Protestant Christianity

Religion in the United States from the colonial period through the Civil War was dominated by Protestant forms of Christianity. The Protestant churches as a group were not only religious institutions but also a major influence on the general culture of the United States. Such shared values as a belief in the importance of hard work, the notion that virtue should be rewarded, and the concept of religion as the cornerstone of civilized society, were taught in homes and public schools as well as in the churches. As the church historian George Marsden has noted, the most popular textbooks in American grade schools after 1826, McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, were thoroughly Protestant in content. They included lessons with such titles as "No Excellence without Labor," "Respect for the Sabbath Rewarded," "The Bible, the Best of Classics," and "The Righteous Never Forsaken" (Marsden 1991, pp. 10–11).

It is important to remember, however, that Great Britain, a colonial power with a Protestant state church, was not the only European nation that established settlements in North America. The thirteen British colonies along the Eastern seaboard had been preceded by the Roman Catholic missions of New Spain in the American Southwest and New France in what is now Canada. Given the rivalry between France and Great Britain for possession of the northern portion of the continent, as well as the bloody history of religious wars in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the settlers of New England and the Middle Atlantic colonies were often defensive about their Protestantism. Fear of the "Popish menace" associated with the French and Spanish monarchies led to widespread anti-Catholic feeling that persisted among American Protestants well past the end of the Civil War in 1865 (Ahlstrom 1973, p. 53). Thus in the period between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, Protestantism was closely linked with patriotism as well as with civic virtue in the minds of many Americans.

It is also important to recall that some of the original colonies as well as the mother country had established churches. Because the early settlers of New England and the colonies further south were accustomed to having a state church as part of the general pattern of European government, the question in their minds was not whether to have an established church but rather which church to establish. By degrees Congregationalism became the established church of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, while the Anglican (Episcopal) Church was established in Virginia and received some degree of public support in the Carolinas, New Jersey, Georgia, and New York. Of the original thirteen colonies, only Rhode Island and Maryland were founded without a state church, and in Maryland the religious freedom originally guaranteed in the colony's 1649 Act of Toleration did not last.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the colonial state churches were moving toward disestablishment. By 1775, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Virginia were the only colonies that still had official state churches at all, and even they generally practiced an informal toleration of other bodies. The Revolution brought an end to the establishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia. Congregationalism lasted a bit longer in New England, however; it was not until 1818 that Connecticut finally adopted a state constitution that disestablished the Congregational Church. Connecticut's example was followed by New Hampshire in 1819 and Massachusetts in 1833. The existence of state churches in the thirteen original colonies, however, is part of the background for understanding the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century. People who had found the older churches lacking in spiritual vitality after the Revolution were open to religious revivalism as well as the various moral crusades (particularly abolitionism and the temperance movement) of the 1820s and 1830s.

Changing Denominational Mix

The decades preceding the Civil War were marked by several other changes in the denominational landscape of American Protestantism. One was the explosive growth of the churches that were able to adapt most readily to the challenges of the frontier—the Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples of Christ (Marsden 1991, p. 12). By 1844, when the Methodist churches divided between North and South over the issue of slavery, they represented the largest religious body in the United States (Ahlstrom 1973 p. 437). The denominations that had dominated American Protestantism in the late eighteenth century—the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, and the Congregationalists— also grew in numbers, but much more slowly (Ahlstrom 1973, p. 454).

An important reason for the slower growth of the more traditional churches was their insistence on an educated ministry. The oldest colleges in the United States, including Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701), had been founded specifically to train clergy. Thomas Clap (1703–1767), the fifth rector and first president of Yale, revised the college's constitution in line with his conviction that "the Principal Design of the Institution of this College was to educate Persons for the Work of the Ministry" (Bainton 1985, p. 12). Emphasis on education as a prerequisite for ordination, however, led to a growing division between churches that accepted this principle and those that regarded personal conversion and charismatic preaching as the primary qualifications for ministry. Even during the first Great Awakening, Clap and his likeminded colleagues opposed the open-air preaching of George Whitefield and other itinerant revivalists.

The educational requirements for ordination in the Congregational, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches were raised further by the establishment of theological seminaries alongside medical and law schools as graduate institutions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By 1812 Princeton had separated its seminary from its undergraduate college, followed by Harvard in 1815 and Yale in 1822 (Bainton 1985, pp. 79–81). The General Convention of the Episcopal Church voted to establish the General Theological Seminary in New York City in 1817, although the first buildings were not constructed until 1827. The Lutherans, separated from the mainstream of American Protestantism by their liturgical forms of worship as well as language differences, founded a theological seminary at Gettysburg in 1826 (Nelson 1980, pp. 128–129). The school's campus later became the site of fierce fighting on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863.

