Christianity: Christianity in North America

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CHRISTIANITY: CHRISTIANITY IN NORTH AMERICA

Christianity came to North America with European explorers, colonizers, and settlers, expressing in a New World version enduring continuity but also substantial change. In what became Canada and the United States (the limits of North America for this article), national and political considerations proved important, but smaller, regional forms of Christianity also flourished. North American Christianity struggled with its plurality, perhaps, ironically, achieving its greatest unity in its large-scale dedication to mission.

Christians Made and Born

Intrinsic to the Christian vision was a commitment to mission—to the task of bringing all peoples to God through the saving power of his son Jesus Christ. So far did the ideology of mission extend in North America that, even in the case of those reared ostensibly as Christians, the mission to convert became in many instances a major concern.

Conversion of native North Americans

Aims for the conversion of indigenous North American peoples figured large in the rhetoric of the colonizing nations. But the religious impulse was also molded by the political ambitions of European nation-states. Hence, conversion went forward as an arm of the colonial ventures of the Spanish, French, and English governments.

In an often-cited debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1550), the Spanish had pondered the question of whether native North Americans were slaves by nature or fit subjects for Christianization. The outcome, supporting Sepúlveda and Aristotle's theory of natural slavery, was not surprising, since the Spanish already considered Aztec religion, with its human sacrifice, worship of the devil. Similarly, both English and French called the Indians "savages," wild men without law or religion. Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw them as "minions" of the devil, heathen who practiced nefariously in the forests. French Franciscans argued that until Indians were civilized they were not capable of Christianity. And French Jesuits, in the most positive estimate, saw a natural nobility in the "savage" peoples. These early opinions, if expressed more subtly, continued to inform the ideas and work of missionaries who, after Canada and the United States became political realities, carried on their work among the Indians.

Spanish missions

As early as the 1520s, Roman Catholic priests were in Florida and the Chesapeake, and by 1595 there was serious missionary work in Florida. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, Franciscan friars had accompanied the Spanish conquerors, and in 1598 they began an era of forced mission presence among reluctant Pueblo peoples. In California, efforts to convert the Indians proceeded less violently under the missionary leadership of the fabled Franciscan priest Junípero Serra (1713–1784). At its height, the system of missions established by Serra attracted over 21,000 Indians, who settled around the missions, Christianized and living according to Spanish order in farm communities.

French missions

If the Spanish arrived in the New World as conquistadores, the French came, especially, as fur traders. In this context, both Franciscan Recollets and Jesuits evangelized, the Jesuits particularly among the Hurons, living with them and speaking their language. Although for a time Iroquois hostility effectively ended the work of the Jesuits, by 1668 they were preaching among their former Iroquois persecutors. When the French opened the Mississippi to Europeans, Indians in southern New France heard the gospel, while those at the other end of the French empire also knew the mission presence. Still, by the close of the French era in Canada, the missionaries had been more successful in making the Indians loyal to France than in converting them.

English missions

Evangelization of Indian peoples appears clearly among English intentions in colonizing North America. Yet the English were demonstrably slower and feebler in implementing their aims than either the Spanish or the French. The Mayhew family worked successfully among native North Americans at Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, and in seventeenth-century New England John Eliot (1604–1690) preached in the Massachuset tongue and translated the Bible and other works for his converts, settling fourteen villages of "praying Indians." Eliot was in at least one sense representative, for Protestant missions in British North America were tied to a deep sense of the importance of the word. Introducing Indians to Christianity meant, above all, introducing them to a sacred book.

Canadian and American (U.S.) missions

After Canadian confederation, Protestant missionary efforts went forward in the West, encouraged in part by the development of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Meanwhile, Roman Catholics had achieved a solid presence among certain groups in the West as well. In the United States, by 1787 the interdenominational Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians had been established, to be followed in 1810 by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and later, in 1881, by the National Indian Association. As in Canada, Protestants and Roman Catholics alike evangelized, and in both countries the twentieth century saw Christian denominations still at work. Much of the effort continued to be traditional, but there was growing awareness of the problem of cultural imperialism. Christian missionaries learned that cultural contact was a two-way process and that Indians had much to contribute to a renewed Christianity.

Conversion of African North Americans

The Christianization of African North Americans largely occurred in the United States. In Canada, economic conditions did not favor slavery, and only a small free black population struggled along. In the United States, the majority of converted slaves embraced some form of Protestantism.

At first, many slaveholders were reluctant to allow proselytizing among their slaves, fearing that Christian baptism might render slaves materially equal or doubting that blacks had souls to save. For their part, blacks did not readily adopt the Anglican Christianity of the early eighteenth century. In time, however, slaveholders became more convinced of the practical value of converting slaves for social control, while by the end of the eighteenth century, Baptist and Methodist missionaries brought a revivalist Christianity that blacks found more attractive.

In the years that followed, two kinds of Christianity evolved. First, there was the official church Christianity that slaveholders fostered and controlled. Second, there was the so-called invisible institution, a form of unchurched Christianity created and controlled by blacks, blending elements of their African past and their lived experience on the plantations with Christian language. An "instant" (conversion-oriented) Christianity, unlike the gradualism of the Anglicans, it was shared in part by European North Americans in the revivals.

