How Did American Christianity End Up Like This?
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 “preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” 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 “A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America” (Atlantic Monthly Press), describes Moore as “large and gregarious, and always spoiling for a fight.” 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’s official church. An exasperated judge told him, “You shall lay in jail until you rot.” Yet Moore, imprisoned in Alexandria, remained full of zeal, preaching through latticed windows to crowds outside.
Moore played an early role in the making of American Christianity. At the time of the country’s 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 “Burden of an ecclesiastical Establishment,” signed by ten thousand men, arrived at the newly constituted Virginia House of Delegates. Moore later said that he’d 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’s 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’s protégé, James Madison, successfully passed a slightly modified version of the measure, enshrining a watershed idea in America: the withdrawal of state control of religion.
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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 “on account of religious belief or worship,” prohibiting “any national religion,” and guaranteeing “equal rights of conscience.” 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: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Jefferson later argued, in a letter to a Baptist group in Connecticut, that the amendment established “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
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 “how much religion they wanted in their government, institutions, and communities,” the historian Matthew Avery Sutton writes in his book “Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity” (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.
The harvest field is a metaphor in the Bible which speaks to people’s 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 “were thrown into wonderful and strange contortions of features, body and limbs,” one observer said. Soon after, during a gathering at Gasper River, the “prostrate bodies of penitents” 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. “It baffled description,” he later said.
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’s 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. “The 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,” Stone later wrote. Some attendees shrieked and jerked; others laughed uncontrollably, or emitted grunts that resembled barking. One participant likened the cacophony to “the roar of Niagara.”
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 “circuit riders,” 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.
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 élitist. Revivalism democratized Christianity. It elevated a new class of spiritual leaders—people 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 “the ideals of political democracy and religious democracy went hand in hand.”
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 “new measures,” which included addressing listeners in forthright, accessible language and incorporating an “anxious seat” for the spiritually undecided. He encouraged preachers to think of themselves as marketers, insisting that a revival was “not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle,” but a “right use of the constituted means.”
Mark Noll, a historian of religion, argues that revivalism in America brought vitality to the church but left it intellectually impoverished—a “scandal of the evangelical mind.” Nevertheless, the revivalists got their results. Religious adherence surged in the nineteenth century; by the twentieth, the majority of Americans belonged to a church.
In “Chosen Land,” 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.
In the nineteen-twenties, the topology of faith was dramatically shifting. Acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, along with loosened sexual mores and technological progress, threatened to dislodge the church’s primacy in American life. The journalist Walter Lippmann noted the “dissolution of the old modes of thought” and the way the “circumstances of life” had conspired with “the intellectual habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative belief incredible to large masses of men.” The needs of religious consumers were changing, and church leaders scrambled to adapt.
On Sunday, May 21, 1922, the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan became the site of a fork in the river. The church’s 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.
Fosdick was part of the modernist movement in American Protestantism, which grappled with the implications of evolution and with new scholarship about the Bible’s origins. Liberal clergy abandoned certain tenets of Christian orthodoxy—the Virgin Birth, Christ’s miracles—for a more literary and historical approach to the Bible. Many were proponents of the so-called Social Gospel, arguing that believers’ 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 “fundamentals” of the faith and root out liberalism in their denominations.
Fosdick’s sermon on that fateful spring day had been advertised in the city’s newspapers: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” From the pulpit, he argued that “new knowledge and the old faith had to be blended in a new combination.” He castigated fundamentalism as “illiberal and intolerant.” He suggested that there was room for a spectrum of theological views in the church. “Opinions may be mistaken,” he said. “Love never is.” Fosdick later insisted that he had intended his message as a “plea for good will.” He instead succeeded in starting a war.
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 “Bible expert” 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’s 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’s ideas no longer appealed to “the best brains and the good sense of a modern community.”
The market had seemingly chosen. Fundamentalists found themselves excluded from the nation’s 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.
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 “canvas cathedral.” Graham was a product of fundamentalism’s wilderness period. He’d graduated from Wheaton College, in Illinois, the preëminent 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.
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 “new evangelical” 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 “Christians could be both modern and conservative.” 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.
In the turbulence of the sixties and early seventies, when racial, gender, and sexual norms were upended anew, American churches underwent a “great re-sorting,” as Sutton puts it. White evangelical churches—revivalists, under Sutton’s classification system—experienced 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—particularly those with what the historian George Marsden has called “fundamentalistic” attitudes—began shifting their attention to the political realm. “They positioned race, gender, and sexuality at the center of their resurrected and refashioned crusade to once again remake the United States as God’s chosen land,” 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’s religious economy.
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, “dedicated to teaching America’s forgotten history and heroes, emphasizing the moral, Christian, and constitutional foundation on which our nation was built.” Barton was not a trained historian—his degree, from Oral Roberts University, was in religious education—but he had developed a hobbyist’s interest in the Founding Fathers. In 1989, he published his first book, “The Myth of Separation,” which promised to reveal to readers “what the Founders and early Courts really said” 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’s work has been eviscerated by scholars, but this has hardly dented his popularity. In “One State Under God: A History of Religion in Texas” (University of Texas Press), the historian Joseph L. Locke notes that readers of Barton’s books weren’t looking for rigorous research. “Instead, they wanted a weapon,” Locke writes. “And Barton was handing them one.”
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’s ambiguity means that, as Sutton points out, “Americans have never really separated church from state.” Activists of all kinds, from Frederick Douglass to Jerry Falwell, have wielded the Bible and sought political power. It’s inarguable, however, that Donald Trump’s 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 movement has placed a nostalgia for a Christian past at the center of a grievance-based politics.
Barton’s 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 “through government policy.” 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 “the seven mountains of cultural influence”—an 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’s legacy, “fighting the good fight for our country.”
She’s doing so at an opportune moment for the American church. Although only about two-thirds of Americans now identify as Christians—compared with just under ninety per cent in the nineteen-nineties—a 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.
As in the past, its form will be determined by the religious marketplace. The First Amendment’s “disestablishment and free-exercise clauses do not dictate outcomes,” Sutton writes. “They offer choices.” 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 “players who, for lack of a ball, just stand around.” In this way, they explain the extraordinary rise of evangelicalism.
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. ♦