{"id":507,"date":"2026-06-14T10:08:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T10:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=507"},"modified":"2026-06-14T10:08:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T10:08:42","slug":"how-did-american-christianity-end-up-like-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=507","title":{"rendered":"How Did American Christianity End Up Like This?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jeremiah Moore was an irritant to the Crown. Colonial authorities in Virginia apprehended him repeatedly for being, as one magistrate put it, in 1773, a \u201cpreacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.\u201d This was a true statement, but incomplete. Moore was a Baptist evangelist, admired for his knowledge of the Scriptures and for his satirical edge from the pulpit. Brook Wilensky-Lanford, the author of \u201cA God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America\u201d (Atlantic Monthly Press), describes Moore as \u201clarge and gregarious, and always spoiling for a fight.\u201d He ranged all over Fairfax County and, at one point, pastored in a place called Difficult, in between Falls Church and Leesburg. His alleged crime was preaching without the authorization of the Church of England, the colony\u2019s official church. An exasperated judge told him, \u201cYou shall lay in jail until you rot.\u201d Yet Moore, imprisoned in Alexandria, remained full of zeal, preaching through latticed windows to crowds outside.<\/p>\n

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Moore played an early role in the making of American Christianity. At the time of the country\u2019s founding, the church was experiencing an ebb tide, as the rejection of organized religion became more commonplace. Nevertheless, Christianity was enmeshed in public life. Most of the new states mandated that officeholders be Protestant; many still had officially recognized churches, sanctioned by the government. Moore and his fellow-Baptists were religious dissenters. In the fall of 1776, a petition complaining of the \u201cBurden of an ecclesiastical Establishment,\u201d signed by ten thousand men, arrived at the newly constituted Virginia House of Delegates. Moore later said that he\u2019d presented the petition directly to Thomas Jefferson, who at the time represented Albemarle County. Around this period, Jefferson was closely studying the political philosopher John Locke\u2019s arguments for religious freedom. He drafted a pioneering bill that barred the punishment of individuals for their religious beliefs, but failed to get it through the legislature. In 1786, Jefferson\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9, James Madison, successfully passed a slightly modified version of the measure, enshrining a watershed idea in America: the withdrawal of state control of religion.<\/p>\n

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Madison went on to become one of the principal architects of the Constitution and, later, the primary drafter of the Bill of Rights. His proposal for the First Amendment was sweeping, and included barring the abridgment of civil rights \u201con account of religious belief or worship,\u201d prohibiting \u201cany national religion,\u201d and guaranteeing \u201cequal rights of conscience.\u201d The final language approved by Congress, however, was more ambiguous, a product of conflicting desires to protect religious freedom and to curb the influence of the irreligious: \u201cCongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.\u201d Jefferson later argued, in a letter to a Baptist group in Connecticut, that the amendment established \u201ca wall of separation between Church & State.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Reality turned out to be more complicated. The First Amendment insured that faith in the United States would be voluntary. It would be up to the people to decide \u201chow much religion they wanted in their government, institutions, and communities,\u201d the historian Matthew Avery Sutton writes in his book \u201cChosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity\u201d (Basic). Many clergy feared what this would mean for their congregations, but the outcome upended all expectations. The great deregulation of religion led to a thriving marketplace, forcing churches to innovate and to compete for customers. The question, then as now, was how the winners would seek to imprint their values and beliefs on the nation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The harvest field is a metaphor in the Bible which speaks to people\u2019s openness to the Gospel. In the years after the American Revolution, many clergy believed that the harvest field had become barren. Then, in the spring of 1800, remote regions of Kentucky became the setting for strange, otherworldly scenes. At a Communion service near the Red River, attendees \u201cwere thrown into wonderful and strange contortions of features, body and limbs,\u201d one observer said. Soon after, during a gathering at Gasper River, the \u201cprostrate bodies of penitents\u201d covered the floor of a meeting house and had to be carried outside and laid out on the grass. The following year, in Logan County, in the southern part of the state, a Presbyterian minister named Barton Stone attended a revival meeting on the edge of a prairie. He saw people fall down and lie still for hours before suddenly rising and shouting words of deliverance. \u201cIt baffled description,\u201d he later said.<\/p>\n