Meanwhile, black churches arose not merely at the initiative of white slaveholders. In the northern United States, free blacks had already begun to form their own churches in the late eighteenth century. In the South, prior to the 1830s, Baptist congregations had also enjoyed a measure of independence and control. However, only after the Civil War did black churches, both North and South, proliferate. By the late nineteenth century, the Holiness movement flourished among blacks, and by the early twentieth century, Pentecostalism had become popular. Beyond these, massive immigration to northern cities helped to spawn a series of small but intense religious movements based in Christianity but including new revelation. Yet for the most part, blacks who counted themselves church members in the twentieth century were Baptists or Methodists, usually belonging to separate black congregations of larger white denominations. As a rough estimate, almost two-thirds were Baptists and nearly one-quarter were Methodists.

In Canada, the situation for blacks had been in many ways different. When the imperial parliament abolished slavery in 1833, British North America had already long been free of the institution. But without the long and oppressive incubation period of slavery, Canadian blacks evolved a perhaps less distinctive religious life than American blacks had. Still, by 1840 racial prejudice meant that black congregations were separated from white ones, and blacks willingly fostered distinct institutions within the larger churches. They joined a range of denominations including the Baptist and Methodist as well as the Presbyterian and Anglican. Often, too, blacks in Canada, as in the United States, left the mainstream denominations to form their own sectarian groups. But overall, Baptist fellowships predominated among blacks in Canada as in the United States.

Conversion of European North Americans

Although the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions worked to an extent among native North Americans, it had been founded for work abroad. Other denominational and nondenominational organizations followed, and by late in the nineteenth century the Student Volunteer Movement was aiming at "the evangelization of the world in this generation." Reflective of the tenor of its times, it joined other missionary societies in mingling evangelical zeal with expansionist political ambitions. Similarly, in British North America the Canada Foreign Missionary Society had been established as a nondenominational agency in 1854, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the major Christian groups in Canada were engaged in serious mission work abroad. From 1893, foreign mission boards from the United States and Canada came together in New York, meeting annually until, in 1911, they formed the Foreign Missions Conference of North America.

Despite the clear commitment these nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts expressed, the more important missionary focus remained the unconverted at home. Typically raised in a Christian milieu and even holding Christian theological beliefs, the unconverted were those who had not experientially encountered the gospel. For a variety of historical and sociological reasons, this mission to the unconverted was most noticeable in the United States. Here the Puritan and revolutionary heritage intensified a religious situation already volatile in all of North America, separated from European culture and institutions and undergoing other forms of change.

Puritanism

The Puritan movement had arisen in England as various separatist and nonseparatist groups sought to purify the Anglican Church. Imbued with Calvinism and also with elements from the left wing of the continental Reformation, Puritans sought simplicity in worship and in life, and they preached a free, or gathered, church of the elect. In the English Atlantic colonies, Puritan presence was a major factor, with key colonial governments controlled by different Puritan groups. Moreover, Puritanism in the colonies fostered significant developments in the movement's religious teaching and practice. Increasingly, a doctrine of special chosenness and covenantal relationship with God prevailed. Puritans paid greater and greater attention to inner, emotional states, stressing the necessity for an experience of conversion before one could become a full member of the church. From this perspective, Puritans faced a generation of unbelievers not only among peers who were strangers but even among their children. Puritans could not expend resources converting Indians because, in part, they were already too busy converting their own.

Revivalism

Influenced by this understanding and by frontier conditions and economic forces, in the early middle decades of the eighteenth century the Great Awakening spread in the English Atlantic colonies. Under the preaching, especially, of the itinerant Methodist George Whitefield (1714–1770) and the latter-day Massachusetts Puritan Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), emotional and physical manifestations became outward signs of God's inward work among thousands. Then, by the turn of the century, the Second Great Awakening brought visible signs of conversion to a new generation. In Kentucky and Ohio, lengthy camp meetings attracted massive crowds who fell under the power of the Spirit, experiencing strong physical and emotional manifestations.

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, American revivals followed cyclically. Each regeneration brought converts to the churches, but over time enthusiasm waned and there was need for further missionary effort. With Charles G. Finney (1792–1875) and his deliberate use of "new measures," revivalism became a technique for mass evangelism. Later, as more and more people moved to the cities, urban revivalism found its chief organizer and innovator in the lay preacher Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899). The greatest of the twentieth century's preachers, William A. (Billy) Sunday (1862–1935) and Billy Graham (b. 1918), built on Moody's work and adapted it to new technologies and times. And throughout the century a flourishing Holiness-Pentecostal movement institutionalized physical and emotional religion so that even regular worship services became revivals.

In Canada, revivalism never achieved the spectacular presence that it had in the United States. It is significant that the first notable revival in British North America took place in Nova Scotia, the place to which New Englanders in large numbers immigrated before and during the Revolution. At the opening of the nineteenth century, a great revival spread through Upper Canada (Canada West), with many of the same physical and emotional expressions that characterized the American frontier revival. Itinerating Methodists who crossed the border built a rapidly growing denominational connection, especially among the large numbers of American immigrants to the area. Then, from roughly 1885 to 1900, the Holiness movement and the Salvation Army brought their brand of aggressive revivalism to the disinherited and competed effectively in urban settings. In the twentieth century, emotional religion grew with increasing Pentecostal membership. During the Great Depression a religious awakening spread in the West, and during the fifteen years after World War II a revival swept through Canada, paralleling one in the United States.

