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I. Introduction

Americans turned to religion as they navigated rising tensions with Great Britain, the conflicts of the American Revolution, and the meaning of their new Independent nation. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Great Britain levied a series of new taxes on the American colonies to recoup the debt acquired in the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763. This outraged many colonists. Religious issues helped deepen the rift between the colonies and England. In the decades before the revolution, colonists feared a tightening of the ecclesiastical control the Church of England had over the English settlements in the New World. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, the Archbishop of Canterbury moved toward appointing an Anglican bishop for North America. The news triggered intense backlash from colonists of other denominations.¹ Although the proposal was ultimately abandoned, the controversy escalated the imperial crisis. The Quebec Act of 1774, in which England promised the conquered French colony the freedom to practice Catholicism, caused similar outrage. To the predominantly Protestant population of the English colonies to the South, most of whom shared deep anti-Catholic sentiments, the law seemed to further confirm the looming threat of religious tyranny.

Still, in the 1760s and early 1770s, the idea of launching a mass rebellion against the mother country and moving toward separation seemed crazy. Over the course of the previous centuries, the thirteen colonies had created different political, legal, and economic systems, and developed distinct, if overlapping, demographic profiles and cultural identities. The alliance of thirteen diverse colonies was difficult to develop. Revolutionary leaders knew that they needed to create a shared sense of identity and purpose. Religion helped revolutionaries foster patriotic sentiment and argue for the righteousness of their rebellion.

The colonies were religiously diverse on the eve of American independence, but they were also predominantly Christian. As the single most significant text, the Bible provided a common language and interpretative framework for the majority of settlers. Revolutionary leaders drew heavily on Christian scripture to justify the rebellion against British monarchical rule and to sacralize the violence of the war for independence. This was true even for figures who were famously critical of institutionalized religion, such as Thomas Paine. In January of 1776, the recent English immigrant published Common Sense, the treatise that would become synonymous with American revolutionary sentiment. Paine would later describe the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) as rather “the word of a demon than the Word of God.”² Yet in Common Sense, he quoted extensively from the Bible to argue against monarchical rule. “These portions of scripture,” he argued, were “direct,” “positive,” and allowed for “no equivocal construction.” Paine concluded that this could mean one of two things. It was either “true” that “the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government…, or the scripture is false.”³ Royal power, he claimed, cannot “be defended on the authority of scripture; for the will of the Almighty…expressly disapproves of government by Kings.”⁴ Benjamin Franklin, moreover, proposed a depiction of the Exodus for the nascent nation’s official seal, with the caption, “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.”⁵ Whether or not these political leaders personally believed in the Bible, they understood that appealing to Christian scripture could help make their point.⁶

Government officials in the different colonies as well as delegates at the Continental Congress recognized the utility of religion in furthering the war effort. Revolutionaries used Christian rituals to unite the disparate colonies. In 1774, for instance, Virginia declared a fast day—an old Puritan tradition—to express solidarity with Massachusetts after the Boston Tea Party.⁷ The following year, the Continental Congress proclaimed a fast day throughout all the English colonies on the continent.⁸ As in previous wars, revolutionary politicians understood the value of army chaplains in boosting soldiers’ morale and increasing their obedience. The Continental Congress established a national chaplaincy on July 29, 1775.⁹ George Washington, then Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army wrote in December 1775 to the governor of Connecticut, Jonathan Trumbull, praising one chaplain, “the Reverend Mr. [Abiel] Leonard from your Colony,” for “holding forth the Necessity of courage and bravery and at the same time of Obedience and Subordination to those in Command.”¹⁰

Wartime preaching also played a significant role off the battlefield. Many colonists looked to their clergy to provide meaning for the experience of violence and war, as they had done in previous armed conflicts during the colonial period.¹¹ During the war, New England clergymen alone delivered over two thousand sermons each week,¹² the published versions of which comprised more than four times the total of all political pamphlets.¹³ As the rift with Britain widened, many clergymen used the Old Testament narrative of the Exodus as a metaphor for revolutionary politics. The wicked Pharaoh represented King George III, the Sea of Reeds the Atlantic Ocean, and imperial policy the bondage of slavery. Beyond the elite clergy, the war also inspired new religious thinking among lay people. The tumultuous political context led many to conclude that the end of times was imminent. Hundreds of men and women emerged as “prophets,” and numerous publications recorded pseudo-Scriptural dreams and visions.¹⁴ By the end of the war, the military conflict had physically destroyed many churches, but American religion remained vibrant, diverse, and, in many ways, reborn.

II. Religion, Loyalists, and the Disaffected

The American Revolution was not merely a conflict between American colonists and British forces. It was a civil war, in which the settler population made up a sizeable portion of those fighting to maintain their status as subjects within the British Empire. Despite rising dissatisfaction with Britain among many colonists, there was far from a consensus about the desirability of separating from the mother country. Those labeled “loyalists” or “Tories” by their opponents were motivated by a variety of concerns. Many were caught between the patriotic popular sentiment and their religious commitments. Out of an overall population of under three million, over 30,000 Americans ultimately took up arms for the British, and by the close of the war, twice as many had been displaced into exile.¹⁵

There were many reasons why Americans fought against Independence. Thousands of people of African descent—both previously enslaved and free—fought on the side of the crown during the war. On November 7, 1775, the last royal governor of Virginia, John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation declaring “all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free” who were “able and willing to bear arms” to “join the Majesty’s troops.” Around 800 men joined Lord Dunmore’s “Royal Ethiopian Regiment” as a way to secure their legal emancipation.¹⁶ Dunmore’s offer of freedom was later expanded by British General Henry Clinton’s Philipsburg Proclamation, and thousands of people gained freedom from slavery through the British Army. Many more gained freedom by running away and hiding among Black communities in cities, swamps, or wherever they could evade recapture.

The patriots’ victory in the war made many of these newly freed people into refugees who sought new homes, including new religious congregations, outside of the newly independent United States. The Black Baptist George Liele (sometimes spelled Lisle, ca. 1750–1820) led a small congregation to Kingston, Jamaica. Members of the group, who came to be known as the Ethiopian Baptists, helped plant other Baptist congregations in rural areas of the island. A large number of African Americans, including Baptists and Methodists, fled to Nova Scotia. More than a thousand later relocated to Western Africa, where they participated in forming Freetown, Sierra Leone. Black loyalists and other people of African descent, who witnessed the expansion of chattel slavery in the new republic, also settled in places such as the Bahamas, Trinidad, and Liberia. Following the Revolutionary War, Black Americans in exile founded churches across the Atlantic World—some of which exist today—and, thus, increased the transnational reach of American religion(s).

The Revolutionary War put members of the Church of England, also called the Anglican Church, in a particularly tough position. King George III was the worldly leader of Britain and its empire, as well as the “supreme governor” of the Church of England, the country’s official—or “established”—religion. Anglican ministers swore an oath to the king as the head of their church, and most considered it their religious duty to promote loyalty to the crown. Anglican ministers largely sided with loyalists.¹⁷ As tensions escalated, their religious affiliation made them increasingly the target of patriotic pressure. Especially in New England, where they were a religious minority, Anglicans faced significant hostility.¹⁸ A delegation of Massachusetts Anglican ministers reported to the bishop of London in 1768 that “we are neither allowed to speak nor scarcely to be silent unless we join with those who we believe to be laboring in the destruction of our constitution, civil and religious.”¹⁹ Members of the Church of England who stayed in the United States after British defeat formed the Episcopal Church in 1789—a body that was fully independent from the English ecclesiastical hierarchy and the crown but maintained key Anglican traditions and theological emphases.

Not all of those labeled “loyalists” were motivated by a deep sense of loyalty to the British crown. Many had tried to stay out of the revolution altogether. The growing intensity of the armed conflict, however, made life for the so-called “disaffected”—“the large and ever-shifting mass of people who were not strongly aligned with either side,” as one historian defines them—increasingly precarious.²⁰ Pacifist sects such as the Society of Friends (“Quakers”), and “Peace Germans” (Moravians, Mennonites, and Schwenkfelders) all opposed armed conflict on theological grounds. These groups experienced difficulty in accommodating the political pressures of the Revolution and the dictates of their faith. In many cases, these religious pacifists had emigrated to the North American colonies from Europe to escape religious persecution and state demands for mandatory military service or swearing oaths.²¹ While these pacifist groups were present throughout the colonies, they were especially prominent in Pennsylvania, the colony founded by the Quaker William Penn.²²

Having religious scruples against direct participation in the Revolutionary War did not necessarily mean that pacifists rejected other settlers’ critique of Britain’s imperial rule. In the early 1760s, before the eruption of armed conflict, Friends (or Quakers) participated in the non-violent protests against the new taxes imposed on the American colonies. Over eighty Philadelphia Friends, for instance, signed a Stamp Act nonimportation agreement (1765).²³ The mood began to shift by the time of the new 1768 taxes called the Townshend Duties, however. At this point, the influential Quaker Philadelphia Yearly Meeting judged that further participation in the protest movement would encourage war. In January 1775, the Meeting called on Friends across the colonies to avoid “every usurpation of power and authority in opposition to the laws and government, and against all combinations, insurrections, conspiracies, and illegal assemblies,” under threat of disownment.²⁴ Not all congregants complied. Ultimately, over a thousand Friends were cast out of their religious communities for actively supporting the patriots’ cause.²⁵

But following the directive of religious authority figures, too, could have serious consequences for members of pacifist groups. Over the course of the Revolutionary War, those who hesitated or refused to join the Patriots in securing national independence—whatever their motivations were—came under increasing attack. “If these internal enemies are suffered to proceed with their hellish schemes,” a piece published in the Connecticut Courant in May of 1776 raged, “our ruin is certain; but, if they are destroyed, the power of hell and Britain will never prevail against them.”²⁶ Pacifists’ commitment was tested when revolutionary governments began to require loyalty oaths from all male residents, mandatory militia service, and taxes to explicitly support the war effort.²⁷ Even the Pennsylvania General Assembly proclaimed “allegiance and protection are reciprocal…those who will not bear the former are not nor ought to be entitled to the benefits of the latter.”²⁸ After 1776, states began confiscating possessions of those who did not serve in the militia or swear allegiance to the new governments, seizing land, houses, commercial property, and even clothing and household goods.²⁹ Those refusing to pay fines lost civil rights and could have their property sold at auction.³⁰ After Pennsylvania passed its Test Act in 1777, Patriot militias seized Moravian men and marched them off, jailing some for refusing to swear oaths.³¹ Between 1775 and 1782, 143 Quakers in northern Virginia sacrificed property for their failure to support the war effort.³² In the midst of heated warfare, the quiet existence of certain minority religions became seen as a potential threat to the revolutionary cause.

III. Deists, Evangelicals, and the Road to Disestablishment

According to many interpreters, from the late eighteenth century to the present day, the legal codification of broad religious freedom guarantees was one of the great triumphs of US independence. In many ways, the so-called religion clauses of the First Amendment to the US Constitution—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”³³—were indeed revolutionary. For centuries, established churches had been the rule throughout Europe. These included both Catholic and Protestant churches that were recognized by the government or worldly ruler as the official religion of the state.³⁴

In most European nations, religious dissenters experienced persecution, discrimination, violence, as well as financial and legal repercussions for openly practicing their faith or refusing to join the established church. As James Madison described it in an 1833 letter to a clergyman, in the eighteenth century, “the legal establishment of a particular religion without…or with very little toleration of others” was “taken for granted” as an “essential” “part of the political & civil organization.” It was “the prevailing opinion in Europe,” he continued to explain, “that Religion could not be preserved without the support of Government, nor government be supported without an established Religion.” But, Madison argued, “few of the most enlightened judges” would now “maintain that the system has been favorable to either Religion or to Government.” Church establishments and religious intolerance, he and other revolutionaries argued, were part of the European legacy that the new American nation, with its more “enlightened” government, needed to leave behind. It was up to them to put the “great & interesting subject to a fair…[and] decisive test.”³⁵

Although Madison and other so-called “founding fathers” celebrated their “enlightened” nation for its departure from European-style church establishments, they knew that they were not the first champions of religious freedom. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, philosophers and theologians across Europe increasingly debated the soundness of strict church establishments and articulated the value of tolerating different religious groups within the same body politic.³⁶ Many came to see religion as a private matter between individuals and their god. The English philosopher and theologian John Locke famously articulated these ideas in his 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration. The power of government, in his view, “neither can nor ought in any Manner to be extended to the Salvation of Souls.” Locke believed that true religion “consists in the inward and full Persuasion of the Mind” and that no one could “be compelled to the Belief of any Thing by outward Force.”³⁷ A church was, then, a “voluntary society of men,” which should be “absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth.”³⁸ While the concept of separating church and state was not an American invention, US independence and the framing of a new government provided an unprecedented opportunity to make religious freedom a political and legal reality.

Many of the so-called “Founding Fathers” and other leading figures of the revolutionary period—such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine—fell on what one historian has described as “the Deist spectrum.”³⁹ Deists were a product of the Enlightenment-era embrace of human reason over an allegedly irrational “superstition.” They generally acknowledged the existence of a god who had created the universe but rejected the supernaturalism of traditional Christianity. This means that Deists rejected the divinity of Jesus, the idea of divine intervention, biblical miracles, and claims that the Bible was divinely inspired.⁴⁰

According to some accounts, deist advocates of church and state separation anticipated or even hoped that the principles enshrined in the First Amendment would lead to a thorough secularization of American society. But they were far from modern-day atheists. Although Jefferson rejected many of the elements that would have been considered central to Christian orthodoxy, he continued to uphold the moral teachings of the Bible and believed that the spread of a “rational” version of Christianity would actually benefit republicanism and support national progress.⁴¹ As one historian has argued, “while Jefferson demanded a firm wall of separation between church and state, he neither feared nor opposed a flourishing religious society beyond that wall.”⁴²

As was true for other decisions regarding the US government, its relationship with religion was the result of debate and compromise. Virtually all of the leading politicians rejected the idea of a strict church establishment like the one in England, but they disagreed on the details of what to do. Some politicians promoted a model of local religious establishments, in which individual communities would establish distinct churches. Others argued that the US government should support not a specific church but religion more generally, in the form of tax exemptions, donating public lands, financially supporting religious schools and charities, and by legally prohibiting things like blasphemy.⁴³ At the time, even advocates of religious toleration or freedom usually believed that religion was necessary to uphold public morality. Without a religious populace, many argued, republics—where so much rested on the individual citizen’s virtue—would sink into anarchy.⁴⁴ Ultimately, religious freedom meant different things to different people. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson declared that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”⁴⁵ But Jefferson’s support of extending full equal rights to polytheists and atheists made him an outlier even among deists.⁴⁶ Most of his peers expected that US society would remain predominantly Christian.

Skeptics of institutional religion and Christian orthodoxy were not the only forces behind American disestablishment. The adoption of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment to the US Constitution also depended on the support of evangelical Christians, such as the Baptists, who opposed close church-and-state relations on theological grounds.⁴⁷ The common ground between Enlightenment thinkers and evangelical believers is particularly obvious in a letter exchange between a committee appointed by the Danbury Baptist Association and Jefferson in 1801 and 1802. The Danbury Baptists, as they are typically called, began their letter congratulating Jefferson on his “appointment to the chief Magistracy in the United States.” After expressing their “great satisfaction” about the third US president’s “Election to office,” they quickly moved on to their actual concern. “Our Sentiments,” they stressed, “are uniformly on the side of Religious Liberty—That Religion is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals—That no man aught [sic] to suffer in Name, person or effects on account of his religious Opinions—That the legitimate Power of civil Government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbour.”⁴⁸

Jefferson wrote back to the “Gentlemen” the following January. After returning the customary pleasantries, the president expressed his solidarity with the Danbury Baptists’ concerns. He agreed “that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, [and] that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions.” Jefferson praised the First Amendment’s religion clauses as an “expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience” and a step toward “building a wall of separation between Church & State.”⁴⁹ The phrase did not appear in any of the twenty-five proposals for federal religion clauses drafted and discussed between 1787 and 1787.⁵⁰ However, as one historian has put it, “Jefferson’s architectural metaphor, in the course of time, has achieved virtual canonical status and become more familiar to the American people than the actual text of the First Amendment.”⁵¹ The exchange also serves as a reminder that religious actors participated in making American religious freedom a reality.

Baptists and many of the groups who benefited most from the new American legal regime of religious disestablishment had first-hand experience with different forms of religious intolerance and persecution in Europe and the North American colonies. In the late 1630s, the Baptist Roger Williams was famously expelled from Puritan Massachusetts and founded the colony of Rhode Island (originally called Providence Plantations) as a safe haven for religious dissenters in New England. Williams argued that every individual should be free to follow his own convictions in religious matters, for, in his words, “forced worship stinks in the nostrils of God.”⁵² The Puritan establishment in New England saw Baptists like Williams as “incendiaries of the commonwealths and the infectors of persons in main matters of religion and the troubles of churches in all places where they have been.”⁵³ Further attempts of Baptist dissenters within seventeenth-century Massachusetts or Connecticut were “bludgeoned into silence or exile.”⁵⁴ An attempt to build a meeting-house in the heart of Boston in 1679, for example, led to its being boarded up when there was an attempt to use it for worship. As a result, in 1700 there were only twenty-four Baptist churches in the American colonies.⁵⁵ By the late eighteenth century, things had changed dramatically. In 1780, Baptists had about 400 congregations.⁵⁶

One of the key Baptist leaders during the American Revolution was Isaac Backus. Like Williams, Backus was convinced that “religion must at all times be a matter between God and individuals”⁵⁷ and that “true religion is a voluntary obedience unto God.”⁵⁸ “[S]ince religion is ever a matter between God and individuals,” he asked his supporters of church establishments, “how can any man become a member of a religious society without his own consent?”⁵⁹ For Backus, the church was a voluntary society of believers. A state church, therefore, could not be a true church because it forced people to belong to it against their wills.⁶⁰ If state and church stayed in their own lanes, he argued, both sides would profit. This was what Backus called the “sweet harmony”: “civil rulers ought to be men fearing God, and hating covetousness, and to be terrors to evil doers, and a praise to them who do well; and as ministers ought to pray for rulers, and to teach the people to be subject to them; so there may be and ought to be a sweet harmony between them.”⁶¹

The Continental Congress did not immediately settle the question of the proper relationship between church and state. The original text of the Constitution, adopted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, prohibited “religious Test[s]” as a requirement for federal office holding in Article VI, but otherwise remained largely silent on religious matters. This was not an oversight. The delegates gathered at the Constitutional Convention generally assumed that questions of religious freedom (along with all other matters not explicitly granted to the federal government) would be resolved on the state level. In fact, by the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, all thirteen state governments had either created new religious freedom protections or retained the respective provisions made in their colonial charters. However, many Americans ended up being dissatisfied with the omission of specific civil liberties—a federal bill of rights—from the original text of the Constitution. As records of the state ratification debates suggest, specifically the absence of any religious freedom guarantees troubled many. Several states ratified the Constitution only on the condition that the First Session of Congress would amend the document accordingly.⁶²

The members of the First US Congress (1789-1791) who came together in New York and later Philadelphia to draft a federal bill of rights drew on the debates about religion which had taken place in their respective home states. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson, proved especially influential.⁶³ First introduced in the state’s General Assembly in 1779, the bill finally passed in 1786 under the leadership of James Madison, who—during Jefferson’s absence as a diplomat in France—had to defend the proposal against outspoken opponents. Madison’s petition titled Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments helped shift public opinion in the bill’s favor. The Virginia Statute’s broad religious freedom guarantees and strict break with the long tradition of religious establishments are considered an important precedent for the religion clauses of the First Amendment, passed by the First Congress on September 25, 1789.

IV. Religious Freedom and Its Limits

Baptists and other religious minorities celebrated the principles enshrined in the First Amendment. But they knew that the law had its limitations. Like the rest of the US Bill of Rights, its religious freedom protections only applied to the federal government and not the states (this only changed with the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868). Several states, such as Virginia, outlawed religious establishments in their state constitutions either before or soon after the ratification of the First Amendment. Others did not. While all states granted their constituents some degree of religious freedom, several held on to their colonial-era church establishments, giving certain groups privileges over others, including supporting them with tax money. Eleven states had oaths of office that restricted non-Christians, so-called Anabaptists, and other radical Christians from office-holding; eight states supported particular churches through taxes, and atheists were barred from participating as witnesses in courtrooms.

The last states to disestablish were Connecticut in 1818 and Massachusetts in 1833. In their 1801 letter to Thomas Jefferson, the Danbury Baptist Association⁶⁴—most of whose member churches were located in Connecticut—highlighted the fact that whatever “religious privileges” they had as members of a religious minority in the state, they “enjoy[ed] as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights.” As long as it was considered an “object of Legislation” left up to individual states, they feared, their “Religious Liberty” was at risk of being taken away.⁶⁵

Despite the supposed separation of church and state at the federal level, lawmakers continued to uphold many of the obviously religious (and more specifically Christian) rituals and policies implemented by the Continental Congress between 1774 and 1789, such as opening their daily sessions with prayer, and appointing (and funding) chaplains.⁶⁶ At his presidential inauguration on April 30, 1789, Washington swore his oath of allegiance on the balcony of Federal Hall and then gave a short address in which he reminded his listeners that “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.”⁶⁷

Washington invited Americans to imagine the nation as supported and approved by a benevolent God. He would go on to declare a Thanksgiving Day on November 26, 1789. In his Thanksgiving Proclamation, he reminded Americans that “it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.”⁶⁸ Washington imagined that the new nation would be supported by God’s providence. Although there was no established church in the United States, many Americans remained convinced that America was God’s chosen nation and that the combination of democracy and a populace attentive to God’s providence would make America successful. 

While the “wall of separation between Church & State”⁶⁹ remained porous and Protestant Christianity maintained its dominant position, the legal regime of religious freedom in the early republic improved conditions for some religious groups which had historically been excluded from public life. Jewish Americans were granted full citizenship at halting and inconsistent levels. Still, on the eve of American independence, Jews received greater recognition for civil rights than elsewhere in Europe, where persecution remained the norm.⁷⁰

In the decades and years leading up to the Revolution, Jews had actively participated in both the movement for and against American independence. Those in favor signed non-importation agreements, petitioned along with their Christian neighbors, and joined the Sons of Liberty. During the war, they served in the Patriot Army, some even in leading positions. Colonel Mordecai Sheftall of Savannah held the third-highest rank in the Patriot Army, behind Brigadier and Major generals. Solomon Bush and David S. Franks served as lieutenant colonels, and more than a half dozen other Jews were officers. The role of these Jewish officers in positions of authority indicates an erosion of antisemitism. Other Jewish men supported the crown, including David Franks, who provided materials to British troops from his home in Philadelphia, and the Hart family of Newport, Rhode Island, who contributed to the crown through both espionage and active combat.

American Jews also increasingly held positions of authority outside of the military. In 1774, Francis Salvador was elected to South Carolina’s Provincial Congress and in 1776 was elected to the new state’s General Assembly, thus becoming the first Jew elected to a legislature in both the new United States and the Atlantic world. David S. Franks transitioned from his career in the army to serving as a diplomat in North Africa and then as an aide to Thomas Jefferson on his diplomatic mission to France. He later joined the Washington administration. In the 1790s, Jews were elected to public office in New York and Pennsylvania. Solomon Simson, the former president of Shearith Israel, won two consecutive terms as the assessor for New York City. Under Jefferson and Madison, Joel Hart and Mordecai Manuel Noah served as diplomats. Noah, a major in the militia, was later the sheriff of New York City and then a judge.⁷¹

Reflecting on his recent visit to Newport, RI, and the “cordial welcome” he had received there “from all classes of Citizens,” George Washington addressed a letter to the local Jewish congregation in August of 1790. He reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to religious freedom, offering exactly the kind of message that Jewish Rhode Islanders wanted to hear:

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”⁷²

“May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land,” Washington wrote in closing, “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants.”⁷³ While these words are nearly entirely plagiarized from the language that the Jewish congregation in Newport used when writing to Washington, his willingness to recognize Jewish claims of belonging indicates the transformations of religious liberty in the period. However, these advances for Jewish Americans occurred right as the rights of African Americans and Indigenous people were being attacked and eroded, as will be discussed below.⁷⁴

Writing in retrospect in 1833, Madison described the American experiment with disestablishment and religious freedom as a resounding success. The “existing character” of the young United States, “distinguished as it is by its religious features…now more than fifty years, since the legal support of Religion was withdrawn,” he argued, “sufficiently prove[d], that it does not need the support of Government. And it will scarcely be contended that Government has suffered by the exemption of Religion from its cognizance, or its pecuniary aid.”⁷⁵ Disestablishment, he argued, had ultimately benefited both “Government” and “Religion.”