The gatherings culminated in early August, 1801, in Cane Ridge, a tiny settlement whose name came from the dense bamboo that covered the region. A log meeting house, about fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, served as Cane Ridge\u2019s Presbyterian church, where Stone had been serving as pastor. It was his task to administer the summer Communion, typically several days of fasting, prayer, and sermonizing. Thousands of people arrived on foot, on horseback, and by wagon. Preachers mounted tree stumps and worked different parts of the encampment. Multitudes fell down and lay motionless. \u201cThe falling exercise was very common among all classes, the saints and sinners of every age and of every grade, from the philosopher to the clown,\u201d Stone later wrote. Some attendees shrieked and jerked; others laughed uncontrollably, or emitted grunts that resembled barking. One participant likened the cacophony to \u201cthe roar of Niagara.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Cane Ridge Revival would become an epochal moment in American religious history, one of the most visible manifestations of what historians would later refer to as the Second Great Awakening. (The first began in the early eighteenth century.) In 1803, after the Louisiana Purchase effectively doubled the size of the country, religious entrepreneurs gained access to a vast new market. Settlers streamed into the American frontier. Revivalist preachers followed them. For the most part, these were not ministers with formal theological training. They were farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans who forded streams, ascended valleys, and endured rain, wind, and snow in order to bring the Gospel to people eking out livelihoods in the wilderness. Francis Asbury, a young Methodist missionary, raised up an army of \u201ccircuit riders,\u201d preachers who travelled constantly; many of them died young. Asbury himself would traverse some two hundred and fifty thousand miles and preach more than sixteen thousand sermons in the course of forty-five years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The historic European Protestant traditions that were the forebears of the American church placed great emphasis on learning and on doctrine, but the result was a faith that tended to be aristocratic and \u00e9litist. Revivalism democratized Christianity. It elevated a new class of spiritual leaders\u2014people who could hold a crowd in their thrall. They preached that salvation was open to all and exhorted congregants to forge their own moral destinies. Sutton argues that the effect of this movement was a distinctly American faith, one in which \u201cthe ideals of political democracy and religious democracy went hand in hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over time, some preachers sought to systematize these tactics for winning converts. Charles Grandison Finney, who became renowned for his wildly popular revival meetings, honed his \u201cnew measures,\u201d which included addressing listeners in forthright, accessible language and incorporating an \u201canxious seat\u201d for the spiritually undecided. He encouraged preachers to think of themselves as marketers, insisting that a revival was \u201cnot a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle,\u201d but a \u201cright use of the constituted means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mark Noll, a historian of religion, argues that revivalism in America brought vitality to the church but left it intellectually impoverished\u2014a \u201cscandal of the evangelical mind.\u201d Nevertheless, the revivalists got their results. Religious adherence surged in the nineteenth century; by the twentieth, the majority of Americans belonged to a church.<\/p>\n

In \u201cChosen Land,\u201d Sutton identifies four streams of Christian belief which emerged as the nation matured: conservative, revivalist, liberal, and liberationist. Christians who drew from the conservative stream emphasized tradition and historic creeds; revivalists prioritized the conversion of souls and the transformation of individual lives; liberals sought to adapt Christian theology to the latest intellectual currents; and liberationists saw faith as a vehicle for social justice. The streams occasionally flowed together in a single, mighty river. At other times, they split and moved in opposite directions.<\/p>\n

In the nineteen-twenties, the topology of faith was dramatically shifting. Acceptance of Charles Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution, along with loosened sexual mores and technological progress, threatened to dislodge the church\u2019s primacy in American life. The journalist Walter Lippmann noted the \u201cdissolution of the old modes of thought\u201d and the way the \u201ccircumstances of life\u201d had conspired with \u201cthe intellectual habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative belief incredible to large masses of men.\u201d The needs of religious consumers were changing, and church leaders scrambled to adapt.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, May 21, 1922, the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan became the site of a fork in the river. The church\u2019s parklike campus took up an entire block on Fifth Avenue, and its high pulpit was occupied by Harry Emerson Fosdick, a bespectacled liberal Baptist minister. Fosdick had acquired renown as the author of a series of devotional books on prayer, faith, and service. At First Presbyterian, his irenic, empathetic sermons became public spectacles. On Sunday mornings, lines extended outside the sanctuary doors, and ushers seated worshippers in every nook of the church, even on cushions on the altar stairs.<\/p>\n

Fosdick was part of the modernist movement in American Protestantism, which grappled with the implications of evolution and with new scholarship about the Bible\u2019s origins. Liberal clergy abandoned certain tenets of Christian orthodoxy\u2014the Virgin Birth, Christ\u2019s miracles\u2014for a more literary and historical approach to the Bible. Many were proponents of the so-called Social Gospel, arguing that believers\u2019 obligations to the poor and needy were just as important as the project of soul-winning. In response, an alarmed cohort of theological conservatives pledged to defend the \u201cfundamentals\u201d of the faith and root out liberalism in their denominations.<\/p>\n