Evangelicalism and moral crusades

Revivalism provided a condensed version of what evangelicalism worked to achieve in North American culture more broadly. The religious imperative of mission meant commitment to transform both individual and society. Canadians and Americans alike responded energetically, and a common moralism pervaded their cultures. Already in New France, Roman Catholic moral rigorism had blended with harshness of land and climate to produce a quality of asceticism in public life. Later, in the British era, Canadian Protestants displayed even greater rigor. Mid-nineteenth-century ministers denounced alcohol and behavioral impropriety in general, particularly rebuking abuses of the Sabbath. After confederation, the war against alcohol became the great evangelical cause, and sabbatarianism also grew as a public cause. A more collective social concern was evidenced in the nineteenth-century condemnation of slavery—less of an issue in Canada than in the United States—but it was only in the twentieth century that moralism was effectively transmuted into social witness. The new Social Gospel was more subdued on issues like temperance and sabbatarianism and more emphatic on questions of economic organization and social service. By 1907, Canadian Protestants had established a Social Service Council, while Roman Catholics, in the wake of the social teachings of Pope Leo XIII, inaugurated a visibly successful epoch of Catholic trade unionism. In the United States, the Puritan legacy of moralism remained, and in the nineteenth-century atmosphere of nonestablishment, the need for public witness to propriety seemed the stronger. From other quarters, the Arminian teachings of religious liberals emphasized personal responsibility in Christian life, while Enlightenment deism, with its stress on the moral life, fostered the moralistic ethos. Two great public crusades for moral purity, the antislavery and temperance movements, flourished side by side, the former ended by the Civil War, the latter successfully culminating in the Prohibition amendment of 1919. By the second half of the twentieth century, new abolition crusades achieved public prominence, both in conservative struggles to end legal abortion and in liberal challenges to environmental pollution. The Social Gospel, with its calls for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth, was an American movement that spread to Canadian shores. After the Civil War and in the early twentieth century, its concerns were clearly articulated, and in the 1960s it again found a voice in the militant civil rights movement. Meanwhile, from the Roman Catholic side the social teachings of the church had their impact, although in the early century much less prominently than in Canada. Still, the Catholic Worker movement, arising during the depression, offered a telling witness to social concern within Catholicism. In the post–Vatican II era, that concern became a leading feature of the American church.

Churches, Denominations, and Independent Religious Groups

The Christian genius for organization was nowhere more apparent than in North America. Here the old European church establishments became problematic. In the late eighteenth-century United States, the diversity of colonial establishments made a national church impractical. In New France, military defeat ended official church establishment. And in British Canada, the Anglican establishment found it impossible to become the religion of all or most of the people. Hence, denominationalism became the hallmark of North American Christianity: whatever the claims of an Old World church to universality, now the term church became simply a label of convenience. Still, the denominations understood themselves as participating in something larger—a universal church to which all Christian groups belonged. Beyond the denominations, other forms of Christianity flourished. There were sectarian movements, which maintained strong barriers against the outer world and held to a more intensive religious regimen than the mainstream. There were other religious groups that claimed sources of revelation in addition to Christian scripture or, at least, offered a major reinterpretation of it. The cultural climate of the United States, more than that of Canada, fostered these groups and, likewise, encouraged the multiplication of denominations.

Roman Catholicism

Roman Catholic spirituality stressed tradition as much as the written word of the Bible. Strongly authoritarian, the Roman Catholic Church had the most to lose in the evolving denominational situation. Yet in some ways it was more compatible with the North American setting than was Protestantism. With its strong sacramental cast, Roman Catholicism could see nature and the material world as the vehicle for spiritual reality. Hence, in its dealings with Indian peoples, Catholicism perhaps expressed less contempt for native ways and more willingness to incorporate aboriginal forms into a native North American Catholicism. Moreover, among the European immigrants, Catholicism provided the highly tangible institutional and ritual structures that could reassure those who were homesick for cultures and countries left behind.

New France

Catholicism in New Spain had been the religion, mostly, of Spanish conquerors and Indian converts. In New France, however, white settlement meant a transplanted European church that learned quickly to adapt to life on the frontier. Religious orders of men and women had come, the nuns making New France a pioneer in social concern and the French clergy forming a dedicated core. Their flock evidently responded. Although the settlers were remembered for their gaiety and enjoyment of life, European travelers were also impressed by their piety. There were, indeed, tensions between various religious orders and problems arising from the absenteeism of a series of bishops in Quebec, but Catholicism was in northern North America to stay.

British North Atlantic colonies

Roman Catholicism came to the British North Atlantic colonies in a far less privileged position. With a royal charter granted to George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore (1580?–1632), the Maryland colony was founded as a refuge for Catholics persecuted in England. Laws passed in 1639 and a decade later guaranteed religious liberty, but Puritans quickly took control of the government and in 1654 repealed Maryland's Act of Toleration. Even in the first days of the colony, Catholics had been a minority, and by the early eighteenth century they were denied voting rights although they were paying taxes to support an Anglican establishment. Likewise, New England proved to be hostile ground for Catholic growth.