V. Revivalism and Religious Diversification in the Early Republic

Religion indeed flourished in the early republic. National disestablishment and religious freedom provided a fertile ground for religious innovation and experimentation, creating what many scholars have referred to as a competitive and increasingly pluralistic religious marketplace, despite continuing prejudices against non-Protestants. As the United States grew in terms of land and people—through conquest and immigration—over the course of the early national and antebellum periods, so did its number of churches, rising from 4,696 in 1790 to an estimated 52,500 in 1860.⁷⁶

One of the most significant developments of the period was the growth of evangelical Protestantism—an interdenominational movement emphasizing a spiritual rebirth—into a mass phenomenon. Beginning in the 1790s, a new wave of religious revivals—often referred to as the Second Great Awakening—led to an increase in church membership across the Protestant denominational spectrum. Evangelical revivals in the early republican period took on a variety of forms, ranging from orderly spiritual renewal within churches to large, unruly, outdoor camp meetings that included highly advertised spectacles, featuring charismatic preaching and converts overcome by intense emotions and exhibiting spiritual gifts such as holy laughter or speaking in tongues. Proponents saw these as evidence of a genuine outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Skeptics, including more moderate evangelicals, viewed the lack of order and discipline and alleged enthusiasm as unnecessary and possible signs of the devil’s involvement.

A revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, drew between 10,000 and 20,000 people. Beginning in August of 1801, it became one of the signal events of the Second Great Awakening. One of the largest outdoor camp meetings in decades, the Cane Ridge Revival showed how early republican revivalism promoted the emergence of new religious movements outside of established denominations. Interdenominational by design, the meeting was led by the minister Barton Stone. Although Stone was a Presbyterian minister at the time of the revival, he is better known for being a leading figure in the Restoration Movement. Restorationists believed that reforming society was best done by restoring the early Christian church described in the New Testament. They embraced the belief that the pure religion of Jesus had become increasingly corrupted in the centuries since his death. The only way to recapture that original perfection was to remake the world in the image of the “primordial” days – a conviction known as primitivism.⁷⁷

For Barton Stone, the desire to return to ancient models emerged from a discontent with the fragmented nature of contemporary Protestantism into different denominations. Swept up in the success of the Cane Ridge Revival, Stone announced the death of his “sect”—the Presbyterian Church—in 1804 by issuing The Last Will & Testament of the Springfield Presbytery. With dramatic flair, Stone and his followers, “in perfect soundness and composure of mind,” willed “that this body die” so that it might “sink into union with the Body of Christ at large.”⁷⁸ Stone’s decision to sever his ties with his original denomination and encourage his followers to do the same was part of a larger pattern that distinguished the early republican revivalism from the so-called First Great Awakening in the early to mid-eighteenth century—a revitalization movement that primarily took place within existing denominations.

His mission to restore the ancient world through a literal reading of the Bible connected Stone to other primitivists of the age, including Thomas Campbell and his son Alexander, both of whom had recently immigrated from Scotland. In 1809, Thomas Campbell issued his Declaration and Address, a pivotal document for restorationists, which outlined a similar agenda to Stone’s in Kentucky. Campbell insisted they were fostering reform and unity by “opening up the way, that we may come fairly and firmly to original grounds…and take up things just as the Apostles left them.–That thus disentangled from the accruing embarrassments of intervening ages, we may stand with evidence upon the same ground on which the church stood at the beginning.”⁷⁹ Having thrown off the labels of “Presbyterian,” “Methodist,” and “Baptist,” Restorationists preferred more ‘historical’ labels, such as “Christians” or, older still, “Disciples.”

The various restorationists united in 1832 under the combined influence of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell.⁸⁰ The focus among “Christians” or “Disciples” on restoring the conditions of the early church precluded them from participating in the reform efforts embraced by an increasing number of Americans in the early republican and antebellum periods. Restorationists believed that even the “millennium,” the return of God, would not bring newness. “Just in so far as the ancient order of things, or the religion of the New Testament, is restored,” Alexander Campbell wrote in 1825, “just so far has the Millennium commenced.”⁸¹ This stifled religious vision had wider social and cultural consequences, especially when it came to abolition and women’s rights. In both cases, restorationists’ literal reading of the New Testament convinced them of a lack of ‘scriptural’ precedents for abolishing slavery or for women’s leadership in church or society.

Although all Protestant denominations grew in the context of the Second Great Awakening, not all did so at the same speed. This lastingly changed the landscape of American Christianity. In terms of membership growth, Methodists and Baptists were the clear winners of the early republican revivals. Both were more open to recognizing lay religious authority and experimenting with new revivalistic methods. These denominations—neither of which had experienced the comforts of being the established church in any of the colonies—had an easier time adjusting to the new legal and social conditions. At the time of national independence, Congregationalists—with 668 churches and twice as many preachers as any other denomination in British North America—had been the dominant force in American Protestantism.⁸² By 1820, things had changed drastically. While Congregationalists had nearly doubled their number of churches, Baptists and Methodists had grown from 497 and 495 churches in 1776, respectively, to approximately 2,700 each.⁸³

Groups such as Methodists and Baptists, on the whole, were more willing than some Protestant contemporaries to challenge certain kinds of traditional religious authority.⁸⁴ For instance, they often recognized the charismatic authority of lay itinerant preachers over formally trained and ordained clergy. While it would be misleading to think of these Baptists and Methodists as egalitarian, the prioritization of personal new birth experiences did provide more opportunities for those generally excluded from positions of power, such as Americans of African descent.

White Baptists, inspired by Jonathan Edwards’s evangelical Calvinism, began preaching among Black people in New England, South Carolina, and Georgia in the 1760s, converting a few and baptizing them by immersion. They also encouraged a small number of Black men to preach as exhorters but usually restricted them from performing the sacraments (called “ordinances” by Baptists) of baptism and communion. A scarcity of first-hand accounts produced by the largely disenfranchised people of African descent in this period makes it difficult to ascertain what drew individual Black converts to a specific denomination and how they experienced their conversion to Christianity. Some scholars have observed that Baptist rituals meshed well with some West African cosmologies. Conversion as experienced at the hand of a revivalistic preacher might have seemed similar to spirit possession as known in some West African religions. Baptism by immersion made sense to those who knew of water spirits and had heard of religious ceremonies involving substances like salt. A deity predetermining all events (most early Black Baptists were Calvinists) was familiar not only from West African religions but also from Islam, which had touched many of the regions on the African continent most impacted by European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Independent Black Baptist congregations, moreover, could also offer women and men of African descent a degree of autonomy and self-determination, which—whether enslaved or free—they were denied in American society as a whole.

Early Black Methodism originated in the efforts of English missionaries like George Whitefield, John Wesley, Francis Asbury, and Thomas Coker. Preaching divine care for the disenfranchised and the need for immediate acceptance of divine presence in one’s life, these men were successful in bringing Black people into the church. White evangelicals’ interest in converting Americans of African descent did not necessarily lead them to reject slavery. Wesley ultimately came to oppose the institution as cruel and sinful. Whitefield, on the other hand, legally owned enslaved people. Generally speaking, most White Methodists did not welcome Black believers as equal church members. In the late eighteenth century, Methodist churches with biracial congregations enforced segregation, pushing Black members into crowded or obscured seats. One important incident in early Black Methodism occurred in 1787 in Philadelphia when Richard Allen led Black congregants out of the church after they were ordered not to pray in an area claimed for White worshippers. The walkout ultimately resulted in the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church), the first separate Black American denomination.

VI. Reform and Mission

Fueled by the religious revivals in the decades after national independence, Americans turned with a renewed interest to reform. Anxieties about the moral character of a society undergoing dramatic demographic and geopolitical changes motivated many evangelical Protestants to pursue causes like temperance, education, and antislavery efforts. Cut off from much of the European institutional support, they founded a multitude of voluntary, lay-led societies modeled after British examples.⁸⁵ Many of these were denomination-specific or regional, but around the turn of the century, transregional and inter-Protestant efforts emerged. Women often took on leading roles within this movement of social reform, which is sometimes referred to as the “Benevolent Empire.”⁸⁶

Many early republican evangelicals came to understand it as their duty to facilitate the spread of Christianity, in the United States as well as abroad. In June of 1810, Adoniram Judson Jr., Samuel Nott Jr., Samuel J. Mills, and Samuel Newell, students at Andover Theological Seminary, approached the Congregational ministers who made up the General Association of Massachusetts. Declaring that “their minds have been long impressed with the duty and importance of personally attempting a mission to the heathen,” the four young men requested the guidance “of their Rev. Fathers” on how they could devote themselves to the cause. The General Association agreed that the “object of missions to the heathen cannot but be regarded, by the friends of the Redeemer, as vastly interesting and important.”⁸⁷ Citing the Great Commission that a resurrected Jesus Christ had given to his disciples—“go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature”⁸⁸—they claimed that each Christian had a duty to participate in the conversion of the world. Based on these beliefs, they voted unanimously to create an institution to support that effort.⁸⁹ And in so doing they birthed the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the first nominally interdenominational and national foreign missions society in the young United States. It would become the most significant body of its kind in the nineteenth-century US.

The foreign missions movement emerged in the context of ongoing evangelical revivals (commonly known as the Second Great Awakening) and a renewed dedication among American Protestants to social and moral reform around the turn of the nineteenth century. Its declared goal was nothing if not ambitious: the “conversion of the world” (which, according to an 1818 ABCFM pamphlet, required evangelizing every human who wanted the gospel.⁹⁰ Although nineteenth-century evangelicals generally believed that Christ had died for all of humanity, without access to the saving message of the Bible, the large majority of the world’s population was thought to be headed toward eternal damnation.⁹¹ The widespread conviction that the end-times were fast approaching lent a sense of urgency to global conversion efforts. While its supporters were motivated by deep spiritual commitments, the early Protestant foreign missions movement also depended on European and American imperial expansion for physical access to distant lands as well as material support.⁹²

The founding of the ABCFM and various state- and denomination-based mission societies represented the opening of a new chapter in the history of American Protestantism. But the notion that Christians needed to save so-called “heathen” populations was not new.⁹³ In fact, this belief had legitimized European settler colonialism and conquest in the Americas from the very beginning. The 1629 seal of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, for instance, depicted a Native American man with the words “Come over and help us!”⁹⁴ The mostly British-funded evangelizing activities conducted by Protestant Euro-Americans during the colonial period, however, remained largely unsuccessful in terms of Native American conversion.⁹⁵

Nineteenth-century missionaries understood themselves to be part of this colonial-era legacy. But it was the recent evangelizing work conducted by Europeans that served as a more immediate catalyst. American efforts built on and helped re-intensify older transatlantic religious networks. Sermons, tracts, and evangelical newspapers exposed large numbers of Americans to missionary intelligence from across the globe. The reports of British evangelicals laboring in India and Tahiti under the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS), especially, garnered much attention among American Protestants. It was these reports, as well as direct guidance from the LMS, which helped Board leaders decide on the ABCFM’s first mission site. Within two years of the organization’s founding, the first American missionaries set sail for Asia.⁹⁶ Before their departure in 1812, they were instructed to regard “[t]he Christian Missionaries of every Protestant denomination, sent from Europe to the East, …as your brethren; the servants of the same Master, and engaged in the same work with yourselves.”⁹⁷ Spreading the Kingdom of God was understood as a transnational Protestant affair.

By the time of its bicentennial “jubilee meeting” in 1860, the ABCFM’s then-president proudly announced that the organization’s many mission stations now “belt the globe, so that the sun does not set upon them.”⁹⁸ Over the course of its first fifty years of existence, the ABCFM had dispatched roughly thirteen hundred missionaries and missionary assistants. Compared to the “heyday”⁹⁹ of American foreign mission activity beginning after Reconstruction, this number was modest. But the influence of the missionary impulse on American society in the early republic and antebellum period cannot be accurately gauged from the lists of those employed by mission societies. Mission work, after all, was an expensive endeavor that relied on the broader public’s ideological and financial support. The ABCFM and other nineteenth-century mission societies thus invited, or rather urged, Americans at home to imagine themselves as active participants in the cause. As one historian has recently argued, “popular interest in and devotion to the missionary cause” permeated American culture in the early republic.¹⁰⁰

VII. Conclusion

The American Revolution transformed American religion as profoundly as it reshaped American politics. Religion helped inspire, execute, and sustain the movement for Independence as well as galvanize opposition to the American rebellion. The Revolution dealt a blow to the millennia-old tradition of state-sponsored religion, unleashing a new era of religious creativity and competition. From camp meetings to reform societies, Americans yearned to see God’s kingdom take hold in their new nation. Protestantism remained hegemonic in American culture, yet practitioners of religious traditions and those opposed to all of them continued to carve out spaces for themselves. As Americans claimed a place for themselves on the global stage, they did so through a renewed commitment to meshing their national identity with their visions of divine destiny. These powerful dreams proved to be nightmares for many, yet their power would only grow in the coming decades.

VIII. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Johanna I. Mueller, with content contributions from Michael A.G. Azad Haykin, Shannon Duffy, Paul Finkelman, Gino Grivetti, Israel Ben-Porat, Johanna I. Mueller, John Saillant, Tara Strauch, Ben Wright, and Kristofer Zimmitti.

Recommended Readings

• James B. Bell, A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans, and the American Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
• Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1992).
• Katherine Carté Engel, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
• Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2015).
• David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989).
• Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (Basic Books, 2010).
• Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022).
• Spencer W. McBride, Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (University of Virginia Press, 2016).
• Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002).
• Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: 2012).
• Shari Rabin, The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025).
• John A. Ragosta, Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, Jeffersonian America (University of Virginia Press, 2013).
• Daniel K. Williams, The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2026).
• John Witte Jr. and Joel A. Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Notes

1. Peter W. Walker, “The Bishop Controversy, the Imperial Crisis, and Religious Radicalism in New England, 1763-74,” The New England Quarterly 90, no. 3 (2017): 306. ↩︎
2. Thomas Paine, Age of Reason (1794, 1795), quoted in James Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013), 2. ↩︎
3. Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, Second Edition (R. Bell, 1776), 19. ↩︎
4. The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), vol. 1, §XV. ↩︎
5. “Proposal for the Great Seal of the United States, [before 14 August 1776],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-22-02-0330. ↩︎
6. Cf. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, 2. ↩︎
7. Spencer McBride, Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (University of Virginia Press, 2016), 12, 15-17. ↩︎
8. Worthington C. Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, 2:87-88. ↩︎
9. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, 42. ↩︎
10. George Washington to Jonathan Trumbull, December 15, 1775, George Washington Papers, Series 2, Letterbooks 1754-1799: Letterbook 7, June 24, 1775 – March 13, 1776. https://www.loc.gov/item/mgw2.007/. ↩︎
11. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, 3. ↩︎
12. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, 16. ↩︎
13. Harry Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford University Press, 1986), 6, 373 n. 6. ↩︎
14. Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 64. ↩︎
15. Ruma Chopra, Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 28, 46; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Alfred P. Knopf, 2011), 6, 351-352. ↩︎
16. Dunmore’s Proclamation, printed in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, December 6, 1775. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC01706, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/content-images/dunmores_proclamation_glc01706p124.jpg. ↩︎
17. James B. Bell, A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans, and the American Revolution. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 224-240. ↩︎
18. Carla Gardina Pestana, “Revolutionary Divisions, Continuing Bonds,” in Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 218-255; Katherine Carte Engel, “Revisiting the Bishop Controversy,” in Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman, eds. The American Revolution Reborn (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 133; Bell, A War of Religion, x. ↩︎
19. Bell, A War of Religion, 83. ↩︎
20. “Disaffected” is a term increasingly used in place of “neutrals” to describe those in Revolutionary America who attempted to remain apart from the events of the Revolution—as Aaron Sullivan defines them: “the large and ever-shifting mass of people who were not strongly aligned with either side.” See: Aaron Sullivan, The Disaffected: Britain’s Occupation of Philadelphia during the American Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 6. ↩︎
21. Based on the teachings of their founder George Fox, Quakers, for instance, did not pay taxes in support of war, swear oaths, or paid fines in lieu of military service. Quakers committed to pacifism shortly after their founding in the 1640s. Founder George Fox argued that “every man was enlightened by the divine light of Christ,” and that embracing this “inward light” was required for salvation. Such salvation “takes away the occasion of wars, and gathers our hearts together to God…” A. Glenn Crothers, “Northern Virginia’s Quakers and the War for Independence: Negotiating a Path of Virtue in a Revolutionary World,” in The Other Loyalists: Ordinary People, Royalism, and the Revolution in the Middle Colonies, 1763–1787, eds. Joseph S. Tiedemann, Eugene Fingerhut, and Robert Venables (SUNY Press, 2009), 108. Mandatory militia laws, war taxes, and loyalty oaths also posed a theological problem for the Pietist or “Peace” Germans—the Mennonites, Moravians, Dunkers, and Schwenkfelders—who stressed quiet obedience to earthly rulers until “Providence” should decide otherwise. Jared S. Burkholder, “Neither “Kriegerisch” nor “Quäkerisch”: Moravians and the Question of Violence in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania,” Journal of Moravian History 12, no. 2 (2012): 153-155. ↩︎
22. Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers (Friends United Press, 1988), 144. ↩︎
23. Richard Bauman, For the Reputation of Truth: Politics, Religion, and Conflict among the Pennsylvania Quakers, 1750-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 128, 131. ↩︎
24. Karin Wulf, “Introduction,” in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, eds. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 41. ↩︎
25. Wulf, “Introduction,” Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, 40. ↩︎
26. Connecticut Courant, May 20, 1776, in Chaim M. Rosenberg, The Loyalist Conscience: Principled Opposition to the American Revolution (McFarland & Company, Inc., 2018), 92-93. ↩︎
27. Chopra, Choosing Sides, 13. Virginia also did not accommodate the roughly 2,000 Quakers living in the commonwealth. In September 1777, fourteen Quakers were seized in Frederick County, muskets were tied to their bodies, and they were forcibly marched to Washington’s headquarters outside Philadelphia; only the intercession of a Continental officer and lapsed Quaker released them. A. Glenn Crothers, “Northern Virginia’s Quakers and the War for Independence,” 105-106. ↩︎
28. Aaron Sullivan, “Uncommon Cause: The Challenges of Disaffection in Revolutionary Pennsylvania,” in The American Revolution Reborn, eds. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 53. ↩︎
29. Rosenberg, Loyalist Conscience, 79. ↩︎
30. Aaron Sullivan, “Uncommon Cause,” 52. ↩︎
31. Scott Paul Gordon, “Patriots and Neighbors: Pennsylvania Moravians in the American Revolution,” Journal of Moravian History 12, no. 2 (2012): 112, 128. Moravian leader Johann Ettwein of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania called the Test Act “the most absurd, tyrannical & wicked Law that ever was passed in a free country. Gordon, “Patriots and Neighbors,” 113. ↩︎
32. A. Glenn Crothers, “Northern Virginia’s Quakers and the War for Independence,” 118. ↩︎
33. Lawmakers on the state and federal level drafted and debated at least twenty-five different proposals before the First House and Senate passed the exact language of the First Amendment’s religion clauses on September 25, 1789. See: “Drafts of Federal Religion Clauses (1787-1789),” in John Witte, Jr. and Joel A. Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2016), 295-297. ↩︎
34. In the aftermath of the Protestant reformations in the sixteenth century, European monarchs increasingly asserted that their status and absolute authority was the result of their divine appointment. Since monarchs were God’s representatives on earth, challenging their rule, according to the theory referred to as “the divine right of kings,” was an offense against God. Glenn Burgess, “The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered,” The English Historical Review 107, no. 425 (1992): 837–61. ↩︎
35. James Madison to Jasper Adams, September 1833, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/99-02-02-2830. ↩︎
36. Donald Wayne Viney, “American Deism, Christianity, and the Age of Reason,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2010): 84f. ↩︎
37. “A Letter Concerning Toleration. Written by Mr. Locke. LICENSED, October 3d, 1689,” (Printed in the Year M.DCC.XL), 9-10. ↩︎
38. Quoted in: Witte and Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 33. Locke, as John Witte Jr. and Joel A. Nichols highlight, “did not press this thesis to radical secular conclusions,” as he “presupposed a magistracy and community committed to a common Christianity.” In his envisioned community, there was no room for non-Christians “who deliver themselves up to the service and protection of another prince” and “those…who deny the being of a God” were “not at all tolerated.” Quoted in Witte and Nichols, 33. ↩︎
39. David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford University Press, 2006), 44. ↩︎
40. Deists differed in their attitudes toward Christian orthodoxy but generally emphasized Jesus’s moral lessons over the redemptive nature of his death. Daniel K. Williams, The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2026), 197-8. ↩︎
41. “Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 23 March 1801,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-33-02-0362. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 33, 17 February–30 April 1801, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton University Press, 2006), 423–424]. Jefferson anticipated that Americans would increasingly embrace a form of Christianity that was compatible with his own religious convictions. He celebrated the rise of Unitarianism—a movement emerging within New England Congregationalism whose followers rejected traditional Calvinism and, especially, the doctrine of the trinity—in the early nineteenth century as a “revival of primitive Christianity,” and “confidently expect[ed] that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United states.” “Thomas Jefferson to James Smith (of Ohio), 8 December 1822,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-19-02-0157. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 19, 16 September 1822 to 30 June 1823, ed. J. Jefferson Looney et al. (Princeton University Press, 2022), 213–214.] ↩︎
42. John Andrew Ragosta, Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, Jeffersonian America (University of Virginia Press, 2013), 30. ↩︎
43. Witte and Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 38-9. ↩︎
44. Ragosta, Religious Freedom, e.g. 34, 77. ↩︎
45. “Query XVII,” in Notes on the State of Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, The Library of America 17 (Literary classics of the United States, 1984), 285. ↩︎
46. Although far from being an atheist himself, Jefferson’s “unorthodox” religious views made him a target for his political opponents. New England Federalists attacked Jefferson’s unorthodox religious views in an attempt to prevent his election as president in 1800. Timothy Dwight, a well-known Congregationalist minister and current president of Yale College, predicted that the country would “see the Bible cast into a bonfire, …and our children, either wheedled or terrified, uniting in the mob, in chanting mockeries against God” should Jefferson be elected. The Hartford Courant prophesied that “[m]urder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood, the nation black with crimes.” Quoted in: Ragosta, Religious Freedom, 18-19. ↩︎
47. Witte and Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 32. ↩︎
48. “Danbury Baptist Association to Thomas Jefferson, [after 7 October 1801],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-35-02-0331 [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 35, 1 August–30 November 1801, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton University Press, 2008), 407–409].  ↩︎
49. “V. Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1 January 1802,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-36-02-0152-0006. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 36, 1 December 1801–3 March 1802, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton University Press, 2009), 258.] ↩︎
50. Witte and Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 103. ↩︎
51. Daniel Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (NYU Press, 2002), 3. ↩︎
52. Quoted in: J. Stanley Lemons, First: The First Baptist Church in America (The First Baptist Church in America, 2001), 5. ↩︎
53. William G. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630−1833 (University Press of New England for Brown University Press, 1991), 34. ↩︎
54. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty, 26. ↩︎
55. H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Broadman Press, 1987), 200. ↩︎
56. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1992), 270. ↩︎
57. Isaac Backus, A Door Opened for Christian Liberty (Boston, 1783) in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754−1789, ed. William G. McLoughlin (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 431. ↩︎
58. Isaac Backus, Government and Liberty Described (Boston, 1778) in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, 351. ↩︎
59. Isaac Backus, A Door Opened for Christian Liberty (Boston, 1783), in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, 432. ↩︎
60. This is demanded by the Lord’s exclusion of the sword from his kingdom—Backus appealed here to John 18:36⎯and by the nature of religion itself. Isaac Backus, Policy as Well as Honesty (Boston, 1779) in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, 382. ↩︎
61. Isaac Backus, A Fish Caught in his Own Net (Boston, 1768) in Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, 190−191. ↩︎
62. Witte and Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 70-5. ↩︎
63. Formally called: A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, The Library of America 17 (Literary classics of the United States, 1984), 346-8. ↩︎
64. Organized in 1790, the Danbury Baptist Association primarily represented Baptist churches in Danbury, Connecticut, but also included three congregations in eastern New York. The Association was at the center of a petition movement campaigning to end the establishment of the Congregational Church in the state of Connecticut. William G. McLoughlin, Volume II New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, Volume II: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (Harvard University Press, 1971), 920, 985-6. ↩︎
65. “Danbury Baptist Association to Thomas Jefferson, [after 7 October 1801],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-35-02-0331 [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 35, 1 August–30 November 1801, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton University Press, 2008), 407–409.].  ↩︎
66. Witte and Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 65ff. ↩︎
67. George Washington’s First Inaugural Address; 4/30/1789; (SEN 1A-E1); Presidential Messages, 1789 – 1875; Records of the U.S. Senate, Record Group 46; National Archives Building, Washington, DC. ↩︎
68. George Washington, George Washington Papers, Series 8, Miscellaneous Papers -99, Subseries 8A, Correspondence and Miscellaneous Notes: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Notes, 1773 to 1799. /1799, 1773. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mgw8a.124/. ↩︎
69. “V. Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1 January 1802,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-36-02-0152-0006. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 36, 1 December 1801–3 March 1802, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton University Press, 2009), 258.]. ↩︎
70. Jews in England could not vote, earn degrees at universities, become military officers, barristers (the British equivalent of a lawyer), judges, enter various professions and business, serve in Parliament or in any local office or be “employed in any office or trust, civil or military.” David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485-1850(Oxford University Press, 1994) 241-42. For a counter narrative see David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries (Princeton University Press, 2019). ↩︎
71. For a full discussion of these issues, see Paul Finkelman and Lance J. Sussman, “The American Revolution and the Emergence of Jewish Legal and Political Equality in the New Nation,” American Jewish Archives Journal, 75 (2023): 1-47. ↩︎
72. “George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 18 August 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 6, 1 July 1790 – 30 November 1790, ed. Mark A. Mastromarino (University Press of Virginia, 1996), 284–286.]. ↩︎
73. “George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 18 August 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 6, 1 July 1790 – 30 November 1790, ed. Mark A. Mastromarino (University Press of Virginia, 1996), 284–286.]. ↩︎
74. Shari Rabin, The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025). ↩︎
75. “James Madison to Jasper Adams, September 1833,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/99-02-02-2830. [This is an Early Access document from The Papers of James Madison. It is not an authoritative final version.] ↩︎
76. Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002), 166. ↩︎
77. Primitivists read the Bible literally, viewing it as a historical account of ancient Palestine, but also embraced new historical research. Their emphasis on historical accuracy illustrated the ways in which religion, and religious revivals, and “enlightened” learning could go hand in hand for American Protestants. ↩︎
78. Barton Stone et al, The Last Will & Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804), 21. ↩︎
79. Thomas Campbell, Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington (1809), 16, emphasis added. ↩︎
80. Alexander Campbell, like his father and Stone, believed in relying on the Bible alone to restore what he called “the Ancient Order of Things.” A publisher and newspaper editor, he used his print empire to disseminate “biblical” truth that would help in the project of restoration. Campell became particularly embroiled in topics that he did not deem part of the original church, including the historically legitimate form of baptism and even the legitimacy of the Trinity as a description of God. ↩︎
81. Quoted in: Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989), 168. Emphasis added. ↩︎
82. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776 – 2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, 2nd ed., 4th paperback pr (Rutgers University Press, 2008), 28. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 4; 59. ↩︎
83. Figure 31 in Edwin S. Gaustad, Historical Atlas of Religion in America (Harper & Row, 1962), 43. By 1860, the trend was even more obvious: 2,234 Congregational churches, 6,406 Presbyterian churches, 12,150 Baptist churches, and 19,883 Methodist churches. See: Figure 32 in Edwin S. Gaustad, Historical Atlas of Religion in America(Harper & Row, 1962), 43. See also: Noll, America’s God, 181. ↩︎
84. Jon Butler complicates the notion that American Protestantism after the revolution was a democratic or antiauthoritarian force. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1992). ↩︎
85. Brian Russell Franklin, “America’s Missions: The Home Missions Movement and the Story of the Early Republic,” (PhD diss., A&M University, 2012), 23-4. ↩︎
86. As Thomas Whittaker recently observed: “The phrase “benevolent empire” seems to have been coined by Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933).” See: footnote 13 in Thomas Whittaker, “The Missionary Republic: Missionization, Improvement, and the Remaking of American Protestantism, 1787-1837” (PhD Diss., Harvard University, 2022), 5. ↩︎
87. “Minutes of the First Annual Meeting,” in ABCFM, First Ten Annual Reports of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, With Other Documents of the Board (Printed by Crocker and Brewster, 1834), 2-3. ↩︎
88. Mark 16:15-16 (KJV), as cited in: “Minutes of the First Annual Meeting,” First Ten Annual Reports, 3. Cf. Matthew 28:19-20. ↩︎
89. Cf.: “Minutes of the First Annual Meeting,” First Ten Annual Reports, 3. See also: Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early Republic (Cornell University Press, 2017), 24. ↩︎
90. Gordon Hall and Samuel Newell, The Conversion of the World: or, the Claims of Six Hundred Millions of Heathen, and the Ability and Duty of the Churches Respecting Them (Printed for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, By Flagg & Gould, 1818), 14. ↩︎
91. Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America From the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014). ↩︎
92. Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism, 24-25, 30, 178. The relationship between missionaries and the US state was often mutually beneficial. See, Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024). ↩︎
93. For an in-depth discussion of the “heathen” as a racialized category in American history, see: Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022). ↩︎
94. For the seal, see: https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/public-records/history-of-seal.htm. This is a reference to Acts 16:9-10, which describes a vision of the Apostle Paul. Acts 16:9-10 (KJV): “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us. And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them.” Cf: William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5, 8, 10, 23ff. ↩︎
95. Whittaker, “The Missionary Republic,”25-26. For a convincing argument against “conversion” as the most useful category in the history of Native Americans’ engagement with Christianity, see: Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
96. Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism, 23-24, 61. ↩︎
97. “Minutes of the Third Annual Meeting,” in First Ten Annual Reports, 39. ↩︎
98. “Dr. Hopkins’s Historical Discourse,” in Rufus Anderson, Memorial Volume of the First Fifty Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Published by the Board, 1861), 18. William Hutchison estimates that a total of around two thousand American missionaries were sent abroad over the course of the movement’s first sixty years. See Hutchison, Errand to the World, 7. ↩︎
99. Hutchison identifies the period between 1880 and 1930 as the “heyday” of the “foreign mission enterprise.” Hutchison, Errand to the World, 1. ↩︎
100. Whittaker, “The Missionary Republic,” 2. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