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Fosdick\u2019s sermon on that fateful spring day had been advertised in the city\u2019s newspapers: \u201cShall the Fundamentalists Win?\u201d From the pulpit, he argued that \u201cnew knowledge and the old faith had to be blended in a new combination.\u201d He castigated fundamentalism as \u201cilliberal and intolerant.\u201d He suggested that there was room for a spectrum of theological views in the church. \u201cOpinions may be mistaken,\u201d he said. \u201cLove never is.\u201d Fosdick later insisted that he had intended his message as a \u201cplea for good will.\u201d He instead succeeded in starting a war.<\/p>\n

A group of conservative Presbyterians, including William Jennings Bryan, the populist firebrand and thrice-failed Democratic Presidential candidate, tried to force Fosdick from the pulpit. The fracas played out in heated sermons, editorials, and denominational meetings. In 1924, Fosdick finally resigned. The following year, however, the fundamentalist advance stalled in Dayton, Tennessee, when Bryan took the stand as a \u201cBible expert\u201d during the trial of John Thomas Scopes, a teacher who had been arrested for violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution. Bryan\u2019s stumbling responses, under questioning from the legendary defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, left him humiliated. The fundamentalist movement became a national laughingstock. Lippmann later wrote that fundamentalism\u2019s ideas no longer appealed to \u201cthe best brains and the good sense of a modern community.\u201d<\/p>\n

The market had seemingly chosen. Fundamentalists found themselves excluded from the nation\u2019s major denominations, but they were hardly defeated. They threw themselves into establishing their own Bible schools, independent churches, and mission organizations. They experimented with new forms of media, founding radio programs that combined upbeat hymns and accessible messages. They made a point of minimizing denominational differences, lowering barriers to entry for newcomers. Even in exile, the dynamism of the fundamentalist movement enabled it to grow.<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1949, Billy Graham, a thirty-year-old evangelist with a square jaw and swept-back hair, began preaching under a giant tent in downtown Los Angeles, dubbed the \u201ccanvas cathedral.\u201d Graham was a product of fundamentalism\u2019s wilderness period. He\u2019d graduated from Wheaton College, in Illinois, the pre\u00ebminent fundamentalist institution of higher learning, and honed his skills as a revivalist travelling the country for Youth for Christ, an evangelistic ministry for teen-agers. In Los Angeles, Graham catapulted to national prominence, preaching for eight consecutive weeks to some three hundred and fifty thousand people.<\/p>\n

Graham went on to hold mass meetings, or crusades, as he called them, in dozens of American cities. He became the avatar of a burgeoning \u201cnew evangelical\u201d movement whose adherents were deeply influenced by fundamentalism, even as they eschewed the label. As Wilensky-Lanford explains, the new evangelicals hoped to build a more inclusive faith that engaged the broader culture and demonstrated how \u201cChristians could be both modern and conservative.\u201d In Graham, they found an ideal ambassador. His media savvy and relentless focus on an unadorned Gospel message helped him build a diverse coalition that crossed denominational lines.<\/p>\n

