Religion and American Culture

A Brief History

George M. Marsden

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780802875396
• eBook ISBN: 9781467451130
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

While Americans still profess to be one of the most religious people in the industrialized world, many aspects of American culture have long been secular and materialistic. That is just one of the many paradoxes, contradictions, and surprises in the relationship between Christianity and American culture. In this book George Marsden, a leading historian of American Christianity and award-winning author, tells the story of that relationship in a concise and thought-provoking way.

Surveying the history of religion and American culture from the days of the earliest European settlers right up through the elections of 2016, Marsden offers the kind of historically and religiously informed scholarship that has made him one of the nation’s most respected and decorated historians. Students in the classroom and history readers of all ages will benefit from engaging with the story Marsden tells.

CHAPTER 1

Christendom and American Origins

For this end we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality, we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body. . . . For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630)

To understand the role of religion in American history, we must recognize the immense importance of the ideal of “Christian civilization.” The Europeans who settled the Americas throughout the colonial era simply took for granted that they represented Christendom. This was as much a part of their identity as being Spanish or French or English.

Christendom, however, was bitterly divided. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Western church under Rome had separated early in the Middle Ages so that Eastern Orthodoxy was a distant reality to most Western Europeans. Central to the Western European experience, though, was the split in the Church of Rome brought about by the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation, triggered by Martin Luther in 1517, shattered European unity and dominated Western politics for the next century. This coincided almost exactly with New World explorations and early settlements. The Protestant reforms, though motivated primarily by deep disagreements over religious issues, had immense political implications. Europeans in the sixteenth century assumed, as they had through the Middle Ages, that a country’s ruler would not only determine its religion but also would suppress heresies and false worship. “One state, one religion” was the rule.

The Cold War

The success of the Reformation depended not only on persuading the population about Protestant doctrines; it hinged as much or more on converting rulers to the cause. As a result, existing political divisions and monarchical rivalries in Europe were vastly deepened by fierce ideological-religious struggles for political control of the ruling houses. The closest counterpart to this situation in recent times would be the lengthy cold war through much of the twentieth century between Marxists and anti-Marxists. Sixteenth-century Europe was similarly divided between two contending ideologies both vying for the hearts of people and political control. As in the communist or anticommunist fervor of the twentieth century, each side vilified the other. Each was sure God was on their side and that it was God’s will that the other side be stopped by any means possible. Each saw the other as literally of the Devil.

The largest group of early Protestants were Lutherans, followers of Martin Luther (1483–1546), whose churches became state churches in many German provinces and in Scandinavia. By the second generation of the Reformation, the most aggressive major Protestant group pushing for political-religious revolutions was the Calvinists. Calvinists followed theologian John Calvin (1509–64), who had established a model for Christian rule in the independent city of Geneva, Switzerland. Because Calvinists had a disproportional influence in shaping the future culture of the United States, their teachings should be given due attention.

Calvin attempted to build a thoroughgoing Reformation theology based on the Protestant principle of “the Bible alone” as religious authority. This principle challenged the institutional authority of the Catholic Church. Catholics believed that God had ordained the institutional church, ruled on earth by the pope, to interpret biblical revelation and especially to provide the sacramental means through which people could receive the grace of God necessary for their eternal salvation. Protestants claimed the church had become a corrupt human institution. It needed to be reformed, they asserted, by testing its claims against the Bible alone.

Calvinists attempted to carry as far as possible the principle that one should rely entirely upon God and not on humanity in religious matters. God, they emphasized, was the absolute sovereign ruler of all creation. Nothing happened outside God’s ultimate control. Humans, accordingly, could do nothing to promote their salvation. They were corrupted, sinful beings whose only hope of redemption was through the grace of God. Yet that was a wonderful hope. Through the sacrificial death of Christ, God graciously provided salvation from sin for those whom he would save. The Bible alone and the sovereignty of God were thus the two organizing principles of Calvinist Christianity.