In the decades before the American Revolution, British North America witnessed a growing intensity in religious activity. Missionary organizations such as the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) sent missionaries to North America in hopes of converting Natives and enslaved Africans to Anglicanism. They had considerable competition from Moravians, Quakers, and Congregationalists. Although the SPG achieved mixed results in its quest for conversions, it drew the attention and concern of its rivals. In New England, ministers and laypeople grew especially anxious about the growing influence of the Church of England in colonial affairs, which they believed might empower Anglicans to begin appointing bishops to oversee colonial religious life. Puritans had long battled Anglican authorities, and they feared that a North American bishop would threaten their “city on a hill,” which they believed modeled righteous religious and political governance.

Against the backdrop of perceived Anglican threats, enthusiasm surged in the 1740s with the arrival of British celebrity preacher George Whitefield. His tour ignited a wave of revivals that captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, even if only briefly. Opponents soon emerged, and debates over the revivals echoed back and forth through an increasingly influential world of print media. In the broader context of colonial religious life, however, this short-lived “Great Awakening” was just one of several eighteenth-century efforts to link political and religious ambitions. Indigenous people experienced the constant encroachment of settlers as an existential threat, and many turned to religion in their response. The stirrings of religion in the eighteenth century increased the movement against slavery and animated African American efforts for both physical liberation and spiritual salvation.

The revivals covered in this chapter would cast long shadows across the history of American religion. And many of the same problems of colonialist violence, racism, and inequality would haunt American religion for centuries. But before the cascade of consequences fell and remade American religion, deep faultlines of faith erupted. 

II. Awaiting Awakening

New England churches were already primed for the revivals that would later characterize the Great Awakening. Throughout the early 1700s, ministers and laypeople lived within a disciplined and emotionally charged religious system structured around moral vigilance, spiritual self-scrutiny, and the pursuit of “visible sainthood.” To be a true Christian meant living in conformity with divine law. In theory, salvation rested entirely on God’s sovereign grace. In practice, however, the uncertainty of God’s purposes meant that individuals were expected to show convincing signs of being among God’s elect before they could join the church.

This expectation produced a culture saturated with introspection. Converts recorded detailed accounts of their spiritual struggles, their awareness of personal sin, despair over their own inadequacy, and eventual release through Christ’s mercy.  Ministers stood at the center of these dynamics. Their sermons helped congregants make sense of earthquakes, epidemics, conflicts with Native Americans, and other dramatic events, reminding listeners of how fragile their world truly was. Over time, these dynamics trained congregants to anticipate extraordinary events as part of the normal rhythms of religious life. Ministers also coached parishioners on writing personal conversion narratives, encouraging the kind of self-scrutiny and spiritual anxiety that reinforced the existing religious system. They reframed internal turmoil, including doubt, fear, and fleeting assurance, all as stages in a larger divine process. In doing so, they wove emotional conflict into the very grammar of conversion. Through these practices, ministers cultivated the patterns of religious life that shaped New England communities and taught laypeople to examine both themselves, their neighbors, and the institutions that sustained their spiritual world.

Concerns about maintaining a stable moral order shaped much of New Englanders’ religious scrutiny, especially because church and community life were deeply intertwined. Religious life required obeying local laws and paying taxes that supported churches. Offenses such as adultery, drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, or slander were not viewed as private moral failings but as threats to the well-being of the entire community. Sermons repeatedly claimed that God might abandon New England altogether if they strayed too far from the path of righteousness. Church discipline, therefore, served both as a means of social control and as an expression of pastoral care. Penitent offenders were expected to confess publicly, express sorrow, and then be restored to fellowship. Discipline reaffirmed both God’s justice and the possibility of mercy. At the same time, ministers urged their congregations to seek sincere and heartfelt religion rather than mere outward conformity. These shared expectations about conversion and proper conduct held New England churches together, but they also produced anxiety and excluded many who struggled to meet the community’s strict standards of visible piety.

Printed sermons and devotional manuals circulated widely, encouraging regular fasting, prayer, and reflection on mortality. Through funeral sermons and reprinted deathbed testimonies, death loomed large in New England’s religious imagination. The boundary between life and eternity often felt very thin, and a hyperawareness of mortality only reinforced the urgency of a proper spiritual life. Central to this religious world were the sacraments of baptism and communion. Without any clear visible markers for the state of their salvation, parishioners frequently examined themselves to determine whether they were worthy of participating in these rites as a way of measuring the state of their souls. Many refrained from full membership out of fear that their conversion was not genuine, or because they worried they were deceiving themselves. Some remained in a state of long-term spiritual uncertainty, unsure whether they belonged among the redeemed. Ministers, too, worried about people who displayed outward conformity without inward transformation. In many respects, the ideal of righteous living functioned more as an aspiration than a fully attainable standard.

Questions about divine approval also led New England ministers and laypeople to pay close attention to religious developments elsewhere in North America. They frequently looked for signs of missionary success in newspapers and letters, reading them as possible indicators of God’s favor toward their own religious project of saving the world from paganism, Catholicism, Anglicanism, and really any belief that did not comport with their New England brand of Calvinism. Reports of English efforts to counter French and Spanish Catholic influence among Native Americans circulated widely in printed sermons and correspondence. Congregationalist leaders in New England used these concerns to bolster support for their own missions to Native peoples in Southern New England. Rival Anglican leaders expressed similar anxieties. Distrustful of New England Congregationalist efforts, the Church of England established the SPG to spread Anglicanism among Native Americans and enslaved Africans in Mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies. As stories of missionary successes, failures, and occasional stirrings of revival traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, these publications helped create the communication networks that later allowed observers to stitch together a wide range of local religious experiences into a single phenomenon that would eventually be called the Great Awakening.

New England Congregationalists had long placed their hopes for religious renewal on the success of missions to Indigenous people, particularly the Wampanoag, who had sustained their communities in the early years of colonization. These efforts continued into the eighteenth century. One notable example was the missionary named Experience Mayhew, who followed in the footsteps of the well-known seventeenth-century minister John Eliot. With tremendous effort, skill, and mastery of languages, Native translators such as Cuckenoe, John Sassamon, Job Nesuton, and Wawaus (who would later be known as James Printer) produced the first complete Bible printed in a Native American language. New England Congregationalists successfully showcased the power of the printing press to produce a text completely in a Native language. For sponsors of the project, the Eliot Bible, as it would be called, demonstrated English Protestantism’s conquest and mastery of Native American culture.

A few decades later, Experience Mayhew pursued a similar project, becoming one of the most important chroniclers of Wampanoag Christianity in the eighteenth century. In 1727, he published Indian Converts, a collection of biographical sketches describing the religious lives of Wampanoag men, women, and children on Martha’s Vineyard. In the introduction, Mayhew boasted of his Indigenous converts’ “Knowledge, Convictions, Faith, Repentance, and other Graces of the HOLY SPIRIT.”¹ By foregrounding the spiritual agency of Native Americans, Mayhew hoped to counter persistent skepticism among New England ministers, many of whom doubted whether Native conversions could be genuine. Despite his careful documentation, Mayhew’s text did little to dispel such doubts. Anti-Indigenous prejudice proved too strong for his tales of Christian redemption. Questions about the sincerity of Native Christianity continued to shape missionary debates well into the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Indian Converts reflected a deep and ongoing concern among ministers that the success or failure of their project rested on their ability to Christianize racialized populations.

Mayhew’s work also appeared during a period of declining public support for missions in New England. Ongoing conflicts between Native communities and English settlers over the continuing encroachment into Native lands, as well as European imperial rivalries causing conflict with the French, led many New Englanders to lose interest in funding missionary efforts. At the same time, Protestant clergy across the colonies grew increasingly anxious about the spread of Catholicism. One minister who endorsed Mayhew’s book lamented that Protestant churches had done “so little for the Propagation of a Faith” compared to the Jesuits. He reminded them that their Protestantism was that “which emancipates Mankind from the worst of Slaveries and Miseries” and that “the Missionaries of Antichrist are more than can be number[ed], and the Bigots are at prodigious Pains to propagate the Romish Idolatries.”² Such commentary reflected a broader fear that Protestants were falling behind their Catholic rivals in the religious contest for the Americas. Thus, missionary work among Native communities continued into the mid-eighteenth century, though results remained mixed. The limited successes, particularly among the Mohegan, would later play an important role in the development of distinctly Native forms of Christianity. These early efforts also helped shape emerging networks of communication, translation, and Indigenous leadership that would influence Native Christian movements in the decades to come.³

At the same time that missionaries focused on Native communities, reports of Jewish conversions arriving from London heightened Protestant anxieties. After the ban on Jewish settlement in England lifted in 1656, London printers began producing a steady stream of Jewish conversion narratives. These accounts circulated widely, encouraging ministers such as the famed Cotton Mather to pursue the conversion of Jewish merchants passing through Boston’s ports. Mather found little success in the previous century, but his fortunes changed with the arrival of Judah Monis, a self-described expert in Hebrew. Monis was either from the Iberian Peninsula or Italy, and he had been educated in various Jewish academies in Europe. He visited Jewish communities in Jamaica and New York before settling in New England. At Harvard, Monis offered to teach Hebrew with an accompanying promise to be baptized into Christianity. Both his arrival and purported conversion sparked widespread attention, with newspapers reporting on the event and his new academic appointment. In 1735, he published Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet, the first Hebrew grammar printed in North America. Although many students had grown weary of studying Hebrew and Greek as part of their ministerial training, Monis’s textbook demonstrated Harvard’s ability to sponsor ambitious scholarly projects and highlighted the intellectual ambitions of early New England institutions to rival their British counterparts.

Yet Monis’s conversion was highly unusual when compared to the broader experiences of Jews in early British North America. In 1700, the Jewish population numbered about two hundred, concentrated primarily in Rhode Island, New York, and Charleston. Most were Sephardim, descendants of Jews who had fled the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition. By 1774, the Jewish population had grown to roughly 2,500. Synagogues regulated access to key milestones in Jewish life such as circumcision, marriage, and burial. Authority in these communities typically rested with lay leaders called hazzans, who enforced norms of observance and community membership. In a society where religious pluralism was limited and public life was dominated by Protestants, synagogues served as centers of cultural survival. Because of these institutional structures and the strong communal identities that they preserved, Jewish conversion to Christianity remained rare. Hence, Monis’ experience, while far from representative of the broader realities of Jewish life in early America, nevertheless reflected both the opportunities created by Protestant educational institutions and the social pressures faced by Jews navigating a colonial world shaped overwhelmingly by Protestant norms.

To counter the efforts of their New England counterparts, the Church of England focused their sights on Anglican missions in places like New York and Virginia. In 1710, the SPG sent missionary Andrew Williams to facilitate the conversion of Mohawk communities near Albany, New York. Mohawk parents and children showed some initial interest in the translated materials he brought, particularly Mohawk translations of Anglican texts such as the Book of Common Prayer. Some even committed to attending the school. Early eighteenth-century New York City saw similar efforts under SPG missionary Elias Neau. Neau established a school to provide religious instruction to enslaved peoples passing through the city, believing, like Andrews, that translating religious texts into the languages of potential converts would make Christianity more accessible. Like with Native Americans and their raids on colonial encroachments on Native land, Protestant enthusiasm for converting enslaved peoples was also repeatedly tempered by fears of slave uprisings, which grew throughout the colonies in these years.

These concerns were not unfounded as religion certainly played a crucial role in slave revolts and cultures of resistance. A 1712 revolt in New York, in which twenty-three Black men killed nine white colonists and injured several others, intensified white anxieties. Two of those convicted attended Neau’s school. Rumors of additional conspiracies spread across the city and into the Hudson River Valley, leading both colonial officials and missionary organizations to leave unaddressed Neau’s desire to print translations in the dialects of Black converts. SPG leaders became wary of translating catechisms into African languages, fearing that Christian literacy might encourage organized rebellion. In these cases, Protestant Christianity was imagined as a potential catalyst for resistance rather than a tool for social stability. Some also drew on inherited African religious traditions as they encountered new forms of Protestant worship. The Stono Rebellion of 1739 is a striking example of enslaved peoples adapting Christianity in ways that spoke directly to their lived circumstances.⁴ Many of the rebels were Kongolese Catholics who intentionally launched their uprising on September 8, the feast day of the Virgin Mary according to the Kongo Catholic liturgical calendar.⁵ Others also blended African and Protestant ideas to meet their immediate needs. In the mid-Atlantic, enslaved Africans incorporated drums, percussive fiddles, and other expressive practices into Pinkster celebrations rooted in Dutch Reformed tradition.⁶ By the time of the early rumblings of the New England revivals, thousands of enslaved and freed peoples seized on the emotional and experiential flexibility of the First Great Awakening, participating in revival meetings that allowed for ecstatic movement, shouted prayer, and new forms of communal worship.⁷

Despite these moments of creativity and agency, overall missionization efforts among enslaved Africans moved slowly and achieved limited success. Missionaries’ accounts often revealed enslaved people’s ambivalence toward Anglo-Protestant ideals, especially regarding marriage practices, modes of worship, and the moral codes missionaries sought to impose. Records also revealed the degree to which missionaries depended heavily on the cooperation of enslaved peoples to achieve any real success. In a 1714 letter, SPG agent Francis Le Jau described how the “most sensible” of his target Black population in Goose Creek, South Carolina had “solemnly” promised to report any murmurs of potential uprisings. Le Jau underscored his lack of authority, however, writing, “I can’t but depend upon the truth of their words.”⁸ Moravians in the Danish West Indies had somewhat greater success. Founded by German reformer Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf, they established a mission in 1732 on St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies and soon expanded across the Caribbean, including Antigua. They would help spread among enslaved populations in the West Indies, aided by Moravians’ willingness to preach in Creole languages and empower Black converts as evangelists. This Caribbean movement represented one of the earliest sustained Protestant evangelizing efforts towards enslaved Africans and would become one important site for African cultural and spiritual survival and adaptation in North America.

Taken together, these missionary activities towards Native Americans, Jewish communities, and enslaved African populations reveal a growing expectation among Anglo-American Protestants that some broader spiritual revival should be imminent across the Americas.  Many missionaries hoped that converting a few members of non-English populations would spark similar awakenings among Euro-American Protestants, a belief that later revivalists would repeat. Yet most local ministers remained skeptical. They regularly questioned the sincerity of these conversions, and debates about the authenticity of religious transformation, especially among marginalized groups, continued to occupy American religious leaders for decades. What ultimately captivated the broader New England public was not the conversion of racialized communities or the renewed piety of religious outsiders. Instead, it was the arrival of a British celebrity preacher, George Whitefield. His skillful self-promotion, his extensive network of supporters among local ministers, and his widely advertised preaching tour featuring dramatic, emotionally charged performances catalyzed a series of events that later scholars would call “The Great Awakening.”

III. Promoting Revivals

Across the Ohio Valley-Great Lakes region, many Native communities experienced their own waves of spiritual renewal. New prophets guided communities through the devastation of epidemic disease, land dispossession, and escalating conflict with Euro-American settlers.⁹ Congregationalists in New England; Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Moravians and German Pietists in the Middle Colonies; and Methodists in Wales and England all witnessed noticeable increases in religious activity during the mid-eighteenth century. Together, these developments set the stage for what later observers would call the Great Awakening.

During the 1730s and 1740s religious life in New England changed dramatically, and these changes would echo throughout several centuries of American religious history. Previously, religious practice centered on the steady rhythms of attending services, hearing sermons, reading scripture, and engaging in careful self-examination within tightly knit communities. Revivalism disrupted these routines. Worshippers reported ecstatic visions, physical displays such as fainting or convulsing, and encounters with itinerant preachers who traveled from town to town, sometimes challenging local ministers and fracturing congregations. The expanding power of print, in the form of newspapers, published letters, and printed sermons, enabled contemporaries to connect these scattered episodes into what appeared to be a single, transatlantic phenomenon. As a result, the Great Awakening emerged as not only a widespread religious revival, but also as a media-driven spectacle and a source of intense theological debate that reconfigured the role of Protestantism in colonial society. It also left a lasting mark on American religious culture.¹⁰

In many respects, the narrative of a singular Great Awakening began with the publications of Northampton minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), an influential figure whose legacy would continue long after his death. A member of a prominent family of Connecticut River Valley ministers, Edwards published A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in 1734, describing an unexpected surge of religious enthusiasm in his congregation. Hundreds of attendees converted and testified to a personal, religious experience. Church membership at Northampton swelled to over six hundred, which accounted for nearly every adult in the town. Edwards described these mass conversions as a “shower of divine blessing” that spread from Northampton to neighboring towns such as South Hadley, Sunderland, and Westfield. He observed how New Englanders – men, women, and children – were all suddenly gripped by intense spiritual concern, devoting themselves to stricter Sabbath observance, more frequent Bible reading, and heightened private devotion. Many experienced deep anxiety over the fate of their souls and cried out, “What shall we do to be saved?” Others reported visions, emotional outbursts, trembling, fainting, or other dramatic signs of conversion that went beyond conventional professions of faith.¹¹

Edwards’ wife, Sarah, also described powerful spiritual experiences during this period. As a minister’s spouse, Sarah was subject to higher levels of scrutiny relative to her peers. Despite the risk to her reputation, she began recounting to her husband an “agitation of body” and “convulsive motions” that she interpreted as signs of divine assurance from God. Yet, like many women’s spiritual writings of this period, her accounts were circulated cautiously and intensely curated to avoid overtly challenging patriarchal authority. Many ministers worried that vivid descriptions of bodily revelation, especially those written by women, might undermine not just their clerical authority but also be weaponized to discredit the emerging revival movement by their opponents.¹² Trusting in Edwards’ curatorial hand to make a convincing case for the revivals that would appeal to their more conservative counterparts, Boston clergyman and editor Benjamin Colman (1673–1747) helped shepherd Edwards’ Faithful Narrative to publication with London printers in 1737. Once published, the text reached a transatlantic audience increasingly eager to reproduce Northampton’s experiences in their own congregations. As one scholar has recently put it, the dissemination of Edwards’s report “shaped Protestant patterns of revival” across a British landscape increasingly connected by cheap and popular print.¹³ Beyond the mere details filling its pages, A Faithful Narrative became a prototype of revivalist news-sharing and, of course, revivalism itself.

No figure took advantage of the rising revivalist excitement more effectively than English preacher George Whitefield. Whitefield was an Oxford-trained Anglican and collaborator with John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism. He launched a widely publicized preaching career in England in the late 1730s. In his 1737 sermon The Nature and Necessity of the New Birth, he sharply criticized Christians who treated religion as routine habit rather than a truly heartfelt transformation. Genuine faith, he insisted, required being “baptized with the Holy Ghost” and that the confessant becomes a “New Creature,” saved from sin.¹⁴ In a religious culture long centered on orderly parish life and deference to ministers’ authority, Whitefield’s message was akin to spiritual anarchy.¹⁵ For many Congregants frustrated by the false assurance of salvation through steady, predictable rhythms of New England religion, however, Whitefield’s approach felt energizing, exciting, and even at times apocalyptic. One admirer from Byfield, Massachusetts, remarked that Whitefield seemed able to rouse the “Churches from their Deadness & Formality in Religion.”¹⁶

Newspapers, letters, and printed journals transformed Whitefield into a celebrity before he even reached North America. The itinerant preacher’s theology was not entirely novel to New England, but printed accounts fixated on his innovative delivery. Whitefield preached without a script and used dramatic gestures, tears, and direct appeals to his audience. These techniques sharply contrasted with the calm, measured style favored by most New England ministers. He was also a skilled self-promoter who used the expanding print network to craft the first truly modern, media-driven religious awakening. In July 1739, the South Carolina Gazette reported on the “wonderfully laborious” preacher who gathered crowds of 20,000 people in London’s outdoor public squares.¹⁷ Print accurately captured Whitefield’s ability to create powerful public spectacles that emphasized emotional renewal and personal rebirth, fueling expectations of an imminent, sweeping revival.

