RELIGION
"Upon my arrival in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, "the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention." Throughout American history visitors have remarked on the religious character of the United States. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, concluded that America thought of itself in religious terms and that the United States was "a nation with the soul of a church."
Indeed, the statistics are staggering. Gallup poll data tell us that 94 percent of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, as compared with 76 percent of the British, 62 percent of the French, and 52 percent of the Swedes. In addition, 65 percent of Americans claim membership in a church or synagogue, and 42 percent attend religious services in any given week.
Thus, Americans are undeniably a religious people. To a remarkable degree, many seek to fashion their conduct around religious principles, and their religious communities very often define their social networks. Extolling the unique religious character of the United States has become a staple of political discourse. Throughout their history Americans have believed that their country occupies a special place in the divine plan. When Thomas Prince sat down early in the eighteenth century to write his history of New England, he felt compelled to begin his narrative with the Genesis account of creation, so confident was he of America's special place in providential history. The Puritans saw themselves as the New Israel, fleeing the Egypt of England for the Promised Land of Massachusetts. Even Benjamin Franklin, so much a man of the Enlightenment, proposed that the seal of the United States depict Moses leading the children of Israel across the Red Sea.
In addition to historical identifications with ancient Israel, millennial notions have also shaped American self-identity and its hopes for the future. No less a thinker than Jonathan Edwards believed that the millennium would begin in Northampton, Massachusetts. Joseph Smith taught his followers that the center stake of Zion would be in Jackson County, Missouri. Countless religious visionaries have decided that America would provide the most fertile soil for constructing one sort of utopia or another. America's sense of destiny has also filtered into political rhetoric. One has only to chart the political slogans through the centuries—John Winthrop's "Citty upon a Hill" in the seventeenth century, "the sacred cause of liberty" during the revolutionary era, "manifest destiny" in the nineteenth century, "making the world safe for democracy" in the twentieth—to get a sense of America's belief in its divine mission.
Undeniably, the hyperbole of political rhetoric notwithstanding, religion has played an important role in America's history. Spanish conquistadors bore the standard of Christianity to the New World, although they were clearly not averse to filling the king's coffers and lining their own pockets with booty. The Pilgrims, exiled from England and uneasy with their new lives in the Netherlands, sought religious refuge across the Atlantic. The Puritans, who followed a decade later, had a more ambitious agenda —to demonstrate to the world the workings of a true church purified of all vestiges of Roman Catholicism—but by the close of the seventeenth century their quest for profits had unmistakably compromised their professions of piety. The religious motivations of other settlers—the Dutch, the Swedes, the Scots-Irish, the Anglicans—are considerably less obvious, although it is clear that the Huguenots fled religious persecution in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Roger Williams, Lord Baltimore, and William Penn all envisioned havens of religious toleration in the New World.
The religious pluralism that characterized colonial America demanded some kind of unique accommodation in the polity of the new nation. Indeed, religious establishment—the designation of a particular religious group or denomination as favored by civil authorities and therefore eligible to receive public revenues—had proved impractical in most of the colonies outside of New England. Protestant leaders such as Isaac Backus and William Livingston joined Thomas Jefferson and Enlightenment deists in an unlikely alliance to ensure religious toleration and disestablishment. Far from crippling religious expression, as the Congregationalists of New England had feared, disestablishment instead created a salubrious religious climate in America. The First Amendment, with its proscription against religious establishment and its guarantee of religious freedom, has set up a kind of free market of religion in America, where religious "entrepreneurs" of all stripes—Joseph Smith, Ellen Gould White, Mary Baker Eddy, Elijah Muhammad, Jimmy Swaggart, Robert Schuller—have competed for popular followings in the marketplace of ideas.
This playing to popular tastes has doubtlessly compromised religious orthodoxy and rigor. Indeed, another peculiar characteristic about religion in America is its latitudinarianism. With the exception of Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr, Americans have rarely distinguished themselves as theologians; they tend to be rather eclectic in their beliefs, with little regard for consistency. But what you believe is less important than belief itself, or at least the trappings of spirituality. One has only to glance in the direction of the vitiated religious establishments in other Western nations to understand the contrast. Whereas other peoples become passionate about politics, Americans are passionate about religion, and in any priority of personal disclosure most Americans would divulge their religious views before their political affiliations.
No era of American history better demonstrates the influence of religion on public life than the nineteenth century, particularly the antebellum period. The revival fires of the Second Great Awakening unleashed an unprecedented reforming impulse in the new nation, much of it directed toward the establishment of a millennial kingdom in America. Americans were so steeped in optimism about the perfectibility of individuals and the amelioration of society that they organized benevolent and reform societies—temperance reform, abolitionism, female suffrage, prison reform—with a zealotry unmatched in American history. Religious sensibilities pervaded American culture, often mixing with nationalism and xenophobia—witness the nativist sentiment directed against non-Protestant immigrants, as well as McGuffey's Reader of the nineteenth century, with its unabashed celebration of Protestantism and patriotism.
