American history
TODAY IN HISTORYReligion and the New Republic
The religion of the new American republic was evangelicalism, which, between 1800 and the Civil War, was the "grand absorbing theme" of American religious life. During some years in the first half of the nineteenth century, revivals (through which evangelicalism found expression) occurred so often that religious publications that specialized in tracking them lost count.
In 1827, for example, one journal exulted that
"revivals, we rejoice to say, are becoming too numerous in our country to admit of being generally mentioned in our Record."
During the years between the inaugurations of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, historians see "evangelicalism emerging as a kind of national church or national religion."
The leaders and ordinary members of the "evangelical empire" of the nineteenth century were American patriots who subscribed to the views of the Founders that religion was a "necessary spring" for republican government; they believed, as a preacher in 1826 asserted, that there was "an association between Religion and Patriotism."
Converting their fellow citizens to Christianity was, for many Christians, an act that simultaneously saved souls and saved the republic. The American Home Missionary Society assured its supporters in 1826 that "we are doing the work of patriotism no less than Christianity."
With the disappearance of efforts by government to create morality in the body politic (symbolized by the termination in 1833 of Massachusetts's tax support for churches) evangelical, benevolent societies assumed that role, bringing about what today might be called the privatization of the responsibility for forming a virtuous citizenry.
In the late 18th century and early 19th century, Bishop Francis Asbury led the American Methodist movement as one of the most prominent religious leaders of the young republic. Traveling throughout the eastern seaboard, Methodism grew quickly under Asbury's leadership into one of the nation's largest and most influential denominations.
1. The camp meeting
In 1800 major revivals that eventually reached into almost every corner of the land began at opposite ends of the country: the decorous Second Great Awakening in New England and the exuberant Great Revival in Kentucky. The principal religious innovation produced by the Kentucky revivals was the camp meeting.
The revivals were organized by Presbyterian ministers, who modeled them after the extended outdoor "communion seasons," used by the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, which frequently produced emotional, demonstrative displays of religious conviction. In Kentucky the pioneers loaded their families and provisions into their wagons and drove to the Presbyterian meetings, where they pitched tents and settled in for several days.
When assembled in a field or at the edge of a forest for a prolonged religious meeting, the participants transformed the site into a camp meeting. The religious revivals that swept the Kentucky camp meetings were so intense and created such gusts of emotion that their original sponsors, the Presbyterians, as well the Baptists, soon repudiated them.
The Methodists, however, adopted and eventually domesticated camp meetings and introduced them into the eastern United States, where for decades they were one of the evangelical signatures of the denomination.
2. Emergence of African American churches
Scholars disagree about the extent of the native African content of black Christianity as it emerged in eighteenth-century America, but there is no dispute that the Christianity of the black population was grounded in evangelicalism.
The Second Great Awakening has been called the "central and defining event in the development of Afro-Christianity." During these revivals Baptists and Methodists converted large numbers of blacks.
However, many were disappointed at the treatment they received from their fellow believers and at the backsliding in the commitment to abolish slavery that many white Baptists and Methodists had advocated immediately after the American Revolution.
When their discontent could not be contained, forceful black leaders followed what was becoming an American habit--forming new denominations.
In 1787 Richard Allen (1760-1831) and his colleagues in Philadelphia broke away from the Methodist Church and in 1815 founded the African Methodist Episcopal (A. M. E.) Church, which, along with independent black Baptist congregations, flourished as the century progressed.
By 1846, the A. M. E. Church, which began with 8 clergy and 5 churches, had grown to 176 clergy, 296 churches, and 17,375 members.
3. Mormonism
The origins of another distinctive religious group, the Latter Day Saints (LDS)—also widely known as Mormons—arose in the early 1800s during the "Golden Day of Democratic Evangelicalism." The founder, Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844), and many of his earliest followers came from an area of western New York called the "Burned Over District," because it had been "scorched" by so many revivals.
The revivals sparked a strong desire in the fourteen year old Smith and his family to unite themselves to one of the Protestant denominations exuberantly evangelizing in the district in that era.
However, Smith's own personal religious experience led him to reject all the denominations. Instead Smith claimed to have revelations with God and other divine beings who called and ordained him to restore the early Christian church which had fallen away in a Great Apostasy.
After publishing the Book of Mormon—which he claimed to have translated by divine power from an ancient American record written on golden plates by ancient American prophets—Smith organized the "Church of Christ" on April 6, 1830.
LDS subscribed to many mainstream Christian beliefs but professed distinctive doctrines based on post-biblical revelation. Because of persecution that began with Smith's First Vision, LDS moved from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, where they built up the city of Nauvoo. On June 27, 1844 Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were murdered by a mob. By the winter of 1846 persecution and violence threatened the LDS in Nauvoo.
Under the leadership of Brigham Young, most LDS migrated to Utah to escape persecution. The first pioneer parties arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. The church headquarted in Utah is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and is a flourishing, worldwide denomination with over twelve million members.
Some LDS did not migrate to Utah and reorganized its followers eventually under the leadership of Smith's son Joseph Smith III. This group is now known as the Community of Christ and has a membership of about 140,000. Several other much smaller sects have broken away from the LDS Church.
4. Benevolent societies
Benevolent societies were a new and conspicuous feature of the American landscape during the first half of the nineteenth century. Originally devoted to the salvation of souls, although eventually to the eradication of every kind of social ill, benevolent societies were the direct result of the extraordinary energies generated by the evangelical movement--specifically, by the "activism" resulting from conversion. "The evidence of God's grace," the Presbyterian evangelist, Charles G. Finney insisted, "was a person's benevolence toward others."
The evangelical establishment used this powerful network of voluntary, ecumenical benevolent societies to Christianize the nation.
The earliest and most important of these organizations focused their efforts on the conversion of sinners to the new birth or to the creation of conditions (such as sobriety sought by temperance societies) in which conversions could occur.
The six largest societies in 1826-1827 were all directly concerned with conversion:
- the American Education Society
- the American Board of Foreign Missions
- the American Bible Society
- the American Sunday-School Union
- the American Tract Society
- the American Home Missionary Society.