Whitefield’s popularity surged as he toured the colonies between 1741 and 1742. Other itinerant preachers copied several of his methods, including Gilbert Tennent, Eleazar Wheelock, and Daniel Rogers. They held multi-day meetings, preached spontaneously, and challenged the traditional system in which each town only allowed a single minister to oversee local religious life. Their efforts spread revivalist excitement even into rural parishes and reshaped ministers’ understanding of their own roles. Increasingly, revival-oriented clergy imagined themselves not as guardians of steady religious order but as divinely empowered agents capable of provoking radical spiritual transformation.

Revivalists went further, questioning the spiritual state of even the most respected church members who prided themselves on moral behavior, regular communion, and sound doctrine. Diaries, sermons, and conversion narratives from this period reveal that laypeople increasingly described their lives in terms of sudden awakening or impending damnation. Edwards himself escalated revivalist rhetoric during Whitefield’s tour, most famously in his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Here he likened sinners to “a spider” dangling over the fires of hell by God’s sheer mercy. It was a message aimed not at notorious sinners but at complacent church members. In an ironic twist, the revivals’ fiercest denunciations were directed at the very visible saints of New England’s churches:

“The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours.”¹⁸

Gilbert Tennent advanced an even more pointed critique in his 1740 printed sermon The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry, accusing ministers who did not support the revivals of being “Pharisee-Teachers” who misled their congregants by confusing outward discipline with true spiritual rebirth. If empty piety laid at the heart of their ministrations, Tennent surmised, “Then it is both lawful and expedient to go from them to hear Godly Persons.”¹⁹ Such charges emboldened revival supporters to form new congregations, often directly beside or right across from the churches they left. What revivalists celebrated as a divine spark of renewal increasingly proved destabilizing. Whitefield’s tour fractured parish life, undermined longstanding clerical authority, and replaced inherited religious assurances with a volatile culture of spiritual self-examination.

Whitefield’s emphasis on a personal “new birth” and his contrast between heartfelt conversion and steady, routine spirituality fractured religious life throughout the colonies. Bodily manifestations such as trembling or fainting were not entirely new. Puritanism had long linked physical sensation to spiritual transformation. But the revivals intensified these practices and extended them beyond clerical control. Increasingly, such experiences occurred not only in formal worship but also in homes, fields, and informal gatherings. What ministers had once regarded as signs of genuine regeneration increasingly slipped beyond their ability to regulate or sometimes even understand. Men, women, children, including some Native and African converts, certainly saw the democratizing potential behind the notion that conversion could be a spontaneous, God-directed process. If anyone at any point in time could experience this burst of divine inspiration and salvation, then Anglo-Protestant ministers’ interventions could be deemed superfluous to one’s own personal relationship with God. Furthermore, anyone, and not just ministers, could personally corroborate their own salvation strictly through the evidence apparent on their bodies. This shift also elevated the role of personal engagement with scripture. While ministers had long served as the primary interpreters of the Bible, revivalists encouraged ordinary believers to seek meaning directly from the text. As laypeople increasingly relied on their own interpretations, biblical reading became a powerful tool for self-authentication. This trend magnified the authority of private judgment and weakened older communal and clerical frameworks.

Behind the revival phenomenon stood an extensive print media infrastructure. In addition to Whitefield’s sophisticated use of newspapers and correspondence, ministers such as Thomas Prince (1687–1758) published works that stitched together numerous local episodes into a larger narrative of spiritual revival. Prince’s An Account of the Revival in Boston in the Years 1740-1-2-3 (1743) and his periodical Christian History, reported on revival activity throughout the British Atlantic world. Through these publications, printed sermons, and reports of conversions more than tripled the size of government printing and political news.²⁰Although not all ministers endorsed the revivals, those who supported them still outnumbered critics nine to three in Boston.²¹ Print not only documented revival activity. It also amplified, legitimized, and sustained the energy and excitement for it.

Even those outside the revivalist movement found themselves drawn into its spectacle. Printer and future founding father Benjamin Franklin did not share Whitefield’s theology, but he greatly admired the revivalist’s oratorical power. After hearing Whitefield preach outdoors, Franklin marveled at the clarity and reach of his voice. As he wrote in his autobiography: “He had a loud and clear Voice, and articulated his Words and Sentences so perfectly that he might be heard and understood at a great Distance… I computed that he might well be heard by more than Thirty Thousand. This reconcil’d me to the Newspaper Accounts of his having preach’d to 25,000 People in the Fields, and to the ancient Histories of Generals haranguing whole Armies, of which I had sometimes doubted.”²² So impressed was Franklin that he published some of Whitefield’s sermons for Philadelphia readers, further contributing to the movement’s media presence.

IV. Opposing Revivals

By 1743, the revivals had alienated many local ministers who felt threatened by itinerants. One dramatic example was the behavior of itinerant preacher James Davenport. By then, Davenport had already urged his followers to attack local sheriffs, had been arrested and jailed numerous times, was declared insane by several assemblies and juries, and had been forced to leave both Connecticut and Massachusetts. After receiving an invitation from a congregation in New London, he returned to Connecticut and staged a large bonfire, urging listeners to burn books written by respected New England ministers. The next evening, he organized a second fire, this time insisting that attendees also throw their clothing into the flames because, in his view, garments had become symbols of vanity. Davenport led by example, casting his own pants into the fire. A woman in the crowd disrupted the hysteria by retrieving his pants and handed them back to them, breaking the spell he had cast over listeners. In the aftermath, the itinerant preacher’s embarrassed followers began publicly distancing themselves from him, and even Davenport later lamented that he had strayed from God’s path.²³

Opposition to the revivals had been building steadily throughout the 1740s as Whitefield’s followers increasingly challenged the authority of established ministers and local officials. Despite assurances from revival leaders that the movement’s excesses could be managed, ministers on the ground struggled to restrain the more disruptive behaviors without appearing hostile to the spirit of revival. As divisions continued to fracture communities, lay exhorters and visionaries began claiming biblical authority outside of ecclesial structures. Congregations began splitting between “New Lights,” who supported and promoted the revivals, and “Old Lights,” who opposed them. However, even among revival supporters, disagreements about theology and church structures increased. This was because many participants interpreted their revival experiences through the lens of Pentecost, the moment described in the Bible as when the Holy Spirit descended upon the early Christian apostles. If this was happening again amongst them, many felt that spiritual authority rested not with churches or clergy, but with visible signs of divine power. In other words, supporters encouraged a view of the revivals as a new kind of religious dispensation: the inauguration of a revolutionary system that replaced the old order rooted in the authority of a local minister with the authority of itinerant preachers or even direct revelation from God. So, when standing ministers resisted the movement’s more disruptive practices, revivalists took this resistance as proof of spiritual blindness. They understood their actions, which looked like schisms to opponents of revival, as obedience to God’s will.

As revivalist enthusiasm intensified, the conflict also spilled into civic life. Separatists who founded new congregations directly challenged compulsory parish taxes, contested clerical authority in court, and occasionally disrupted services. What began as a theological debate over conversion and assurance over salvation increasingly became a struggle over the boundaries of civil and political authority. By 1742, the Connecticut Assembly passed a law banning itinerant preaching. Itinerant preachers like Davenport and Wheelock soon lost their positions in local churches for violating the law. For some revivalists, the same experiences that validated exercised bodies now justified organized protest. Indeed, if God communicated his truth directly to those who are saved, then civil and ecclesiastical sanctions should be dismissed as human interference with divine will.

The Connecticut Assembly’s ban on itinerant preaching marked a turning point for opponents of the revival. Concerned that the law would extinguish revival enthusiasm, Edwards published Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742) in an effort to defend the movement and support the work of itinerant ministers like Wheelock. Edwards readily celebrated the spiritual egalitarianism of the revivals, noting that “All Sorts of Persons, throughout the whole Congregation of Israel, Great and Small, Rich and Poor, Men and Women, helped to build the Tabernacle in the Wilderness.” He continued, “Everyone whose Heart stirred him up, and every one whom his Spirit made willing; all Sorts contributed, and all Sorts were employed in that Affair, in Labours of their Hands, both Men and Women.”²⁴ Converted African Americans and Native Americans who he initially believed were “ignorant and barbarous,” he recorded as growing “very glorious in [the revivals] Influences and Effects [on them].”²⁵

Yet Edwards’s inclusive vision for the revival did not translate into expanded social or political opportunities for marginalized peoples. He continued to own enslaved Africans, and he framed the growing diversity of religious voices as an opportunity for ministers to exercise their ability to manage and oversee those converts, rather than embracing the democratizing spirit it seemed to carry. Edwards’ publication attempted to offer a middle path: it acknowledged the legitimacy of the revivals but without giving into its egalitarian social and political promises, therefore reassuring anxious clergy and civic leaders that their authority could still remain intact.

Edwards’ ardent defense, combined with declining enthusiasm for revival among ministers, gave Boston minister Charles Chauncy the opening he needed to rally anti-revivalists into a united opposition. Within just a few months after Some Thoughts was published, Chauncy published his rebuttal aptly titled Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743). Summarizing the frustrations of fellow Anglo-Protestant clergy, he complained that “Men of all Occupations… sometimes Lads, or rather Boys: Nay, Women and Girls; yea, Negroes, have taken upon them to do the Business of Preachers…[and] to be Teachers of others… Neither have they contented themselves to speak in the more private Meetings of Christians but have head forth in the publick Congregations.”²⁶ While Edwards sought to ease ministers’ anxieties by finding room for them within the revivalist movement, Chauncy reassured them that their authority can only be maintained by defending the old religious order. As he wrote to his readers: “We, who have been made Overseers of the Flocks in this Land, are peculiarly oblig’d to use our Endeavours, in all suitable Ways, within our proper Sphere, to suppress these Disorders.”²⁷ After months of witnessing the excesses and disruptions of the revivals, Chauncy’s views resonated widely. Subscribers to Seasonable Thoughts included the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, prominent merchants, town magistrates, more than a hundred ministers, and several militia officers. Chauncy’s rebuttal made him the leading voice of the antirevivalist movement and the primary editor of publications opposing the revivals.

Chauncy’s success came not only from the timing of his publication and his attentiveness to ministers’ growing dissatisfaction, but also from his willingness to boil the debate about the revivals down to a matter of interpretation: namely whether ambiguous bodily performances and ecstatic conversions should be understood as manifestations from God. Indeed, for most of the revivals’ presence in print, this was precisely how it was marketed and promoted by its supporters. So when revival leaders viewed public displays of emotion as signs of genuine love for God, Chauncy argued directly that true love should not be so ephemeral, but rather “uniform, steady and pleasant.”²⁸ Similarly, revivalists interpreted crying and fainting as evidence of true spiritual joy. Chauncy countered that such a reaction could just as readily be explained as mere “animal Passion,” and that true joy consists of “a holy Satisfaction and Chearfulness of Mind… mixt with a becoming Fear and Caution.”²⁹ In using terms like “animal passion” and “hysteria,” Chauncy offers a natural and physiological counter-explanation for the revivals that reframed it as an event marked strictly by its emotionalism rather than anything about divine intervention. His title choice makes this very clear. Whereas Edwards’ title Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England readily described the phenomenon as a “revival,” Chauncy refused to even acknowledge it as such. Instead, he titled his work Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England. Befitting the stature of someone beholden to the traditional order he wanted to restore, Chauncy relied strictly on the force of his ideas to challenge the print spectacle and media-saturated coverage of the revivals.

Some Thoughts accelerated institutional disinvestment in the revivals. Chauncy’s campaign spread across New England and beyond. Ministerial associations publicly denounced the revivals, itinerant preachers abandoned their circuits, and print coverage of revival activity declined sharply. By 1746, only about 5 percent of publications addressed revival news, compared to roughly 35 percent the previous year.³⁰ Harvard College issued its own rebuttal in 1744 with The Testimony and Advice of the Pastors of New-England, which withdrew support for the revivals and condemned their disruptive effects on New England society. Perhaps most damaging to the cause of revival, however, was publishers’ sudden loss of interest in promoting revival literature. Before 1742, printers throughout New England had eagerly published almost anything related to the movement. In the following years, printed texts from revivals were printed primarily by a small handful in the publishing industry: Boston printers Samuel Kneeland and Timothy Green, and bookseller Daniel Henchman. Without widespread support for the revivals, which thrived primarily as a media spectacle, New England residents’ interests in religious revivals would similarly wane.

These institutional shifts chased out many itinerant preachers into neighboring colonies such as New York and Pennsylvania, placing them beyond the reach of Congregationalist oversight. Despite Jonathan Edwards’s prominence and his family’s regional influence, a combination of changing church policies on membership, disputes over his salary, and a scandal involving young men accessing a midwife’s manual ultimately led to his dismissal from the Northampton church in 1749. Afterward, Edwards accepted a position in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he ministered to the local Native communities. He was later offered the presidency of the College of New Jersey. Edwards worked closely with Native peoples, and at times advocated for their interests. He and his family never emancipated his own enslaved people, leaving unrealized the democratizing promise of the revivals even in the household of one of its most visible leaders. Several of Edwards’s theological heirs, including Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards Jr., Joseph Bellamy, and even southern Baptists such as Oliver Hart, eventually drew on aspects of his thought to promote abolitionism in later decades. Meanwhile, Whitefield shifted his attention toward establishing and maintaining an orphanage in Georgia. To sustain the institution, he spent considerable effort lobbying in support of slavery in the colony, and he himself owned numerous enslaved workers. In these ways, the spiritual egalitarianism so celebrated by revivalists proved, as Chauncy suggested, more marketing and rhetoric than actualized freedoms. The social and political payoffs of this democratizing movement were indeed limited.

V. Beyond Revival

The significance and long-term influence of the 1740s revivals on colonial American history remains debated, even among historians. In New England, the revivals’ legacy was marked by growing separatism and factionalism. Ministers in later decades worried that similar upheavals could recur, and many became cautious about encouraging anything that might reignite such divisions. This became especially true as tensions with Britain escalated in the 1760s. Outside of New England, revivalists pursued similar spiritual awakenings in the South, particularly in Anglican-dominated colonies, while continuing efforts among Native Americans and African Americans. Yet for many who did convert during the revivals, the egalitarian promises of the 1740s awakenings never fully materialized. New England churches that had initially welcomed Native and Black converts increasingly hardened their racial boundaries in the following decades, applying church discipline unevenly and often along racial lines. These failures led to further fragmentation, prompting Native and Black Christians to form their own congregations. In this sense, the democratizing possibilities of the revivals proved short-lived. Even so, the revivals did leave a lasting impact. Missionaries and revivalist leaders helped build important religious networks and institutional structures that later supported the rise of new denominations and fueled additional waves of revival in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

As the flames of revival dimmed, many of the movement’s supporters began searching for the next wave of religious enthusiasm. Baptists who emerged from the New England revivals tried to spread revivals into the predominantly Anglican Virginia and the Carolinas. Leaders such as Samuel Harris and John Waller organized new Baptist congregations that emphasized adult conversion, believer’s baptism, and highly emotional styles of worship. Much like in New England, these revivals spread quickly through the Piedmont and backcountry regions, appealing especially to small farmers and settlers who lived far from the structures of Anglican parish life. Yet revivalism in Virginia brought conflict as well as growth. As dissenting groups multiplied during the 1760s, Anglican authorities sometimes arrested and jailed Baptist preachers for holding unauthorized services.

These movements often crossed racial boundaries as enslaved Africans participated in some early Baptist congregations. But like in the northern colonies, this egalitarianism was inconsistent and soon receded. Similar patterns unfolded in North Carolina, where Moravian missionaries arrived in the 1750s with hopes of building a unified community of believers. Within only a decade, they began purchasing enslaved people, revealing how easily revivalist ideals of Christian fellowship were constrained by entrenched racial hierarchies. Their rhetoric of spiritual equality did not translate into social equality in practice.³¹

A smaller but notable revival returned to New England during the 1760s, though it never matched the media spectacle of George Whitefield’s earlier tour. One influential leader was Sarah Osborne. She led prayer gatherings in her home and became a respected figure in her community. When Newport’s First Church sought a new minister, Osborne’s support for Samuel Hopkins, one of Edwards’ theological descendants, helped him secure the position. Hopkins often consulted Osborne while preparing his sermons, a sign of her informal but significant authority within the congregation. Osborne and other revivalists supported antislavery views. Yet even they did not fully embrace the social implications of their theology. Osborne herself kept her enslaved laborers and did not emancipate them, revealing once again the gap between the revivals’ egalitarian promises and their limited actions.³²

Revival leaders such as Eleazar Wheelock shifted their focus toward Native American communities. Wheelock founded Moor’s Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, intending to educate Native children and train them as missionaries to their own communities. One of his most successful students was Samson Occom, a Mohegan minister who embraced the revivalist message and sought to spread Christianity among Native peoples. Occom believed that working with Anglo-American institutions might advance both religious and social opportunities for Native communities. However, his wife Mary Occom, who was also educated at Wheelock’s school, remained skeptical.³³ Mary often refused to correspond with revivalist sympathizers from London, and many visitors often remarked on the ways she rarely spoke in English and continually dressed in Native garb, despite having been educated in those customs. At first, her outright refusal to engage with Anglo-Protestant society bothered her husband, but her approach would prove to be the least harmful to the Occom’s cause. After Occom undertook a major fundraising tour in Britain to support Moor’s Indian Charity School, Wheelock used the funds instead to establish what would become Dartmouth College for the education of Anglo-American Protestant children. Feeling betrayed and already underpaid compared to White missionaries, Occom distanced himself from Wheelock and recommitted to Native-centered efforts. He went on to become the first Native American author to publish a book in colonial America with his 1772 Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul. Later, he joined other Native Christians in founding the community of Brothertown in upstate New York in an attempt to build a refuge from the constant suspicion and discrimination they faced in Anglo-American religious life.³⁴

VI. Indigenous Revivals

Between 1740 and 1770, numerous Native American communities saw a remarkable surge in prophetic religious movements. These movements offered both explanations for Native suffering and strategies for cultural survival in the face of epidemic disease, land dispossession, and increasing dependence on European goods. This period saw the global conflict between Britain and France called the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Colonists called the conflict the French and Indian War, but Indigenous people fought on both sides. The war ravaged Indigenous communities through direct combat and through the removal of the French from the region. Allies of the French suffered most directly, including the Wabanaki, Ojibwa, Odawa, Lenape, Potawatomi, and more. But even those who did not ally with France suffered as Indigenous people lost significant leverage after they could no longer make Britain compete with France in negotiations.

Religious prophecy rose in response, and many of these prophets blended elements of Christianity with longstanding Indigenous religious traditions. They taught that Native people had been spiritually weakened through their interactions with Europeans, which disrupted the natural order and set their communities on a path toward destruction. According to these teachings, the loss of sacred power could be reversed only by rejecting European goods and customs and returning to traditional Native practices and lifeways.

Perhaps the most well-known of these prophets was the Lenape/Delaware shaman Neolin. Little is known about his early life, but beginning in 1761, during the war, Neolin reported a series of visions in which he encountered the Master of Life, who revealed specific instructions, prayers, and rituals to him. Neolin explained to his followers that the Master of Life was upset with Native people for their dependence on white people and for their apparent disregard for the traditional spirits. Hence, Native communities had strayed from the correct spiritual path, and returning to it required both purification and reform. He enacted these reforms by blending previous Delaware visionaries and folklore with Christian tropes and symbols like God, heaven, Satan, hell, and the paths to salvation and damnation. Native people, he insisted, must abandon alcohol, polygamy, witchcraft, and internal conflict. He also urged cultural renewal by rejecting European goods and practices of all kinds: “If you suffer the English among you, you are dead men,” he told his followers. “Sickness, smallpox, and their poison will destroy you entirely.”³⁵

Neolin also called for returning to the bow-and-arrow, for wearing only skins and furs, and for the faithful execution of specific prayers and rituals. Through these actions, Native people could purify themselves. Unlike the rhetoric of the New England revivalists, this message went beyond individual spiritual renewal. It was a call for political resistance. The Master of Life, he taught, had declared: “This land where ye dwell I have made for you and not for others…[and] those who come to trouble your lands,—drive them out, make war upon them.”³⁶ Through purification and renewed unity, Native peoples could regain the sacred power necessary to expel European settlers. This aspect of Neolin’s teachings resonated strongly with the Odawa leader Pontiac, who in 1762 and 1763 incorporated its themes into his own calls for resistance in what would later be known as Pontiac’s War.

Another influential prophet of this era was Papunhank (1705-1775), a Munsee religious leader known for advocating a message centered on peace, moral reform, and cultural renewal.³⁷ He told Natives and settlers alike that “whatever argument might be advanced in defense of war… when God made men, he never intended they should kill and destroy one another.” According to later accounts, Papunhank began his prophetic career after undertaking a vision quest around 1750 in response to the death of his father. On the fifth day of his quest, he experienced a powerful revelation from the Great Spirit. He returned to his Pennsylvania community transformed and soon began preaching to neighboring Native groups, including Munsees, Delawares, Conoys, and Nanticokes, about the reforms required to restore Native well-being.

 Amid the turmoil of the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Rebellion, Papunhank urged strict adherence to traditional rituals, the revival of sacred dances, daily morning and evening prayer, and moral discipline. He condemned alcohol, called for the rejection of European customs, and encouraged Native communities to reform themselves in ways that would promote both cultural survival and spiritual renewal. Papunhank’s insistence on nonviolence linked him to older Indigenous traditions of diplomacy and peacekeeping. As a Munsee leader, he likely knew of earlier figures such as the sachem Tackapousha, who spent decades in the seventeenth century using negotiations, strategic alliances, and legal petitions to shield Munsee people from the escalating pressures of settler encroachment. For Tackapousha, these strategies were practical tools of survival. For Papunhank, however, they became matters of deep moral and spiritual conviction. “It has been told to my heart [by the Great Spirit], that man was not made for that end, therefore I have ceased from war.”³⁸

Papunhank’s encounters with pacifist Quakers and Moravians during the late 1750s and 1760s reinforced his own pacifist views. While their understandings of peace differed, these groups mutually welcomed and wooed a Native who sounded a similar message. Papunhank agreed with many other Indigenous leaders that white settlers were destroying their worlds through corruption, deceit, fraud, and aggression, and he was bolder than most in speaking truth to colonial authorities. However, he also believed that rejecting everything Euro-American was neither possible nor desirable. When in 1763-1764 his village became more vulnerable to violent attacks from both Native warriors and vigilante settlers during Pontiac’s Rebellion, Papunhank turned to Moravian Christianity. In the final decade of his life, he helped lead Native Moravian communities in Philadelphia, northern Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Country as they searched for a secure homeland. For a time, these communities offered fragile refuge from both Native warriors and white vigilantes, demonstrating the possibilities and the limits of Papunhank’s vision of moral reform and peaceful coexistence.

VII. African American Responses

Among enslaved Africans, religious revival and conversion failed to advance their social or political goals. For some, this only reinforced the importance of preserving the spiritualities they brought from Africa. The violence of slavery was so pervasive across all aspects of colonial American life that it not only affected the physical body, but it also circumscribed Black spiritual and psychological selves. Amid separation from their homelands and families of origin, Black survival hinged on maintaining ancestral religious remembrances.³⁹

Some West Central Africans trafficked from the Senegambia region continued to maintain Islamic traditions in bondage. Yarrow Mamout, a Fulani Muslim who was forcibly removed to Maryland in 1752, sought to preserve core elements of his Islamic traditions, such as daily prayers, dietary restrictions, and recitations of the Quran.⁴⁰ While continuity marked Mamout and other Muslims’ practices, other enslaved peoples forged new rituals by interpreting traditional African cosmologies through the aperture of their “New World.” Often denigrated by missionaries and enslavers and labelled “witchcraft,” “fetish,” or “superstition,” these vernacular religious practices involved spiritual and pharmacological interventions, as well as objects that were believed to heal, protect, or cause harm depending on how they were engaged.⁴¹ Far from being marginal, these practices became central tools for maintaining cultural identity, spiritual resilience, and communal care under conditions of profound dislocation.

Black converts to Protestantism also contributed to the revival culture of the Americas. Some embraced Protestantism out of genuine belief in its spiritual promises, including the hope of spiritual salvation and the appeal of an egalitarian Christian community. Others understood conversion as a possible avenue for improving their social standing in colonial society. This belief was widespread enough that colonial legislatures felt compelled to clarify, once again, through statutes and legal rulings, that baptism did not grant freedom to enslaved people, thereby denying any link between Christian conversion and emancipation. For those who adopted elements of revivalism as it spread through plantations, churches, and daily routines of colonial life, conversion resembled cultural adaptation and socialization. One early figure who emerged from this context was Jupiter Hammon. Born into slavery on a Long Island manor, Hammon became one of the first published Black writers in North America when his poem An Evening Thought appeared as a broadside in 1761. His writings reveal how he drew upon Christian rhetoric and theology to critique slavery, anticipate later abolitionist arguments, and carve out a literary voice within the constraints of bondage.⁴²

The mid-to-late eighteenth century also witnessed the emergence of African American literature whereby Protestant reflections, imagery, and themes became crucial sites for exploring African American life. The most famous among these was poet Phillis Wheatley Peters. Enslaved and educated in the Wheatley household in Boston, she gained recognition through her poems which circulated in colonial newspapers. Her Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (1773) earned her celebrity across the Atlantic and made her the first African American woman to publish a book. This rise was made possible by her connection to wealthy patron Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon.⁴³ A close friend of Whitefield, Hastings provided crucial support for revivalist ministers and helped bring the remarkable book to press before a transatlantic audience. However, the countess’s complicated relationship with slavery reflected the contradictory revival culture she financed. She supported the publications of Black writers such as Wheatley, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and Olaudah Equiano, while she herself owned enslaved people and inherited Whitefield’s plantation operations in Georgia. 