Growth and change in North American Catholicism

After Quebec fell to the British in 1760, the Church of England was the official established church, but in practice Roman Catholicism enjoyed the privileges of establishment. Closely bound to the culture and ethos of the French Canadians, it became a badge of ethnic identity, the sign of the French nation still flourishing in the heart of British North America. The Quebec Act of 1774 brought a vast territory of British North America into the French Canadian province, retained much of the old French legal and customary structure, conferred citizenship and ability to hold office on Roman Catholics, and permitted their church to maintain its tithing policy. After the Union Act of 1840 made Upper and Lower Canada (Canada West and East) one governmental unit, Catholics in 1845 obtained a return to denominational schools, a pattern that continued—not without challenge—in the Canadian system. By the end of the nineteenth century, French Canadians considered themselves a sacred, if beleaguered, people, with a special destiny to preserve their faith.

Outside French Canada, Roman Catholicism grew apace, brought in part by other immigrants. In the Maritimes, three distinct traditions—Acadian, Irish, and Scottish—flourished despite the tensions between them and despite the largely Protestant environment. To the west, French missions served the settlers, but English-speaking Catholics were not absent. Although their church continued to be dominated by the French, with time the role of the minorities increased. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Catholicism was Canada's majority religion, and in 1975 some 52 percent of the population counted themselves Roman Catholic.

To the south, the American Revolution had inaugurated an era of religious toleration. To be sure, there was anti-Catholic feeling and, at times, violence against Catholics in the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries. But the larger saga of Roman Catholicism was one of increasing integration into national life. Indeed, one of the biggest problems Catholics faced was that of becoming too well-integrated, too much like the Protestant majority. Thus, the trusteeship controversy of the early national period centered around the initiatives of Catholic laymen who attempted to follow the Protestant congregational model, calling and dismissing their pastors at will. And later efforts by liberal bishops led in part to Leo XIII's Testem benevolentiae (1899), warning against the heresy of "Americanism."

Not only did American Catholicism encounter the Protestant majority with its denominational plurality, but the church also found an abundant ethnic plurality within its own ranks. By the 1840s, a massive Irish immigration was changing the character of American Catholicism, and over time other groups joined the Irish: Germans, Italians, Poles, and Hispanics (the last through territorial acquisition as well as through immigration). There were marked tensions among these groups, but in the end the Irish form of Catholicism won, dominating the hierarchy and imprinting its character on American Catholic life.

Protestantism

Reformation spirituality had been born in protest against sacramentalism and traditionalism in the medieval church. It preached collective return to biblical sources of revelation and individual reliance on the grace of God in winning salvation. In fact, it was only a matter of time before the centrifugal tendencies implicit in the Reformation came to realization. Thus North America, settled largely by dissenting Protestants, proved fertile ground for a series of separate and at times competing denominations. At the same time, with its emphasis on the priestly vocation of all Christians in whatever worldly station, Reformation spirituality encouraged new sources of linkage between religion and culture. If church and state eventually became separated in North America, unofficially they sustained each other.

American denominationalism

The Virginia colony was settled by nondissenting members of the Church of England, but New England and Pennsylvania were colonized by sectarian groups—nonseparatist Puritans, separatist Pilgrims, and separatist Quakers. These "outsider" groups moved from quasi-sectarian status in England to the religious and political center in the New World. But when church nonestablishment was safeguarded by the new constitution, there were officially no religious "insiders" in the nation. Hence, from two directions there was movement toward homogenization.

For the Puritans of New England, however, something of the sectarian character remained. With their emphasis on congregational autonomy, Puritans quickly became Congregationalists. But their moralism and righteousness, their sense of destiny and chosenness, and their millennialism spread throughout religious and political culture. On the one hand, these attitudes engendered in the early republic a public Protestantism with a heavy ideological tinge. On the other hand, these attitudes encouraged, by their clarity, the self-definition of others and the multiplication of religious groups. Moreover, immigrants continued to bring Old World religions to the United States, further increasing the plurality.

After the Revolution, the American Church of England reconstituted itself as the Protestant Episcopal Church (1789). Meanwhile, Presbyterian and Baptist groups continued the Puritan vision, while Methodists, as new arrivals, achieved a separate American organization. The years of the early republic were times of spectacular Methodist development and growth, but Baptist fellowships, Methodism's closest competitors, also flourished, and restorationism (to the primitive New Testament church) grew with the Disciples of Christ, or "Christians" (1832). Thus, the evangelical character of these and other denominations was heavily imprinted on the culture. Nonetheless, a small but important liberal movement in religion had also arisen from Puritanism, assuming institutional form in 1825 as the American Unitarian Association. Liberalism likewise appeared in the popular religion of rural New England as Universalism, so called because of its teaching of universal salvation.

The Civil War brought serious denominational splits, and the post–Civil War epoch yielded new tensions between liberals and conservatives within denominations. With the new science of the era and the growing prestige of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, some preached world acceptance, welcoming "higher criticism" of the Bible and propounding a theology of immanence. Others, deeply troubled by these developments, welded millennial and rationalistic themes to shape a fundamentalism stressing biblical literalism and inerrancy. In this milieu, too, a "gospel of wealth," enjoining material prosperity, and a critique of poverty, preaching the Social Gospel, seemed to pull in opposite directions.