For most of the sixteenth century, Protestants battled Catholics for control of a number of European countries, with Calvinists often taking the lead in pressing for further expansion. Catholics fought back ardently, especially under the influence of the new Jesuit order. The Jesuits were instrumental in countering the Reformation, sending out missionaries, and securing centers of Catholic influence.

The New World was of strategic importance to the Catholic powers, especially to the Spanish, who dominated European advances in South and Central America throughout the 1500s. Exploitation of New World wealth provided the chief practical motive for European conquests, but what seemed a God-given opportunity to expand Christendom provided a higher justification. As always had been the case when political power and economic interests were closely related to religious rationales, remarkable paradoxes resulted. Providing opportunity for Catholic missions was one of the rationales for military conquest. Yet the conquests were accomplished with much cruelty toward the native peoples, vastly increasing the difficulties of effective mission work. Even so, dedicated Catholic missionaries brought with them Christian moral principles that mitigated some of the exploitation. Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), a Dominican priest, was especially notable among the early missionaries in insisting that the Indians be treated as fellow humans. Eventually, most of the natives decided to live peacefully with the new arrivals, and many were Christianized. So most of the Western Hemisphere was at least officially Catholic long before Protestants were on the scene.

In the 1600s, French Catholics became another force in settling and evangelizing substantial territories in the New World, particularly what are now eastern Canada and the American Midwest. During the 1500s, it had not been clear whether France would become Protestant or Catholic, and the nation had been divided by a bloody civil war over that issue. Once that issue was settled in favor of Catholicism, France emerged in the 1600s as a major international power with New World aspirations. In the more sparsely settled, largely wooded regions of French influence, missionaries played a leading role in the quest for evangelizing Native Americans. Missionary explorers, most notably the Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette (1637–75), penetrated the Mississippi valley, into the areas that are now Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa (where place names such as Eau Claire, Des Plaines, Fond du Lac, and Des Moines still exist). The French, especially the Jesuits, were probably the most effective European missionaries in the New World. They usually had the advantage over their Spanish or English counterparts of not being either preceded by conquests or accompanied by large numbers of settlers who wished to displace the native peoples from their territories. They were thus able to preach the gospel message without the encumbrances of the political dimensions of Christendom. By the 1700s, nevertheless, their missionary efforts had helped secure for France many Indian allies who were then drawn into Christendom’s rivalries and wars.

The English Reformation

The English settlements on the eastern coast of what is now the United States should be understood in the context of the religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. International rivalries, especially with Spain, and quests for economic and imperial expansion were essential motives. Still, when the English established their first permanent settlement, one in Jamestown in 1607, it was not lost on them that they were establishing a very small beachhead in a largely Catholic hemisphere. Throughout American colonial history, struggles between Protestants and Catholics were crucial factors in defining British-American identities.

The English had a peculiar role in the ongoing Protestant-Catholic struggles. England had more or less backed into the Reformation. In the early years of Luther’s revolt, the English had been in the Catholic camp. By the late 1520s, however, Henry VIII (1491–1547) wanted to change wives, and when the pope refused to grant a divorce, Henry decided to change churches. In 1534, he severed the English church from the leadership of the pope in Rome and declared himself the sovereign over English church affairs. This opened the door for Protestantism in England. The issue was far from settled, however.

Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was Spanish and Catholic. When their daughter Mary (1516–58) became queen of England in 1553, she reinstituted Catholicism, putting to death many Protestant leaders. Others of these leaders escaped to the continent; some went to Geneva, where John Calvin presided. When Mary died in 1558, Elizabeth (1533–1603), Henry’s Protestant daughter by his second marriage, acceded to the throne, and England went back to the Protestant fold. Elizabeth forged a compromise for the Church of England, retaining the Episcopal form of government (leadership by bishops) and much of traditional Catholic ritual but instituting Protestant doctrine. This “Elizabethan compromise,” although it placed England solidly in the Protestant camp, did not please all Protestants, especially some of those exiled under Mary to Calvin’s Geneva and now returning, who wanted to press the Protestant principle of “the Bible alone” as the guide for the church. The church, they contended, should have only practices explicitly commanded in Scripture. Hence, they argued, the Episcopal hierarchy, lavish ecclesiastical adornments, and formal rituals of Anglican worship should go. This Calvinist party within the Church of England, who wanted to further purify the church, became known as Puritans.

Protestant England under Elizabeth emerged as a leading naval power and successfully challenged the dominance of Catholic Spain. The turning point was the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English fleet in 1588, an event that, for centuries after, English-speaking Protestants viewed as evidence of God’s providential intervention on their side. The defeat of the Spanish Armada gave England sufficient security on the seas to begin North American settlements.

The Religious and the Secular

Despite the prominence of religion in such national conflicts, it is difficult to tell how deeply religious motives figured for those who settled the colonies. In the rhetoric of early Virginia, for instance, the first settlers boldly proclaimed themselves, as John Rolfe (of Pocahontas fame) put it, “a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God, to possess it, for undoubtedly he is with us.”¹ Establishing Protestant outposts in the New World to counter what they regarded as the evils of Roman Catholic influences seemed to many English men and women to be a God-given duty. They also had hopes to convert the Indians, although these soon foundered. The early colonial authorities strictly maintained the religious formalities of the day, including laws requiring church attendance. Yet in reality, the Virginia colony in its earliest decades soon became more like a company town, perhaps like a mining outpost in later times in the distant reaches of Alaska.

Anglican England, from which the settlers came, was, like every nation, a mix of religious practices with secular forces that had little to do with religion. This was, after all, the age of William Shakespeare, whose plays reflected the sophisticated, Renaissance, this-worldly humanism of the day. People in Shakespeare’s plays were motivated by rivalries, ambitions, greed, loves, hatreds, and much more in human nature that seldom seemed connected to any discernible religious considerations. So it is hardly surprising that a motley assortment of English men and women from Shakespeare’s time transplanted to the New World would be driven by a similar assortment of concerns. For some, these perennial human traits would be refracted through strong religious commitments. For most, the purely secular would predominate. In fact, in the Virginia colony, formal Anglican Christianity depended largely on government authority and custom and tended to languish in the frontier setting. What worked in a settled Anglican parish in England would be hard to sustain in the rugged open spaces of the American continent.

The Puritan Heritage

At the same time, some very intense Protestantism, especially through the Puritan movement, soon influenced British-American colonies. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, she was succeeded by one of her cousins, King James VI of Scotland, who as king of England (r. 1603–25) was known as James I. James’s Stuart family in Scotland had been forced, reluctantly, to accept a Calvinist Presbyterian Church. James and his Stuart successors, who ruled England for most of the 1600s, accordingly disliked English Puritans intensely. The feelings were mutual. A small group of more extreme Puritans felt they must leave the Church of England and hence England itself. Eventually, this group founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620, famed largely for its early struggles and for the first Thanksgiving celebration. When James’s son, Charles I (1600–49), came to the throne in 1625, the tension in England became so severe even for moderate Puritans that a substantial number of these Puritans were willing to brave the high seas and the wilderness to found an alternative society based on Puritan principles. This society, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, would be, as Governor John Winthrop put it in 1630, “a city upon a hill,” a model Christian state that all the world could imitate.

The Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were convinced that they had been commissioned by God to play a major role in world history. Their rule for life was the fundamental Protestant principle that the Bible alone should be their supreme guide. For a model society, they looked to the Old Testament, which described God’s governance of Israel. Surely, they reasoned, these God-given principles should apply to nations even in their time.

Central to the Old Testament view of the nation was the covenant, which defined the relationship between God and a nation as a contract whose terms were the law of God. By far the most crucial factor determining the success or failure of a nation was its relationship to God. If a nation kept the law of God, that nation would be blessed. If it broke God’s law, it would be punished. Morality, based on biblical law, was the key to success.

The seventeenth-century Puritans were by far the most articulate and best educated of North America’s early settlers and so had an immense and disproportional influence on the later American culture. One of the first things that the Massachusetts Puritans did was to found Harvard College in 1638. Through the next three centuries their New England heirs were often the leading educators in the new nation. As particularly intense Protestants in overwhelmingly Protestant British North America, they offered a language that many later Americans used for talking about the religious dimensions of their nation’s heritage.

The Thanksgiving holiday is the best-known example. The Pilgrims of the fledgling Plymouth Colony held a feast of Thanksgiving in 1621 in gratitude to God for the harvest and other blessings. At least ninety Native Americans were their guests in an event lasting three days. Occasional Thanksgivings became a common practice in Puritan New England. These celebrations had Old Testament precedent and fit well with the idea that their society was under a covenant with God, who would bless them for faithfulness and punish them for misdeeds. So they had not only Thanksgiving feast days but also fast days for collective repentance. When the United States was founded, it adopted similar practices. Presidents would occasionally call for days of thanksgiving or of fasting. But during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) declared Thanksgiving to be a national holiday. He also declared days of fasting. Eventually days of fasting became rare, but Thanksgiving became a regular holiday. Even though there had been many sorts of thanksgiving celebration in North America before 1621, the colorful story of the Pilgrims became the standard national story. That fit with trends, especially in the nineteenth-century North, to emphasize the Puritan role in the foundation of the nation as a whole. Furthermore, the persistent image in the popular lore was that the Pilgrims and Puritans came to America as champions of freedom.² These ardent Protestants did indeed cross the ocean seeking a refuge where they would be free to practice their religion. But they were not interested in other people’s religious freedom. Rather, they saw it as their God-given duty to banish those whose religious teachings differed substantially from their own.

The influences of the Puritan covenantal heritage on later American national self-understanding are a good example of the mixed benefits of the Protestant religious heritage. On the positive side, it was one among a number of influences that helped define the nation not simply in terms of protecting its own interests but as having moral obligations. That emphasis fit, for instance, with later republican ideas that the success of a nation depended on the virtue of its citizens. Such emphases on morality and virtue helped create a sense of civic responsibility among the citizenry—clearly an important ingredient in a successful republic. Most citizens will play by the rules, for instance, accepting election results that they strongly oppose. Moreover, such moral emphases have fostered countless reform efforts at home and humanitarian concerns both at home and abroad.

Ironically, such a sense of the importance of virtue, which the Puritan heritage helped provide, can lead to an arrogant moral superiority that transgresses the very rights of others that the moral system claims to protect. For instance, when the new nation was founded, Americans saw themselves, with some justification, as beacons to the world demonstrating the virtues of a republic. When the new nation was formed, Americans readily accepted covenant talk about being blessed by God or in danger of God’s judgments. Americans liked to think of themselves as having a special mission. They readily spoke, almost as the Puritans had, of the United States as a new Israel chosen by God to play a leading role in a new era of the world’s redemption. That helped inspire a moral idealism and a willingness to be open to helping the stranger. As the plaque on the Statue of Liberty reads: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Yet that same moral idealism, combined with a sense of being a chosen nation, a new Israel, heightened nineteenth-century Americans’ sense of mission, or “manifest destiny,” in becoming a transcontinental power. Americans took vast tracts of land from native peoples and from Mexico, partly on the grounds of the United States’s supposed moral superiority. In the twentieth century, when America became a world power, the chosen-nation ideal and American sense of virtue were important rationales in American foreign policy, sometimes for the good, but also sometimes for overreaching.

As we will be see in the history that follows, defining one’s nation’s uniqueness in terms of its virtues has i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Christendom and American Origins
• 2. Religion and the American Revolution
• 3. The Age of Democratic Revivals
• 4. Protestant and Progressive America: 1860–1917
• 5. Pluralistic America: 1860–1917
• 6. Keeping the Faith in Modern Times
• 7. A Return to Faith and the Quest for Consensus: 1941–63
• 8. The 1960s and Their Legacy—A Fragmented Nation in Search of a Soul
• 9. The Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Index