The relative informality of Methodist and Baptist worship, as well as their deemphasizing of formal education as preparation for ministry, helped these churches to thrive on the western frontier. Peter Cartwright (1785–1872), a Methodist circuit rider and one of the outstanding preachers of the Second Great Awakening, even regarded higher education as a hindrance to the spread of the Gospel. Converted at a camp meeting in 1801, Cartwright said, "I have seen so many educated preachers who forcibly reminded me of lettuce growing under the shade of a peach-tree, or like a gosling that had got the straddles by wading in the dew, that I turn away sick and faint" (Ahlstrom 1973, p. 438).

Another change in the denominational composition of American Protestantism prior to the Civil War was the emergence of separate black churches. In 1816, Richard Allen (1760–1831), a former slave, became the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a denomination organized in Philadelphia that had about 25,000 members by 1860. In 1821 another black Methodist body, the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion (AME Zion) was formed in New York City. As the Union armies moved deeper into the South toward the end of the Civil War, both AME churches opened missions among the freedpeople. They grew exponentially over the next few decades, the AME counting 452,725 members by 1896 and the AME Zion 349,788 (Ahlstrom 1973, pp. 708–709). The first black Baptist denomination, the Colored Primitive Baptists, was organized in 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War.

Sectarianism

The nineteenth century witnessed a growth in the number and variety of denominations and smaller groups (sects) within American Protestantism as well as an overall increase in the number of church members. European visitors to the United States from the 1830s onward remarked on the sheer number of different religious bodies in the country. Even in the 1930s, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then a graduate student in New York City, recorded in his diary, "It has been granted to the Americans less than any other nation on earth to realize the visible unity of the Church of God" (Bonhoeffer 1965, p. 94).

The distinction between a denomination and a sect is not always easy to draw, but in general a denomination can be defined as a socially and theologically stable body of Christians with a conventional church structure, whereas a sect is a group that develops on the periphery of a religion or denomination and eventually secedes from it, developing its own set of doctrines and religious practices as it separates from the parent body (Stark and Bainbridge 1979, pp. 121–122). Moreover, while denominations typically attract people from a range of social backgrounds, occupations, and educational levels, sects are more likely to appeal to those who feel disadvantaged or marginalized (Ahlstrom 1973, pp. 473–474).

In the period between the 1820s and the outbreak of the Civil War, the Second Great Awakening and other revival movements helped to prepare the ground for new sects that emerged from mainstream Protestantism but differed from it in a number of ways. The emphasis of nineteenth-century revivalists on "heart religion" rather than theological precision and on immediate spiritual experience rather than a sense of the historical continuity of the Church favored the growth of movements led by charismatic individuals who were not ordained by or identified with the traditional churches. Many of these persons developed their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible or, as in the case of Joseph Smith (1805–1844), claimed to be recipients of a new set of inspired writings.

William Miller (1782–1849) was a Vermont farmer who had left the Baptist Church as a young adult but returned to it after a conversion experience in 1816. He began an intense study of the Bible and came to the conclusion that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in 1843. He did not begin to preach or lecture publicly about his calculations, however, until 1831. By 1840 Miller's ideas had gained national attention, and local meetings were organized all over the United States to summon people to repentance and preparation for the Lord's return. Although Miller initially predicted the Second Coming to occur at some point between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844, he was persuaded by some of his followers to revise his calculations and set the final date as October 22, 1844. When that day—known as the Great Disappointment—came and went, most of Miller's followers abandoned the movement.

Some, however, followed a new leader, Ellen H. White (1827–1915). White had earlier left the Methodist Church to join Miller's movement in 1842. After the Great Disappointment of 1844, White began to have visions and claimed to have a spirit of prophecy. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, White and her followers formally established the Seventh-day Adventist Church, known in the twenty-first century for its distinctive views on diet and health as well as for its general cultural conservatism.

