of atheism and materialism, Oxnam severely rebuked the committee for making unverified claims and taking no responsibility for either these claims or the untold damage caused by the claims. The bishop than stated that the churches have done more to destroy the communist threat to faith and freedom than all investigating committees combined.
When Senator McCarthy was formally censured by the U.S. Senate in 1954, his popularity and influence quickly faded, along with that of the many investigators, critics, and opportunists who followed him. The effect on American religion, and especially upon liberal Protestantism, was to weaken its moral leadership in areas of social justice, where such leadership was critically required. An atmosphere of peace and prosperity eventually led to a sense of complacency regarding social injustices and inequities.
Religious Renewal
For two decades following World War II, mainstream religion prospered. Church membership rose to nearly 65 percent of the national population, its highest proportion ever. Among Catholics, weekly attendance at worship reached about 60 percent. Financial contributions to churches and synagogues increased steadily to billions of dollars. In 1957, the U. S. Bureau of the Census conducted a poll that discovered that 96 percent of the nation’s citizens identified with a religious tradition, whether or not they were members or attendees (including 70 million as Protestant, 30 million as Catholic, 4 million as Jewish, and a few other categories).
The two decades following the Second World War were growth years for the major denominations and many of the minor ones as well. Religion also enjoyed a good deal of public confidence, as measured by the regular Gallup polls that inquired about such things. The most obvious sign on the American landscape of renewal was a burst of ecclesiastical building, using new technologies and architectural forms that strove to reflect the current styles of building (as older church styles were seen as suggesting that God did not exist today).
In the 1950s, therefore, the United States witnessed the designing and constructing of many sophisticated, contemporary church buildings. For example, the Priory of St. Gregory the Great was built in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, with sheet copper for the roofs, concrete slabs for the walls, and redwood board for much of the interior, creating a stunning image of innovation. The First Presbyterian Church of Cottage Grove, Oregon, on the other hand, avoided all traditional symbols such as the use of an arch, steeple, or stained glass, instead using simplicity in both its interior and external design. In Bloomington, Indiana, the First Baptist Church intended its new structure to partake of modern materials and modern methods of construction, providing a simple and meaningful place of worship and a Christian symbol that would speak of the search for God in the forms and with the materials of the current time.
At the same time that American religious communities were exploring new architectural forms, they participated in a liturgical renewal as well. Liturgy (which literally means the work of the people) gathers worshipers together in a collective ritual of celebration. Through liturgy, Jews honor the exodus from Egypt and many other events in the Jewish past. In a similar way, Christian liturgy centers on remembrances of things past, notably the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. In the 1950s and beyond, more conscious attention was given to the place of such remembrances, even among groups that thought of themselves as non-liturgical. Many denominations also used prayers and hymns of other denominations, and the Roman Catholic activity of the early 1960s was particularly prominent.
In 1960, the voting public of the country for the first time elected a Roman Catholic as its president: John F. Kennedy. Religion was prominently under discussion in this presidential campaign, as it had with Alfred Smith’s campaign thirty years earlier. In the generation since then, pluralism had become more acceptable or at least more obvious, and the realities of nativism (preference for native-born Americans and standard American customs) and anti-Catholic bigotry had become less acceptable or at least less blatant. Yet Kennedy found the religious question pressed upon him continually during his campaign, given concerns that he would be influenced by the pope (an authority outside the United States).
Before the election, Kennedy dealt directly with the fact of his Catholicism before the Society of American Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C., before the press in Los Angeles after he won the Democratic nomination, and before the Ministerial Association in Houston. To each audience, he made the point that, should he become president, he was committed to upholding and defending the U.S. Constitution, including its First Amendment guarantees regarding freedom of religion. He also argued that he wished no votes to be cast either for or against him merely because he was Catholic. He further noted that Roman Catholics had served in every other conceivable civil capacity without questions concerning their religion being raised.
Kennedy observed that the presidency in the United States was not an instance of rule by one person. No president could ignore Congress, the courts, or voters. Though he expressed concern that anti-Catholic bigotry might prevail in the election, such bigotry had lessened sufficiently to permit his election in 1960.
Two years before Kennedy’s election, an Italian churchman who took the title John XXIII was elected pope, serving from 1958 to 1963 and proving even more revolutionary than America’s election of a Catholic president. Though he was in his late seventies and chosen as a presumably safe, compromise pope, he startled many by his own openness as well as his intent to create a more open church. Through his personality, common touch, and willingness to leave the confines of the Vatican, he inspired affection and trust around the world. During his service, he labored to help his church loosen the hold of the Vatican’s entrenched bureaucracy.
Two major writings demonstrated his spirit to embrace the modern world rather than condemn it. In 1961, he wrote a letter that addressed itself to social, economic, and political questions in light of 20th century concerns and demands. He probed the standards for justice and equity in an industrialized world, searched for ways to assure a family life that would be decent and humane, defended social insurance and social security as appropriate means for reducing imbalances among social classes, and spoke on behalf of an improved rural life through government provisions for essentials such as pure drinking water, good housing, decent roads, and quality education. He further had concern for the relationship between economically advantaged nations and those in the process of development.
His second writing, issued in 1963, attracted even more attention, both due to its topic as well as because the pope went out of his way to address it to those beyond the Roman Catholic community, to all people of good will. Beginning with a recognition of basic human rights, John XXIII urged that all governments provide a charter of fundamental human rights incorporated into their constitutions. The pope also urged a cessation of the arms race, an obliteration of all lingering traces of racism, and a limitation on the expanding power of individual nations. He argued that worldwide problems required worldwide authority, perhaps a world government, or at least a greatly strengthened United Nations.
John XXIII is best remembered for calling the modern world’s most important church council: Vatican II, which met from 1962 to 1965. This was the most ambitious council of the Roman Catholic Church in centuries, as it made an effort to come to terms with the non-Catholic world, the non-Christian world, and the secular and pluralistic world. Though the pope died before the council completed its work, he did see the Vatican opening to the outside world. Vatican II led to the publication of sixteen official documents, which brought great changes to the Roman Catholic Church.
The Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray introduced into Vatican II what was generally called the American document—the “Declaration on Religious Liberty.” Murray defended the document and persuaded the majority that the time had come for the Catholic Church to recognize the reality and desirability of religious freedom. In addition to being symbolically important, the document also had substantive value. The church now recognized the inappropriateness of coercion in matters of conscience. The council agreed that the exercise of religion consisted of voluntary and free acts to set a life toward God; no human power could command or prohibit acts of this kind. The council further acknowledged that the rights of free assembly and freedom of worship were required by human nature and the nature of religion.
Vatican II did much more than issue a pronouncement in favor of religious freedom. It also revised the liturgy so that a far wider use of the language of the people replaced the mandatory use of Latin. It also revised the Catholic worship service to more clearly show the purpose of its several parts and the connection between them. In addition, it recognized other Christians (non-Catholics) as truly brothers and sisters rather than heretics. Special effort was made to soften the antagonism between the Western and Eastern churches. The council further removed the notion that all Jews past and present were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. It affirmed God’s all-embracing love that extends to all people, and it denounced anti-Semitism.
While Vatican II could not address every issue that faced the Roman Catholic Church, it revealed a new spirit of dialogue and mutual respect and new courage in confronting the problems of its own history and the world’s history. Vatican II sought to modernize the Catholic Church, making it relevant for the current time. Vatican II set a model for religious renewal, which was imitated by some and scorned by others. While some Roman Catholics broke away afterward, preferring to leave the Latin worship unchanged, most American churchgoers accepted the fresh perspective and challenges offered by the council.
Chapter 16. The Courts, the Schools, the Streets
In the years following World War II, the powerful presence of religion in the nation was obvious even to secular Americans. Religion had influence in numerous public places: the daily press, political campaigns, public schools, protests, calls for constitutional amendments, and legal battles. Courts were crowded as religious partisans cried out for justice and fairness. From the perspective of litigation, the nation had entered a new era of conflict over religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
For the first 150 years of the nation’s existence, religious issues rarely reached the Supreme Court. Beginning in the 1940s, however, religion cases increased in both frequency and difficulty over the following decades. The public divided sharply over one judicial decision after another, and the court justices were rarely much closer to agreement. More and more it appeared that religion in America was a matter for the courts.
There were several reasons for this dramatic increase in litigation. First, the Supreme Court in a 1940 case decided that the First Amendment was applicable to the states; in other words, states no less than the federal government itself were bound to respect the free exercise of religion and avoid any establishment of religion. Second, by World War II the ever-growing pluralism of the country had become so evident that it was impossible to pretend all citizens believed and behaved alike. Third, specific organizations helped bring religion cases to the highest court in order to test the protections and limits of the of the First Amendment with respect to religion. Fourth, the federal Constitution itself became increasingly the symbol of national unity as well as the source of both goodness and truth; citizens turned more and more often to the Constitution for direction in the morally complex world. Finally, liberal demands for a more thoroughly secular state reached a critical point by the 1960s; concerns about numerous religious matters were finally able to get a continuous hearing.
The Supreme Court in each decade of the 1970s and 1980s heard more church-state cases than in the years from 1790 to 1940 put together. Further, issues once decided continued to appear in slightly different forms or were decided again with surprisingly different results. Just as the Court, American society searched for a clear path for a viable relationship between religion and public life.
Cases of Conscience
The “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment has been called upon many times to protect behavior guided by conscience and shaped or determined by religion. No group in America’s history has done more to clarify the meaning of the free exercise of religion than the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have pressed their claims through the legal system many times. Members of this group have had confrontations with law enforcement and judicial agencies numerous times over matters such as preaching in public parks, distributing religious literature, trespassing, and failing to obtain a municipal license. Two famous cases attracted the most attention, as they concerned the requirement that the salute and Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag be offered as a daily exercise in public schools.
In 1940, the U.S Supreme Court heard the Minersville School District v. Gobitis case that arose from the refusal of two Jehovah’s Witnesses children (William and Lilian Gobitis), to salute the flag and join in the Pledge of Allegiance each school day. Their refusal was based on their denomination’s belief that this action was idolatry (honoring an image and essentially having a God before Jehovah). The group had come to a similar conclusion in 1930s Germany, when it decided that the salute to Hitler was a form of idolatry. State courts in America who heard such cases regularly decided against the Jehovah’s Witnesses or dismissed the case, deciding that there was no substantial question of religious freedom.
In 1940, the Supreme Court (by a vote of eight to one) ruled in a similar way–that the requirement imposed by the Pennsylvania school district was constitutional. Justice Felix Frankfurter described the importance of the flag as the symbol of national unity. On the other hand, Justice Harlan Stone dissented from the majority view, declaring that the very essence of civil and religious liberty was the freedom from compulsion to think and speak in a way that was untrue to one’s religion. Frankfurter prevailed in the case.
