History of religion in the United States
The "Mainline Protestant" denominations promoted the "Social Gospel" in the early 20th century, calling on Americans to reform their society; the demand for prohibition of liquor was especially strong.
[17] Tenskwatawa urged the tribes to reject the ways of the Americans: to give up firearms, liquor, and American-style clothing, to pay traders only half the value of their debts, and to refrain from ceding any more lands to the United States.
In 1773, Isaac Backus, a prominent Baptist minister in New England, observed that when "church and state are separate, the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued."
Driven by "the sacred duty of finding a refuge for his Roman Catholic brethren", George Calvert obtained a charter from Charles I in 1632 for the territory between Pennsylvania and Virginia.
According to one expert, Judeo-Christian faith was in the "ascension rather than the declension"; another sees a "rising vitality in religious life" from 1700 onward; a third finds religion in many parts of the colonies in a state of "feverish growth.
People began to study the Bible at home, which effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious manners and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Reformation.
[64] The South had originally been settled and controlled by Anglicans, who dominated the ranks of rich planters but whose ritualistic high church established religion had little appeal to ordinary men and women, both white and black.
Patriotic American members of the Church of England, loathing to discard so fundamental a component of their faith as the Book of Common Prayer, revised it to conform to the political realities.
[73][74] Historians in recent decades have debated the nature of American religiosity in the early 19th century, focusing on issues of secularism, deism, traditional religious practices, and newly emerging evangelical forms based on the Great Awakening.
[75][76] The Constitution ratified in 1788 makes no mention of religion except in Article Six, where it specifies that "No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States".
[citation needed] However, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1791, has played a central role in defining the relationship of the federal government to the free exercise of religion, and to the prohibition of the establishment of an official church.
In setting up the University of Virginia, Jefferson encouraged all the separate sects to have preachers of their own, though there was a constitutional ban on the State supporting a Professorship of Divinity, arising from his own Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom[83] The Treaty of Tripoli was a treaty concluded between the US and Tripolitania submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, receiving ratification unanimously from the US Senate on June 7, 1797, and signed by Adams, taking effect as the law of the land on June 10, 1797.
[94] The Gilded Age plutocracy came under harsh attack from the Social Gospel preachers and with reformers in the Progressive Era who became involved with issues of child labor, compulsory elementary education and the protection of women from exploitation in factories.
[108] The interdenominational Protestant United States Christian Commission sent agents into the Army camps to provide psychological support as well as books, newspapers, food and clothing.
According to historian R. Laurence Moore, Christian Scientists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Pentecostals, and Roman Catholics responded to hostile comments by sensing themselves as persecuted Americans on the margins of society, which made them cling tightly to their status as full citizens.
[127] Historian Edward Ayers describes an impoverished South with a rich spiritual life: Starting in the colonial era, most of the Protestant denominations operated missions to Native Americans.
After the Civil War, the programs were expanded and the major Western reservations were put under the control of religious denominations, largely to avoid the financial scandals and ugly relationships that had previously prevailed.
[134] Historian Cary Collins says Grant's Peace Policy failed in the Pacific Northwest chiefly because of sectarian competition and the priority placed on proselytizing by the religious denominations.
Inspired by the Social Gospel movement to increased activism, young people on college campuses and in urban centers such as the YMCA contributed to a great surge that brought the total to 5000 by 1900.
From 1886 to 1926, the most active recruiting agency was the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), which used its base on campus YMCAs to appeal to enlist over 8,000 young Protestants.
Mission leaders had strongly endorsed the war; the younger generation was dismayed amid growing doubts about the wisdom of cultural imperialism in dealing with foreign peoples.
[145][146] In 1930–1932, Harvard Professor William Ernest Hocking led the Commission of Appraisal, which produced the Laymen's Inquiry which recommended a shift on Christian missionary activities from evangelism to education and welfare.
The most controversial Social Gospel reform was prohibition, which was highly popular in rural areas – including the South – and unpopular in the larger cities where mainline Protestantism was weak among the electorate.
[150][151][152][153] Webb (1991) traces the political and legal struggles between strict creationists and Darwinists to influence the extent to which evolution would be taught as science in Arizona and California schools.
Only a minority of religious leaders, typified by Reinhold Niebuhr, paid serious attention to the threats to peace posed by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or militaristic Japan.
[161][162] In one of the largest white Protestant denominations, the Southern Baptists, there was a new awareness of international affairs, a highly negative response to the axis dictatorships, and also a growing fear of the power of the Catholic Church in American society.
[170][171][172] In Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, a Supreme Court decision in 1892, Justice David Josiah Brewer wrote that America was "a Christian nation".
After the Reed Smoot hearings began in 1904, a Second Manifesto was issued which specified that anyone entering into or solemnizing polygamous marriages would be excommunicated, and clarified that polygamy restrictions applied everywhere, and not just in the United States.
The Church of Christ, Scientist was founded in 1879, in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy, the author of its central book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which offers a unique interpretation of Christian faith.
The proportion of the population has been about 2% to 3% since 1900, and in the 21st century Jews were widely diffused in major metropolitan areas around New York or the Northeastern United States, and especially in South Florida and California.