But if Protestantism's influence on American culture has been pervasive, its hold has never been hegemonic. Indeed, Americans' religious imagination has been limitless, giving rise to all manner of permutations and innovations—restorationism, Mormonism, Christian Science, transcendentalism, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Moorish Science Temple, Jewish Reconstructionism, the Nation of Islam, and countless others. All are indigenous American religions, and all have won a place—and at least a measure of respectability—in the marketplace of ideas. Indeed, the challenge facing Americans over the last century has been the accommodation of the nation's religious pluralism, a concession that some of the more conservative Protestants have been reluctant to grant, especially to non-Christian traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.
Religious sensibilities have shaped American culture beyond the realm of politics. Sunday blue laws persisted well into the twentieth century, and the Methodist township of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, managed to ban automobiles from its streets every Sunday until a court decision in 1979 declared the law unconstitutional. United States coins and currency bear the inscription, "In God We Trust." Sunday schools began in the late eighteenth century to provide a rudimentary education for children of the working poor, but as common schools grew in popularity during the succeeding decades, Sunday schools provided religious instruction and served as a significant means of recruitment for Protestant churches. Public schools, however, shed their Protestant biases only slowly, and this reluctance prompted the great school wars in New York and Philadelphia over what amounted, Roman Catholics charged, to Protestant catechetical instruction in the public schools. At the Third Plenary Council in 1884, Catholics responded with an ambitious program of parochial schooling to educate and socialize Catholic children in the faith. The "school wars" of the twentieth century placed conservative Protestants on the defensive. Ever since the Supreme Court's 1963 decision banning prayer in public schools, fundamentalists have urged a reversal of that decision, and they have launched desultory efforts either to ban the teaching of evolutionary theory or, once that battle was lost, to insist that public schools teach the Genesis account of creation alongside of Darwinism.
Historically, religion has shaped higher education in America as well. A large portion of the nation's most prestigious universities trace their origins to confessional or sectarian motivations: Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth (Congregational); the College of William and Mary and Columbia (Anglican); Princeton (Presbyterian); Brown (Baptist); Georgetown (Jesuit). Although many of these institutions have slipped their religious moorings, others—Notre Dame, Southern Methodist, Brigham Young—have remained rather more faithful to their origins. In addition, hundreds of colleges throughout the country were begun by religious groups in an effort to expand their influence on American culture—Colby (Baptist), Connecticut Wesleyan (Methodist), Davidson (Presbyterian), Gettysburg (Lutheran), Kenyon (Episcopal), to name only a few.
Indeed, the aggregate influence of religion upon American culture is so great as to be incalculable, but the reverse is true as well: religion in America bears a distinctive cultural stamp. More than anything else it is marked by a disregard for tradition and precedent. The New World attracted adventurers, people disenchanted in one way or another with the existing order, many of whom fled the institutional constraints of the Old World. They brought with them a willingness to experiment and even a passion for novelty. The United States was the first modern, Western nation founded by Protestants, not Catholics. Protestantism, which by its very definition defies tradition, did not have to overcome the ossified European institutions of churches and universities; instead, the New World allowed Protestants to start anew.
The other peculiar characteristic of religion in America derives from its populist character. Lacking confessional boundaries and institutional constraints, religious groups very often coalesce around a charismatic individual who defines the faith, beliefs, and practices of his or her followers. In the twentieth century, the media have allowed a number of religious figures to exploit that circumstance to their advantage and build large empires of radio and television stations, colleges, seminaries, and even, however briefly, an amusement park.
Religion in America has had oddly divergent influences on American life, in some cases challenging and in other cases defending the status quo. Northern Protestants of the antebellum period pushed a comprehensive agenda of social reform. The Social Gospel movement at the turn of the century sought to redress the ravages of urban life. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement advocated workers' rights and even socialism. The "peace churches"—Quakers, Mennonites, and others—have faced censure, ridicule, and even the distraint of goods in times of war. Jews and Christians cooperated in the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow laws and against the mores of southern culture.
Religion, however, has generally exerted a conservative influence on American life—witness the unabashed celebration of patriotic values in McGuffey's Reader, the identification of capitalism with Christianity by powerful churchmen such as John D. Rockefeller, the fundamentalist political resurgence since 1975, and the fierce conservatism of the Mormons, despite their persecution at the hands of federal authorities in the nineteenth century. Religion in America rarely challenges the political or social order; when it does, it usually does so only to champion so-called traditional values or to evoke a halcyon past when America was purportedly even more religious. On such occasions it calls upon and thereby perpetuates the enduring mythology of America as a Christian nation and Americans as God's chosen people.
Twenty, fifty, and even a hundred years ago, the conventional wisdom of modernization and secularization theorists was that as any nation modernizes and industrializes, religion would be pushed to the periphery. America's persistent spirituality, however, has confounded those experts. In the United States, surely among the most modern and industrialized nations on earth, religion remains very much a part of both private life and public discourse.
Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (1972); Mark A. Noll, One Nation under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America (1988).
Randall Balmer
See also A.M.E. Church; Black Churches; Blue Laws; Christian Science; Church and State; Deism; Evangelicalism; Great Awakening; Jews; Missionaries; Mormons; Puritanism; Quakers; Roman Catholic Church; Second Great Awakening; Shakers; Social Gospel; Transcendentalism; and entries for individual religious figures.