The other major sect to emerge from American Protestantism in the 1840s was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon Church. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, claimed to have been guided by the angel Moroni to a set of golden plates buried in a hillside near Palmyra, New York, in 1827. Smith spent the next three years translating the plates and published the result as the Book of Mormon in 1830. His new revelation, whose language echoes that of the King James Bible, began to attract followers within weeks of its publication. By the early 1840s the first Mormon colonies had begun their westward migration, chased from one Midwestern town after another by citizens offended by Smith's threats of violence against opponents, his claims to be a "Second Mohammed" (Ahlstrom 1973, p. 506), and by the Mormon practice of plural marriage. After Smith was lynched by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, in June 1844, Brigham Young (1801–1877) led the Mormons further west to what was then Utah territory, becoming its first governor as well as the second leader of the Latter-day Saints.

Missionary Activity

The period from 1815 to 1914 has sometimes been described as the "great century" of Christian missions (Latourette 1970, p. 225). In the United States, missions to the Indians began in the colonial period and continued as settlers moved westward in the years preceding the Civil War. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), an important figure in the first Great Awakening and an eminent theologian, served as a missionary to the Hou-satonic Indians in western Massachusetts (then a frontier area) from 1750 until 1757, when he left Stockbridge reluctantly to assume the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). By 1798 Connecticut had its own Missionary Society, which described its purpose as "Christianiz[ing] the heathen in North America" (Bainton 1985, p. 132).

In addition to converting the Native Americans to Christianity, nineteenth-century Protestant clergy also saw missions in the West as a way of slowing the growth of Roman Catholicism in the newly opened territories. Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), another leader of the Second Great Awakening and the founder of Lane Theological Seminary in Ohio, preached a sermon in early 1834 on the importance of keeping the West safe for Protestantism (Beecher 1835, pp. 10–12). Tragically, Beecher's sermon led to the burning of a Roman Catholic convent in Boston in August 1834 (Boston Evening Transcript, August 12, 1834).

Protestant missionaries were also sent to Native Americans in the southeastern states by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a Congregationalist body chartered in 1812 as an outgrowth of the Second Great Awakening. Many of these missionaries, in particular Jeremiah Evarts (1781–1831), the secretary of the ABCFM, were opponents of President Andrew Jackson's policy of Indian removal and lobbied Congress to protect the Indians from forced deportation to the West.

Evarts was also instrumental in opening missionary work to unmarried women. Under his leadership, the ABCFM sent Ellen Stetson (1783–1848) as the first single woman missionary to the Indians in 1821 and Betsey Stockton (1798?-1865), an African American born in slavery, as a missionary to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) in 1822 (Maxfield 1998, pp. 172–175). Evarts's acceptance of women as missionaries inspired Mary Lyon (1797–1849) to open Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837 to give women their first opportunity for higher education equal to that offered by the men's colleges. Lyon hoped that many of the school's graduates would enter the mission field. Writing to her fellow New Englanders in 1843 to support missions at home and abroad, Lyon singled out the work of the ABCFM:

I took a survey of Modern Missions. What a sublime spectacle! I glanced over the history of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions—the glory of our country—the corner stone of all our voluntary benevolent associations. I love to go back in its history more than thirty years… Though I was but a child [in 1812], I love even now the very thought that I can remember even the beginnings of this great and glorious enterprise (Lyon 1843, p. 15 ).

Although Lyon's seminary was not chartered as a college until 1888, it paved the way for the women's colleges founded during or shortly after the Civil War, including Vassar (1861), Smith (1875), and Wellesley (1875).

Women's Ministries

In addition to the opening of the mission field, the nineteenth century witnessed other new developments in the ministries of women outside as well as inside the Protestant churches. It was ironic, given the opposition of many American Protestants to Roman Catholicism, that one of the pioneers of women's ministries in the early nineteenth century was Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774–1821), an Episcopalian who became a Roman Catholic in 1805. Seton founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph in 1809, the first women's religious order that began in the United States. She was also the first native-born American to be declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, being canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1975.

Women in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches in the 1850s had a new opportunity for service as deaconesses. The office of deaconess had existed in the early Christian churches, as is evident in the New Testament, but had largely disappeared in the European churches by the end of the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century, however, some clergy in the Church of England and the Lutheran churches of Germany decided to revive the ancient office. As the early deaconesses had cared for the sick and helped to prepare women converts for Christian baptism, the nineteenth-century founders of deaconess movements trained women for service as teachers (particularly in girls' schools and foreign missions), lay ministers, and nurses. The first Episcopal deaconesses in the United States were consecrated in the Diocese of Maryland in 1855 (Rich 1907, n.p.). William Passavant (1821–1894), a devout Lutheran layman, founded an Institution of Protestant Deaconesses in Philadelphia modeled on the pattern of the deaconess motherhouse established by Theodor Fliedner in Kaiserswerth, Germany, in 1836. The first American Lutheran deaconesses began their work in Passavant's institution in 1849 (Weiser 1962, pp. 54–55).