While much of Wheatley’s poetry was crafted to appeal to Anglo-American Protestant readers, it nonetheless expressed her own spiritual commitments and hopes for emancipation. In her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” she famously reminded readers that her “sable race” had an equal right to the “angelic train” of a Christian heaven.⁴⁴ However, her critique of American Christianity appeared more readily in a letter to Occom as she observed the hypocrisy of their cry for freedom, which they did not extend it to fellow believers:

In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance, and by the leave of our Modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him honor upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their Fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse disposition for the Exercise of Oppressive Power over others agree.

This letter revealed both the promise and limitations of transatlantic awakenings in the middle eighteenth century. Any democratizing efforts that spiritual emancipation could have heralded were readily quashed by longstanding religious institutions and a new generation of ministers who reclaimed and preserved older hierarchies. Women preachers were repeatedly discouraged, and both Native and Black preachers regularly faced discrimination in church and in the presses.

VIII. Conclusion

These shortcomings haunted life in the eighteenth century and would soon shape a Revolution where the marginalized would claim the banner of freedom and democracy not under the auspices of revivals or spiritual awakenings, but on the battlefield where perhaps their deepest political aspirations might be truly realized. Decades of revival politicized the populace and created both unity and division through debates over the nature and boundaries of true religion. Soon, crises of empire would bring new divisions and new violence.

IX. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Michael Baysa, with content contributions from Tucker Adkins, Michael Baysa, Joseph Cochran, Joshua J. Jeffers, Brenda Lakhani, John T. Lowe, Caitlin McGeever, Rick Pointer, Benjamin Steiner, Katy Telling, and Ben Wright.

Recommended Reading

• Catherine Brekus, Sarah Osborne’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (Yale University Press, 2013).
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York University Press, 1998).
• Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
• Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
• Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
• Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity (Yale University Press, 2007).
• Richard W. Pointer, Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).
• Amanda Porterfield, Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation (Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Jon F. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
• David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).
• Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South.
• Douglas L. Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Notes

1. Experience Mayhew, “Author’s Preface,” Indian Converts, or some account of the lives and dying speeches of a considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, (Printed for Samuel Gerrish, 1727), xii-xiii. ↩︎
2. Mayhew, “An Attestation by the United Ministers of Boston” in Indian Converts. ↩︎
3. See Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, (Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
4. See Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina, 1998). ↩︎
5. “Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” quoted from Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Louisiana State University, 2007), 68. ↩︎
6. Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613-1863 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). ↩︎
7. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). ↩︎
8. Francis Le Jau to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 22 January 1714, quoted from The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706-1717 (University of California Press, 1956), 137. ↩︎
9. See Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). ↩︎
10. Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton University Press, 1999). ↩︎
11. Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative in C. C. Goen, ed., Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 4: Great Awakening (Yale University Press, 1970), 152–53, 161, 184. ↩︎
12. Kenneth Minkema, Catherine Brekus, and Harry Stout., et al. “Agitations, Convulsions, Leaping, and Loud Talking: The “Experiences” of Sarah Pierpont Edwards.” The William and Mary Quarterly 78 no. 3 (2021): 491-536, 499. ↩︎
13. William R. Smith, Benjamin Colman’s Epistolary World, 1688–1755: Networking in the Dissenting Atlantic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 206. ↩︎
14. George Whitefield, quoted in Jonathan Yeager, ed., Early Evangelicalism: A Reader (Oxford University Press), 24–25. ↩︎
15. Douglas Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 135. ↩︎
16. Byfield Church Records, 1744–1826, p. 57, Congregational Library & Archives, Boston, Mass. ↩︎
17. The South Carolina Gazette, July 14, 1739. ↩︎
18. Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, (Printed by S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741). ↩︎
19. Alan Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and its Consequences (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 86–87. ↩︎
20. Hugh Amory, “The New England Book Trade 1713-1790,” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 330. ↩︎
21. Edwin Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (Harper and Brothers, 1957), 55. ↩︎
22. Benjamin Franklin, Franklin’s Autobiography, ed. Frank Woodworth Pine, (Henry Holt and Company, 1916), 106. ↩︎
23. See Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity, (Yale University Press, 2007), 138-155. ↩︎
24. Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts concerning the present revival of religion in New-England, (Kneeland and Green, 1742), 139. ↩︎
25. Edwards, Some Thoughts, 86. ↩︎
26. Charles Chauncy, Seasonable thoughts on the state of religion in New-England, (Rogers and Fowle, 1743), 226. ↩︎
27. Chauncy, Seasonable thoughts, 334. ↩︎
28. Chauncy, Seasonable thoughts, 26. ↩︎
29. Chauncy, Seasonable thoughts, 27. ↩︎
30. Lambert, Inventing the Great Awakening, 251-252. ↩︎
31. Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). ↩︎
32. Catherine Brekus, Sarah Osborne’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (Yale University Press, 2013). ↩︎
33. Hillary Weiss, “Mary Occom and Sarah Simon: Gender and Native Literacy in New England.” New England Quarterly 79, no.3 (2006): 387-412. ↩︎
34. For Occom’s writings, see Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, ed. Joanna Brooks (Oxford University Press, 2006). ↩︎
35. De Villiers to D’Abbadie, Dec. 1, 1763, Illinois Historical Collections, 10:51. ↩︎
36. M. Agnes Burton (ed.), Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy (Published by Clarence Monroe Burton under the Auspices of the Michigan Society of the Colonial Wars, 1912), 28, 30. ↩︎
37. See Richard W. Pointer, Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). ↩︎
38. Anthony Benezet, “An Account of the Behaviour & Sentiments of a Number of Well-Disposed Indians Mostly of the Minusing Tribe,” in George S. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937), 482. ↩︎
39. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). ↩︎
40. James H. Johnston, From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family (Fordham University Press, 2012) and Sylvianne Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York University Press, 1998). ↩︎
41. Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015). ↩︎
42. Jupiter Hammon, The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon: Poems and Essays, ed. Cedrick May(University of Tennessee Press, 2017). ↩︎
43. For recent work on Phillis Wheatley Peters, see Honorée Fannone Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) and David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). ↩︎
44. Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (Printed for A. Bell, 1773), 18.  ↩︎

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I. Introduction

As the settler population in North America steadily rose throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, so too did the numbers and variety of religious adherents. From 1650-1720, Catholics and Protestants alike took up the fervent work of fortifying existing settlements, gaining converts, and spreading their influence, often relying on individual families as partners in their quest to spread “true religion.” Religious bodies such as the Church of England ultimately succeeded in establishing Anglicanism as the official state religion of Britain’s North American colonies. But it was not easy. Church officials had to contend with the reality of increasing numbers of Protestant dissenters and colonists accustomed to living under relative religious liberty. European settler colonists sought to disrupt and, in many cases, eradicate Native American and indigenous African spiritual and kinship practices. But they failed, and a constellation of faith systems persisted, joined by a host of syncretic traditions. And the story of colonial American religion was not that of Christianity alone. The earliest recorded Jewish settlers in North America arrived in 1654, and Islam came to the Americas with enslaved African Muslims. Religion in colonial America reflected the diversity of those who inhabited it, and that diversity often spun into cycles of competition and coexistence.

II. Kinship and Family

Colonial American religion was rarely experienced or expressed in individualistic terms. Religious and spiritual life was largely communal for the many religious traditions in early America. “Family” was a porous term. But it was an essential idea in all religious groups. Individuals existed within communal life in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Religious commitments to both hierarchy and mutuality held together white settler kinship networks. Christian settlers believed that families should be ordered as little churches, patriarchal structures that encouraged husbands and fathers to act as priests with wives and children serving as the congregation. A good wife and mother reinforced her family’s piety and Biblical education and ultimately submitted to her husband’s authority on religion and all other matters. Though women were expected to tend to their family’s religious education, they were often expressly barred from formal church leadership.

Such a familial arrangement was not just intended to shore up spiritual health but also to ensure the smooth operation of society. English settlers were especially vocal about the importance of religion in their culture. Puritan theologian Cotton Mather (1663-1728) stated: “Families are the Nurseries of all Societies; and the First combinations of mankind. Well-ordered Families naturally produce a Good Order in other Societies.”¹ There were certainly Christian settlers whose religious lives embraced a more expansive understanding of a well-ordered family and household. For example, the intensely communal Moravians practiced communal child-rearing among other practices that upended the conventional model of a nuclear family in 1740s Pennsylvania. Catholics could always opt out of marriage by joining celibate religious orders, and some radical Protestant traditions like Quakerism allowed for women, married or single, to serve as traveling ministers. But for many white European Christians, Protestants in particular, the patriarchal household was foundational to proper religious and civic life.

This model of family sat directly at odds with Indigenous kinship systems. Kinship systems varied and continue to vary widely among and within Indigenous communities, but cosmologies frequently reflected the critical language of kinship shared by all. The Anishinaabe looked towards the Seven Grandfathers who offered the seven core teachings upon which to base the Anishinaabe way of life. Diné creation stories featured the White Shell Woman and Black Shell Woman, sisters who played crucial roles in the establishment of the world. The centrality of kinship to Indigenous beliefs undergirded both the disruptiveness of European colonization and the creativity of Indigenous responses. The imposition of European familial structures on Indigenous people was both a means of Christianization and of weakening Indigenous resistance. The emphasis on individual Christian salvation, strict monogamy, and women’s spiritual submission to men could and did disrupt familial and community bonds.

Yet it was those same familial and community bonds that Indigenous people called upon to retain native practices and ways of life. Native people routinely adapted and subverted settler religious practices to ensure their traditions’ longevity. For example, Spanish priests enforced nuclear family norms, but Native people creatively integrated Catholic practices, such as godparenthood, into their traditional rituals. These practices helped reinforce and repair social and spiritual networks suffering in the context of mass disease and exploitation. Often, Catholic missionaries were forced to adapt to Indigenous kinship and belief structures.² The matrilineal Caddo of the Texas borderlands initially welcomed French and Spanish missionaries in the 1680s and 1690s, but restricted European access to full religious rituals such as seasonal planting rituals performed by women. Missionaries were only allowed in spaces where “male-defined rituals” took center stage.³

Native Protestants also found creative ways to maintain community ties amid attempts to separate them from one another and their culture. Throughout New England, Puritan missionaries such as John Eliot worked to establish “praying towns” or communities of Indigenous people who converted to Christianity. It was within one of these praying towns that Eliot worked with Indigenous Christians to produce an Algonquian-language edition of the Bible in 1663. For Eliot and other Puritans, the goal of a praying town was to convince Indigenous people to completely abandon their traditions and submit both to Puritan worldviews and governance.⁴ Yet across the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Indigenous Protestants connected Christian parables to Indigenous spiritual beliefs and created a distinct Native Christianity. Historian Douglas Winiarski describes this as Indigenous people creating “autonomous, though structurally parallel, indigenous churches.”⁵ As Catholic and Protestant missionaries competed with one another in claiming Indigenous territory and converts, Native Americans resisted and recast the rituals, symbols, and material culture of both to preserve kinship ties and spiritual longevity.

III. Catholic Foundations

Catholics had been in continental North America since at least 1513, when the Spanish established permanent footholds in present-day Florida.  Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics from Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain continued to arrive in North America even as they faced challenges from Protestant empires and their colonial envoys.

The most famous Catholic colony in British North America was the Province of Maryland. From 1634 until the establishment of the Anglican Church in 1692, Catholics in Maryland enjoyed a degree of religious liberty rarely found across Britain’s empire. Yet even in England’s supposed Catholic colony, Maryland’s Catholic settlers were frequently outside the primary halls of power, even if they were the demographic majority in certain towns.⁶ When granted the charter to settle Maryland in 1634, Cecelius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, hoped to establish a safe haven for Catholics living across England’s Anglican empire. The 1649 Maryland Toleration Act seemed to fulfill Calvert’s vision, granting freedom of worship to all Christians. The Act, though nullified just five years later in 1654, signaled the possibility–if an uneasy one–of Catholic and Protestant co-existence throughout North America.

More reliable Catholic strongholds could be found in the vast imperial holdings of New Spain and New France. These Catholic empires fought to save the souls of those they deemed to be damned, while also preventing the spread of Protestantism. Catholic and Protestant missionaries justified their capture of Indigenous lands through the doctrine of Christian Land Discovery, which directed all Christians to capture land in order to convert non-Christians living upon it, acting as if they were encountering empty land. Under this belief, acquiring land was not only a profitable means of supporting empire; it was also holy work.

Yet Native Americans both adapted and resisted Catholic encroachment at every turn, ensuring the survival of both their people and their beliefs. During “the Beaver Wars,” the French explorer Samuel de Champlain sought to take the Haudenosaunee capital in 1615 in current central New York. Champlain’s interest in Haudenosaunee territory only increased after 1654, when the Onondaga revealed a valuable salt spring to French Jesuit Father Simon LeMoyne. Onondaga Lake was both a valued nexus of Indigenous trade as well as a sacred space where 1,000 years prior the Peacemaker had carried the Creator’s message of peace to five warring nations: the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. And though French Jesuits marched to the Haudenosaunee capital in 1656 with a deed for 600 acres of land, the Onondaga successfully coerced the Jesuits to leave eighteen months later.

Elsewhere in Catholic North America, resistance turned to successful revolt. Fleeing from Spanish persecution, Po’pay, a medicine man from San DepJuan Pueblo, retreated to the secluded northernmost pueblo of Taos.⁷ From there, news spread through the Pueblo world of this medicine man’s visions of rebellion. The pan-Pueblo movement only excluded the Piro Pueblos to the far south, who perhaps were deemed too Christianized. Dispatching runners to both near and distant pueblos, Po’pay secretly recruited caciques from all of the pueblos. August 11, 1680, the first night of the new moon, was selected as the date for the revolt.

On August 9, 1680, Po’pay dispatched two runners to each of the pueblos with each runner carrying a knotted cord. By untying a single knot in the cord, pueblos would signal their willingness to participate in the action to come. The runners also delivered the corollary message that “all of them…should rebel, and that any pueblo that would not agree to it they would destroy, killing all the people.” Early on the morning of Sunday, August 10, Fray Juan Pío left Santa Fe on foot with an armed escort for Tesuque to give Mass. The pueblo was deserted on arrival. Searching for the Indians, the two eventually found them in an arroyo fully armed and wearing war paint. According to legend, he cried out to them: “what is this children, are you mad? Do not disturb yourselves; I will die a thousand deaths for you.”⁸ According to legend, his prophecy was fulfilled in one moment as “a shower of arrows pierced his breast.”⁹ The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 had begun.

When the stirs of rebellion had stilled with the last of the Spaniards retreating south to El Paso (Ciudad Juárez), the many Pueblos of present-day New Mexico and Arizona accomplished what no other Native American society had been able to achieve on such a broad scale before and what none have been able to achieve since – a massive reversal of European expansion in the New World. In the wake of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, more than eighty years of Spanish colonial presence in New Mexico ended in ruins.

In the aftermath of the revolt, the Pueblos swiftly destroyed any remnants of Spanish presence and influence. In addition to killing twenty-one Franciscans (nineteen priests and two brothers), the rebels removed all the symbols and icons of Christianity. Images of the cross, Jesus, Mary, and all the saints were to be desecrated, smeared with feces, and finally destroyed. The Pueblo were to “wade into the rivers and wash themselves with yucca root” to wash away their Christian baptism. Christian names were to be forgotten and only their native ones were to be used. Spanish was never to be spoken and the names of the saints never again invoked. Men were to abandon their Christian wives. Even the plants and animals the Spaniards had brought to New Mexico were to be burned. Those who did not comply faced severe punishments. Though the Spanish would return twelve years later, the Pueblos sent a powerful message that their cultures and belief systems would not be easily suppressed.

IV. The Church of England in America

The Protestant presence in colonial North America grew alongside that of Catholics. Not only did Protestants hope to lead souls to salvation, but they also strove to combat the inroads made by Catholic empires and rival Protestant factions. Between 1650-1720, the Church of England intensified its efforts to establish permanent Anglican settlements and spread British imperial influence across the continent.

Anglicanism was successfully established as the state religion of Virginia in 1619, but church leaders dismayed at their struggle to establish Anglican dominance elsewhere in North America. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Foreign Parts (SPG) tried to help assert Anglican authority. Founded in 1701, the SPG was tasked with sending Anglican clergy to the British colonies to establish churches and schools and convert all non-Anglicans. Because the Church of England was the official state religion of Great Britain, Anglican ministers were also implicitly tasked with establishing English cultural and political dominance in the colonies. In their view, to be Anglican was to be British, and vice versa. An early account of the SPG’s activities also explicitly identified the threat that Catholic missionaries posed to the practice of “true religion” as they tempted the King’s “loving subjects to Popish superstition and idolatry.”¹⁰

In the Anglican parish system, all those living within a designated area were expected both to regularly attend church services and to pay taxes to cover their priest’s wages. To Anglicans, everyone living within the boundaries of a parish were parishioners, even if only in name.¹¹ Weekly church attendance, marriage, baptism, and daily family prayer were not only essential elements of a robust Anglican practice, but also crucial means of performing Englishness. Moreover, attendance at Anglican services every Sunday was both an important feature in parishioners’ social lives, as well as a valuable venue for demonstrating social hierarchies. Elite Virginians would arrive to worship prepared to demonstrate their piety while displaying their wealth in carriages and Sunday finery. As it was with Congregationalists (as former Puritans came to be called), Anglicans’ ability to rent or own box pews and sit together as a family close to the pulpit demonstrated their material and social capital.¹²

Yet as much as Anglican leaders stressed the importance of an active participation in church life, the reality on the ground was far more complicated: irreligion seemed endemic, especially in the Southern colonies. Anglican ministers routinely complained of recalcitrant parishioners who refused to regularly attend church services or pay priests’ wages. They railed against religious groups they viewed as threatening the spiritual health of British colonists (especially those traditions which eschewed baptism, like Quakers, and traditions critical of Anglican orthodoxy, such as Baptists and Presbyterians). Lacking significant clerical numbers even in supposed Anglican strongholds, magistrates were empowered and encouraged to conduct marriages, a rite typically deemed as being the church’s responsibility. Crucially, the Church of England failed to formally establish church courts as they existed in Britain. So judges, not priests disciplined moral offenses. Aggrieved by parishioners and colonial officials alike, Anglican ministers worried that the church’s influence was too weak. Yet while Anglican church leaders dismayed at the pace, the Church of England grew and became established as the official state religion for several colonies after Virginia, including Maryland, parts of New York, and the Carolinas.¹³

English Protestants in North America were never far removed from the influence of political and religious instability in Great Britain, and many of the grievances that Anglican leaders voiced in North America could be traced back to the bitter disputes raging over clerical and royal authority in Great Britain. Puritans, though most often associated with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were similarly shaped by their counterparts back in the imperial metropole. Indeed, the vast majority of Puritans remained in England, where they became the most vocal critics of King Charles I (1625-49), who promoted consciously anti-Puritan attitudes and policies. Yet over the course of the mid and late seventeenth century, Protestants in North America witnessed the changes wrought by the English Civil Wars.

So vehement were the disputes between Charles I and Parliament that they erupted into civil war in 1642. Broadly speaking, Charles I’s Royalists were Anglican, and his Parliamentarian foes were Puritans and other dissenters, so the English Civil War (r. 1642-49) was both a contest over the exercise of political power and between competing forms of Protestant Christianity. Indeed, the small but steady flow of Puritans to New England dried up as the chances for “thorough reformation” at home grew. A few New Englanders even traveled back to Britain to fight against the Anglican crown.

The North American colonies themselves were divided. Those with Anglican majorities or official sympathies, like Virginia, might prefer the Royalist cause, and those with Puritan or dissenter majorities, like New England, might pray for a Parliamentarian victory. But the colonies all opted to officially stay out of the conflict, and the violence remained confined to one side of the Atlantic.

Far from forcing Puritan conformity, the Civil War and Commonwealth years saw the rise of several radical religious groups moving through every corner of English society. Groups such as the Society of Friends, or Quakers, were a direct product of the cultural and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England. Dissenter George Fox yearned for a return to a “primitive Christianity” that rejected the material excess and clerical hierarchy of Anglicanism. Fox imagined a Christianity centered on an “Inward Light,” which he saw as the universal in-dwelling presence of God. He was spurred by a religious vision in 1652, and his ministry laid the foundations for the Quaker movement. As the number of Protestant sects in Britain exploded, Quakers embraced a radical set of beliefs, including that no priests or baptisms were necessary for salvation, women could serve as religious leaders, practitioners were forbidden from swearing oaths, and members were urged to live as simply and plainly as possible. Most controversially, Quakers also embraced a strict theological commitment to pacifism.

Quakers’ radical beliefs generated near instant animosity. Beginning in the early 1660s, several thousand Quakers were jailed for refusing to swear allegiance to the newly restored monarchy of King Charles II, galvanizing interest in taking Quakerism beyond England’s shores. William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” in the Pennsylvania Colony was the most famous of the Quakers’ destinations. A 1681 gift from King Charles II to satisfy a debt owed to William Penn, Sr., Pennsylvania touted itself as a Quaker stronghold and haven for religious liberty. But Pennsylvania was only one part of the Quakers’ story. Quakers also settled in the British Caribbean as early as the 1650s. They went to New England, securing a northern foothold in defiance of Puritan hostilities and the execution of the four Quaker martyrs in the late 1650s and early 1660s. They spread across the Carolinas and Virginia beginning in the 1650s, much to the chagrin of Anglican ministers like Charles Eden, who urged action in 1717 to “recover all those already seduced by Quakerism” in North Carolina.¹⁴

Radical groups like the Quakers were not the only source of ire for England’s beleaguered Anglicans. Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic continued in their shared fear of domestic and international Catholicism. England’s Catholics had become a tiny minority since Elizabeth’s reign, but their presence continued to agitate Protestants, who feared them both as enemies of God and of England. It did not help that Charles II himself exhibited Catholic sympathies. Worse, Charles had no sons; his brother James, Duke of York, was his legitimate heir, and James had converted to Catholicism. James became king in 1685 as James II, but Protestants hoped his Catholic regime would be short-lived. Already in his fifties, his heir was his eldest daughter, Mary, a Protestant married to the Dutch Protestant William, Duke of Orange. But Protestant elites watched with growing alarm as the Catholic king worked to undercut Protestant hegemony in the kingdom and elevated Catholics to high positions in government and the military. When Parliament objected, he dissolved it. His Protestant subjects increasingly saw his aggressive promotion of religious toleration as part of a conspiracy to return Catholicism to power.

While the North American colonies had largely steered clear of the English Civil War, they could not avoid being pulled into the controversies around James II. The king combined the Puritan colonies of New England with the more diverse Protestant colonies of New York and New Jersey to form the Dominion of New England in 1686. His lieutenant, Sir Edmund Andros, was sent to govern the Dominion with a mandate for religious toleration. When he arrived in Boston as governor, Andros appointed anti-Congregationalist judges, abolished mandatory religious taxation to support Congregationalist ministers, and requisitioned a Boston church for Anglican services.

Back in England, the birth of a male heir to James II in 1688 was the last straw. Now facing not just a heavy-handed Catholic king but an entire Catholic dynasty, England’s Protestant elites invited Mary’s husband William to take the throne. William invaded England in November 1688, and James fled the country. When the news reached the colonies, disaffected colonists rose up against James’s lieutenants in New England, New York, and Maryland. In Boston, locals arrested and imprisoned Edmund Andros.  The events of 1688 became remembered as England’s “Glorious Revolution.” James II came to be remembered as a Catholic tyrant who circumvented Parliament and William as the Protestant who restored England’s liberty and cooperated with Parliament. Importantly, the new political establishment normalized Protestant pluralism in the 1689 Act of Toleration. The Church of England remained the established, officially supported church, but the legal penalties for nonconformity were repealed for Protestants. The ultimate result formed a potent idea: to be English was to be free and Protestant simultaneously.

The North American colonies felt these changes, too. King William granted new charters to the colonies of the now dissolved Dominion, but New Englanders could no longer enforce a rigid Puritanism or deprive unchurched freemen of the right to vote. Zeal for far-reaching reformation gave way to “latitude” among Protestants.

V. Protestant Pluralism

The seeds of Protestant pluralism were planted in Britain’s North American colonies even prior to the implementation of the 1689 Act of Toleration. Some New England colonists had pushed back against a singular Puritanism for decades. The colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island were founded by emigrants and exiles from Massachusetts who objected to its hierarchical politics.¹⁵ Their first constitutions curtailed the power of the governor by removing his legislative veto, concentrating lawmaking power in the deputies elected to represent their towns. Voting rights were extended to all freemen, rather than just to church members as in Massachusetts.

Connecticut hewed more closely to the Congregationalist puritanism of Massachusetts and maintained strategic military alliances. However, Connecticut did diverge from Massachusetts’s religious template in that prospective church members were not required to make a public relation of their spiritual experiences before the congregation.