There were two results of this decision against the Jehovah’s Witnesses that quickly became apparent. First, popular resentment against the group grew as wartime patriotism grew stronger. Members of the group were victims of mob violence all across the country. Many schools also added the formal requirement to salute the flag (if they did not previously have this requirement), making public school attendance increasingly problematic for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Second, legal scholars, religious leaders, editorial writers, and others joined together to condemn the 1940 decision as undemocratic, creating a burden on this widely persecuted minority. It soon became clear that several members of the Court were having second thoughts.
In 1943, the Court agreed to hear a similar case arising from West Virginia. But the results were vastly different. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Court reversed its earlier finding in an eight-to-one decision. Speaking for the Court, Justice Robert Jackson agreed that national unity was vital, yet compulsion should not be used to achieve unity. No official should prescribe a correct view in politics, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to make confessions or take actions that concern such matters. While Justice Frankfurter wrote a dissent, he did not prevail in this case.
Religious minorities also helped broaden the understanding of free exercise with respect to the many Sunday laws on the books of most towns east of the Mississippi River. In this instance, Orthodox Jews and Seventh-day Adventists led the judicial battles. For these two groups, the Sabbath began at sundown on Friday morning, not at sunrise on Sunday morning. Orthodox Jews, who closed their shops on Saturday as a religious requirement, were also required to close their shops on Sunday as a legal requirement, and thus suffered economic penalties not faced by those who accepted Sunday as the Sabbath. In 1961, the Court heard two cases that challenged the validity of the Sunday closing laws. Chief Justice Earl Warren in both cases argued that the laws were more part of general welfare regulation than a sign of sectarian favoritism, and that the laws met the tests of constitutionality, only having an indirect burden on the free exercise of religion.
In the first case (McGowan v. Maryland), Justice William Douglas dissented sharply, pointing out that the state had no right to make protesting citizens refrain from doing innocent acts on Sunday, merely to avoid offending sentiments of Christian neighbors. In the second case (Brownfield v. Brown), Justice Potter Stewart dissented, calling the law a cruel choice that requires Orthodox Jews to choose between their religious faith and economic survival.
In the case of Sherbert v. Verner, two years later, the Court decided that a Seventh-Day Adventist who had been denied unemployment benefits for refusing to work on Saturday was entitled to such benefits. Justice William Brennan argued that to hold otherwise would be to force a person to choose between following a religion and accepting work. Justice Stewart agreed with the Court’s opinion in this instance, arguing that the Constitution commands the protection of religious freedom for everyone.
In America’s history, the delicacy of the matter of conscience has been most apparent in the many cases relating to military conscription and service. As long as the nation has been involved in war, it has wrestled with the issue of conscientious objection to war and sometimes to any involvement in a war effort. In the 1960s, however, the problem was greatly aggravated by the duration and unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the widespread refusal of young men either to register for the draft or to accept conscription into the armed forces. The Court now had the task of trying to interpret the language of Congress in its selective service acts, and in this debate about legislative language and intent, the significance of religious conscience was at stake.
In the 1965 case of United States v. Seeger, the Court explored the breadth of the word religion, for Congress had specified exemption from the military draft would be granted only to those who, due to religious belief, were opposed to participation in war in any form. Five years later, however, the Court (in Welsh v. United States) began to pull buck, as the justices divided over the question of how broadly the matter of conscience could be interpreted. They questioned whether conscientious objection always had a religious base, whether one could object only to a particular war (rather than war in general) on conscientious grounds, and how the decision was to be made between the requirements of national interest on the one hand and the protections of free exercise of religion on the other. A majority of the Court decided that people should be exempted from military service due to matters of conscience, spurred by moral or religious beliefs.
However, the minority of the Court felt that this decision was taking the language of Congress and the Constitution too far, making the privilege of religion extend to every conceivable sincere belief. A year later, the Court pulled back even more, holding that not all dissent and disagreement about war (specifically the Vietnam War) involved a truly conscientious objection.
The Supreme Court justices, like Americans more generally, had the dilemma of taking the matter of national solidarity with the utmost seriousness, while respecting the right of all Americans to the free exercise of religion that often conflicts with the apparent interest of the state. Holding these competing principles together in a proper relationship has long been a great constitutional balancing act.
The Schools, Public and Private
In public schools, the issue with respect to religion has been primarily curricular: what can be taught or recited in the classroom. In private schools, the issue with respect to religion has been primarily financial: what can be paid for in the sectarian or parochial school by the tax monies of all citizens. Both issues have proved troublesome to the courts and have aroused widespread public passion and involvement in a way that few other policy questions have managed to do in times of peace.
In public schools, recent controversy has most intensely involved the issues of prayer and Bible reading, and with creationism (creation science). Despite the long history of prayer and Bible reading in schools, it was not until the 1960s that the U. S. Supreme Court dealt directly with these practices.
In 1962, the case of Engel v. Vitale concerned the recital of a prescribed prayer, written by the regents of the state, that was required in every public school classroom in New York. The surprising court decision, which was unanimous, was that such a practice was unconstitutional and must therefore cease. The public outcry condemning the decision was enormous.
The majority opinion, delivered by Justice Hugo Black, stated that the New York practice violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, given that the state was engaged in promoting an affirmation of divine faith and supplication for the blessings of God. After reviewing the history of religious freedom in America, Black acknowledged that the nation’s religious heritage was rich and vital, and the Court’s decision showed no hostility toward religion. On the contrary, the First Amendment and Court decision aimed to put an end to government control of religion and prayer and not destroy either. Government should abstain from writing or sanctioning official prayers, leaving that purely religious function to the people themselves and those they look to for religious guidance.
Large segments of the public cried out that the decision was antireligious, atheistic, and perhaps even inspired by communism. Political figures generally condemned the decision (though President Kennedy was an exception). Many diverse religious leaders also expressed outrage (including Billy Graham).
On the other hand, several Protestant theologians praised the opinion for protecting the integrity of religious conscience and the proper function of religious and governmental institutions. Baptist spokespeople from both north and south approved of the decision, though acknowledging the criticism at the grassroots level. Many Jewish organizations joined together to file a brief in opposition to the use of the prescribed prayer. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that the decision was good, as it reaffirmed the separation of church and state, which was basic to the nation.
The following year, the Court (in the Abington v. Schempp case) went on to say that ritual Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the public schools were likewise unconstitutional. In this case, the Court made a clear distinction between the practice of religion on the one hand and the study of religion on the other; the former was clearly unconstitutional so far as governmental agencies or schools were concerned, but the latter was appropriate and should be encouraged. The Bible and religion could be studied, but religious exercises in schools were seen as a violation of the First Amendment.
Reactions to these two major Supreme Court judgments took a variety of forms. Many school districts continued, as before, with daily prayers and reading of the Bible. Others complied with the rulings. Still others tried in some way to restrict the power of the Court; one Texas congressman even introduced a bill that would empower Congress to override any ruling of the Court with which it disagreed. The most sustained reaction, which continued for decades, was to propose an amendment to the Constitution that would negate the 1962 and 1963 Court decisions.
Soon after these decisions, about 150 different amendment proposals were put forward in Congress, and many more suggestions were offered outside the legislative halls. Congressman Frank Becker gathered much support for an amendment that would make prayer and Bible reading in public schools or government places constitutional, if participation is on a voluntary basis. But Congressman Emmanuel Celler held hearings before his House Judiciary Committee that showed much public resistance to such an amendment, including of major religious bodies. Becker’s amendment never came to a vote.
In the Senate, Everett Dirksen introduced a similar amendment that did come to a vote in September 1966. It was narrowly defeated, but the cause remained alive. Other amendments were proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, including one by President Ronald Reagan that said that individual or group prayers in public schools or other institutions should not be prohibited, though participation was not to be required. Though the amendment had wide support, it did not receive the required two-thirds vote for a constitutional amendment.
Since the 1980s, there have continued to be conflicts over prayer in the public schools. Highly publicized cases have emerged involving student-led prayer before football games as well as organized prayer at school assemblies such as graduation ceremonies. The issue has come to center on the extent to which student-conducted prayer is considered a voluntary rather than an officially sanctioned activity. Consensus over how to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable devotional activities in the public schools has been difficult to reach.
The other religious contest in which public schools have been involved concerns the curriculum itself: required or recommended books, philosophies followed, and courses of study all students are obliged to pursue. Some school districts have engaged in censorship on religious grounds. Other districts have been presented with parental petitions to excuse their children from certain required courses, to permit home instruction, or to create a separate curriculum. The most heated debates have centered on science courses in which evolution is taught not as theory but as fact, with no alternative explanations for the origins of life offered.
The alternative most frequently proposed has been a religious explanation of those origins, such as explanations based on the biblical book of Genesis and bearing the name creationism. In January of 1982, the U. S. district judge in Arkansas declared a law titled Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science to be in violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, arguing that it amounted to government sponsorship and support for a particular sectarian point of view.
Afterward, the U. S. Supreme Court was asked to consider an even older Arkansas law that prohibited teachers in public schools and universities from teaching any theory suggesting that humans evolved from some other form of life. The Court agreed unanimously that the 1928 law was defective, since it advanced the narrow religious interest that saw the book of Genesis as the correct teaching regarding human origins and amounted to religious favoritism, rather than neutrality.
In 1986 and 1987, a creation-science initiative from the state of Louisiana was the subject of Supreme Court argument and action as another balanced treatment law came up for review. In Edwards v. Aguillard, the Court said that the history of legislative action in Louisiana clearly demonstrated that its purpose was to give advantage to a particular religious doctrine that rejects the factual basis of evolution. Its constitutional defectiveness involved advancing a specific religious doctrine. Two dissenters argued that the law also had a secular basis that must be recognized.
Judicial rulings have repeatedly gone against creationism, though not always unanimously. One consequence of the public discussion has been a new awareness that Darwinism is indeed only a theory, though admittedly the highly favored theory of the worldwide scientific community. Another consequence has been to arouse among certain groups more resentment against the public schools, with a number of parents, on religious grounds, turning to private education or home schooling. But private education also has involved much litigation and discussion about the separation of church and state.
Within private education, the leading issues remained financial. Money issues took a large variety of forms. The Supreme Court felt it necessary to invent a new set of guidelines to determine whether or not the First Amendment establishment clause was being violated. Yet the simple prohibition from Congress establishing religion proved inadequate for contemporary questions regarding textbook purchases, salary subsidies, construction loans, tax credits, voucher plans, and other financial help.
Faced with numerous cases, the Court asked if a particular law mainly benefited the child or the church school, if the law had a prevailingly secular purpose, if the effect of the law was to advance or inhibit religion (or be neutral in regard to religion), if the administration of the law required government to become overly entangled with religion, and if such a law was likely to unify the population, or divide it through religious disagreement. Given these questions, the court had difficulty in deciding cases or reaching unanimity in its decisions.