In the turbulence of the sixties and early seventies, when racial, gender, and sexual norms were upended anew, American churches underwent a \u201cgreat re-sorting,\u201d as Sutton puts it. White evangelical churches\u2014revivalists, under Sutton\u2019s classification system\u2014experienced remarkable growth, while liberal mainline Protestant churches withered. Sutton points to, among other factors, a gap between the progressive stances adopted by mainline clergy and the more conservative views of the average mainline churchgoer. Sensing an opportunity, many evangelicals\u2014particularly those with what the historian George Marsden has called \u201cfundamentalistic\u201d attitudes\u2014began shifting their attention to the political realm. \u201cThey positioned race, gender, and sexuality at the center of their resurrected and refashioned crusade to once again remake the United States as God\u2019s chosen land,\u201d Sutton writes. The result was the rise of the modern religious right. By the end of the twentieth century, this fundamentalism-inflected evangelicalism, with its muscular politics, was the unequivocal winner in America\u2019s religious economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Many of the most prominent entrepreneurs in the American church today straddle the spiritual and the political. In the late nineteen-eighties, David Barton, a former youth pastor and math and science teacher, founded WallBuilders, an organization in Aledo, Texas, \u201cdedicated to teaching America\u2019s forgotten history and heroes, emphasizing the moral, Christian, and constitutional foundation on which our nation was built.\u201d Barton was not a trained historian\u2014his degree, from Oral Roberts University, was in religious education\u2014but he had developed a hobbyist\u2019s interest in the Founding Fathers. In 1989, he published his first book, \u201cThe Myth of Separation,\u201d which promised to reveal to readers \u201cwhat the Founders and early Courts really<\/em> said\u201d about the separation of church and state. He went on to write more than twenty books, becoming the leading salesman for a cottage industry of historical misinformation that reached deep into the world of evangelical churches, home schools, and advocacy organizations. Barton\u2019s work has been eviscerated by scholars, but this has hardly dented his popularity. In \u201cOne State Under God: A History of Religion in Texas\u201d (University of Texas Press), the historian Joseph\u00a0L. Locke notes that readers of Barton\u2019s books weren\u2019t looking for rigorous research. \u201cInstead, they wanted a weapon,\u201d Locke writes. \u201cAnd Barton was handing them one.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fusion of Christianity and nationalism that Barton promotes is not new, though it has taken different forms in the course of American history. The First Amendment\u2019s ambiguity means that, as Sutton points out, \u201cAmericans have never really separated church from state.\u201d Activists of all kinds, from Frederick Douglass to Jerry Falwell, have wielded the Bible and sought political power. It\u2019s inarguable, however, that Donald Trump\u2019s ascendance has nourished a darker, more volatile version of the phenomenon. Tapping into the lineage of white evangelicalism, with its charismatic leaders, anti-intellectualism, and political militancy, the MAGA<\/em> movement has placed a nostalgia for a Christian past at the center of a grievance-based politics.<\/p>\n

Barton\u2019s pseudo-scholarship furnished Christian nationalists with valuable ammunition, but the movement needed foot soldiers. In 2012, an eighteen-year-old named Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA, a nonprofit organization meant to promote fiscal conservatism among young people. Kirk had been a Christian since childhood, but he was initially circumspect about his faith, arguing that religious conservatives had erred by imposing their beliefs \u201cthrough government policy.\u201d In 2019, however, Kirk met Rob McCoy, a pastor who challenged Kirk to more aggressively bring his Christian world view into the public arena. The following year, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Kirk lauded President Trump for understanding \u201cthe seven mountains of cultural influence\u201d\u2014an evangelical vision, dating to the nineteen-seventies, that calls on believers to influence the realms of family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Kirk embraced the idea himself, building a media empire and organizing a grassroots army to turn out Trump voters during the 2024 election. Last year, after a gunman shot and killed Kirk at a campus event in Utah, his wife, Erika, a former Miss Arizona who started her own ministry organization and a faith-based clothing company, vowed to carry on her husband\u2019s legacy, \u201cfighting the good fight for our country.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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She\u2019s doing so at an opportune moment for the American church. Although only about two-thirds of Americans now identify as Christians\u2014compared with just under ninety per cent in the nineteen-nineties\u2014a recent Pew Research Center survey concluded that the erosion in belief has likely levelled off. New data from Gallup show a surge of religiosity among young men. It seems possible that Christianity is once again on the upswing in America.<\/p>\n

As in the past, its form will be determined by the religious marketplace. The First Amendment\u2019s \u201cdisestablishment and free-exercise clauses do not dictate outcomes,\u201d Sutton writes. \u201cThey offer choices.\u201d The sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have argued that, historically, the most popular religious bodies tend to exert a countervailing force on the culture at large. They demand sacrifice from their adherents but also promise temporal and eternal rewards. Expecting churches that preach a distant, unresponsive God to be attractive to new believers is akin, Finke and Stark write, to believing that soccer fans would buy tickets to matches with \u201cplayers who, for lack of a ball, just stand around.\u201d In this way, they explain the extraordinary rise of evangelicalism.<\/p>\n

Could these churches, which have dominated the marketplace for a half century, change? Or could an upstart that prioritizes love and mercy, say, over dominion lure away their customers? Plenty of evangelical pastors, writers, and advocates have called for and modelled a more compassionate and inclusive faith. The issue is one of scale. Can a rivulet turn into a river? It would demand charismatic religious entrepreneurs championing a countercultural, supernatural faith that encourages its followers to love their neighbors and grow in grace. Perhaps such a gospel could flood the nation.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more My N.B.A. Knowledge Comes In Handy<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Luo reviews Matthew Avery Sutton\u2019s \u201cChosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity\u201d and Brook Wilensky-Lanford\u2019s \u201cA God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Did American Christianity End Up Like This? - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=507\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Did American Christianity End Up Like This? 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