Roger Williams’s break with Massachusetts was more dramatic. After arriving in 1631 New England, Cambridge graduate Roger Williams moved between Boston, Salem, and Plymouth, before taking up a ministerial position at Salem. In 1635, Massachusetts banished him for his several criticisms of the colony, including his claim that its churches were insufficiently disassociated from what he saw as the corrupt Church of England.¹⁶ Fleeing southwest to Narragansett Bay before he could be deported to England, Williams established his colony of Providence in the winter of 1636. In his writings, he argued for a total separation of church and state, railing against the corruption of professional ministers and insisting that Jews, Muslims, and pagans were just as capable of being good citizens as Christians. These views closely informed the religious policies of Providence and later Rhode Island, which had no established church and offered freedom of worship to Protestants of all kinds.

 The crisis in Boston’s Church now widely known as the Antinomian Controversy (1636-1638) was key to the early expansion of Rhode Island. Prominent members of the congregation came to believe that most of New England’s ministers placed too much emphasis on moral transformation (or “sanctification”) in religious salvation. They argued instead that God saved his chosen men and women, called “the elect,” through a gift of “free grace” that bore no necessary relationship to their ethical comportment, religious practice, or faith. John Cotton, one of the colony’s leading theologians, was investigated for allegedly encouraging this perspective from the pulpit. John Wheelwright, another minister, was banished for espousing it. But the authorities singled out midwife Anne Hutchinson, who preached an extreme interpretation of the doctrine of free grace at private meetings at her home. Hutchinson was banished for intimating during her civil trial that she received direct revelations from God. She left Boston in March 1638, followed by eighty households of sympathizers.¹⁷ With Williams’s help, they settled near Providence, establishing the town of Pocasset (later Portsmouth). After the death of her husband, Hutchinson and her family moved to New Netherland, where they were killed by the indigenous Siwanoy.

The Middle Colonies–Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, New York–were especially associated with relative religious toleration despite legal challenges to freedom of conscience. Pennsylvania was founded as a haven for Quakers, who held majority representation in the colonial assembly until the 1750s. But the colony adopted broad laws allowing for religious freedom and other faiths soon joined the Quakers in the Delaware River Valley. Members of the Dutch Reformed Church and Lutherans settled the colonies of New York and Delaware, later to be joined by French Huguenots after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes removed legal protections for French Protestants to safely practice their religion.¹⁸ In 1647, the arrival of Pieter Stuyvesant as director-general of New Netherlands forced a reconsideration of religious toleration in what would later become New York. Stuyvesant was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and hesitant to extend religious rights to other Protestants. He also absolutely despised Catholics.¹⁹ Yet the tradition of Dutch religious toleration held strong amongst many daily practitioners. In 1657, a group of men composed and published the Flushing Remonstrance, an official rebuke to Stuyvesant and his directive for New Yorkers not to harbor Quakers.²⁰ The text reaffirmed the city’s commitment to toleration and modeled the kinds of pluralistic reality that persisted even after the English seized the colony and the Church of England established itself as the state religion.

While the Church of England cemented its foothold in the Southern colonies, a strong tradition of religious dissent remained, particularly in the Carolinas. Anglican church leaders bemoaned the proliferation of Dissenters, including Quakers Baptists, and Methodists. But the presence of these people proved to be profitable. A petition laid before the Houses of Commons and Lords in Great Britain argued that Dissenters fleeing religious persecution in Britain had been fundamental in the early settlement of the Carolinas, and thus asked that freedom of worship and freedom from oath taking (prohibited by Quakers and Mennonites) be “expressly provided for.”²¹

VI. Religion and War

The reality of multiple religious denominations living together did not easily translate to tolerance or acceptance amongst religious groups. Nor did the presence of those fleeing from religious persecution elsewhere always imagine a peaceable coexistence with those outside of their religious community. Violence was common in colonial America and those experiencing it frequently understood it in religious terms. The language of spiritual warfare was commonplace amongst religious and civic leaders in warring Protestant and Catholic empires that vied for souls and resources alike. Though rationale for warfare varied across religious worldviews, enduring concepts of just war and holy war were crucial to the British colonial context.  Just wars are fought mainly for self-defense or to advance nationalist objectives, supported by political authority, while holy wars carry overt religious implications and are mandated by religious authorities or even God himself. In such a belief system, the killing of non-Christian and Catholic people might be considered unfortunate but ultimately theologically justified (as it was in colonial New York).

Given that the British empire was concerned with acquiring land and souls, the line separating the two was frequently blurred. Two illustrative examples may help explain the violence perpetrated against Indigenous people in New England and Virginia in the mid to late 1670s. Settler-Indigenous relations were persistently strained in colonial New England. Not only did Puritan settlers covet Indigenous lands, but they believed Indigenous people themselves to be envoys of Satan whose defense of their ancestral lands was actually an assault on Puritans’ holy mission. This belief motivated the actions of Puritans in the Pequot War (1636-38) and was invoked once again during the violent events of Metacomet’s War–also known as King Philip’s War–from 1675-1676.

Having witnessed years of increasing Puritan encroachment on Native lands and angered by years of cyclical violence, Metacomet led the Wampanoag resistance, killing and kidnapping  English colonists and burning down English villages to remove them from Indigenous lands. The genocidal violence that the English launched in response was partly justified under the claim that Indigenous people were not capable of truly receiving God’s salvation, and their defeat constituted a religious duty. In the same year of 1676, Nathaniel Bacon launched his multiracial rebellion against the Susquehannock and Virginia’s planter elite. Religion was not at the heart of Bacon’s grievances against what he perceived as his enemies, but he invoked language similar to the Puritans when referring to Virginia and Maryland tribes as “barbarous heathens.”²² Religious worldviews continued to shape all interactions, including war, even when religion was not the explicit rationale for colonial violence.

The religious paranoia that shaped British Protestant perceptions of Indigenous people in North America was shored up by continuing Protestant and Catholic antagonisms that extended throughout imperial contests. The series of imperial wars between Britain and France that began with King William’s War in 1689 were replete with apocalyptic and millenarian implications, as the Protestant American colonists perceived Catholic France as an existential threat.  The relative success of French missionaries in converting Indigenous people to Catholicism fueled British fears that the papal Antichrist was preparing Native people to exterminate Christ’s true disciples.

Colonists also had to contend with violent ruptures from within. Orthodox dogma existed alongside folk practices in colonial religious life. Colonists reached for a variety of explanations for their trials, from the divine to the profane. The 1692 witch panic in Salem, Massachusetts encapsulated the complex interplay between religion and politics in early America and the role of the supernatural in Puritans’ social and legal life.

In 1692, three young girls began experiencing strange convulsions and vocal outbursts in the house of Salem parish minister Samuel Parris. Wracked by pain, these young girls resembled the afflicted Goodwin children of Boston four years earlier that caused Goody Glover to be hanged for witchcraft after the Goodwin children accused her of casting a spell over them. In 1692, the frightening specter of witchcraft reared its head once again. This time, it was the house servant enslaved by Rev. Parris, Tituba, who was on the receiving end of the children’s accusations. Tituba’s confession and subsequent imprisonment marked the beginning of a panic that spread throughout New England and resulted in over 150 arrests and twenty executions.

As accusations whirled (and gradually worked their way higher up Salem’s social ladder), courts sought and admitted spectral evidence into their cases against the accused. The move caused considerable controversy, and one justice resigned after the case against Bridget Bishop was largely decided on the weight of spectral evidence. Rev. Increase Mather published a sharp critique of the proceedings in Cases of Conscience where he wrote, “It were better that ten suspected Witches should escape, than that one innocent Person should be Condemned.”²³ And yet it would take intervention from Governor William Phipps to halt witch trials and reconsider the weight of spectral evidence (eventually outlawing its use in January 1693).

The Salem Witch Trials constituted a perfect storm in which internal and external anxieties erupted in the context of Puritan religious fervor and belief in the devil’s efforts to destroy God’s chosen people.²⁴ Within Salem Village, Rev. Parris faced efforts to oust him as minister, as it was in his home and in the homes of his most ardent supporters where the witchcraft afflictions broke out.²⁵ However, local politics only explains some of the animosity exhibited in 1692, especially after the accusations spread more widely. Many of the accusing families fled frontier violence in the northern reaches of the colony, now Maine, in the decades before the trials. Massachusetts Puritans understood Indigenous resistance to colonization as God’s punishment for tolerating sin or Satan’s efforts to destabilize their settlements.²⁶ To many Puritans, the fight for religious purity was part of spiritual warfare that must be fought from without and within.

VII. Slavery

Slavery touched nearly every aspect of life in early America. Religion was certainly no exception. European colonists enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent by the millions for economic profit, but as the numbers of the enslaved grew in the Americas, slavery became increasingly based on race and justified by religion. In the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, Christianity and slavery not only coexisted, but co-constituted each other. Amidst the violence and displacement of slavery, enslaved people held onto traditional religious practices, continued to practice Islam, converted to English Protestantism, and fostered a vibrant syncretic tradition of Black Christianities.

Though it is impossible to fully capture the breadth of religious traditions held by the twelve million Africans enslaved across the Atlantic, a few tendencies are worth noting.²⁷ No indigenous god was worshiped across the entire region, but ancestor veneration was nearly universal.²⁸ Ancestors were dead humans who remained involved in the lives of the living. They could be approached verbally or through rituals, potentially blessing those who called on them or speaking in dreams or trances to offer advice or warnings.

Many West Africans drew on the distinctive pluralistic and experimental religious outlooks of their homelands as they created community with the strangers among whom they had been enslaved.²⁹ Some gods, such as the Vodún of today’s Benin (whose name lies behind the English word “voodoo”) or the Orishas of Nigeria, were elaborately defined by means of comprehensive oral traditions (including songs and dances), and their distinctively oral cosmologies were carried with their peoples across oceans. Other deities were tied to specific places, and so the dehumanizing and destabilizing violence of the slave trade separated people from those places and those powers

One of the earliest arguments Protestant Christians waged over the question of slavery was whether or not enslaved people could be (or should be) converted to Christianity at all. The Bible verse 1 Corinthians 7:22 holds that no Christian can be a slave, as all are liberated through Jesus Christ. For Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, baptism was the liberatory act that made people Christians. Thus, the question of whether or not baptism conveyed material or spiritual emancipation needed to be settled by law. In 1667, the colonial Virginia Assembly ruled that “the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffredome,” thus paving the way for Indigenous and African conversion to proceed without enslavers’ worrying that baptism would grant the enslaved legal freedom.³⁰

The social construct of race developed through European and African encounters during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and initial distinctions of human difference were based on religious status rather than skin color. But by the end of the seventeenth century, race soon replaced religion as the most important arbiter of who could and could not be enslaved.

Yet, several individuals born into slavery and later freed became influential in the development of Black Christianity and individual Black churches. Moravians, members of a Protestant sect that hailed from the Bohemian Crown Lands, established a mission to minister to enslaved people in the Dutch West Indies in 1732. Rebecca Protten, a Black woman, became influential in the Moravian Christianization efforts on St. Thomas. Due to her formerly enslaved status, she was able to access several locations and communities that white missionaries were not. Her early evangelical efforts were influential in the development of the Black church in the Atlantic.³¹

Catholic empires were as invested in the transatlantic slave trade, though they differed from Protestants in their early stances on enslaved baptism.³² Early African contact with Catholic merchants and missionaries established an enduring Black Catholic tradition. The Portuguese had been active along the coast of West Africa since the mid fifteenth century.  The type of Christianity they introduced in Africa stood relatively close to Indigenous African religions. At that time, the African continent was still firmly in the hands of Africans. The early dissemination of Christianity in continental Africa was, thus, primarily the result of Portuguese and African alliances.

As a result of Portuguese influences in Africa, a significant minority of the enslaved population in the Americas had been baptized as children and were very familiar with Christianity. An example can be found in the eighteenth-century Virgin Islands, where Christian Oldendorp, a missionary of the Moravian Church, noted that some of the enslaved Africans on these Caribbean islands were already familiar with Christianity. From conversations with a man from Kongo, Oldendorp learned that “most people in his land went to a Christian church and were baptized and married by a priest.” The man also informed Oldendorp that the Kongolese “had priests of their own nation, who baptized people, organized Masses, could read, and had their own religious books.”³³ Oldendorp further learned that it was common “among blacks who came from Portuguese countries . . . particularly those from Kongo” to perform “a kind of baptism” and that they even engaged in missionary work among other Africans, whom they “teach, absolve, and baptize.”³⁴ This case reveals that some enslaved African communities in the Americas took Christianization into their own hands and built their own congregations.

New York was also the site of a significant colonial Black Catholic population. In August 1733, Jacobus van Cortlandt placed a runaway slave advertisement in the New-York Gazette in an attempt to recover Andrew Saxon. Saxon was first described with the standardized language of the time, but then Van Cortlandt made a surprising reference to the fact that Saxon “professeth himself to be a Roman Catholic” and that “the shirts he had with him … are marked with a cross.”³⁵ By marking his shirts with a cross, Saxon clearly did not make a secret of his faith. Saxon’s story becomes even more intriguing if we connect him to the city’s earliest Black community, at the time when New York was still called New Amsterdam. There, the entire Black population had Iberian Catholic baptismal names and were eager to give newborn children a Christian baptism.

Christianity was not the only tradition that enslaved and formerly enslaved people practiced. Islam was introduced in the Americas via the arrival of enslaved Muslims, the evidence of which endured in naming practices and anecdotal evidence of enslaved people’s rituals of prayer, fasting, and dietary restrictions.³⁶ Historian Michael Gomez estimates that 200,000 Africans came to North America from areas heavily influenced by Islam during the slave trade.³⁷ Moreover, because of the emphasis Muslims placed on education and literacy, enslaved Muslims were likely able to make converts amongst other enslaved people.

Frequently, enslaved people held to their indigenous beliefs despite attempts from both Protestants and Catholics to eradicate them. To understand West African religion in the period of the slave trade requires an appreciation of three qualities of their societies: pluralism, flexibility, and orality. Taking these three qualities together, thrust into new multiethnic societies in the Americas, many West Africans drew on their cultural toolkits to create community out of the strangers among whom they had been placed. At the same time, however, they did not hesitate to blend traditional African religions or Islam with elements of Christianity as they tried to heal the psychic wounds of slavery.

As the trafficking of enslaved Africans expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Afro-Atlantic Catholics from areas with a historically strong Portuguese influence adopted a syncretic form of Christianity that blended Catholic rituals with Indigenous African elements. Muslim Africans did the same as well. As members of a global religion, these Indigenous Muslim Africans were often literate and able to make connections with fellow believers of different ethnicities in the course of their removal from their homelands. Though pluralist experimentation was typically discouraged in Islamic traditions, which, like Christianity, insisted upon exclusivity as a matter of principle, the centuries preceding the Atlantic slave trade saw long periods of West African religious tolerance between Indigenous religions and Islam punctuated by sharp crackdowns intended to purify the faith.³⁸ Disappeared to the Americas and cut off from the Muslim communities of their homelands, many Muslim Africans participated in Christian church life, with their children sometimes becoming Christians themselves.

Most African Americans would eventually become Christians, but that does not mean that they had simply assimilated into European Christianity. On the contrary, over centuries of painstaking experimentation, African Americans of all religious backgrounds sifted through various religious raw materials, including multiple Christian traditions, African religions, expressions of Islam, and Indigenous North American cosmologies, translating all of these into a unique and authentic version of religious practice that spoke to their experiences and needs.³⁹ In other words, the Black Church was a multiethnic church from the very beginning.

VIII. Judaism in Colonial America

Though the vast majority of settler colonists in colonial North America were Christian, they were not the only religious group to make a life for themselves. The first community of Jews in colonial America arrived in New Amsterdam in September 1654 aboard the Ste. Catherine. These twenty-three refugees fled the Brazilian town of Recife after Portugal reconquered it from the Dutch and expelled its Jewish inhabitants. As Peter Stuyvesant was hesitant to grant these refugees a permanent foothold, their arrival constituted one of the earliest tests of New Netherlands’ famed religious tolerance. Ultimately swayed by the argument that religious toleration would attract more settlers and grow New York’s economy, Stuyvesant backed off. In 1655, the refugees won the right to establish a Jewish cemetery, and in 1682 they were permitted a specific place for communal worship. Outside of New Netherlands, other early Jewish settlers sought refuge in Newport, Rhode Island. Though conflicting reports exist about the exact date that Jews arrived in the tolerant New England colony, efforts to establish a cemetery in the 1670s confirms their early presence.⁴⁰

Early on, Sephardim (Jews of Iberian descent) exercised religious and cultural hegemony, although Ashkenazim (Jews hailing from Germany and Poland) constituted the majority by the 1720s. Unlike in many European contexts, the two groups mingled extensively and intermarried due to their small numbers. They also shared in synagogue and communal governance. The synagogue constituted the epicenter of Jewish communal life, and each Jewish community had one by the end of the colonial period. More than just a locus of religious worship, the synagogue distributed kosher meat, matzo during Passover, and alms to the poor. It was also the place where sons would be religiously educated. Overall, the synagogue saw itself as the representative body of the entire Jewish community. And since Jews needed a synagogue if they hoped to live as Jews, much power was concentrated in the synagogue’s oligarchical leadership. They doled out ritual honors and controlled access to the rites of circumcision, marriage and burial. Colonial America had no trained rabbis, so wealthy laypersons governed religious matters in their stead.

As with all other religious groups in colonial America, degrees of religious observance varied widely amongst Jewish settlers. Yet active participation in religious life was a means of personal survival. Slowly, the Jewish population began to grow. In 1700, around two hundred Jews lived in colonial America. Three-quarters of a century later, at the dawn of the Revolution, that number had grown to around 2,500 in a broader population of two and a half million.

IX. Conclusion

Religion in colonial America was eclectic and resilient. Though Protestants and Catholics made early inroads in North America in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and their numbers continued to grow, whether by the arrival of European colonists or the conversion of Indigenous and African-descended people. However, Christians were far from the only religious group in North America. Jewish settlers arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654 and enslaved Muslims introduced Islam to the Americas. Despite the violent ruptures of settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, Native American and African practitioners retained many of their indigenous spiritual practices, often creating syncretic traditions by incorporating aspects of Christianity into native practice. Others resisted the imposition of Christianity in its totality and successfully rebelled against Christian colonialism, as did Po’pay and his allies in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.

Both Catholic and Protestant leaders alike feared that the other would not only gain more converts, but they worried that permanent Catholic or Protestant footholds were existential threats to the empires to which they each belonged. Within Protestantism, debate raged as to which practice most properly expressed true religion. Though the Church of England, and its missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, worried that Dissenters such as the Quakers were threats to the Church of England’s position, Protestant pluralism flourished in Britain’s North American colonies. The English Civil Wars of 1642-1651 spawned a number of radical new Protestant sects that found religious relief abroad, while the Toleration Act of 1689 granted freedom of worship to Protestant nonconformists throughout the British Empire. Meanwhile, Protestant settlers in New England challenged the idea of a Puritan orthodoxy as early as the 1630s, when Rhode Island and Connecticut broke off from Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Middle Colonies in particular offered legal protections for most Christians to worship in relative freedom without fear of incarceration or expulsion.

Yet the reality of religious pluralism existed beside the reality of violence for religious practitioners of all kinds in colonial North America. Puritans justified settler violence enacted upon Indigenous people as holy war, recasting the Pequot War (1636-38) and King William’s War (1675-76) as divine retribution; likewise, they explained the events of the 1692 Salem Witch Panic as punishment for their religious impurity. Catholics and Protestants alike similarly justified the daily violence of Indigenous dispossession and slavery as a civilizing mission that could easily be accommodated within a Christian worldview.

As the eighteenth century wore on and religious bodies such as the Church of England successfully established state religions along the eastern seaboard, the religious inhabitants of colonial North America prayed, venerated, gathered, resisted, and rebelled. They were members of a religious plurality that would diversify even more with the coming events of the Great Awakening and the proliferation of evangelical traditions.

X. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Katy Telling, with content contributions by Philip P. Arnold, Sandy Bigtree, Dan Howlett, Caitlin McGeever, Nathan Rives, J. Seth Schermerhorn, John Howard Smith, Katy Telling, Christopher Peter Trigg, Anca Wilkening, and Ben Wright.

Recommended Reading

Notes

1. Cotton Mather, A family well-ordered, or, An essay to render parents and children happy in one another handling two very important cases (Boston, 1699), 3-4. ↩︎
2. Many supposed converts integrated elements of Christianity within longstanding Indigenous traditions. For a sophisticated discussion about the idea of conversion, see Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 6- 7. ↩︎
3. Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of A Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 44. ↩︎
4. See the definition of “praying town” used in EBSCO, “Praying Indians,” as of 2026. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/praying-indians. ↩︎
5. Douglas Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony, 1670-1770,” Religion & American Culture Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer 2005), 158. ↩︎
6. Susan Juster, A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). ↩︎
7. Joe S. Sando and Herman Agoyo, eds., Po’pay: Leader of the First American Revolution. (Clear Light Publishing, 2005). ↩︎
8. Declaration of Pedro Hidalgo, Soldier, Santa Fe, August 10, 1680, in Charles Wilson Hackett, ed., Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermín’s Attempted Reconquest, 1680-1682, trans. Charmion C. Shelby, 2 vols. (University of New Mexico Press, 1942), 1:7. ↩︎
9. Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford University Press), 133. ↩︎
10. Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, An account of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts, established by the Royal Charter of King William III. With their proceedings and success, and hopes of continual progress under the most happy reign of her most excellent majesty Queen Anne (London: Printed by Joseph Downing, 1706), 17, Internet Archive (from Princeton Theological Seminary), https://archive.org/details/accountofsociety00soci/page/16/mode/2up. ↩︎
11. John K. Nelson, A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 18. ↩︎
12. For more on the material culture of Southern Anglicanism, see Lauren F. Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Yale University Press, 2010); “History Bytes: Church Pews,” Newport Historical Society, as of 2026, https://newporthistory.org/history-bytes-church-pews/#:~:text=Most%20early%20churches%20and%20meeting,History%2C%20listed%20at%20%2323. ↩︎
13. For more on the process of establishing the Church of England in British North America, see chapter 4 “The Renewal of Christian Authority” in Jon Butler, Awash In A Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1990), 98-128. ↩︎
14. Letter from Charles Eden to David Humphreys, October 8, 1717, North Carolina Letter Book of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Vol. II, p. 292-293, Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Documenting the American South, University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.php/document/csr02-0151. ↩︎
15. David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 38-39. ↩︎
16. Michael P. Winship, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (Yale University Press, 2018), 97-99. ↩︎
17. Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History (Scribner, 1975), 25. ↩︎
18. Patricia Bonomi, “Religious Pluralism in the Middle Colonies,” Divining America, TeacherServe©, National Humanities Center, as of 2026, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/midcol.htm. ↩︎
19. “Pieter Stuyvesant, c. 1612-1672, Director General of New Netherland, 1647-1664,” Historical Society of New York Courts, as of 2026, https://history.nycourts.gov/figure/pieter-stuyvesant/. ↩︎
20. The background information for the Flushing Remonstrance is courtesy of the Historical Society of the New York Courts, “The Flushing Remonstrance,” accessed April 18, 2026. https://history.nycourts.gov/about_period/flushing-remonstrance/. ↩︎
21. “The Case of the Church of England in Carolina,” London: c. 1705, John Carter Brown Library. ↩︎
22. “Declaration of Nathaniel Bacon in the Name of the People of Virginia, July 30, 1676,”Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 4th ser., 1871, vol. 9: 184–87, collected in History Matters, George Mason University, archived in the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, as of 2026, https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5800.html. ↩︎
23. “Cases of conscience concerning evil spirits personating men, witchcrafts, infallible proofs of guilt in such as are accused with that crime. All considered according to the scriptures, history, experience, and the judgment of many learned men / by Increase Mather, president of Harvard College at Cambridge, and teacher of a church at Boston in New-England.” In the digital collection Early English Books Online 2. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, as of 2026, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eebo2;idno=B43422.0001.001, 66. ↩︎
24. Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (Oxford University Press, 2015). ↩︎
25. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Harvard University Press, 1974); and Forum: Salem Repossessed in The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2008): 391-534. ↩︎
26. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft; Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Vintage, 2003); and Emerson W. Baker and James Kences, “Maine, Indian Land Speculation, and the Essex County Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692,” Maine History 40, no.3 (2001): 158-189. ↩︎
27. David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2019), “Part 1.” ↩︎
28. Jacob Olupona and Stephen J. Stein, “Some Notes on African Religious Traditions from the Fourteenth Century Onward,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in America, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96–110. ↩︎
29. For an overview of African religions in the Americas, see: Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). ↩︎
30. “An act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage” (1667), in The Statutes at Large, ed. William Waller Hening (R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 2:260. ↩︎
31. John F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2005). ↩︎
32. Or at least Matthew Cavedon points towards Iberian Catholics’ embrace of enslaved baptism as “a way to induce slave conformity.” Matthew Cavedon, “Kongolese Sacred Sovereignties and Legalities in the Early Modern Trans-Atlantic,” Religions 16, no. 444 (2025): 1-37, 12. ↩︎
33. Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan, insbesondere der dasigen Neger und der Mission der evangelischen Brüder unter densleben, eds. Gudrun Meier, Stephan Palmié, Peter Stein, and Horst Ulbricht, 2 volumes (VWB, 2000), 1:445–48. ↩︎
34. Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln, 1:446–47; 2, book. 2, 758. ↩︎
35. The New-York Gazette, August 27, 1733. ↩︎
36. Michael Gomez, “Muslims in Early America,” Journal of Southern History 60, no. 4 (1994): 671-710, 674. ↩︎
37. Gomez, “Muslims in Early America,” 682. ↩︎
38. Michael Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton University Press, 2018). ↩︎
39. The term “translation” here means more than linguistic recoding. A term used in the field of World Christianity to differentiate cultural accommodation of the Christian message from “diffusion,” or imposing one’s original message, “translation” requires active intellectual engagement by the people who will ultimately own the message. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Orbis, 2009). ↩︎
40. Michael Hoberman, “Exiles by the Streams of Babylon: Newport Jews in the Colonial Era,” History Now 71 (Summer 2024), The Jewish Legacy in American History, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, as of 2026. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/exiles-streams-babylon-newport-jews-colonial-era. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

How do we tell the origin story of religion in North America? When does the story begin? Or, perhaps, even more importantly, where? Who is involved, and who isn’t? Holding these questions in mind, listen to Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday tell of the dawning of religion in the southern Plains:

“The night the old man Dragonfly came to my grandfather’s house, the moon was full. It rose like a great red planet above the black trees on the crooked creek. Then there came a flood of pewter light on the plain, and I could see the light ebb toward me like water, and I thought of rivers I had never seen, rising like ribbons of rain. And in the morning Dragonfly came out from the house, his hair in braids and his face painted. He stood on a little mound of earth and faced east. Then he raised his arms and began to pray. His voice seemed to reach beyond itself, a long way on the land, and he prayed the sun up. The grasses glistened with dew, and a bird sang from the dawn. This happened a long time ago. I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there.”¹

It is said that “the past is a foreign country,” and indeed it is.² As in Momaday’s story, it is a country full of rivers we have never seen: not just rivers of water, but rivers of experience, rivers of power, rivers of meaning. Many of these converge in the river we call “religion,” a word that is, at best, a shorthand for a multiplicity of experiences, beings, and processes that can seem immense, intimate, and otherworldly. The history of American religion is not just a few hundred years of churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. It involves millennia of Indigenous spiritual practices that ranged widely across time and space. As Momaday’s story tells us, the rivers of religion in the Americas run deep with history and meaning.