The 1947 case of Everson v. Board of Education is famous for several reasons. First, it explicitly applied the Establishment Clause to the states (through the Fourteenth Amendment). Second, with its five-to-four decision, it began a tradition of a much-divided court in cases related to religious schools. Third, it used the strongest separationist language imaginable yet decided in favor of a practice that seemed to some the opposite of separation in matters of church and state. The case involved a New Jersey law that authorized school districts to use public transportation (rather than school buses), reimbursing children for the bus fares (including children in one township that rode public buses to parochial schools).
Justice Hugo Black, speaking for the majority of five, concluded the Court’s opinion with the argument that the New Jersey law did not breach the separation of church and state. The dissenters, in contrast, argued that the principle of keeping these two areas separate was the main issue at stake, rather than how much money was being spent to transport children to parochial schools.
Much debate over such issues lay ahead in the 1960s-1980s. The Court divided again and again, and state legislatures tried repeatedly to find other means for financial assistance to parochial schools. In a New York case in 1968, a majority of six justices agreed that a state law that would lend textbooks free of charge to all students in grades 7-12 (including parochial school students) was constitutional. Dissenters called this law a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Six justices decided the law was constitutional and would stand.
In the 1974 Meek v. Pittenger case, from Pennsylvania, the Court divided once again six to three, but this time the majority moved in the direction of restricting the use of public monies for parochial schools. Helping with textbooks was ruled acceptable, but helping with other services was not acceptable. Several justices concurred in part but dissented in part.
The division of the Court reflected the division of the larger society. Public schools in the 1960s and beyond came under increasing criticism from many segments of society. Meanwhile, private schools ceased to exist mainly for Roman Catholics, as many traditional supporters of public schools now began to develop schools of their own, for reasons involving religion, morals, safety, quality of education, or race or social class. By the 1980s, efforts to find more suitable means for publicly supporting private education had won some significant victories.
One notable and surprising victory pertained to a Minnesota case the Court decided in 1983. In Mueller v. Allen, the Court examined a state law that permitted all parents to deduct from their taxes between five and seven hundred dollars per child for tuition, textbooks, and transportation to any school, public or private. Judges were divided five to four, with the majority finding the Minnesota law permissible because any aid that reached the parochial schools was a result of individual parental decision and did not involve state approval. Dissenters observed that most of the private school students attended schools that included religious instruction, that no effort had been made to restrict the public monies to secular (rather than religious) uses, and that the decision in this case contradicted earlier judgments of the Court.
The justices recognized that they followed no clear direction, and decisions were likely to fluctuate from case to case. While one justice confessed that judicial decisions often must seem arbitrary, another claimed that the Court sacrifices clarity for flexibility. Political changes, including the appointment of new justices, aggravated the difficulties.
Matters of Life and Death
Americans have encountered even more divisive controversies than those described above. While the controversies tended to be more personal and private, their resolution was repeatedly sought in very public ways. Contending parties have even debated in the streets, where violence sometimes has replaced debate.
State and federal courts have been required to deal with laws concerning contraceptive devices and birth control instruction. They have had to decide on cases involving euthanasia, made more complex by the modern technical ability to sustain biological life long after life of any discernable quality has ceased. In the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses, courts have had to remove a child temporarily from the custody of parents so that a life-saving blood transfusion might be administered (as Jehovah’s Witnesses forbid blood transfusions). In groups that practice faith healing, if a person died without conventional medical assistance being made available, questions of criminal neglect demanded legal resolution. Numerous other social issues have emerged as subjects of religious debate and disagreement.
One subject has surpassed all others in the degree of public attention it has received and the vigor it has aroused on each side. Abortion is not a church-state question in the sense that the First Amendment provides the grounds for judicial opinion, but it is a religious question in the sense that churches and religious associations have acted repeatedly as antagonists, litigants, or lobbyists. Some observers have referred to this issue as a religious war or as the critically divisive issue in a larger culture war.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the move to eliminate criminal penalties for abortion gained much religious support particularly among Protestants and Jews. A professor at the Episcopal Theological School led much pro-choice reform, aided by the official statements of such denominations as the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church. Many evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants joined the pro-life effort, as did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the Roman Catholic Church has been seen as the most consistent and powerful opponent of abortion.
In 1973, the Supreme Court at last agreed to hear an abortion case, and the result in Roe v. Wade increased the social and religious divisions, becoming a rallying point for both critics and supporters of the Court’s decision. The Court began by recognizing that this was an issue of utmost complexity and deepest conviction. It then reviewed historical attitudes regarding abortion from the ancient world up through English Common Law and early American law. It also evaluated the official pronouncements of such agencies as the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the Roman Catholic Church, the National Council of Churches, and others. As a result of this extensive review, the Court decided that in the first trimester of pregnancy, the decision about abortion must be left to the medical judgment of the attending physician. In the second trimester, the state may, if it so chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways reasonably related to maternal health. And in the final trimester, the state may, if it so chooses, regulate or even prohibit abortion except where it is judged necessary for the life and health of the mother.
One of the two dissenters in this case, Justice William Rehnquist argued that the issue should be left to the states rather than the federal government. This dissenting opinion gained the support of conservatives, who also criticized the involvement of the federal government in subsidizing and funding abortions. Legislative lobbying, constitutional amendment proposals, and popular demonstrations occurred after the court case. President Reagan identified closely with the pro-life cause.
In presidential campaigns, as well as in state and local races, abortion has remained a controversial issue, for some the single issue on which to base a vote. In appointments to the Supreme Court, as well as to all lower federal courts, the prospective jurist’s views on abortion often overshadow everything else. Efforts for more constructive dialogue have focused on areas of agreement such as preventing teen pregnancies and reducing the number of abortions, in an attempt to bring people together for civil discussion. However, the abortion debate remains a difficult religious and social issue with far greater potential to divide than unify.
Native Americans and Religious Freedom
One of the most important and contentious church-state debates in recent decades has concerned the religious freedom of Native Americans, especially the freedom to use the cactus peyote (a hallucinogenic drug) in religious ceremonies. Just as missionaries and government officials felt they had virtually succeeded in their programs of assimilation and conquest, a new religious movement, centering on the ritual ingestion of peyote, came to prominence among Plains Indians at the end of the 19th century and soon spread much more widely. Peyote had long been in use among tribes in Mexico and Texas, employed in healing ceremonies, visionary practices, and divination (or foretelling the future). When the peyote movement took off among tribes across the western United States after 1900, missionaries responded with alarm. Native practitioners claimed that peyotism was closely allied with Christianity, producing a Native American Church, but this claim only aroused the anger of missionaries, who considered the use of peyote to be sacrilegious (or even to constitute a false religion).
As early as 1897 and increasingly by the 1910s, missionaries and their supporters lobbied for legislation to suppress the peyote religion. Amidst the temperance crusades and the prohibition agenda that sought to make the use of alcohol illegal, the use of peyote was a clear target for reformers, who were sure it was more dangerous to the moral and physical well-being of its partakers than even alcohol. Yet Native Americans, with the help of allies such as the anthropologist James Mooney, held off legislation at the time, leading a campaign to incorporate the movement as a denominational organization and demonstrate that the moral tone of the Native American Church was in keeping with wider religious values of the day. The supportive commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs consolidated the victory in 1934 when he declared that no interference with native religious life or ceremonial expression would be tolerated, insisting on constitutional liberty for natives in religious matters. The Native American Church grew rapidly, becoming the most successful pan-Indian religious movement of the 20th century and now counting about 25 percent of Native Americans among its followers.
Those early successes did not settle the church-state matter, however. In the 1960s, as leaders of the counterculture gave drug use increasing status and often drew on Native American traditions to justify their own experimentation, questions about the legitimacy of the Native American Church were raised again. In 1962, three Navajo Indians in California were arrested for using peyote as part of their religious ritual. Found guilty of violating state law prohibiting drug use, they appealed to the California Supreme Court. The court in 1964 found in favor of the Navajos and their religious freedom, recognizing that, in the pluralistic society of the United States, pressures for religious conformity must be resisted. Interest in permitting free religious expression outweighed interest in enforcing laws against narcotics.
Legal opinion tended to side with the Native American Church in the 1970s. In 1978, the U. S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, declaring it official U. S. policy to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and native Hawaiian, including access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.
Despite this act of Congress, the peyote sacrament in the Native American Church became again the object of much legal dispute in the 1980s and 1990s. In Oregon, Alfred Smith, a counselor in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and member of the Native American Church, was fired from his job in 1984 when he refused to stop participating in the peyote rituals. Denied unemployment benefits by the Oregon Employment Division as a result of state laws prohibiting the use of certain controlled substances, including peyote, Smith countered with a lawsuit claiming that the constitutional guarantee to the free exercise of religion had been violated. Smith won in the Oregon Supreme Court, but the Employment Division v. Smith case then ended up before the Supreme Court in 1990, where Justice Anthony Scalia led the court in a five-to-four decision to reverse the lower court’s ruling. The decision affirmed that the state was under no obligation to create an exemption to regulations on controlled substance because they indirectly impeded religious practice.
The decision shocked and stirred members of the Native American Church, but it also rallied other religious leaders and civil libertarians to demand, in contrast to the judgment, that a state must defend a compelling interest in making laws which impede religious practice. The court decision immediately intensified the legislative conflicts, which resulted in Congress passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 that explicitly restored the standard for the protection of religious liberty and free exercise that was in effect before the Smith case. However, the Supreme Court declared this act unconstitutional in a six-to-three decision in the 1997 City of Boerne, Texas v. Flores case, arguing that Congress had overreached its legislative powers. The conflict continues, with many Native American Church members increasingly turning to state legislatures to continue their fight for the guarantee of religious freedom.
Primary Text 8: From “What Ten Years Have Taught Me” in Christian Century, February 17, 1960 (by Billy Graham)
What ten years have taught me | The Christian Century
The lessons of this decade have been staggering. Many of my original concepts and convictions have become more certain; others have been amplified, enlarged and changed.
First, I recognize more clearly today than I did ten years ago the narrow limits assigned to the evangelist. I take as my definition of evangelism the classic one formed by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Committee of 1918: “To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit that men shall come to put their trust in God through Him, to accept Him as their Savior and serve Him as their King in the fellowship of His Church.”
One of the best definitions of evangelism is that formulated by representatives of 30 Protestant communions at the 1946 meeting in Columbus, Ohio, of the executive committee of the old Federal Council of Churches. It reads: “Evangelism is the presentation of the good news of God in Jesus Christ so that men are brought through the power of the Holy Spirit to put their trust in God, accept Jesus Christ as their Savior from the guilt and power of sin, to follow and serve Him as their Lord in the fellowship of the church and in the vocations of the common life.”