The results, for the twentieth century, included a denominationalism that often concealed within the ranks of the same religious organization individuals and groups of quite different theological and ethical bent. After 1925, fundamentalism for a time seemed less important, but the movement enjoyed a widespread resurgence by the last quarter of the century. At the same time, the twentieth century saw the development of a world ecumenical movement in which American denominations participated, especially through the World Council of Churches (1948) and the National Council of the Churches of Christ (1950).

Canadian denominationalism

In the territory that became the Dominion of Canada, Protestantism first came with Huguenot traders and settlers. Nearly two centuries later, in 1760, the Church of England officially became the established church. Establishment, however, was mostly a legal fiction. Anglican clergy were insufficient in numbers and enthusiasm, the Anglican relationship to government often proved a liability, and the formal character of worship and gradualist model of Christian life were poorly adapted to life on the frontier.

Protestant groups that reaped benefits from Anglican problems were largely Presbyterians, Methodists, and, to a lesser extent, Baptists. With this denominational spectrum, and with the far greater Roman Catholic population (four times as numerous as Anglicans in 1842), resentment flared periodically over government aid to the Church of England through lands set aside as clergy reserves. When, in 1854, legislation proclaimed the desirability of ending any appearance of connection between church and state and commuted parts of the reserves as a permanent endowment, dissatisfaction remained. But the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the Wesleyan Methodist Church—along with the Roman Catholic Church—all received a share of the commutation. The voluntary principle, in the end, had won.

Generally, if not officially, the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches supported the Confederation of 1867. By 1881, the four major Protestant denominations could count over half the Canadian population as members. Methodists had established themselves as the largest among these churches, while Presbyterians were a close second. Moreover, both denominations, through a series of unions and reorganizations, successfully brought together nearly all groups in their respective denominational families.

These late-century mergers to form national bodies paved the way for the union, in 1925, between the Methodist and Presbyterian churches and the much smaller Congregational Union to form the United Church of Canada. The new church became, in effect, the "national" Protestant church, the body that, of all Protestant bodies, provided a counterweight for Catholicism. A liberal evangelical communion, it supported the Social Gospel. Likewise, when union sentiment arose anew with the ecumenical organization of the Canadian Council of Churches in 1944, the United Church was part of the undertaking. Since close to four out of five Canadian Protestants were United Church members or Anglicans, the denominational center seemed even stronger.

Eastern Orthodoxy

Wherever it existed in North America, Eastern Orthodox spirituality grew in national churches that enjoined continuity with the past. Formality and ritual splendor in the Divine Liturgy mediated a familial closeness, as the mystical Christianity of traditional Orthodoxy blended with the often intense nationalism of its congregations. Although it never became mission-minded, Orthodoxy did adapt to its new setting, introducing English into the Divine Liturgy, erecting pews in churches (unlike the traditional arrangement), and bringing feasts and holy days into conformance with the Western calendar.

The third major branch of Christianity first came to North America in the eighteenth century: Russian Orthodoxy grew in Alaska until, in the beginning of the twentieth century, some one-sixth of its people were Orthodox. Meanwhile, after Alaska became a possession of the United States, Russian Orthodoxy moved to San Francisco (1872) and then, by the end of the century, to New York. In the twentieth century, Greek Orthodoxy—present even before the turn of the century with immigration—grew larger than its Russian cousin, so that by 1975 there were almost two million Greek Orthodox Christians in the United States. Together with one million Russian Orthodox and still another million or so in separate national Orthodox churches, American Orthodoxy had solid grounds for its claim to be the fourth major faith in the nation (after Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Judaism).

Early twentieth-century immigration brought Eastern Orthodoxy to Canada as well, when Russians, Greeks, Serbians, and especially Ukrainians came. In 1918, the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada was established, providing a religious center for its adherents in western Canada. Meanwhile, Russian Orthodoxy grew, particularly in Alberta, despite the differences, as in the United States, between various factions. By the late twentieth century, Eastern Orthodox adherents in Canada numbered over 362,000.

Independent religious groups

The spirituality of independent religious groups, in general, stressed intensity of commitment and the transforming power of religion in every aspect of life. Frequently millennial in orientation, these groups often expected the dawn of a new age. Moreover, the line between them and the Protestant denominations is difficult to draw. From one point of view, many of the sectarian movements may be considered Protestant, provided that they are not considered closely related to mainstream Reformation churches and, on the other hand, that any roots in Reformation churches are taken into account. Even more, when such sectarian movements lose their exclusiveness and move in a more denominational direction, their inclusion with other Protestant groups becomes virtually automatic. Beyond the sects, religions like Mormonism and Christian Science fall outside the scope of Protestantism, although for practical purposes these religions are also often lumped together with the Protestant churches.

Sectarian movements

Marking their boundaries with the outside world far more strongly than do denominations, sects form tightly knit groups of committed coreligionists. Yet they are often intensely conversionist, with a powerful missionary urge, a sense of impending end to the present era, and an accompanying doctrine and experience of new birth. In short, what the evangelical denominations in North America in many ways adumbrated, its sectarian movements carried to logical and psychological completion. Moreover, in the United States, where sects appeared in far greater number and variety than in Canada, the national ideology of newness helped to foster the experience of new birth.