II. Creation

How did the world begin? According to one Haida story, shared by many Indigenous nations of the Pacific Northwest, a trickster Raven created much of it. Raven made islands by dropping pebbles in the sea and found the first humans inside clamshells. In an oft-told story, Raven stole the Sun from a great chief. Other and birds replanted the northern forests after the glacial retreat at the end of the last ice age, and led people to new lands where they found forests and shellfish and salmon and beaver. People of these nations honored their animal guides with totem poles and other forms of carving.³

On the other side of the continent, a story from the Haudenosaunee tells of many beings forming a habitable world for humans. Skywoman fell from a hole in Sky World, and geese mobilized to catch her. Turtle offered their back as a place to land, and Muskrat dove to the bottom of the water world to retrieve mud to build earth upon Turtle. On Turtle’s back, Skywoman danced nimbly, forming the terrestrial world out of the Muskrat’s mud. This collaborative creative act made the continent that many Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands call Turtle Island, or what others know as North America.⁴

These are only three of the thousands of stories Indigenous peoples tell of their deep time connection with North America. Indigenous stories carry and convey history, but they are thick, spirited histories in which innumerable beings, including humans, animals, spirits, and the earth itself, all play a part. Stories like these are vital components of “Indigenous religious traditions.” They speak to the historical processes, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, through which Indigenous people experienced their spiritual worlds.

III. Place, Power, Protocol

Generalizing can obscure the many unique qualities of individual Indigenous traditions. However, it is possible to identify “family resemblances” among Indigenous religious traditions, especially in the unique interplay between three key concepts: issues of place, of power, and of protocol.⁵ In this model, “place” refers to both specific landscapes and their characteristics, “power” is a mode of communion between human and other-than-human worlds, and “protocol” refers to ethical systems guiding how people participate in relationships of power.⁶

Human existence depends on a robust understanding of place. The Karuk Nation along the Klamath River in present-day California embraces the seasonal features of the river as the essential lifeblood of both the people and the river’s salmon, who provide a key symbol for Karuk identity and a model for living life properly. They honor the river through ceremonies involving prayers, fasting, and dances. Through these ceremonies, they call on the river to heal the earth and restore the environment so that it may nurture the people.⁷

Power has broad applications too. Though it is often used as a synonym for dominance, Indigenous peoples have conceptualized power in multiple ways, including creative power, visionary power, and destructive power. Within Indigenous cosmologies, power invokes consciousness beyond humans. The world is populated by spirited animals, plants, and presences connected to the landscape. For instance, Kachinas, the spirit beings of Pueblo societies, impact the growth of plants, support fertility, and invigorate Pueblo societies at the deepest levels. There is material evidence of Kachina dolls since 1300 CE in Hopi archaeological sites. Further south, another group of Mesoamerican deities appears in material culture, such as the god of rain, known variously as Tlaloc to the Mexica (Aztec), Chac to the Maya, and Cocijo to the Zapotec. Mesoamerican rain spirits populate the archeological record of the early Postclassic Period, dating to approximately 900 CE. Each is distinctive in its own ways, reflecting the lands to which they are connected. For instance, Chac dwells in ancient sinkholes where drinking water could be found in the Yucatán Peninsula. These sacred places are called cenotes. Across the Indigenous Americas, places accrue significance through the spirits that inhabit them. Cenotes and mountains, kivas and temples are all examples of sites where power is concentrated and may be accessed through ceremony.

Place and power connect directly to the concept of protocol, which may be formalized in ceremonial practice. Just as sites are connected with spirit beings and with stories of creation or emergence, protocols and ceremonies are potent communicative forms that express human intentions and responsibilities and reinforce relationships with spirited entities and cosmic forces. Indigenous peoples practiced these rituals at both the common household or family level as well as in organized, external spaces with ritual specialists called “medicine people.” However, this is only an approximation of the many roles, responsibilities, and titles that medicine people have in Indigenous traditions.

The canoe nations of the Pacific Northwest including the Makah, Kwakiutl, Tlingit, and Haida identify a complex system of reciprocity that these navigators enact when they visit neighboring nations. Songs, speeches, and gift exchanges seal relationships that tribal communities acknowledge as their ancestral traditions. In addition to human-to-human etiquette and propriety, these nations use songs, dances, and prayers to express gratitude to oceans, rivers, and sea creatures, thanking them for the gifts they provide the people. Another way of expressing gratitude for the abundance in this region is the potlatch, a ceremonial feast in which wealth is revealed by the quality and quantity of food, regalia, furs and crafts that they offer.⁸

While it is important to understand how pre-colonial Indigenous peoples oriented themselves to place, power and protocol in an ongoing quest for balance and harmony, such a state was hardly a given.⁹ Rather, as in every part of the world, attaining and maintaining thriving societies required visionary leadership, technological ingenuity, spiritual insight and, at times, extraordinary acts of personal and communal sacrifice. In many instances, these were in short supply. There are ample stories of times of conflict and crisis across the continent.

A Laguna Pueblo story tells of a time when a young man who liked to play with magic came to town.¹⁰ By performing a series of astonishing spectacles, he diverted the people’s attention away from the life-sustaining ceremonies with which they had been entrusted. As a result, Earth Mother gathered her plants, animals, and rain and departed to a third world away from ours. The lush high desert quickly turned into a scorched and barren wasteland, and the people began to suffer and starve. It took the combined efforts of Hummingbird, Fly, and Buzzard, and multiple trips to the third world to convince Earth Mother to return and bring back life to the people and the land. When Earth Mother finally returned, she told the people:

“Stay out of trouble from now on.

It isn’t easy to fix things up again.

Remember that

The next time

Some Ch’o’yo magician comes to town.”¹¹

This story highlights the integral connection between ceremony, political struggle, and ecological crisis. It reminds Pueblo people how easily neglect and carelessness can turn catastrophic and the tremendous effort it requires across multiple domains and species to set the world back in order.

To the Northeast, the Haudenosaunee story of the coming of the Peacemaker and the formation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy begins during an era of strife. Relations were strained to the point of collapse among and between the Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, Mohawk, and the earth. When the Creator sent the Peacemaker to repair relations among the nations, the first challenge he encountered was crossing Lake Ontario. To do this, he carved a canoe out of white stone and paddled across – a seemingly impossible vessel for a seemingly impossible task. Then, traveling from community to community, he made his eloquent appeal for peace, with a particular focus on the most belligerent and warped people, both in terms of body and spirit. One of his first supporters was the conflict-loving woman, Jikonhsaseh, who accepted his message and became the first Clan Mother. The Peacemaker’s most formidable opponent was Tadodaho, a man so evil he had snakes as hair and had committed murder. Yet, at long last, confronted by the Peacemaker, Jikonhsaseh, and a man named Hiawatha who was related to those murdered, Tadodaho realized he had met his match. He had a change of heart so profound that it reverberated across the nations and through the generations. He became the first presider over the Grand Council of the fifty chiefs of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy who buried their hatchets and accepted the Law of Peace. The Peacemaker planted a white pine tree as a living witness to this new way of being and relating. Hiawatha created a belt made from purple and white wampum shells which materialized the potency of the covenant of the people with each other, with the water and with the forests.¹²

IV. Ceremony

Such were the existential crises and conflicts that Indigenous peoples confronted long before the arrival of Europeans. And it was through these that they obtained some of their most powerful insights and received their most potent ceremonies, including the following.

Thousands of people gathered in the immense central plaza of Cahokia. Many arrived from surrounding settlements with food, fuel, pottery, and other offerings. Massive amounts of food sat in ceramic jars and fire burned around the plaza. Performances, including speeches, dances, and music, entertained the multitude as the great feast began. Venison, fish, turkey, maize, fruits, nuts, and more were consumed by the multitude. After the celebration, the ritual continued with a prompt and respectful cleaning of the plaza. The refuse was carefully gathered and buried. Scholars disagree as to whether these events were used by leaders to assert their power or whether these events were bottom-up articulations of community identity. Either way, these gatherings and ceremonial feasts help create a sense of cultural unity around the peak of Cahokia in 1050 CE. These rituals bound together the largest city to exist north of the Rio Grande River until 1800.¹³

Further to the south and east, other Indigenous people practiced a similar feasting ritual. As the summer ended and maize began to ripen, the Green Corn Ceremony, sometimes known as the Bust, began. No one was allowed to eat this new harvest until the ritual was complete. But first, the community had to purify themselves. Families discarded broken materials, swept their homes, and generally cleaned their community and their souls. Many people fasted and avoided sex. Elders prepared special medicine using herbs and roots. Fires were put out to symbolize the end of the old cycle. And then elders lit a new flame that others used to light their own fires, connecting families, the community, and cosmos as a whole. After this purification, the party began. Dancing, singing, drumming, games, and more reverberated through the community. The harvest was then taken, and daily life resumed.¹⁴

Still further to the south, one night in the mid-720s CE, the ruler of Yaxchilan, Itzaamnaj B’ahlam II and his wife Lady K’ab’al Xook, adorned themselves in elaborate regalia invoking spirits, animals and ancestors, and made their way into a fire-lit chamber. K’ab’al Xook knelt in front of Itzaamnaj B’ahlam II and offered him her tongue. Taking a blade-tipped rope laced with obsidian barbs, he drove the point through the tongue’s pink flesh. When the blood sacrifice was complete, K’ab’al Xook returned to her feet with less blood in her veins, but much more power; power she would carry into her long life as a royal woman.¹⁵

The lintel that memorializes Lady K’ab’al Xook’s ritual is one of many testaments to the range of bloodletting techniques commonly practiced in Mesoamerican cultures. Through these practices, people forged visceral connections with each other and their spirited worlds through carefully orchestrated, and importantly non-fatal, ritual performances. These included blood offerings by bleeding earlobes, tongues, and other body parts.

For contemporary First Nations peoples, Native American nations and tribes, and Indigenous Mesoamericans, these stories are not traces of a bygone past nor are their worlds ended; their stories are rivers of meaning and power that continue to vitalize nations and worlds across vast geographies and form vital connections between ancestors, contemporary communities, and future generations.

As Momaday tells us: “I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there.” We were not there when Skywoman danced the world into existence on Turtle’s back, or the morning Dragonfly prayed the sun up over the plains, or the night Lady K’ab’al Xook performed her ritual. We were not there to witness the blossoming of human societies and their “religions” on this continent. Nor were we there when worlds, long separated by oceans, clashed together.

V. European Conflict

On July 24th, 1534, a group of Indigenous people enjoyed their prime fishing spot in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, and watched with interest, then alarm, as Jacques Cartier and his French-commissioned crew conducted a ceremony around their newly erected 30-foot cross. The next day, Donnacona, a leader of the Indigenous community Cartier identifies as Stadaconans, approached the ship “and made to us a harangue showing us the cross and marking the said cross with his two fingers, and then showed us the country all about us as if he wished to say all the country was his, and that we should not plant the said cross without his leave.”¹⁶

This encounter reveals a conflict that would vex Indigenous-European relations for centuries: Europeans understood religion through a heaven-dwelling God, often (though not always) accompanied by the conviction that God had given the earth as an inheritance to the people of his kingdom. Indigenous people believed spiritual power emerged from the navigating and sustaining of an intimate relationship with spirited places.¹⁷ When people from across the Atlantic began arriving in the North American continent, the push and pull between these perspectives remade the world.¹⁸

Europe had, for centuries, experienced transformative religious conflicts between varieties of Christian, Judaic, and Islamic religious traditions. After nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule, the capture of Grenada in 1492 by Christians meant that Spanish Jews and Muslims were given the choice to either convert or be forcibly expelled from their homes.

The conquest of Grenada occurred the same year as Christopher Columbus’s Spanish-sponsored voyage to, by happenstance, the Taíno island of Guanahaní. Columbus exported Spain’s systematic persecution of non-Catholics across the ocean.¹⁹ The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, chartered just a few decades earlier by Pope Sixtus IV, gave a theological and legal structure to this violent persecution.²⁰ The Spanish Inquisition echoed other forms of religious violence in neighboring European lands. Throughout the continent, Jews experienced persecution through false accusations of horrific crimes, as did individuals accused of witchcraft.

The rise of the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa contributed to a climate of fear and hostility toward Muslims and the Islamic world within Christian Europe.²¹ And, as various reform movements, including the (Protestant) Reformation and the responding Catholic Reformation (or Counter-Reformation), challenged existing power structures, wars broke out in Europe, spilling blood for over a century, from 1522 to 1648.

Meanwhile, the recent availability of mass-produced books exposed Europeans to philosophical, scientific, and religious ideas from Greco-Roman antiquity and the Islamic world.²² Johannes Gutenberg, a metalworker and craftsperson, combined centuries of printmaking to produce the first mechanical moveable-type printing press around 1440. The machine was used first to print Gutenberg’s version of the Bible, in 1455, and six decades later to disseminate Martin Luther’s theological manifesto, The Ninety-Five Theses.²³ Thus began the Protestant Reformation.

VI. Religion in England

In England, Luther’s ideas proved less influential than King Henry VIII’s personal vendetta against the Pope. After Pope Clement VII refused to allow Henry to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry rejected papal authority, and by 1534, Henry was named the supreme head of the Church of England.

On a theological level, the new Church of England had a lot in common with the Roman Catholic Church it replaced. For many English Protestants, the two were too similar, and these tensions would cause conflict over the coming centuries. Yet Henry’s seizure of monasteries from 1536 to 1540 brought radical change. Vast tracts of land and the expensive buildings they hosted were confiscated, and much of the wealth of the church flowed to the Crown and its allies.²⁴

For many English people, this was a dramatic and sometimes traumatic change. These tensions caused one of the most significant rebellions in all of English history. In 1536, as many as 30,000 villagers, nobles, clergymen, and merchants all banded together behind the lawyer Robert Aske. They marched through northern England in protest of what they saw as an attack on the true faith. Eventually, however, this movement, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, was suppressed, and Aske and others were executed. Crushing the rebellion proved Henry’s authority over matters of religion.²⁵

After Henry died in 1547, the advisors to his young son Edward VI made even more dramatic changes, including issuing the Book of Common Prayer, which united practice among adherents to the Church of England, called Anglicans. Many of the more dramatic changes which occurred under Edward were quickly reversed after he died in 1553 and his half-sister Mary I restored Catholicism in England.

Mary’s government ordered the execution of nearly 300 men and women. These deaths were memorialized in a widely read book commonly called Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that fueled generations of hatred toward Catholicism among English Protestants.²⁶ Mary herself died after only five years, and her successor Elizabeth I adopted a less coercive approach than either Edward or Mary. In what became remembered as the Elizabethan Settlement, England adopted a moderate Protestant theology that maintained many traditional Catholic ceremonies while asserting the supremacy of the Crown over the church.²⁷

Religious life in England centered not on decrees from the halls of power but rather the rhythms of the local parish church. The Book of Common Prayer included scripture in English and united the nation as parishioners across the nation generally recited the same prayers and followed the same religious calendar.

VII. Iberian Catholicism at Sea

Partly because of its religious instability, England remained behind several other European nations in engaging the rest of the world. Spain, and especially Portugal, led the way. Technologies included new shipbuilding, navigation, and cartography, alongside the rise of banking, which helped enable the emergence of a new merchant class. The caravel, a small, shallow-riding ship developed in the early 1500s, allowed the Portuguese to embark on significant nautical voyages south first to the Canary Islands, then along the coast of Western Africa, around the southernmost tip of the continent, and eventually to the Indian subcontinent.²⁸ European traders connected with traffickers in the Bight of Benin and elsewhere in Western Africa, exchanging both people and material goods.²⁹

These markets birthed the Atlantic slave trade. From the early sixteenth century to around 1650, this trans-oceanic trade in human life was dominated by agents of the Iberian Peninsula, but sustained by English, French, and Dutch investment, as each nation attempted to establish a colonial footing in the Western hemisphere.³⁰ Across this period, Portuguese-African alliances disseminated a form of Christianity that ran alongside, rather than replaced, Indigenous African religions.

The Indigenous West African religious worlds these European colonizers encountered were multifaceted and diverse, containing innumerable overlapping and distinct cultures and peoples. In this early modern period, these worlds were rooted in oral traditions that were highly respected and sometimes even privileged over the written word. Islam had also been present in West Africa since the 8th century, and Muslims enjoyed considerable influence due to widespread literacy, among other factors.

Daily life, even in remote regions, often involved accommodating and even drawing on different cultures, languages, and religions. For example, for protection from evil spirits, someone might wear verses from Muslim scripture, sewn into a leather pouch, while also offering sacrifices to one or more local gods for help in overcoming a disease, and simultaneously honoring traditional protocols so as not to offend an ancestor. Flexibility with practices, and even beliefs, brought religious experimentation. For example, if a god or an ancestor was petitioned to heal a disease, but did not answer the prayer, the community might try a different god, until they found something that worked. West Africans brought this experimental mindset into both Christianity and Islam, despite hostility from some adherents.

As Europeans spread outward from their continent towards Africa and especially the Americas, they were immediately confronted with people and places beyond their stories and cosmologies. Where did Indigenous peoples fit in the family tree of biblical human genealogy? Did they show any traces of a “correct” understanding of God? Were they salvageable and saveable? If so, how? These were the kinds of questions Europeans pondered and debated at length. In the Valladolid debates in the mid-sixteenth century, Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda battled over Indigenous humanity. In North America, seventeenth-century Puritans debated whether Indigenous peoples could be truly converted or whether they must undergo a complete civilizing program first.³¹

Indigenous peoples’ humanity was at stake in these debates, but Indigenous people almost never had any say in the matter. But, there are moments when Europeans put their questions directly to Indigenous people. In 1679, two Dutch Labadist priests asked a Lenape elder named Jasper “where he believed he came from. He answered: from his father.”³² The Dutchmen, like many of their European contemporaries, had little appreciation for Indigenous humor, or for Indigenous cosmologies. The priests roundly dismissed Jasper’s story when he related that the Earth was formed when a tortoise surfaced out of a vast ocean: “the tortoise gradually raised its round back up high, and thus the earth became dry” and that humans had been formed out of a tree that grew atop the tortoise’s earthen back.³³

The first Dutch Reformed pastor to arrive in Mannahatta (or, to him, New Amsterdam) in 1628 proposed an ominous solution for Indigenous souls: “they ought in youth to be separated from their parents; yea, from their whole nation. For without this, they would forthwith be as much accustomed as their parents to their heathenish tricks and devilries.”³⁴ With little capacity to consider Indigenous people or cosmologies on their own terms, European colonists of nearly every nation labeled these people “heathen,” and dismissed their ceremonies as “sorcery” and “witchcraft.”³⁵

The Catholic Church, the dominant authority in Western Europe, used papal decrees such as the 1493 bull Inter caetera to lend religious legitimacy to these colonial projects.³⁶ Later, papal bulls, or letters, would provide the theological foundations to a settler-colonial legal framework known today as the Doctrine of Discovery.³⁷ Pope Nicholas V wrote the first two: Dum Diversas, in 1452, and Romanus Pontifex, in 1455. The bulls authorized European monarchs like King Alfonso V of Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue” anyone deemed a Muslim or pagan, forcing them into “perpetual slavery.”³⁸ The Pope also stated that the lands of such individuals were to be “converted” for the “use and profit” of those monarchs. In short, any place and any non-Christian person must surrender both lands and peoples to the Portuguese crown. Through conquest and missionary efforts, the Catholic Church managed to grow in influence despite losing power to reform movements within Europe. Catholicism became what some historians have called “the world’s first truly global religion.”³⁹

VIII. English Colonies

Forty-five years after the 1534 Act of Supremacy, in a harbor somewhere slightly north of the present-day San Francisco Bay, a male Miwok leader delivered an oration in the Coast Miwok language, accompanied by a performance of bloodletting by a group of Miwok women, to a company of Englishmen who had cast anchor in their waters.⁴⁰ Upon this, Church of England priest Francis Fletcher, chaplain for Sir Francis Drake’s voyage circumnavigating the globe, responded to their Indigenous hosts with a series of Anglican “prayers, singing of psalms, and reading of certain chapters in the Bible,” projecting for likely the first time Anglican doctrine on North American soil.⁴¹

Jamestown, established in 1607, was England’s first permanent colonial settlement in North America and one of the first strongholds of Anglicanism on the continent.⁴² Powhatan religious practice touched every aspect of communal life, including death, illness, farming, warfare, and political authority. English colonists described the beliefs of these people by saying that they acknowledged a creator called Ahone and a spiritual force of chaos called Okee or Okeus. The English often misinterpreted Indigenous beliefs by forcing them into Christian categories, trying to see Ahone as God and Okee as Satan. But the Powhatan people did not divide the world into simple categories of good and evil, and instead they saw spiritual power as more complex and omnipresent. Similarly, the English interpreted Powhatan religious leaders, called kwiocusuk, as ministers when instead they are better understood as teachers, healers, or ritual directors.⁴³

A famous example of English misunderstandings of Indigenous religious practice comes from the writing of John Smith. Smith was taken captive in December of 1607 and brought to a place called Werowocomoco on what came to be called the York River. Religious leaders there performed a ritual to evaluate the meaning of Smith’s presence among them. Smith claimed that the chief’s young daughter Matoaka (also known as Pocahontas) then saved his life, but given his misunderstandings of what was happening, it is unlikely that he had much of any idea of what was happening in these rituals.⁴⁴

The events at Werowocomoco follow a pattern of cultural misunderstanding that accelerated as Virginians seized more and more land to cultivate tobacco. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop, and soon Virginians brought Africans to perform the hard labor. Due to those long-standing relationships between European Christianity and Indigenous African religion mentioned earlier, a significant minority of these African laborers did not experience Christianity as a foreign religion. Many had been baptized as children, grown up with Afro-Catholic rituals around Christmas and Easter, knew the Lord’s Prayer in their local languages, were familiar with European burial rituals, and sometimes turned for solace to the Virgin Mary.