The evangel is the good news that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. The word evangelism comes from the word evangel, which means “good news” or “gospel.” The evangelist is the keryx, or the proclaimer of this message. The Scriptures indicate that when Christ gave gifts to his church, one of the gifts was that of the evangelist (Eph. 4:11). Philip was called an evangelist, and Paul told Timothy to do the work of an evangelist. Yet some in the church refuse—to the detriment of the church—to recognize this particular gift that has been given to some men.
The message of the evangelist is “narrow.” It does not spread-eagle out into the broad ramifications of a total theology or sociology. Contrary to the opinion of some, the evangelist is not primarily a social reformer, a temperance lecturer or a moralizer. He is simply a keryx, a proclaimer of the good news, which in capsule form is “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; . . . was buried, and . . . rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3f). This terse proclamation stretches over the broad frame of man’s basic need. It declares that man is a sinner, that Christ is the only Savior, that Christ lives evermore and that the Scriptures are trustworthy. . . .
A second lesson of the past decade: I have come to face realistically the results of mass evangelism. I am convinced that mass evangelism is not the most ideal method of evangelism. There are many methods that the church can effectively use, and mass evangelism is only one of them. Yet it is an important one.
My associates and I have spent a great deal of time and effort in studying the results of our crusades. Personally I am sick of statistics. How can one translate a reconciled home, a transformed drunkard or a new selfless attitude into a cold statistic? The only reason we keep statistics at all is for the sake of accuracy. If no statistics were kept, the press would exaggerate out of all proportion the number of those who respond to the appeal. For several years we spoke of the responses of the people who came forward in our crusades as “decisions,” but we have even stopped doing that, for only God knows how many have made a definite commitment to Christ. Now we simply call them “inquirers”—people whose interest is sufficiently strong to cause them to make further inquiry about the Christian life. But of course each of these persons is dealt with as an earnest seeker of salvation, as indeed most of them turn out to be. . . .
In the third place, my faith in earlier theological concepts has deepened. For example, the years have brought a deepening conviction that the Word of God is quick and powerful and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
The church has been effective only when it has spoken with authority. Truth begets its own authenticity; if we allow the truth to become adulterated and weakened by rationalisms it loses its power. At one time I grappled with the problem of the authority of the Scriptures. But the problem resolved itself when I finally said, “Lord, I take the Scriptures as thy revealed Word—by faith!” That ended my doubts. From that day to this the Scriptures have been like a rapier in my hand and I am sure than I would be shorn of any effectiveness I may have if this authority were taken from me. Someone will cry “Bibliolotry,” but a soldier need not worship his sword to wield it effectively. I have learned with Jeremiah: “Is not my word like as afire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:29). I am convinced that the reason some ministers are cracking up is that they have no authority. I am thankful that there is a return to biblical preaching in America. The Scriptures are beginning to return to their rightful place as the authority in the church. . . .
A fourth change is to be seen in the fact that during the past ten years my concept of the church has taken on greater dimension. Ten years ago my concept of the church tended to be narrow and provincial, but after a decade of intimate contact with Christians the world over I am now aware that the family of God contains people of various ethnological, cultural, class and denominational differences. I have learned that there can even be minor disagreements of theology, methods and motives but that within the true church there is a mysterious unity that overrides all divisive factors.
In groups which in my ignorant piousness I formerly “frowned upon” I have found men so dedicated to Christ and so in love with the truth that I have felt unworthy to be in their presence. I have learned that although Christians do not always agree, they can disagree agreeably, and that what is most needed in the church today is for us to show an unbelieving world that we love one another. To me the church has become a great, glorious and triumphant organism. It is the body of Christ, and the humblest member is an important part of that body. I have also come to believe that within every visible church there is a group of regenerated, dedicated disciples of Christ.
A fifth change: my belief in the social implications of the gospel has deepened and broadened. I am convinced that faith without works is dead. I have never felt that the accusations against me of having no social concern were valid. Often the message of the evangelist is so personal that his statements on social matters are forgotten or left out when reports are made. It is my conviction that even though evangelism is necessarily confined within narrow limits the evangelist must not hedge on social issues. The cost of discipleship must be made plain from the platform. I have made the strongest possible statements on every social issue of our day. In addition, in our crusades we have tried to set an example. (Naturally, there are some statements that I made a few years ago on sociopolitical affairs that I would like to retract.)
Yet I am more convinced than ever before that we must change men before we can change society. The international problems are only reflections of individual problems. Sin is sin, be it personal or social, and the word repent is inseparably bound up with evangelism. Social sins, after all, are merely a large-scale projection of individual sins and need to be repented of by the offending segment of society. But the task of the evangelist is not merely to reform but to stimulate conversion, for conversion puts man in a position where God can do for him, and through him, what man is incapable of doing for or by himself.
Sixth, I have an increasing confidence in the ultimate triumph of the kingdom of God. I am convinced that history is not wandering aimlessly, but that there is a plan and purpose in what often seems to us hopeless confusion. God has intervened more than once in history, and there is every reason to believe that he will intervene again. Man may build his towers of Babel, as he always has, and the world may marvel at his genius and his ability to make progress even apart from God, but history shows that ultimately man comes down from his tower in confusion and chaos, disillusioned and frustrated. The Scriptures declare that there is only One whose kingdom shall never end. I believe that when our Lord prayed, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” he prayed a prayer which is going to be answered. This will come about not by man’s efforts within history itself but by a direct, climactic intervention of the sovereign God.
Seventh, this past decade has been a period of ripening tares and ripening wheat. During this interval we have seen a strange paradox that often confused and bewildered me. We have seen a revival of religious interest throughout the United States but an acceleration of crime, divorce and immorality. Within the church there is a new depth of commitment, a new sense of destiny and a spirit of revival, yet in the world there is an intensification of the forces of evil. Crime is on the increase. Fear haunts the council halls of the nations. Wars, hot and cold, are being spawned across the world. Family life is threatened by evil forces. And in many places there is a stark lack of social concern. The tares of evil flourish even in the same field with the growing grain of righteousness. But we forget that Christ said: “In the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye first the tares and bind them in bundles and burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn” (Matt. 13:30). The wheat and the tares are destined to grow side by side; when wheat is sown, the Devil sows tares. But a day of separation, an ultimate triumph for truth and righteousness, is coming.
Lecture 9
Chapter 17. Justice, Liberation, Union
When thirteen quarreling colonies managed to agree on the cause of independence from Britain and a few years later agreed on a Constitution, the question of national unity might appear to have been settled. Two hundred years later, however, the American pledge of “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all” remained more a matter of visionary faith than an experiential fact. Some questioned whether this was still an American belief, and others wondered what unity could possibly mean in a society full of divisions based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. While some churches still sought a path of Christian unity in the first half of the twentieth century, the mending of old ecclesiastical divisions still left unfinished most of the larger social issues of reconciliation.
Religion, Social Justice, and Civil Rights
The most pressing religious crusades of the 1950s and 1960s concerned civil rights aimed at improving the status of the nation’s African American citizens. The leader of this crusade was a black Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr. His followers included far more than Baptists or African Americans. Protestant clergy of many denominations, Catholic priests and nuns, and Jewish rabbis and congregants all joined in marching and praying in the interest of justice for all. In solidarity and resistance, they endured abuse, arrest, imprisonment, attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and even death.
King was born in Atlanta, Georgia and attended Morehouse College before undertaking ministerial studies at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and then completing Ph.D. studies in theology at Boston University. He returned to the South in 1954, accepting the position of pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. There, he found himself in the center of an outburst, when one black citizen named Rosa Parks refused to accept the pattern of blacks sitting only in the rear of public buses. Finding all the seats in the rear already taken, she sat in the first available seat in the front of the bus and refused to move. The Montgomery bus boycott began.
Under King’s leadership African Americans, the major patrons of the city’s public transportation system, agreed not to ride the buses again until this pattern of segregated seating was abolished. The nonviolent protest lasted more than a year and resulted in victory on this point. It also thrust King into a role of national leadership that would last for the remaining years of his life.
Marchers moved from Montgomery to Selma in Alabama, from Meridian to Jackson in Mississippi, and from St. Augustine in Florida to Atlanta, as well as to the black ghettoes of northern cities. In 1963, King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama and jailed along with other religious leaders who had joined him in public protest. From the jail, King wrote a letter to some clergy who had complained about activities that took King from his church and pastoral activities in Montgomery. King responded that he was in Birmingham to fight injustice, comparing himself to the Old Testament prophets and the apostle Paul, who went where God sent them to deliver their message (often facing resistance and imprisonment).
In 1963, King carried his message most powerfully to Washington, D.C. when he led a march of tens of thousands. There King spoke not only to the thousands assembled, but also by way of television to millions more. He spoke to the national soul, reminding them that his dream of justice was fundamental to the American dream. In King’s inspiring speech, the religious vision of a beloved community merged with the political vocabulary of democratic freedom.
The next year, following the assassination of President Kennedy, Congress passed a civil rights bill, a process in which the leadership of King made a powerful difference. The visible presence of so wide a spectrum of religious participation in the movement also was critical, as well as the increased lobbying of religious agencies. In 1968, King himself was killed by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee. Yet the push toward racial justice continued.
In 1969, Father Theodore M. Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame, who was himself a courageous spokesman for civil rights, agreed to serve as chair of the federal government’s Civil Rights Commission. The same year, James Forman issued a “Black Manifesto,” which challenged the nation’s religious institutions to cleanse themselves of all institutional racism and begin to repair the damage done to millions of their fellow citizens. An African American theologian named James Cone also joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, later emerging as a leading spokesman for a new kind of religious thinking—a black theology needed due to the failure of white religion to relate the gospel of Jesus Christ to the pain of being black in a white society that he deemed racist.
In a book published in 1970, Cone argued that there can be no Christian theology that is not identified with those who are humiliated and abused, a description he felt applied especially to the black experience in America. He believed that from the African American community could come a revived Christianity that identified with the poor and oppressed, rather than the rich and powerful. He argued that the dominant theology in the United States was that of the white oppressors, which had given religious sanction to the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of black people. He argued that blacks must develop a new kind of theology, a theology of liberation, seeing the Christian gospel as inseparable from the power to end oppression.
Cone’s black theology proved more a theological beginning than an end. Soon leading African American women, such as ethicist Katie Cannon, were developing their own theological voices of liberation in a movement known as Womanism (a term distinguished from feminism as it refers specifically to black women). She argued that black women were the most vulnerable and most exploited members of the American society, who suffered from the constructions of both race and gender.
The civil rights movement among African Americans, along with its theology of liberation, was reflected in the growing efforts on the part of other minorities to gain power in religious and political life. Hispanics, comprising more than one-fourth of all America’s Catholics, gained representation and recognition slowly within Roman Catholicism, as in the wider society. Among the leading proponents of a new activism was the Catholic layman Cesar Chavez, who worked to organize the migrant Mexican laborers in California. He eventually won the support of civil rights advocates. Through long fasts, strikes, and marches, Chavez applied Catholic social teachings to the contemporary economic order.