Although the ordination of women to the ministry was unthinkable in most American Protestant churches at the time of the Civil War, Antoinette Louise Brown (1825–1891), an ardent abolitionist and a leader of the women's suffrage movement, was ordained by the Congregational Church of South Butler, New York, in 1853. She was thus the first clergywoman in a mainstream Protestant denomination in the United States.

Alternatives to Orthodox Protestantism

The Civil War affected the American churches by the sheer number of its casualties as well as by the splits that divided most mainstream Protestant bodies during the abolitionist controversies of the 1840s and 1850s. It is often forgotten that the Civil War cost more American lives (363,000 Union, 200,000 Confederate) than any other conflict in the nation's history, including World War II (408,000). Moreover, this loss occurred when the total population of the country was only 31.5 million, including slaves (Census of 1860). There were many families in both South and North that had to cope with profound grief as well as with the economic dislocations and hardships associated with war.

People who had been raised as Protestant Christians responded in various ways to the human devastation resulting from the war. Some, such as the writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce, were so traumatized by their combat experiences as to give up belief in any meaning to life at all, let alone a religious significance. Bierce wrote toward the end of his life that he had basically given up the traditional Christian belief in an afterlife:

In this matter of immortality, people's beliefs appear to go along with their wishes. The man who is content with annihilation thinks he will get it; those that want immortality are pretty sure they are immortal; and that is a very comfortable allotment of faiths. The few of us that are left unpro-vided for are those who do not bother themselves much about the matter, one way or another (Bierce 1912, p. 35).

John Wesley Powell, the son of a Methodist minister who became a famous explorer and geologist, dismissed the Christianity in which he had been reared as "ghost-lore" (Carter 1971, p. 5).

Other survivors of the war were attracted to spiritualist movements on the fringes of Christianity. These groups offered answers to questions raised by the war about life after death. Although American spiritualism had its beginnings in the 1840s, with the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, and their mysterious abilities of "channeling" the spirits of the departed, the movement grew rapidly in the years after 1865, as thousands of bereaved families asked for "messages" from loved ones killed in battle. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln gave the movement additional publicity by consulting spiritualists in the White House after the death of her son Willie in 1863 and even more frequently after her husband's assassination in 1865 (Ahlstrom 1973, p. 489).

Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877), the founder of a utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana, was converted to spiritualism in 1856 while serving the Pierce administration as a diplomat in Italy. After publishing a book about his experiences of the occult in 1860, Owen received an official initation to the White House in 1862 to give a lecture on his new beliefs. Owen's presentation prompted a classic comment from President Lincoln: "Well, for those who like that sort of thing, I should think it is just about the sort of thing they would like" (Fornell 1964, p. 118). Although the national organization of spiritualists formed in 1863 counted only 50,000 members by 1893, spiritualism proved to be a long-lasting reservoir from which later investigators of the occult—from people fascinated by astrology and paranormal phenomena to the New Age enthusiasts of the late twentieth century—would freely draw.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973.

Bainton, Roland H. Yale and the Ministry. New York and San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985.

Beecher, Lyman. "A Plea for the West." Cincinnati, OH: Truman & Smith, 1835.

Bierce, Ambrose. A Cynic Looks at Life. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1912.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures, and Notes, 1928–1936, ed. Edwin H. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

"Burning of the Charlestown Convent." Boston Evening Transcript, August 12, 1834, n.p.

Carter, Paul A. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971.

Fornell, Earl Wesley. Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of the Expansion of Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1970.

Lyon, Mary. A Missionary Offering, or, Christian Sympathy, Personal Responsibility, and the Present Crisis in Foreign Missions. Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1843.

Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991.

Maxfield, Charles A. "The Legacy of Jeremiah Evarts."International Bulletin of Missionary Research 22 (1998): 172–175.

Nelson, E. Clifford, ed. The Lutherans in North America. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980.

Rich, Lawson Carter. "The Deaconesses of the Church in Modern Times." The Churchman, May 4, 1907.

Stark, Rodney, and William S. Bainbridge. "Of Churches, Sects, and Cults: Preliminary Concepts for a Theory of Religious Movements." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18 (1979): 117–131.

Weiser, Frederick S. Love's Response: A Story of Lutheran Deaconesses in America. Philadelphia: Board of Publication, United Lutheran Church in America, 1962.

Rebecca J.Frey