Unlike the Spanish, White Virginians tried to aggressively prevent enslaved people from practicing or participating in religions they deemed dangerous, especially Christianity. One Virginian law decreed in 1667, “baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedome,” providing a unique theological justification for the lifelong and inheritable form of racialized enslavement practiced by Anglo-American colonizers.⁴⁵

The People of the First Light, or the Wampanoag, experienced a different form of English settlement in their homelands to the north.⁴⁶ In November of 1620, a group of English Puritans came aground the abandoned Wampanoag village of Patuxet, tucked in the curve of present-day Cape Cod Bay, and declared “blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all…perils and miseries.”⁴⁷

According to the Mayflower Compact, the Puritan settlers said that they had come to North America to honor God and spread Christianity by establishing a colony in what they called the northern part of Virginia. To accomplish those goals, they agreed to join together as a “Civil Body Politic”—a self-governing political community—and to create and obey laws that would help them achieve those religious purposes.⁴⁸

Among the most powerful dissenters to the Church of England were a group of English Protestants whose theological roots lay with the French Reformation leader John Calvin, who pushed for a more thorough Reformation. Two groups of English Calvinists settled in what became Massachusetts. The first were Separatists who had given up on the Church of England and abandoned the nation of their birth, first for the Netherlands and then for Plymouth, Massachusetts. These people are now remembered as Pilgrims. A slightly later group of English Calvinists still believed that the Church of England could be saved, or purified. These people, called Puritans, occupied lands stretching from what is now called Salem and Boston. After just a few decades, both communities of Calvinists would blend.⁴⁹

Puritans believed that God commanded them to seize and “improve” Native American lands.⁵⁰ Religious leader and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop told his fellow colonists in 1630 that “the eyes of all people are upon us.” He believed that success would come when “men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘may the Lord make it like that of New England,’” for he and his constituents would strive to create a “city upon a hill.”⁵¹ As scholar Carolyn Merchant puts it, to the minds of those like the New England Puritans, “God had authorized human dominion over the earth.”⁵²

In actualizing their claims to Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Narragansett, and Pequot lands, Puritan and Pilgrim settlers relied primarily upon efforts to missionize, and eventually assimilate, the Indigenous peoples of whom they were guests. But this process proved slower than they expected, and so Puritan settlers turned to genocidal violence. During the Pequot War of 1636-38, colonists sought to annihilate Pequot peoples from their lands.⁵³ Just forty years later, widespread Indigenous resistance mounted by Wampanoag leader Metacomet confined English settlement in the region to coastal holdings.⁵⁴ But over the course of what became known popularly as King Philip’s War (1675–1678), Puritans retaliated by decimating local Native communities, murdering thousands of Native peoples, imprisoning others on islands, or selling whole communities into enslavement.⁵⁵

Simultaneously, a conflict over religious authority gripped Puritan New England from 1636 to 1638. Reverend John Wheelwright, Anne Hutchinson, and their followers mounted religious opposition to their colony’s leaders and ministers. These events are known as the Antinomian Controversy.⁵⁶ Hutchinson, a Puritan woman, stoked outrage for hosting private meetings for women to discuss and comment on sermons and New England civic life. She was eventually convicted of heresy and exiled from the colony alongside Wheelwright.⁵⁷

By the end of the seventeenth century, American Puritanism was slowly absorbed into other Protestant denominations. The Half-Way Covenant of 1662 and the rise of evangelicalism meant that, by the eighteenth century, their beliefs and their politics meant that they no longer were Puritans.⁵⁸

IX. Indigenous Responses

The influx of very different peoples, materials, epidemics, and religiosities challenged Indigenous spiritual systems. On a winter’s day in 1647 on Cape Cod, three decades after an epidemic called the Great Dying that killed tens of thousands of Northeast Native people, a Nauset man told Puritan missionaries about a dream he had years earlier.⁵⁹ In his dream, a white man arrayed in black clothing came to him, brandishing an “English book” and declaring “that God was moosquantum or angry with them and that he would kill them for their sinnes.” The Nauset man questioned the Englishman about the safety and provision of his family until the imposing Englishman “smil’d upon him, and told him that he and his Papooses should be safe, and that God would give unto them mitcheu (i.e.) victuals and other good things so he awakened.”⁶⁰ Notably, for the Nauset man, dreamwork, nourishment, responsibility, and religiosity were all integrally connected. The Nauset man’s dreamworld experience is one of innumerable instances in which Indigenous people plunged into the cosmological borderlands between Indigenous and colonial realms and redirected the detrimental force of colonial religiosity toward Indigenous power.

In the borderlands between Indigenous nations and New France, Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman living from 1655 to 1680, and Marie Rouensa, a Kaskasia woman living from 1677 to 1725, often pressed their Catholic practice well beyond the colonial comfort zones of their French Jesuit spiritual directors and connected with Indigenous cosmographies of the Great Lakes.⁶¹ The Powhatan woman Matoaka (known also as Pocahontas) traveled to England in 1616 at age twenty as a devout Anglican and Indigenous diplomat, turning the Atlantic Ocean into a space where there was no clear-cut boundary between gender roles, Indigeneity, power, and cosmology. And she was not alone.⁶²

In the mid-seventeenth century Northeast, the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe decided together to incorporate a Christian Indian Town to maintain social cohesion.⁶³ Later in the eighteenth century, under the influential leadership of Mohegan Presbyterian clergyman Samson Occom, Native Christians in southern New England determined that they would not only be better off removing themselves from settler society, but would also be better missionaries to their Native Haudenosaunee kin than the English, and founded an entire Native Christian nation they called Brothertown.⁶⁴ These Borderlands Indigenous movements complicate the categories of religious studies as well as historical periodization.

These cosmological and physical borderlands were navigated also by Africans and African Americans who had been violently taken from their Indigenous homelands. The twelve million Africans enslaved across the Atlantic generally fall into two religious camps, with some overlap between the two. The first is Islam, and the second is the constellation of beliefs described as traditional African religions.

As the trafficking of enslaved Africans expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Afro-Atlantic Catholics from areas with a historically strong Portuguese influence adopted a syncretic form of Christianity that blended Catholic rituals with Indigenous African elements.

Muslim Africans did the same as well, except with a head start of about 700 years. As members of a global religion, these Indigenous Muslim Africans were often literate and able to make connections with fellow believers of different ethnicities in the course of their removal from their homelands. Though pluralist experimentation was typically discouraged in Islamic traditions, which, like Christianity, insisted upon exclusivity as a matter of principle, the centuries preceding the Atlantic slave trade saw long periods of West African religious tolerance between Indigenous religions and Islam punctuated by sharp crackdowns intended to “purify” the faith.⁶⁵ Disappeared to the Americas and cut off from the Muslim communities of their homelands, many Muslim Africans participated in Christian church life, with their children sometimes becoming Christians themselves.

Over centuries of painstaking experimentation, African Americans of all religious backgrounds sifted through various religious raw materials, including multiple Christian traditions, African religions, expressions of Islam, and Indigenous North American cosmologies, translating all of these into a unique and authentic version of religious practice that spoke to their experiences and needs.⁶⁶

From the homelands of the Wampanoag to the waters of the Miwok and since the earliest days of Indigenous-European interaction, Christian cosmology could compel some of the greatest atrocities against Indigenous people. But it could also check some of the most vicious aspects of colonization. Colonists used religious arguments to justify violence against Indigenous peoples, including separating children from their parents, dispossessing them of their best lands, pressing them into unfree labor, suppressing religious ceremonialism, regulating and punishing sexuality, and, in some cases, destroying Indigenous lives and communities altogether.⁶⁷ At the same time, within each colonial enterprise, some colonists and communities sought more humane and peaceable engagements with Indigenous people, as seen, for example, in Las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), Roger Williams’ A Key into the Language of America (1643), and in Moravian experiments of alternative kinship and community in Lenape homelands in the eighteenth century.⁶⁸

Violence and coercion washed over American lands in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. So too did resourcefulness and creativity. Sometimes it was unclear where violence ended, and creativity began. In the Southwest, Pueblo villages incorporated Catholicism deep into the fabric of their social and ceremonial life; so much so that even in the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, a Pueblo person (likely a woman) drew a simple but striking image on a rock wall: a feminine bust rendered in pared-down, form-forward Pueblo fashion and with the distinct crown of the Virgin Mary.⁶⁹ Exactly a century before, in 1580, a Mixtec-Christian community near Oaxaca painted a riveting map of their cosmos after a massive epidemic.⁷⁰

X. Conclusion

Indigenous spiritual stories flow together like rivers we can see, and like rivers we cannot see. The 1613 Two Row Wampum Belt, recording a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and their Dutch guests, captures one path for understanding the origins of American religious history. As Ray Fadden Tehanetorens explains:

“These two rows symbolize two paths or two vessels, traveling down the same river [of life] together. One, a birch bark canoe, will be for the Indian People, their laws, their customs, and their ways. The other, a ship, will be for the white people and their laws, their customs, and their ways. We shall each travel the river together, side by side, but in our own boats. Neither of us will make compulsory laws or interfere in the internal affairs of the other. Neither of us will try to steer the other’s vessel.”⁷¹

Of course, much of the early history of colonization involved considerably more coercion. European settlers attempted to replace Indigenous beliefs with their own. Despite tremendous violence, they never fully succeeded.

XI. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Saffron Sener and Anthony Trujillo, with content contributions from Molly Harbour Bassett, Elisha Chi, Matthew Crow, Jeroen Dewulf, Petra Peter Gardella, Paul Grant, Dennis Kelley, Rebecca Mendoza, Piper Milton, Emily Pothast, Saffron Sener, Anthony Trujillo, and Ben Wright.

Recommended Reading

• Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, 2023).
• Ryan Carr, Samson Occum: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast, Religion, Culture, and Public Life (Columbia University Press, 2023).
• Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford University Press, 2006).
• Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (Yale University Press, 1992).
• Michael Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton University Press, 2018).
• Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Jennifer Scheper Hughes, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas, North American Religions (New York University Press, 2021).
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013).
• Tracy Neal Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
• Dana Lloyd, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University of Kansas Press, 2023).
• Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022).
• Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Helen C. Rountree, “Powhatan Priests and English Rectors: World Views and Congregations in Conflict,” American Indian Quarterly 16 (1992): 485–500.
• Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
• Rachel M. Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Cornell University Press, 2008).

Notes

1. N. Scott Momaday, Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land (Harper, 2020), 7. ↩︎
2. This is a reference to the opening lines of the L.P. Heartley novel, The Go-Between (1953). ↩︎
3. Bill Reid, The Raven Steals the Light (University of Washington Press, 1984). “Quileute Tribe,” Quileute Tribe, as of 2024, https://quileutenation.org/stories-and-tales/. ↩︎
4. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013). “Creation Story: As told by Amos Christjohn,” Oneida, as of 2026, https://oneida-nsn.gov/our-ways/creation-story/. ↩︎
5. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Macmillan, 1958) for his use of this concept. Here “family resemblances” follows the conventions of Humanities and Social Science discourse. ↩︎
6. Dennis Kelley, “If Native American Religious Traditions Are Place-Based, How Do ‘Urban Indians’ Practice Their Religion?” in Indigenous Religious Traditions in 5 Minutes, eds. Molly H. Bassett and Natalie Avalos (Equinox Publishing, 2022), 140. ↩︎
7. Dana Lloyd, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University of Kansas Press, 2023); and J. Greeley, “Water in Native American spirituality: Liquid life — blood of the earth and life of the community,” Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts, 2 (2017): 157-179. ↩︎
8. Sara Florence Davidson, Potlatch as Pedagogy: Learning through Ceremony (Portage & Main Press, 2018). ↩︎
9. Vine Deloria Jr., “Sacred Lands and Religious Freedom,” American Indian Religions: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 1(1994): 73-83. ↩︎
10. Julianna Barr, “There’s No Such Thing as ‘Prehistory’: What the Longue Durée of Caddo and Pueblo History Tells Us about Colonial America,” The William and Mary Quarterly  74, no. 2 (2017): 203-240. ↩︎
11. Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (Penguin, 1981), 111. ↩︎
12. This is a synopsis of the story related by the Onondaga Nation. “History,” Onondaga Nation, as of 2026, https://www.onondaganation.org/history/. ↩︎
13. Timothy R. Pauketat et al, “The Residues of Feasting and Public Ritual at Early Cahokia,” American Antiquity 62, no. 2 (2002): 257-279. ↩︎
14. Charles M. Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (University of Tennessee Press, 1976) and Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 (University of Nebraska Press, 1995). See also Robbie Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). ↩︎
15. Lintel 24, c.723-726, The Yaxchilan Lintels, The British Museum, London, as of 2026, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am1923-Maud-4. ↩︎
16. James Phinney Baxter, Jean François de La Roque Roberval, and Jean Alfonce, A Memoir of Jacques Cartier, Sieur de Limoilou: His Voyages to the St. Lawrence, a Bibliography and a Facsimile of the Manuscript of 1534 with Annotations, (Dodd, Mead & Co. 1906) 112. ↩︎
17. See: Vine Deloria Jr., “Thinking in Time and Space” in God Is Red (Grosset & Dunlap, 1973); Brian Burkhart, “Philosophical Colonizing” in Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (Michigan State University Press, 2019); Pamela E. Klassen, “Back to the Land and Waters: Futures for the Study of Religions.” Religion 50, no.1 (2020): 90–96; Jennifer Graber and Pamela E. Klassen, “North America, Turtle Island, and the Study of Religion,” Numen 67 no.2–3 (2020): 313–25. ↩︎
18. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492-1945,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 854; and An Yountae,  “A Decolonial Theory of Religion: Race, Coloniality, and Secularity in the Americas,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 4 (2020): 947–80. ↩︎
19. Encyclopædia Britannica Online (2020), under “Reconquista,” https://hvd.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01HVD_INST/726dgh/cdi_britannica_eb_62907. ↩︎
20. Lu Ann Homza, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Inquisition (Cambridge University Press, 2026). ↩︎
21. David S. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Ashgate, 2010); and Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2007). ↩︎
22. Peter Stallybrass, “‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, eds. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Christopher Wild and Ulrike Strasser, “Introduction,” in Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond, eds. Helmut Puff, Ulrike Strasser, and Christopher Wild (University of Toronto Press, 2017). ↩︎
23. James Moran, Printing Presses: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (Faber, 1973). ↩︎
24. G. W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (Yale University Press, 2005). ↩︎
25. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (Yale, 1992). ↩︎
26. John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006). ↩︎
27. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603, 2nd ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). ↩︎
28. David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2019). ↩︎
29. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, “Part 1.” ↩︎
30. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, “Part 1.” ↩︎
31. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “AAR Centennial Roundtable: Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 3 (2014): 636–65; and Linford D. Fisher and Lucas Mason-Brown, “By ‘Treachery and Seduction’: Indian Baptism and Conversion in the Roger Williams Code,” The William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2014): 175. ↩︎
32. Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in 1679-80 (The Society, 1887), 150. ↩︎
33. This is one of many creation stories from Eastern Woodlands Indigenous nations that tells why North America is often referred to as “Turtle Island.” Danckaerts and Sluyter, Journal of a Voyage to New York, 150-151. ↩︎
34. Letter of Jonas Michaelius, 1628, in Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (Barnes & Noble, 1953), 122-133. ↩︎
35. Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford University Press, 2006). ↩︎
36. Pope Alexander VI, “Inter caetera,” May 4, 1493, in Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, under “Inter caetera, by Pope Alexander VI (May 4, 1493),” as of 2026, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/inter-caetera-by-pope-alexander-vi-may-4-1493/. ↩︎
37. Indeed, in the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case of Johnson v. M’Intosh, Miller writes that, “the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly stated in Johnson that the Doctrine and the loss of rights suffered by Indian Nations were based on the justifications of Christianity and civilization.” [Robert J. Miller, “The Doctrine of Discovery: The International Law of Colonialism,” The Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture, & Resistance 5 (2019): 35–42, 38.] And as Indigenous studies scholar Joanne Barker (Lenape) notes “The rights to jurisdiction and territory were modeled on concepts of individual personal freedom and linked to both secular and Christian ideologies about civilization.”[Joanne Barker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, ed. Joanne Barker, Contemporary Indigenous Issues (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 1–31, 3.] Indigenous and African peoples — always deemed less civilized than Christian Europeans — were not granted rights to their religion, culture, families, or original territories. The doctrine of discovery is a principle of international law that continues to dispossess Indigenous peoples today. ↩︎
38. Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the U.S. and Its Dependencies to 1648 (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), https://archive.org/details/europeantreatie00paulgoog, 23. Today, Guanahaní is known as the island of San Salvador. ↩︎
39. Wild and Strasser “Introduction” in Cultures of Communication. ↩︎
40. Christopher Hodgkins, “Stooping to Conquer: Heathen Idolatry and Protestant Humility in the Imperial Legend of Sir Francis Drake,” Studies in Philology 94, no. 4 (1997): 428-464; and “Coast Miwok,” California Language Archive, as of 2026, https://cla.berkeley.edu/languages/coast-miwok.html. ↩︎
41. Sir Francis Drake, The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake Collected Out of the Notes of Francis Fletcher, and Compared with Divers Others Notes that Went in the Same Voyage (Printed for Nicholas Bourne, 1652), 72; and Hodgkins, “Stooping to Conquer,” 430. ↩︎
42. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007). ↩︎
43. Helen C. Rountree, “Powhatan Priests and English Rectors: World Views and Congregations in Conflict,” American Indian Quarterly 16 (1992): 485–500. ↩︎
44. John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), book 3. See also Rountree, “Powhatan Priests,” and Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 1989). ↩︎
45. Virginia General Assembly, “An act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage” (1667), in The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, ed. William Waller Hening (R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 2:260, Encyclopedia Virginia, as of 2026, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/an-act-declaring-that-baptisme-of-slaves-doth-not-exempt-them-from-bondage-1667/. ↩︎
46. jessie little doe baird, “History and Culture of the Mashpee Wampanoag,” Mashpee Wampanoag, as of 2026, https://mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/culture. ↩︎
47. Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (Yale University Press, 2007), 25; William Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 61. ↩︎
48. Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation, 75-6. The “Northern Parts of Virginia” refers to the lands in and around present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts. ↩︎
49. K. David Goss and A.A. Grishin, Colonial America: Facts and Fictions (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2021), 51. ↩︎
50. John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. James Savage (Little Brown and Company, 1853), 30. ↩︎
51. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in A Library of American Literature: Early Colonial Literature, 1607-1675, eds. Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson(Charles L. Webster & Company, 1892), 304-307. ↩︎
52. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper & Row, 1980) 131. ↩︎
53. Benajamin Madley, “’Too Furious’: The Genocide of Connecticut’s Pequot Indians, 1636-1640” in The Cambridge World History of Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 215. ↩︎
54. Jill Lepore, “What’s in a Name,” in The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (Penguin Random House, 1998); See also: Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, 2023). ↩︎
55. For a discussion over the naming of this conflict, see: Lisa Brooks, “Introduction: Language: Naming War” in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018), 7-10. ↩︎
56. Karyn Valerius, “‘So Manifest a Signe from Heaven’: Monstrosity and Heresy in the Antinomian Controversy,” The New England Quarterly 83 no. 2 (2010), 179; David Hall, “Introduction” of The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Duke University Press, 1990). ↩︎
57. David Hall, “Introduction,” 6. ↩︎
58. The Half-Way Covenant of 1662 was an agreement made by Puritan ministers that “allowed…parents who had themselves been baptized but not converted to bring their children to be baptized” [Jonathan Den Hartog, “Politics: Colonial Era,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in America (CQ Press, 2010), 1676]. As a result, baptism took on “not only religious but also political meanings for inducting members into the Puritan commonwealth,” and the strictures of Puritanism ties to the New England colonies softened [Hartog, “Politics: Colonial Era,” 1676]. Thomas S. Kidd, “What Happened to the Puritans?” Historically Speaking 7, no.1 (2005), 32. ↩︎
59. On early epidemics see: David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Harvard University Press, 2004). ↩︎
60. Thomas Shepard, The Clear Sun-Shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth upon the Indians in Nevv-England. Or, An Historicall Narration of Gods Wonderfull Workings upon Sundry of the Indians, Both Chief Governors and Common-People, in Bringing Them to a Willing and Desired Submission to the Ordinances of the Gospel; and Framing Their Hearts to an Earnest Inquirie after the Knowledge of God the Father, and of Jesus Christ the Saviour of the World. / By Mr. Thomas Shepard Minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ at Cambridge in New-England. (London, England, 1648), 8-11. ↩︎
61. Tracy Neal Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Mary Dunn, “Making Miracles Efficacious: Katherine Tekakwitha, Miraculous Cures, and Relational Networks in Seventeenth-Century New France” in Religious Intimacies: Intersubjectivity in the Modern Christian West, eds. Brenna Moore and Mary Dunn (Indiana University Press, 2020), 65-86; Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩︎
62. Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016); Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: an American Portrait (Hill and Wang, 2004); Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). ↩︎
63. Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge University Press, 1997); James Cedric Woods, “A Comparative Study of the Evolution of Tribal Governance at Mashantucket Pequot and Mashpee Wampanoag” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2007), https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI3252606/. ↩︎
64. Ryan Carr, Samson Occum: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast, Religion, Culture, and Public Life (Columbia University Press, 2023); Hilary E. Wyss and Anthony Trujillo, “Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and New England Native American Evangelicalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2022). ↩︎
65. On West African Muslim imperialism, see Michael Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton University Press, 2018). ↩︎
66. The term “translation” here means more than linguistic recoding. A term used in the field of World Christianity to differentiate cultural accommodation of the Christian message from “diffusion,” or imposing one’s original message, “translation” requires active intellectual engagement by the people who will ultimately own the message. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Orbis, 2009). ↩︎
67. Greer, Property and Dispossession; Deborah A. Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 253–84; Madley, “‘Too Furious’; Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); and Thomas Wickman, “Our Best Places: Gender, Food Sovereignty, and Miantonomi’s Kin on the Connecticut River,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19, no. 2 (2021): 215–63. ↩︎
68. Rachel M. Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Cornell University Press, 2008). ↩︎
69. Matthew Liebmann, Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2012), Chapter 7. Andrea McComb Sanchez, Of Corn and Catholicism: A History of Religion and Power in Pueblo Indian Patron Saint Feast Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). ↩︎
70. Jennifer Scheper Hughes, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas, North American Religions (New York University Press, 2021), Chapter 4. ↩︎
71. Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts of the Iroquois (Ohsweken: Iroqrafts, 1983) 73-74. ↩︎

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God.

Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” (1773).

In 1773, American poet Phillis Wheatley reflected “on imagination,” whose mystery and power she found in the divine. She wrote of imagination, birdlike, ascending to its heavenly home, “The empyreal palace of the thund’ring God.” Imagination was a lifeline for Wheatley, an enslaved woman who took her faith very seriously, and her expression of its majesty flowed naturally through heaven and back again. She wrote where “in one view we grasp the mighty whole / or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.” Wheatley found meaning in her religion. So too did millions of Americans who came before and after her. If we want to understand them—the worlds they made, the lives they lived—we must understand the history of American religion, in all its many forms.

Wheatley knew firsthand that American religion could inspire horrific oppressions and exhilarating liberations. The history of religion in the United States includes stories of imagination and cataclysm. Religion has shaped the nation’s triumphs and its travesties. To reckon with the American past, it is necessarily to reckon with the history of American religion. But American religion has never been singular. Far from static or stable, it exists in a state of unending transformation, perpetually being made and remade across the centuries. Nor is it monolithic. Various forms of Christianity loom large, but Christianity was not the first nor the only religion to shape the United States.

Because religion is far more than formal practice, we therefore seek the history of American religion not just in churches and mosques and synagogues, but in Indigenous towns, plantation arbors, political campaigns, home kitchens, football fields, and board rooms. And we aim not only to capture the diversity of American religious history, but to capture it as a historical phenomenon. Here is a story of conflict and change, of conformity and creativity, of adaptation and innovation. And it is a history with stakes. Far from a collection of static creeds, American religion has been a historical force. We therefore capture that vast diversity of American religiosity—and irreligiosity—without losing sight of power and conflict.

This book begins millennia ago and tracks the spiritual worlds of Indigenous people before examining the transformations in Europe and Africa that led to the exploration, encounter, and invasion of the land that came to be called the Americas. We track the institutions, ideas, and conflicts that made American religions and account for how those religions made and remade the American nation, repeatedly. Our narrative includes prophets and skeptics, saints and heretics, missionaries and mystics, radicals and reactionaries, enslaved preachers and religious innovators. Immigrants forged new traditions and made new homes, while the continent’s first inhabitants, preserved and adapted the continent’s Indigenous spiritualities across the centuries.

While recognizing the power of theology, American religious history is more than a chronicle of disembodied spiritual ideas. Religion is believed, but it is also lived. Major theologians and denominational developments matter to the history of American religion, and they are reflected here, but an added emphasis on lived religion also reveals how ordinary people understood and experienced the sacred and how those experiences changed across the centuries. We therefore spend as much time in living rooms and campfires as we do in church. And our cast of characters includes far more than just famous ministers.

Across American history, religion has inspired love and promoted peace. And yet, often as an engine of violence, it has also drenched the American past in blood. American religious history is a chronicle of war and dispossessions, of slavery and terror, no less than a history of emancipation and moral imagination. Our task as historians is neither to celebrate nor to condemn. We seek to understand religious traditions historically and to approach historical actors with empathy. Recognizing the diversity of beliefs that have made American religious history, we let historical actors convey their own religious worlds whenever possible.

The history of American religion is dynamic and expansive. American religion moves. It travels on foot, on horseback with circuit riders, on trains, steamboats, airplanes, telegraphs, radio waves, telephone lines, and digital networks. Religion has been printed, podcasted, posted, projected, and produced in every form of media. We track these movements and these distributions, ever mindful of how technology has made and remade American religion.

Faith appeals to timeless truths, but religion evolves and adapts. This is, above all else, a history, an inquiry into religious change over time. Every generation inherits a religious world, but no generation bequeaths that world unchanged. