History of Christianity in the United States

Because the Spanish were the first Europeans to establish settlements on the mainland of North America, such as St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, the earliest Christians in the territory which would eventually become the United States were Roman Catholics.

With its first settlements, France lay claim to a vast region of North America and set out to establish a commercial empire and French nation stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.

[4] The colonists were typically inattentive, uninterested, and bored during church services, according to the ministers, who complained that the people were sleeping, whispering, ogling the fashionably dressed women, walking about and coming and going, or at best looking out the windows or staring blankly into space.

However, the 1646 defeat of the Royalists in the English Civil War led to stringent laws against Catholic education and the extradition of known Jesuits from the colony, including Andrew White, and the destruction of their school at Calverton Manor.

Driven by the "duty of finding a refuge for his Roman Catholic brethren," George Calvert obtained a Maryland charter from Charles I in 1632 for the territory between Pennsylvania and Virginia.

After the Glorious Revolution of 1689 in England, penal laws deprived Roman Catholics of the right to vote, hold office, educate their children or worship publicly.

Because the Reformation was based on an effort to correct what it perceived to be errors and excesses of the Catholic Church, it formed strong positions against the Roman clerical hierarchy and the papacy in particular.

Despite substantial doubt that Article Three had been approved by the required two thirds of the voters, in 1780 Massachusetts authorities declared it and the rest of the state constitution to have been duly adopted.

In 1788, John Jay urged the New York Legislature to require office-holders to renounce foreign authorities "in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil"..[12] The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant movement that began around 1790, and gained momentum by 1800.

They were united, among other things, in the belief that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, that churches celebrate the Lord's Supper on the first day of each week, and that baptism of adult believers, by immersion in water, is a necessary condition for Salvation.

The Latter Day Saint movement traces their origins to the Burned-over district of western New York, where Joseph Smith, Jr., reported seeing God the Father and Jesus Christ, eventually leading him to doctrines that, he said, were lost after the apostles were killed.

Joseph Smith gained a small following in the late 1820s as he was dictating the Book of Mormon, which he said was a translation of words found on a set of golden plates that had been buried near his home by an indigenous American prophet.

After continued difficulties and persecution in Illinois, Young left Nauvoo in 1846 and led his followers, the Mormon pioneers, to the Great Salt Lake Valley in what is today Utah.

In July 1879, after separating from Barbour, Russell began publishing the magazine Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence,[19][20] highlighting his interpretations of biblical chronology, with particular attention to his belief that the world was in "the last days".

The religion's history has consisted of four distinct phases linked with the successive presidencies of Charles Taze Russell, Joseph Rutherford, Nathan Knorr and Frederick Franz.

The Baptists, well aware of Jefferson's own unorthodox beliefs, sought him as an ally in making all religious expression a fundamental human right and not a matter of government largesse.

However, many were disappointed at the treatment they received from their fellow believers and at the backsliding in the commitment to abolish slavery that many white Baptists and Methodists had advocated immediately after the American Revolution.

Abolitionism had a strong religious base including Quakers and people converted by the revivalist fervor of the Second Great Awakening, led by Charles Finney in the North in the 1830s.

O'Connell, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobold Mayhew organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the United States to support abolition.

Despite a firm stand for the spiritual equality of black people, and the resounding condemnation of slavery by Pope Gregory XVI in his bull In supremo apostolatus issued in 1839, the American church continued in deeds, if not in public discourse, to support slaveholding interests.

Especially targeting critical approaches to the interpretation of the Bible, and trying to blockade the inroads made into their churches by secular scientific assumptions, the fundamentalists grew in various denominations as independent movements of resistance to the drift away from historic Christianity.

Fearing the end of times, some American Protestants who believed they were God's chosen people, went so far as to claim that the Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation.

In 2002, the United States Supreme Court partially vitiated these amendments, in theory, when they ruled that vouchers were constitutional if tax dollars followed a child to a school, even if it were religious.

At the same time, he reiterated the Church's defense of private property, condemned socialism, and emphasized the need for Catholics to form and join unions that were not compromised by secular and revolutionary ideologies.

Some scholars argue that the horrors caused by World War I left many disillusioned with the Social Gospel's ideals and promise of a glorious future for mankind.

The highly publicized trial pitted two of the pre-eminent lawyers of the time against one another; three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan headed up the prosecution and famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow spoke for Scopes.

On this basis, the North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church (known as the "Metropolia") continued to exist in a de facto autonomous mode of self-governance.

This group, which to this day includes a sizable portion of the Russian emigration, was formally dissolved in 1922 by Patriarch Tikhon, who then appointed metropolitans Platon and Evlogy as ruling bishops in America and Europe, respectively.

[citation needed] The Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908, marked the first major expression of a growing modern ecumenical movement among Christians in the United States.

In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the United States Supreme Court declared the Oregon's Compulsory Education Act unconstitutional in a ruling that has been called "the Magna Carta of the parochial school system."