In 1970, Chavez was invited to San Antonio, Texas to witness Patrick Flores become the first Hispanic elevated to the office of bishop in American Catholicism. In 1979, Flores (the son of migrant farm workers) became the first Mexican American to be elevated to archbishop.
Another important step toward inclusion and fuller recognition included the National Hispanic Pastoral Conferences, which began to be held in 1972. At the second such conference in 1977, the pope lent his blessing, and the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops convened the group with the assurance that the church would do all it could to help people overcome oppression and marginalization. By 1980, the number of Hispanic bishops had grown from one to twelve, and a Secretariat for Hispanic Affairs had become a regular part of the United States Catholic Conference.
In 1983, the nation’s bishops prepared a letter that revealed a new level of consciousness for Catholic Hispanics. It stated that Spanish-speaking parishes should no longer have priests who spoke English only and that liturgy must incorporate the contributions of Hispanic artists and musicians. The priesthood and religious vocations were to be presented as desirable vocations for Hispanic children, and Hispanic parents were encouraged to take pride in having children serve the church in this way. Awareness was also raised regarding social justice issues that affected the Hispanic community, including voting rights, discrimination, immigration rights, the status of farm workers, bilingualism, and pluralism.
By the 1980s and 1990s, Catholic leaders were speaking of a larger Hispanicizing of American Catholicism. Latinos had become crucial in all aspects of Catholic life, from popular devotions to art to food to feast days to pilgrimage sites. Virgilio Elizondo (the son of Mexican immigrants) came to prominence as an interpreter and proponent of Latino religious thought, practice, and culture, sharing in the larger civil rights conviction of holding the United States to its standard of liberty and justice for all.
The future that Elizondo imagines is thoroughly mestizo, a society of cultural, racial, and religious mixing. He has argued that both American Christianity and the wider United States will be shaped more deeply by its encounter with Mexican and Mexican American religious cultures. A number of Mexican practices and Mexican American sacred sites have become popular in the United States. Hispanics are now the nation’s largest ethnic minority.
Gay Rights and Women’s Rights
Confronting the realities of discrimination and inequality in the latter half of the 20th century meant giving attention to issues of gender and sexuality. As with previous struggles for civil rights and social justice, the drive for women’s equality and gay rights has both energized and split America’s religious institutions. In the late 20th century, the ordination of women and gays was a point of controversy. Issues related to gender and sexuality dominated discussion across a wide religious spectrum, forcing every tradition to reconsider its commitments and reexamine its historical positions.
In June 1969, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a club frequented by gays, on the charge that it was operating without a liquor license. A violent confrontation between police and patrons ensued, which spilled out into the streets. The Stonewall riots and protests served to spark a new liberation movement dedicated to protecting and ensuring the civil rights of gays and lesbians.
In October 1968, an openly gay minister named Troy Perry took action that revealed the religious dimensions of the movement. Gathering a small group of worshipers together in his Los Angeles home, he inaugurated a gay and lesbian Christian fellowship. In 1972, he wrote an autobiography that chronicled his early years as a Pentecostal and Baptist preacher and the eventual revoking of his ministerial license due to his homosexuality, as well as describing his vision for a transformed church that was openly accepting of gays and lesbians. Over the next three decades, the group Perry founded grew into a small denomination, the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), with dozens of churches across the country and more than 40,000 members.
The kind of inclusivity for which the UFMCC stands has often met with profound hostility. Local congregations of the group have been the targets of arsonists and vandals, and many of the clergy have been assaulted and threatened. Violence against gays and lesbians has remained rampant across the country, and the UFMCC has had a strong social and political agenda of combating hate crimes. A new religious coalition has emerged within liberal groups that supports federal protections against hate crimes and that stands in solidarity with gay and lesbian Christians.
Beyond confronting the violence against gays and lesbians, religious groups have faced a number of agonizing issues related to the full participation of homosexuals in their communities. Two issues have proven the most controversial: the ordination of gays and lesbians to the ministry and the ceremonial blessing of same-sex unions (or marriages). A North Carolina United Methodist minister named Jimmy Creech became a leader in the late 1980s of the Raleigh Religious Network for Gay and Lesbian Equality. Supporting numerous antidiscrimination measures, Creech lobbied for the legal recognition of gay relationships, rights of adoption for gay parents, repeal of laws against practicing homosexuals, and a compassionate community response to the AIDS crisis. Creech extended the logic of the larger civil rights movement to an attack on the heterosexism of American civil and religious institutions—in other words, preference for heterosexual relationships and discrimination against homosexuals.
A longtime supporter of both gay ordination and same-sex unions, Creech conducted a union ceremony in 1997 for a lesbian couple at a Methodist church in Nebraska, even though the General Conference of the United Methodist Church had formally voted against the ordination of homosexuals in 1988 and against union ceremonies for gay couples in 1996. Creech was brought to church trial, where he was initially acquitted, but he was later found guilty for continuing to perform same-sex union ceremonies. His trials were met with protests on both sides and with extensive media coverage. Creech was stripped of his ministerial credentials in his own church and then moved to the UFMCC, where he continued a campaign of civil disobedience and social action against discrimination of church bodies against gays and lesbians (which he called spiritual violence). The Methodists, along with many other religious bodies, faced ongoing controversy and even church splits over the issues of gay ordination and same-sex unions.
Controversy has been equally intense over women’s liberation and its religious implications. The movement for women’s rights has been long, filled with frustration and disappointment. Rather than supporting the movement, religion has often worked to restrain it. Centuries-old religious traditions and Scriptural precedents made religious institutions centers of male dominance. However, as in other movements for civil rights, religion has also been a source of women’s resistance. Women have led religious movements of their own, dominated church membership rolls, and exercised leadership in areas such as mission, religious education, temperance reform, and health services. Yet women were often denied wider participation in religious service.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, gender-inclusive language has been a particularly fruitful area of controversy and innovation. Standard liturgies and traditional Christian hymns have regularly used the male pronoun not only for God but also for all the people of God, which has proven to be less inviting to those who hear in such words continued patriarchal domination and sexist exclusion. Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether argued that, through language that speaks of the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, religion reflects and helps construct the social reality of male power and privilege, which continues the oppression and marginalization of women.
In seeking to revise gender talk about God, women have sought to transform the very language and liturgies that religious communities employ, and such transformations have been the source of both tremendous creativity and tremendous opposition. In November 1993, a major gathering of feminist theologians and churchgoing women, known as the Re-Imagining Conference, focused on furthering the development of Christian feminist spirituality and ritual and became known for its celebration of the worship of Sophia (or Wisdom) as an ancient feminine aspect of the divine. This idea drew criticism from various conservatives, who saw the matter as apostasy (falling away from the true faith). Revising religious language and liturgy to reflect the values of gender equity and inclusion has proven to be a conflict-ridden proposition.
Gender conflicts are even more serious when dealing not with symbols but with the realities of authority, of office and power. Questions were raised regarding the number of women serving in leadership in local churches and synagogues (as well as governing boards of denominations and seminaries) or who were seen as equals in the professional ministry of various denominations. Issues of women’s ordination dominated all others from the 1960s into the 1990s.
Though the Southern Baptists (the largest Protestant denomination) continued to reserve senior pastor positions for men alone, some Protestant groups (such as Pentecostal and Holiness bodies) had a long tradition of female preaching. Quakers (who had a tradition of no professional clergy) listened to males and females alike, as the Spirit moved people to speak. Early Methodists and Freewill Baptists also were open to women preachers. In Christian Science, the number of female practitioners greatly outnumbered males, and gender equity had been pursued in some other religious bodies. But in the majority of religious groups, allowance for the leadership of women did not come easily.
When the Episcopal Church in 1976 ruled that women could be ordained as priests, a dozen or more churches soon broke away from the parent body, forming a separate diocese for those who sought to maintain a more traditional Church practice. They argued that equality between the sexes did not imply identity of function and that sufficient theological grounds had not been offered for the ordination of women (but merely sociological grounds). The Episcopal Church continued to ordain women priests and then in 1989 confirmed the election of the first female bishop, Barbara Harris. Despite opposition, the Episcopal Church has continued to make professional ministry opportunities available for women.
Within Lutheranism, the progress in permitting ministry careers to women has been uneven, as separate segments of the Lutheran family have moved toward the ordination of women at differing speeds. The Lutheran Church in America in 1966 called for a reexamination of cultural and social differences between men and women, to determine which were outdated and harmful for the church’s ministry. In the late 1960s, three large Lutheran groups held an Inter-Lutheran Consultation on the Ordination of Women. Two of the groups approved the ordination of women by 1970, but the more conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod did not.
Rather than taking steps in the direction of female ordination and greater leadership opportunities for women, some groups have taken steps in the opposite direction. The Southern Baptist Convention had ordained women as early as 1964 (ordaining over 400 women by the mid-1980s). By that time, however, ordaining women to the ministry had become highly controversial, with an increasingly conservative leadership becoming more outspoken in opposition to the ordination of women. At its 1984 annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention declared that women should not assume a role of authority over men. In 1998, the group declared that women were to practice submission to their husbands’ leadership. Women were also removed from the faculty of the denomination’s seminaries, which came under the control of conservatives.
Moderate Southern Baptists have kept up the pressure in support of women’s ordination and women’s leadership. In 1998, William Self, a leading Georgia Baptist and member of the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, argued that the actions of the Southern Baptist Convention in limiting the roles of women in church and society were offensive and that the denomination owed women an apology.
In Roman Catholicism, the question of the ordination of women has been highly visible, but resistance has been successful. Nonetheless, slow changes are under way. In 1972, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious was organized, a body that represented about 90 percent of nuns and female Catholic religious workers in the United States. Two years after its foundation, the conference supported the principle that all ministries in the Church be open to both women and men. In 1976, Catholic women organized a Women’s Ordination Conference to protest the hierarchy in the priesthood.
The following year, the Vatican released a report that addressed the issue of admitting women to the priesthood. It emphasized that Christ was male and only called males as apostles, without evidence of intent to widen the priesthood to include females. This Vatican statement was met with suspicion and ridicule, with the result that the number of American Catholics favoring the ordination of women actually increased. By the 1990s, more than 60 percent of the American Catholic laity favored the ordination of women to the priesthood.
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church confronted special problems regarding the thousands of nuns serving in the United States. First, the general trend toward gender equality and female liberation caused many nuns to resist the severe restrictions of dress, behavior, and male authority. Some small orders disbanded, and thousands of nuns left the monastic life to serve as church administrators, prison chaplains, social workers, professors, and holders of public office. Second, the convent became a less attractive religious vocation for Catholic young women. The number entering any order declined sharply from 30,000 in the years from 1958 to 1962 to fewer than 3000 in the years between 1976 and 1981.
The Catholic Church created more problems regarding women’s issues when in 1968 Pope Paul VI published a writing on human life, which did not modify the church’s historic position with respect to contraception but strongly affirmed the long-standing prohibitions against any form of artificial birth control. Repeated surveys in the United States revealed that Catholics practiced birth control at about the same rate as non-Catholics in similar economic or social classes. Criticism of the pope’s writing abounded, while others simply ignored its prohibitions. Many American Catholic women found themselves in conflict with the Vatican over issues that involved control of their own bodies, whether the issue was birth control, abortion, or premarital sex.
Judaism also moved unevenly toward a full clerical equality for women. Reform Judaism made the initial breakthrough when it ordained its first female rabbi in 1972 (Sally Priesand). However, many congregations refused to hire or even interview her, until the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City offered her the position of assistant rabbi. While noting that Judaism traditionally discriminated against women, Priesand also emphasized Judaism’s flexibility that had enabled it to survive for so many centuries and that likewise would enable her to work toward necessary changes to grant women total equality within the Jewish community.
At the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York City (the leading institution of Conservative Judaism), the faculty in 1979 voted to postpone indefinitely the question of ordaining female rabbis, but then voted again in 1983 to allow such ordination. By that time, Reform Judaism had ordained over sixty young women, and the Reconstructionist branch had ordained over a dozen. While there was vocal resistance among Conservative rabbis to the 1983 decision, no split resulted.
Orthodox Judaism, both in Israel and in America, presented a greater challenge for the ordination of women. In America, this group stood firm against such ordination, though there were some feminist elements in the movement. Blu Greenberg, the wife of an Orthodox rabbi, wrote in 1981 of her gradual realization of the total male domination in that branch of Judaism. She grew more aware of this reality by the stimulus of the 1960s feminist movement. Likewise, Vanessa Ochs has expressed harsh criticism of traditional rabbis, whose refusal to allow women to learn theological matters made her question the wise reputation that they held in Orthodox Judaism.
In one case after another, American religious institutions in the closing years of the 20th century confronted the issues of equity and justice prominently raised by the movements for women’s rights and gay rights. These causes stirred deep scriptural debates and crises of authority in the culture. They also raised fundamental questions about the organization of the family, parenting and home life, and the intimate relationship of couples, all of which affected the core of religious traditions and institutions. Though the religious bodies seemed incapable of resolving these issues, the degree of struggle and engagement proved to be more productive than silence on the matters.
Unions and Reunions
With all the conflict and separation based on race, gender, class, and sexuality, American religion in the latter half of the 20th century also saw divisions based on religion itself. Each decade, schisms appeared to grow deeper and more irreversible. Denominations, already representing countless divisions, divided even further. But there is another side to the story of fragmentation, especially in the last half century.
In addition to such broadly cooperative groups as the National Association of Evangelicals (founded in 1942), the World Council of Churches (founded in 1948) and the National Council of Churches, many denominations in the middle of the 20th century took steps that led to actual mergers. In 1957, the Congregational Christian Churches (the result of an earlier union in 1931) merged with the largely German Evangelical and Reformed Church to form what is now called the United Church of Christ. The Methodists, who brought their southern and northern sections together in 1939, joined with a German Methodist group in 1968 to form the United Methodist Church. However, both Congregationalism and Methodism, despite being strengthened by mergers, were weakened by a slow decline in membership.
Presbyterians—who were divided earlier by questions of revivalism, education, slavery, and ordination—managed in 1983 to bring together the northern and southern halves of a denomination that split just prior to the Civil War. The resulting body took the name of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and built upon an earlier union between northern Presbyterians and a Scottish communion of Presbyterians in North America. The 1983 merger led to a church of over 3 million members (the largest Presbyterian body in America), though there were other Presbyterian groups (such as the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America).
Lutheranism had been divided more due to its countries of origin and its periods of immigration. Modern mergers have overcome many of those historic separations. In 1960, the American Lutheran Church gathered together Midwesterners of German, Norwegian, and Danish background. Two years later, the Lutheran Church in America represented a union of German, Danish, Finnish, and Swedish elements. These two groups then completed another merger in 1988 to create the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (joined also by a smaller Lutheran group).
In 1960, the most ambitious efforts to shape the destiny of institutional religion in America took the name of the Consultation on Church Union (COCU). For more than a quarter of a century, negotiations took place among Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, Congregationalists (United Church of Christ), and sometimes other denominations also. Dialogue began with enthusiasm and optimism that a merger of 20 million or more American Protestants might take place in the 1970s.
By the 1980s, however, optimism and enthusiasm waned as delegates to the successive sessions encountered several more problems after each problem they solved. Some theological agreement was reached in 1984, but ecclesiastical obstacles remained. In the later 1980s, COCU pulled back from the idea of full merger to an agreement known as covenant communion, in which the member denominations would ordain clergy jointly, hold baptismal services in common, and cooperate in areas such as foreign missions and domestic social agenda. Each church would continue, however, to govern its internal affairs and maintain close ties with transnational bodies unique to each denomination.
Perhaps the most dramatic moves toward church union in the last few decades have come from a source that was the least expected—the Roman Catholic Church. Part of this move was likely due to the personality of Pope John XXIII, but there were institutional changes also. Beginning with the creation of a Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity in 1960, the Catholic Church has repeatedly demonstrated a desire for dialogue as well as openness to mutual instruction. In 1964 Vatican II issued a decree on ecumenism (Christian unity), which signaled the beginning of a new era in the relation of the churches to one another. Steps were taken to increase Catholic participation in the World Council of Churches, as Pope Paul VI met in 1966 with the Archbishop of Canterbury (leader of the Anglican Church), and in 1967 with Patriarch Athenagoras I (leader of the Orthodox Church). In 1975, he canonized the first American-born saint (Elizabeth Seton), paying respectful tribute to her upbringing as an Episcopalian. He also addressed a committee charged with responsibility for improved Christian-Jewish relations.
When John Paul II became pope in 1978, he continued the ecumenical efforts among the Orthodox, Protestants, and non-Christians through extensive travels and meetings. He also met with the Orthodox patriarch (Demetrius I), assuring him that the thousand years of common history between the Eastern and Western churches (before the 1054 schism) should be sufficient basis for greater unity between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. John Paul II also addressed ecumenical leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., greeting them as Christian brethren and fellow disciples of Jesus.
Apart from these highly visible papal visits and words, dialogues were more quietly begun between Roman Catholicism and the Lutheran World Federation in 1965; with the Anglican Communion and the World Methodist Council in 1966; with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1968; and with Pentecostals in 1972. Protestants also carried on quieter dialogues: Lutherans with Reformed; Episcopalians with the Orthodox; the United Church of Christ with the Disciples of Christ; and the Methodists with the Episcopalians. These exchanges continued to be fruitful into the new millennium.
However, several ominous events also occurred. The National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) faced criticism for their liberal political, theological, and economic stands. For example, in 1992, during the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, the NCC described Columbus not as a daring Catholic mariner, but as an arch villain in a drama of colonialist invasion and genocide. By the late 1990s, both the NCC and WCC faced massive financial crises and severe cutbacks in programs, making the apparent future of such ecumenical bodies less than bright.
The issues that divided the various churches also divided the ecumenical councils. When the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches approached the NCC about membership in 1982 and 1983, the fragility and limits of church unity became clear. The council, cautious of further alienating its diverse constituencies (especially the Orthodox Churches), postponed action and finally voted against granting observer status to the UFMCC in 1992. Amidst the conflicts within American religion, even the ecumenical movement offered no rest when it came to divisions over issues of human sexuality.
Chapter 18. Politics and Pluralism
The 1960s and early 1970s represented a high point of liberal religious activism—from the successes of the civil rights movement to the beginning of the gay rights and women’s rights movement to the protests of the Vietnam War. The activist legacy survived into the 1980s and 1990s, but the organized resurgence of conservative Protestantism gained perhaps even greater prominence. Now the religious right (conservatism), rather than the religious left (liberalism), captured the bulk of the nation’s attention. At the same time, the revision of immigration laws in 1965 led to a fundamental shift in immigrant demographics, and the religious patterns of the United States became ever more diverse. That widening pluralism—including Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs among others—had transformed the basic shape of American religion by the turn of the new millennium and foretold greater changes ahead.
Pluralism also remained a matter of home-grown sects, as the nation continued to grapple with new religious movements. Such movements grew more visible and varied after the 1960s. At the same time, religious identity itself became increasingly plural as spiritual seekers experimented with a whole series of devotional options and mysterious (or even occult) practices. At the end of the century, there was an explosion of spirituality, which was itself an eclectic and pluralistic construct that embraced everything from Gregorian chants to Jewish mysticism, channeling to yoga, Buddhist meditation to shamanic drumming.
Religion and Politics
In the 1960s, so much had excited the activism of religious liberals and progressives, and nothing more so than the long-lasting Vietnam War (1964-1973). The longer the war continued and the more the American military became involved, the more uneasy or critical many segments of the American public became, including the religious public. In 1965, an organization called Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam was formed to give stronger voice to the religious protests about the war. In 1966, the nation’s Catholic bishops warned that the circumstances of the war may lead to diminished moral sensitivity to its evils. In 1967, the United Presbyterian Church affirmed that the war was the most pressing moral issue confronting the Church. Marches and protests occurred, university campuses were disrupted, and churches and synagogues were urged to action.
The antiwar protests that took place over the Vietnam War made peace activism a primary component of the religious left’s identity. Much of the leadership came from liberal Catholics, such as the monk Thomas Merton, who took a stand on behalf of nonviolence and served as a spiritual guide within the wider peace movement. A Jesuit named Daniel Berrigan, along with his brother Philip, also gained attention when they encouraged resistance to the military draft and even burned draft board records, leading to arrest and jailing, as well as censure by ecclesiastical superiors.
Cautious of the protests and subversive activities of the liberal Catholics, America’s Catholic bishops initially separated themselves from such actions, but eventually they came to share in much of the peace movement’s larger critique of nuclear proliferation and deterrence. In 1983, the nation’s bishops wrote a pastoral letter that adopted a critical tone over the war (and the involvement of the U.S.), which disturbed conservative Catholics who thought their bishops were meddling in politics. The letter argued for an end to the arms race and that the time had come for peacemaking as a requirement of faith.
The protests in the mid-1980s on behalf of a nuclear freeze were a climax of this movement on the religious left. In 1982, about 1 million people took to the streets of New York City to protest nuclear armaments, especially President Ronald Reagan’s support for the production and deployment of the MX missile system. Intensified awareness over the issue of potential nuclear war presented an opening for religious activists and reformers, who pushed for a halt on the testing and production of nuclear weapons. Other issues in the 1980s also drew the activity of the religious left, such as efforts to provide a haven for Salvadorean and Guatemalan refugees fleeing civil strife in their homelands.
Another concern of the religious left was environmental protection. Nuclear power plants, with their radioactive wastes and potential for catastrophe, were the targets of ecological warnings and protests. There was also a larger green movement within American religion. This environmental movement gained momentum after the 1960s, taking on issues that ranged from air, water, and noise pollution to chemical pesticides and energy resources to biodiversity and global warming. In 1964, the Faith-Man-Nature group (a consortium of theologians and conservationists) came together to explore the religious dimensions of environmental issues and to articulate a theology of stewardship for God’s creation.
On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day was held and shared in the larger culture of protest that had developed through the civil rights and antiwar movements. Along with education on pollution and recycling, citizens participated in festivities of costuming and playful destruction (such as ritualized bashing of gas-guzzling cars). Religious institutions (such as the NCC) offered substantial support for this ecological festival. Environmentalism has continued to stir the religious left, evident by the activity of former vice president Al Gore, whose writing on environmentalism included religious themes. By the 1990s, the religious measure had become environmental justice: attentiveness to protecting the environment combined with a social awareness of the ways in which the neighborhoods of the poor and marginalized are left especially vulnerable to pollution.
The religious left has maintained vigor into the 21st century. Some have pointed to the nomination of Senator Joseph Lieberman as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 as bringing the religious left back into national prominence. As an Orthodox Jew who was influenced by the 1960s civil rights struggles, Lieberman spoke passionately during the campaign on the fundamental role of religion in American civic life. He argued against any formulation of liberalism that substituted freedom from religion for freedom of religion, making it seem as if the religious dimensions of social progressivism would again bear influence. However, the Gore-Lirberman campaign was narrowly defeated in 2000. Yet the issues that stimulate grassroots activism—such as the environment, feminism, civil rights, acceptance of gays and lesbians, and economic justice—remain, as do religious organizations that promote such issues.
In the domain of religion and politics, the dominant story of the last quarter of the 20th century was the rise of the new Christian right. As a movement, it has generated high hopes for the redemption of the United States as a Christian nation, though it has also provoked fears of theocratic intolerance (domination of the nation through religion). In 1979, an alliance of three new organizations emerged: the Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell (a Baptist minister in Virginia), the Christian Voice (with headquarters in Pasadena, CA), and the Religious Roundtable of Arlington, Virginia (led by a Texas evangelist named James Robison). These groups shared similar agendas and had ties with the political right. They united in promoting prayer in public schools, opposing abortion, condemning homosexuality, despairing over the growth of secular humanism, supporting teaching of creationism, and promoting a return to Christian America. They united in events such as the 1980 Washington for Jesus Day, which featured speakers who were political and religious conservatives.
The agenda of the Christian right took much of its shape from the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The forces combined to oppose nuclear test ban treaties, the Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action, the National Endowment for the Arts, school busing, and gays in the military. They supported increased spending on national defense, school vouchers, and tax relief for families. Christian lobbying groups had increasing power throughout the 1980s, leading to conservative victories and liberal defeats in various national, state, and local elections.
Falwell’s Moral Majority closed down in 1989 when its supporters faced temporary struggles due to scandals involving well-known TV evangelists. Having accomplished his mission of politically activating America’s conservative Christians, Falwell retired from his prominent position in the effort and settled into the role of elder statesman of the movement he had helped launch. The Christian Coalition (founded by TV preacher and presidential candidate Pat Robertson) then formed to take a leading role in the movement, while concentrating on voter education with emphasis on family issues. Robertson stepped down from presidency of the coalition in 2001.
The pro-life, pro-family agenda of the Christian Coalition has been assisted by three other prominent groups: the American Family Association (organized in 1988), Focus on the Family (founded by child-hood development and radio program host James Dobson, and the Family Research Council (headed by Gary Bauer who served in political roles under Reagan and then became a Republican presidential candidate in 2000). Also noteworthy are the activities of Concerned Women of America, a coalition under the leadership of Beverly LaHaye (promoter of Bible-based family values and opponent of feminism).
For men, the pro-family agenda has gained expression in Promise Keepers, a group founded in 1991 by a college football coach named Bill McCartney. Promise Keepers combines elements of a revival and a men’s support group, emphasizing family in a manner that fits the larger emphases of evangelical conservatism. Through its popular rallies, the Promise Keepers have placed being a better husband and more attentive family man at the heart of the Christian life. Despite facing suspicion of being an antifeminist movement that sought to promote patriarchy, the movement connected to the devotional side of evangelical Christianity and even promoted racial reconciliation.
The power of the Christian right, as well as the limits of its power, perhaps can best be seen in the presidential elections of the last few decades. The 1976 campaign pitted Jimmy Carter against the incumbent president Gerald Ford (who had become president through the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 due to the Watergate scandal). Ethical and religious questions emerged from the scandal. Both Ford and Carter were conservative Protestants. On most political issues, Carter (a Southern Baptist) was more liberal than Ford (an Episcopalian). As a faithful deacon in his local church, a dedicated Sunday school teacher, and a devoted student of the Bible, Carter surprised many by his theological sophistication, his dedication to separation of church and state, and his passionate commitment to human rights around the world. He also openly promoted his beliefs in a way that made religion an issue during the election. However, the religious right refused to support him, finding him too liberal.
In 1980, a new political figure came forward: Ronald Reagan, an actor who had also served as governor of California. In the race between Reagan and the churchman Carter, it seemed religious support would go to Carter. However, it was Reagan who received the attention of the religious right as he called for a moment of silent prayer at the 1980 Republican National Convention, urged a spiritual revival upon the nation, and criticized the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment (which he called a misinterpretation). By the time of the election, Reagan (who grew up in a Disciples of Christ church but attended church inconsistently in later life) gained the role of the Christian candidate.
In his first term as president, Reagan and the Christian right drew even closer together. The president presided at National Prayer Breakfasts, addressed the National Religious Broadcasters Conventions, and spoke to gatherings of the National Association of Evangelicals. He also proposed an amendment to allow prayer in public schools and institutions. In 1984, on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade case, he proclaimed the National Sanctity of Human Life Day and affirmed that abortion had denied to the unborn the most basic human right, making America poorer for their loss.
In the 1984 campaign between the incumbent Reagan and Walter Mondale, two Protestants again headed their respective party’s ticket. The Reagan cause had become identified with the cause of the Christian right, and Mondale warned that this alliance threatened to corrupt faith and divide the nation. Mondale did not believe that political campaigns should become religious crusades, and he was angry at essentially being labeled anti-family and unchristian by the religious right.
Not all attention was at the top of the ticket in 1984, since for the first time a woman (Geraldine Ferraro) had been nominated for vice president by a major party (the Democrats). As a Roman Catholic, Ferraro indicated that she was personally opposed to abortion but supported the 1973 Supreme Court decision as a matter of public law, a stance that led to demonstrations in the street and official rebuke in the church. The Democrat ticket lost votes, and Reagan’s campaign won decisively, carrying an extensive percentage of the votes of evangelicals.
Religion was also prominent in the 1988 campaign. Two clergymen ran for the presidential office–civil rights veteran Jesse Jackson on the Democratic side and the broadcaster Pat Robertson on the Republican side. Though both were Baptists, Jackson focused on poverty and homelessness, inequities faced by women, and the victims of the AIDS crisis, while Robertson wanted to fight communism, end legalized abortions, and promote school prayer. Despite the hope of the religious right for Robertson, past broadcast statements caught up with him (such as dismissing the idea of separation of church and state, arguing that only Christians and faithful Jews should govern). Robertson’s campaign lost momentum, and he instead sought to gain influence by promoting morally righteous legislation through his Christian Coalition. Jackson also suffered from past statements (such as criticism of Jews), as well as his relationship with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who was known for anti-Semitism).
In the end, the presidential ticket of 1988 included neither Jackson nor Robertson, but instead pitted the Episcopalian George Bush against the Greek Orthodox Michael Dukakis. After strengthening alliances with the religious right, Bush triumphed over Dukakis by a wide margin. His cause was helped by his running mate Dan Quayle, whose family was identified with conservative religious causes.
The impact of the religious right continued in the presidential politics of 1992 as the Christian Coalition bore influence at the Republican National Convention. A founder of an antiabortion group pronounced that a vote for Democrat Bill Clinton (who was Southern Baptist) amounted to a sin in the eyes of God. A candidate named Patrick Buchanan further claimed that the United States was in the midst of a cultural war that conservative Christians had to win. Though the religious right faced a setback with Clinton’s victory, it felt vindicated in the 1994 midterm elections that gave Republicans control of Congress.
Clinton’s two-term administration regularly provoked metaphors of warfare from the religious right, especially in response to Clinton’s sex scandal with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. When Republicans were unsuccessful in their effort to remove Clinton from office (and Clinton’s popularity remained high), many religious conservatives were ready to despair over the moral state of the nation. Senator Robert Dole (a Methodist from Kansas) proved to be an uninspiring candidate for the presidency in 1996, causing only modest excitement for the religious right. Clinton came through the scandals of his administration, with a group of ministers who served as his spiritual advisers. His wife Hillary also launched a successful senate bid in New York, with a vision for social gospel activism (nurtured in her United Methodist youth group) that ran counter to much that the religious right stood for. The religious right often proved to be on the losing end of the culture war.
However, the fight continued, and the religious right had another victory with the inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001. In this election, the Methodist Bush prevailed over the Baptist Gore. Though the religious right was kept at the sidelines at the Republican Convention, Bush was clearly the most powerful ally of the Christian right since Reagan, as he (unlike his father) was able to speak the popular language of evangelical Christians in describing his relationship with God and the difference his faith made in his personal life, and he further networked with faith organizations and religious leaders.
Religious Pluralism Since 1965
Pluralism, in many ways, has been the great theme of American religion from the beginning. As a pre-Columbian land of tribal religions, the continent had been incredibly complex in its religious varieties and cultural differences. While much of that diversity was destroyed through European colonization, much of it survived and flourished in a recombined and revitalized form over the next four centuries. This is still a land of rich native traditions, some blended with Christianity, some pan-Indian (such as the Native American Church), and some wholly resistant to the European culture. While the United States became dominantly Protestant, Protestantism itself was a broad label that too easily masked the ethnic diversity and religious conflict within it. Soon Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and Eastern Orthodoxy showed the limits of Protestant claims about the nation’s religious direction. A multitude of sects, seekers, immigrant minorities, and indigenous traditions further countered the religious description of the nation as centering around Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. By 1965, the United States emerged as the world’s most religiously diverse nation.
The stunning demographic shifts of the last few decades are evident everywhere. By the late 1990s, Asian immigrants grew to over 10 million and constituted the fastest growing population in the nation. With these new Asian Americans came a mix of religious traditions—Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Muslim, Hindu, Jain, and Sikh. Asian populations are also changing the face of American Christianity through the presence of ethnic churches such as Vietnamese Catholics and Korean Presbyterians. Christianity in America is no longer just European, African, and Hispanic, but increasingly Asian as well. The evangelical passion of Korean groups has further sought to renew American Christianity.
The diversity of Asian American religions, in addition to the wider immigrant diversity of the last few decades, cannot be easily summarized. For example, American Hinduism reveals an internally diverse and highly populous religious tradition. The classical religious practices of Hinduism were introduced to the United States through the work of Swami Vivekananda and the Vedanta Society at the end of the 19th century, but the Vedanta centers remained small groups without a substantial following. As immigration from South Asia picked up dramatically after 1965, there were more than 200 Hindu temples and sites in America by the turn of the new millennium. Though Hinduism is the principle religion of South Asian immigrants, other religious traditions from India (such as Jainism and Sikhism) are also rapidly transporting additional Indian subcultures to the United States.
Various Hindu-inspired movements have gained attention in America since the 1960s, from Transcendental Meditation of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Oregon in the 1980s. The popularity of such gurus (spiritual teachers) remains an important feature of American-style Hinduism and indicates a wider counterculture of spiritual seeking that has become especially prominent since the 1960s. Some of the temples of the of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness have become meeting grounds for Euro-American converts and new Hindu immigrants.
Hindu immigrants are remapping the sacred geography of the United States. Pilgrimage to sacred places is a central ritual of Hinduism in India, and these journeys often take devotees to rivers for purification (such as the joining of the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela Rivers in Pittsburgh, which reflects the joining of important rivers in India as an important Hindu pilgrimage site). Hindus in Pittsburgh also chose a hilltop for the building of the Sri Venkateswara Temple, a geographic placement that was selected to match the geography of the temple’s original counterpart in India.
The new immigration since 1965 has also transformed the American experience with Buddhism. Buddhism long connected to Americans who were alienated from the prevailing religious culture of the nation. American engagement with Buddhism has flourished in popular culture, seen in the Beat Zen of the 1950s to the Hollywood conversions of celebrities such as Richard Gere and Tina Turner. After 1965, the growing number of immigrants who brought with them the Buddhism from their own ethnic backgrounds made many Euro-American converts look like naïve amateurs regarding Buddhism.
The impact of the new immigration on American Buddhism is profound. Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Thai Buddhists all opened many temples in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Sri Lankan, Tibetan, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese Buddhists add to the diversity and complexity. In Los Angeles alone, there are more than 300 Buddhist temples, and more than 1500 temples and meditation centers now mark the American landscape. Taiwanese Buddhists have built the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California—the largest Buddhist temple in the Western Hemisphere.
The large-scale arrival of Buddhists in the United States has been accompanied by significant controversy. Angry neighbors have tried to thwart the building of Hsi Lai Temple through zoning laws, and some onlookers jeered at the Buddhist float in the local Independence Day parade. Anti-immigrant aggression in American culture has even involved ugly incidents of vandalism.
Hostility and religious suspicion are also familiar to another group that has grown dramatically since 1965, American Muslims. Distrust and antagonism toward Islam have been deep rooted in Western culture. Recent conflicts in Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan have inflamed ancient animosities and given them a distinctly American character, especially in the War on Terror. The common media image of Islam is one of fanaticism, holy war, and extreme fundamentalism, and American Muslims feel repeatedly slandered or profiled by such negative stereotypes.
American incivility is a common experience for Muslims in the United States, but the harassment is often far worse than the discourtesies that come from cultural ignorance, frequently escalating into violence. For example, on a number of occasions, arsonists have burned mosques. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it became even harder to hold animosities in check.
Episodes of religious intolerance and violence in America have not slowed the rapid growth of Islam in the United States. This growth is built on the solid foundation of a long-standing Muslim presence in America. The religion’s first extensive American embodiment was among African slaves, who sometimes brought this faith with them, given the prior spread of Islam in Africa. By the end of the 19th century, small immigrant communities of Lebanese and Syrian Muslims had supplemented this initial group of African Muslims. There was also a small population of Euro-American converts, such as Mohammed Webb, who started his own publishing house and magazine to promote Islam in the United States.
The history of a Muslim presence in America among African slaves in the pre-Civil War period gives a deeper historical resonance to the spiritual journeys of African Americans who have turned to Islam in increasing numbers over the last few generations. Some of those African Americans have embraced the black separatist movement, the Nation of Islam (led by Elijah Muhammad and subsequently by Louis Farrakhan). Along with some orthodox Islamic elements, the Nation of Islam has emphasized its own message of self-determination, economic empowerment, moral discipline, and African American unity against white oppression.
While the nation of Islam has attracted thousands of followers and has cultivated especially successful prison ministries and educational programs, the majority of African American converts to Islam have followed the path of W. D. Muhammad, who has emphasized orthodox Sunni Islam. There have further been signs of a reconciliation between these two dominant strands of African American Islam. Estimates of the number of African American Muslims suggest they make up 25 to 30 percent of the American Muslim population.
One study in 2001 counted over 1200 mosques and Islamic centers across the United States, offering further confirmation that 30 percent of those affiliated with mosques in the United States are African Americans, while 33 percent are of South Asian background and 25 percent are from the Middle East. It is estimated that about 2 million Muslims are connected to these 1200 mosques and centers, while another 2 to 3 million Muslim immigrants are estimated to be living in the United States unaffiliated with an organized religious community. Islam is on its way to surpassing Judaism as America’s second largest faith after Christianity, and there are already more Muslims in the United States than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. There have further been instances of official public recognition of Islam in America, such as a Muslim leader reciting prayer in Congress, Muslim military chaplains, a proclaimed Muslim Appreciation Day, and a U.S. Postal stamp issued in honor of a Muslim feast day.
Muslim immigrants face pressures of change and acculturation, as well as issues in determining how to practice the Muslim faith within American society. Questions about change and tradition affect every aspect of immigrant life, from work to marriage to family life to food to religious activities at the mosque or community center. One example is the much-debated issue of whether traditional patterns of dress are obligatory for Muslim women living within a new culture of fashion and sexual freedom. Such are the everyday negotiations of religious identity with which immigrants live.
This discussion of the religious pluralism of the post-1965 era is only a sample of a rapidly changing religious landscape. Many other examples could be added, such the growth of American Baha’is from a membership of a few thousand before 1965 to nearly 150,000 at the turn of the millennium. This nineteenth-century religious movement had its roots in Iranian Islam with a vision of universality that aimed to restore a oneness to all the religions and people of the world. After facing intense persecution in Iran, Baha’is first brough their global vision to the United States at the end of the 19th century, becoming a more sizable presence in the United States after 1965, as immigration to America increased.
The pluralism of the post-1965 era has grown not only as a result of immigration, but also because America offers a voluntaristic religious marketplace in which new religious movements can thrive. Such movements commonly invoke caution and conflict, as the American public has been on guard against cults and communes (after the 1978 mass suicide of the Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones).
After this incident, new religious movements have tended to look fearful and dangerous, and the negative term “cult” has been used to describe such movements, a term that provokes alarm. The government has vigorously pursued cult leaders for incidental legal matters such as tax evasion, immigration fraud, and polygamy. A significant showdown with a sectarian religious movement occurred with the government assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas in 1993, which led to the death of seventy-four members after the compound erupted in flames. This crisis has raised serious questions about America’s experiment with religious freedom and pluralism, making apparent the dangers of the state assuming the role of cult buster.
Tensions with law enforcement authorities have also arisen with another new religious movement, the Church Universal and Triumphant, led by Elizabeth Clare Prophet and based on a ranch in Montana. Though Prophet’s husband was indicted on a weapons charge, federal authorities eventually negotiated the voluntary relinquishment of firearms at the church’s ranch. The movement has illustrated both the cult scare of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the wider religious eclecticism of the era. Prophet sampled a wide variety of Christian expressions, as well as experimenting with the mind-cure teachings of Mary Baker Eddy and the positive thinking of Norman Vincent Peale, before claiming to be a messenger for enlightened spiritual beings she identified as the Ascended Masters. She also included teachings of soul evolution, angels, karma, reincarnation, mystical Christianity, mystical Judaism (Kabbalah), Hinduism, and Buddhism. This sort of spiritual eclecticism has become increasingly common among a generation of spiritual seekers.
Religious pluralism is now something that many Americans encounter within themselves as much as beyond themselves. Many Americans choose elements of several religions (or popular philosophies). Religious identities have become more permeable in the last generation as the firmness of denominational markers have worn away, the pluralism of the new immigration has born influence, the rates of intermarriage rise, religion becomes part of a global culture of commodities, and private spirituality is valued over institutional religion. Spiritual seekers in America yearn for a sense of wholeness and meaning that has proven elusive.
Contemporary American religion, matching contemporary understandings of the self, has become increasingly fluid and adaptable, a jumble of religious options. America’s vast religious marketplace—including a wide variety of therapies, advice books, spiritual techniques, retreat centers, angels, Christian diets, and small groups—now shapes religious identities in its own ever-shifting image. While religious pluralism in the United States remains primarily an issue of the relationship between the self and other people, it has also become a question about the interior relationship among divided and perplexed selves, in a world of sampling and seeking.
Many find these changing and mixed religious identities cause for alarm more than celebration. Amidst the current era of popular spirituality, some describe an awareness of immediate gratification and diverting entertainment that is characteristic of the modern consumer culture, rather than the deep roots needed for true faith to endure. At the beginning of the new millennium, more and more Americans have come to see religion as a domain that offers a variety of options from which to pick and choose. At the same time, however, many other Americans doubt that gathering up various elements of spirituality from this great assortment of religious practices and teachings will satisfy the spiritual hunger that so many seekers experience.
The recent sociological narrative about spiritual seeking is hardly a new story. It has been observed a century ago, and perhaps even a century before that. The spiritual seeking in American religion is also part of an age-old religious journey within the culture, which has been especially evident amidst those exploring various (and often strange) spiritual practices within the past several decades, in search of that indefinable something that is still driving people to leave the places they came from and search everywhere. Across America can be found a robust religious pluralism and autonomy that are a constant feature of American life and culture.
Primary Text 9: “I Have a Dream” (by Martin Luther King, Jr.)
“I Have A Dream” — Speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963-08-26 (ihaveadreamspeech.us)
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end but a beginning. Those who hoped that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “for whites only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends — so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father’s died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!”
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi — from every mountainside.
Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring — when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
2
The post ecture 1 Part I. Religion in the Colonial Era Chapter 1. Beginnings appeared first on PapersSpot.