Some sects in the two countries were simply European imports, attracted by promises of religious freedom and abundance of land. But because of the isolation of such groups (e.g., the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Hutterites) and their relatively smaller numbers, they did not have nearly so much impact on culture as sectarian movements closer in spirit to mainstream Protestantism. Thus, Adventist movements like the Millerites of the early 1840s attracted wide public notice in the United States and Canada—and a following difficult to number, much of it within the Baptist and other evangelical denominations.

In another example, the American Holiness-Pentecostal movement grew from Methodist perfectionism and other sources until, by the late nineteenth century, the expulsion of Holiness associations or their secession from the Methodist churches came about. In congregations like the Church of the Nazarene, Holiness people were, religiously, relatively conservative, but a more radical expression of perfectionism came early in the twentieth century in Pentecostalism. For Pentecostals, the signs of the Holy Spirit—speaking in tongues and added biblical gifts like prayer, prophecy, and healing—descended in an atmosphere of miracle and millennialism. Their movement, interracial at first but then separated along color lines, spread to Canada and throughout the world. In Canada, Holiness had developed indigenously, but it also migrated northward from the United States just at the time that the Canadian West was experiencing a rapid growth of cities. The Nazarenes quickly rose to prominence among the Holiness sects, even as Pentecostalism entered from both the United States and Great Britain, finding a favorable climate for increase.

New religious movements

Like the sects, new religious movements arose far more often and more prominently in the United States than in Canada. In fact, one such movement, the Mormons, by the late twentieth century had established itself as among the largest religious organizations in the United States. In Canada, the Mormons also achieved a presence, appearing in Ontario and Upper Canada and building a temple in Cardston, Alberta. Eventually they could be found throughout Canada. The major development, though, was in the United States, where Mormon founder Joseph Smith (1805–1844) preached a new revelation transmitted to him on golden plates, a salvation history that centered on early America. Smith's written transcription, the Book of Mormon, grounded the movement, which evolved a distinctive theology of materialism, supporting the American venture and pronouncing a final goal of deification.

Similarly, the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), in Science and Health gave her followers a book that they ranked beside the Bible. Built on a Congregational heritage of Puritanism and a resurgence of Platonism in the nineteenth century, Eddy's teaching stressed the illusory nature of the material realm and encouraged followers to look to divine Truth, experiencing physical healings and other material goods as signs of their apprehension of spiritual reality.

Eddy's Christian Science church was relatively small in size, but it was the best organized of a series of movements in the United States that preached and practiced mental healing. These metaphysical movements often expressed in more concentrated form a general idealism in American culture, and, in their growing emphasis on themes of prosperity, from their own perspective they too taught a theology of materialism. At the same time, Christian Science and New Thought (the general name for other metaphysical movements such as Unity) traveled across the border into Canada where, in missions and churches, they spread their message.

Numbers of other new religious groups, based at least partially in Christianity, prospered and grew in North America. The typical pattern was foundation in the United States and subsequent migration into Canada, where the movement had a much smaller following. Many of these groups seemed bizarre and exotic to more conventional Christians, but, typically, their members linked themselves to Christianity.

Such disparate groups as the nineteenth-century Oneida community that taught a regulated pluralism of sexual partners in complex marriage, the enduring Spiritualist churches from the second half of the nineteenth century that sought to establish contact with the spirits of the departed, and the apocalyptic Children of God organization from the late 1960s that embraced a totalitarian patriarchalism, all expressed currents in the religious culture of North America. They took religious freedom seemingly as far as it would go—even to a commitment that, paradoxically, sometimes became willing bondage. They announced an alienation from tradition and a yearning for identity and community in a North American society grown perhaps too plural and too large. In short, the spread of new religious movements, from Mormonism to the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, must be linked to the history and sociological base of North American Christianity.

National and Regional Chronicles

By the late twentieth century, the United States and Canada had long since divided sovereignty over North America between them. Christianity was the predominant religion in both countries, and in both it exhibited characteristics suggesting the political and cultural ambience of North America. At the same time, each country showed marked differences from its neighbor in the forms its Christianity assumed.

Canadian Christianity

Because of their special history, Canadians generally thought of themselves as two nations—groups bound by ties of blood, tradition, and ethnic identity—in one political state. The political balance of power between French Canadians and English Canadians had a religious counterpart in the more or less equal division between Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians (although a large proportion of Catholics were English-speaking and not French at all). Protestant Christians comprised fewer denominations than in the United States, historically most belonging to the three or four biggest churches. Hence, it is fair to say that Canadian Christianity was both more and less plural than Christianity in the United States.

Canadian Christianity was more plural because the concentration of Christians into fewer religious groups fostered greater visibility and leverage for denominations with sufficient power and status in the community to count. But Canadian Christianity was also less plural than its American counterpart, for the obvious reason that there were fewer groups in absolute numbers, but also because of an ecumenism especially apparent in Protestant Christianity. It was less plural, too, because of the subtle Erastianism that encouraged all denominations to uphold a central cultural order. Christianity in Canada tended to be "social" Christianity, more conservative than in the United States and less rigid in its boundary between church and state.

Mission-minded and voluntaryistic like the American Christian churches, the Canadian denominations had worked on a huge geographical scale, and so—perhaps more than and ahead of their country's politicians—they thought in terms of the North American continent as a whole. Moreover, with the imposing strength of Roman Catholicism before them, Canadian Protestants were particularly urged in cooperative directions. Thus, in some sense they provided the public unity that the state could not give because of its divisions between English and French. Much more than Christianity in the United States, Canadian Christianity maintained its ties with the past, favoring continuity and tradition over religious change and novelty.

Finally, Canadians overwhelmingly counted themselves denominational Christians, exceeding even the high American church membership (nearly 70 percent of the people) in the late twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 90 percent of Canadians belonged to six major Christian groups (including as the largest the Roman Catholic). By the 1960s, with some substitutions, the figure was higher still, and by the early 1970s over three-quarters of the population were Roman Catholic, United Church, or Anglican Church members.

American Christianity

The Puritan ethos left its mark on American religion, and numerical, political, and cultural balance made the United States distinctly Protestant. Although the nation was far more plural than Canada in the number of its Christian groups (a conservative estimate includes more than two hundred), public Protestantism meant that, with less overt cooperation between church and state, the country could become in some ways far more Christian, far less secular, than its northern neighbor.

Thus, while the Canadian system accommodated itself to the support of denominational schools, in the United States the nineteenth-century public schools openly taught Protestant Christianity. Similarly, even as Puritanism faded into other denominational forms, its spirit remained to transform public and political life. Manifest destiny and political imperialism became the harvest of the Puritan past.

Explicitly present in Puritanism, millennialism resurfaced time and again—in liberal expectations of a new era, in sectarian beliefs that the millennium had already come or was just about to break, in fundamentalist announcements of the signs of the swift return of Christ. Nationally, too, political millennialism suffused foreign and domestic policy, so that wars were generally read as epochal events that would determine the future of the nation and even the world.

Tied to this generalized cultural millennialism, ultraism flourished in American social history. The ultraism was evident in the moralistic crusades—which were more strident in the United States than in Canada—over antislavery, temperance, civil rights, and other social issues. Yet for all the mass emotion, the rhetoric of religious individualism became uppermost in the United States. This rhetoric went hand in hand with the ideology of newness and evangelical mission and hand in hand, too, with a pronounced ahistoricism and, in restorationist sentiment, a willingness to skip over long centuries of Christian history. Linked to a search for religious simplicity and sometimes to anti-intellectualism, restorationist movements expressed in institutional form a general spirit in American Christianity.

Certainly, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, Roman Catholicism was the single largest Christian denomination in the United States, and by 1983 it included some 29 percent of the population. But, with a different history and a lesser size, Catholicism never achieved the impact on American culture that had been its birthright in Canada. Simultaneously more and less established than in Canada, public Christianity continued to be Protestant Christianity.

Finally, this public Christianity assumed explicitly political form in what many scholars have called civil religion. While the Enlightenment ideology present at the time of the American Revolution encouraged a form of religious nationalism that was not specifically Christian, later a public alliance between gospel and flag became commonplace. By the 1970s and 1980s, a new Christian Right was working to shape political events. Conservative Christians were probably the fastest-growing Christian groups in Canada as in the United States, but again, because of the different histories of the two countries, they could not capture the public space in Canada in the same way as in the United States. Hence, in American religion, public Protestantism, civil religion, and cultural religion became aspects of the same center.

Regional Christianity

Living together in one area, Christian peoples may share a common history as well as a common religion. Likewise, they sometimes develop ties that, in effect, constitute them as a new "particular people." European sectarian groups that settled in North America offered striking cases of the growth of such religious regionalism. Rural places and urban centers alike often assumed the character of a religious and ethnic group. Meanwhile, more diffused throughout larger areas, identifiable forms of regional Christianity flourished. This was clearly true in the French Canadian Catholicism of the province of Quebec, but it was also true in, for example, the Eastern Cherokee Christianity of western North Carolina after the Indian Removal of 1838. The pattern could be noticed distinctly in the fundamentalist Protestantism of southern Appalachia, and it was strikingly present in black religion as, in sections of the American South, it joined to its Christianity inherited African thought forms and indigenous folk religion.

The larger North American landscape

In the end, however, North American Christianity should be seen from a continental perspective. With its voluntaryism, activism, and moralism, it has been generally evangelistic in tone. The call to mission clearly gave it a distinct identity: Roman Catholic and, more, Eastern Orthodox strains of mystical piety never made their mark on Christian culture as a whole. Denominational in organization, the essence of North American Christianity has been at once its plurality and its seeking for a genuine pluralism, a state of pleased acceptance of the plural situation. At the same time, North American Christianity modified the plurality to reflect political and national needs for unity.

With the second half of the twentieth century, religion in North America encountered the increasing secularization of culture. Although in both the United States and Canada Christian church membership included the large majority, it also seemed that, except for the fundamentalist political thrust of the New Right, Christianity had a diminished connection with everyday life. In a certain sense, the mission-minded evangelical ethos seemed more a style or habit than a substantive transformer of the world. On the other hand, North American Christianity has perhaps grown more modest, chastened by a new awareness of the danger of cultural imperialism. At the start of the twenty-first century, it has turned inward to find spiritual roots in its biblical heritage and outward to listen to the words and messages of non-Christian others at home and abroad.

Bibliography

The one book that deals with all of North American Christianity as defined in this article is Robert T. Handy's A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York, 1977). It is clear and straightforward, written from the perspective of church history and with meticulous attention to detail.

For American (U.S.) Christianity, the most exhaustive source, highlighting the theme of Puritanism, is the monumental work by Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972). More concise but also informative is Winthrop S. Hudson's Religion in America, 3d ed. (New York, 1981). My book America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, Calif., 1981) offers a different approach from the previous works, employing the perspectives of history of religions and interdisciplinary history to study the counterpoint between the manyness and oneness of American religion(s).

As a collection of essays that masterfully explores denominationalism and other central themes in American religious history, the classic work by Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York, 1963), is insightful and rewarding. The Historical Atlas of Religion in America, rev. ed. (New York, 1976), by Edwin S. Gaustad, is invaluable as a religious atlas. The book is especially useful for its careful charts and graphics. Another invaluable work of historical craftsmanship, edited by Edwin S. Gaustad, is his two-volume documentary collection, A Documentary History of Religion in America, vol. 1, To the Civil War, and vol. 2, Since 1865 (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1982–1983). The documents, selected to show a pluralism present in American religious history from the first, contain a wealth of materials for the beginner or the more advanced student. With the possible exception of Mead's essays, all the works above consider American Christianity not exclusively, but as the largest theme in the religious mosaic of the United States, which they seek to describe comprehensively.

Among more specialized studies in American Christianity, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York, 1970) by Martin E. Marty, republished in a second edition as Protestantism in the United States: Righteous Empire (New York, 1986), is still the best treatment of Protestantism, reading it in terms of its impact on culture and cultural imperialism. For Roman Catholicism, the account by John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism, 2d ed., rev. (Chicago, 1969), is yet the classic short work. The book by Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago, 1981), is sensitive to the contact situation but suggestive more than comprehensive as a treatment of the Christianization of Amerindian peoples in American territory. Still, its account of Huronia provides a highly readable introduction to the work of the Jesuits in New France. The pathbreaking work by Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (Oxford, 1978), considerably advances the study of black Christianity. More comprehensive in scope but written to argue a distinct theological agenda is Gayraud S. Wilmore's Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People, 2d ed., rev. and enl. (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1983). Even with the theological tour de force, it is the best survey presently available.

Lamentably, Canadian Christianity has not received nearly the scholarly attention that its American counterpart has. The most useful short history, though dated, is H. H. Walsh's The Christian Church in Canada (Toronto, 1956). More recent and more expansive is the three-volume work, A History of the Christian Church in Canada, produced under the general editorship of John Webster Grant. The first volume of this trilogy, The Church in the French Era: From Colonization to the British Conquest (Toronto, 1966), also by H. H. Walsh, intersperses nuanced biographical sketches in its chronicle of events and offers an absorbing, contextualistic account. The second volume, by John S. Moir, The Church in the British Era: From the British Conquest to Confederation (Toronto, 1972), continues the chronicle to 1867 within a crisp and comprehensive church historical framework. The third volume, The Church in the Canadian Era: The First Century of Confederation (Toronto, 1972), by John Webster Grant, completes the series in somewhat more discursive fashion. For a more popular and colloquial introduction, there is the handsome and illustrated Religion in Canada: The Spiritual Development of a Nation, by William Kilbourn, A. C. Forrest, and Patrick Watson (Toronto, 1968). Its impressionistic surveys sweep through Canadian religious history, virtually all of it Christian, to good effect; and its photo essays prove rewarding complements to the text. And for a useful documentary collection, see the volume edited by John S. Moir, The Cross in Canada (Toronto, 1966).

More specialized accounts of Canadian Christianity include the important work of John Webster Grant, Moon of Wintertime (Toronto, 1984), chronicling the ambiguous encounter between Christian missionaries and Canadian Indians since 1534. More regionally specific, the brief but impressive study by Cornelius J. Jaenen, The Role of the Church in New France (Toronto, 1976), supersedes the Walsh volume on New France and argues the role of Catholic Counter-Reformation piety in its cultural formation. Likewise studying Catholicism in Quebec is the work by Nive Voisine with the collaboration of André Beaulieu and Jean Hamelin, Histoire de l'Église catholique au Québec, 1608–1970 (Montreal, 1971). It is regrettably without notes or index. L'Église catholique au Canada, 1604–1886 (Trois-Rivieres, 1970) by the Abbé Hermann Plante is more widely ranging but unfortunately ends in the late nineteenth century and also contains neither notes nor index.

The short introduction by Douglas J. Wilson, The Church Grows in Canada (Toronto, 1966), although it purports to be a general study, almost entirely concerns Protestantism. Its thumbnail sketches of denominations and sectarian movements are useful, but there are inaccuracies. A classic study of evangelism and revivalism in Canada, dated in its interpretive framework but rich in its use of primary source materials and lively, if lengthy, in its account, is Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto, 1948) by S. D. Clark. Finally, Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841–1867 (1959; reprint, Toronto, 1968) by John S. Moir surveys issues regarding the clergy reserves and education in Canada West (Upper Canada).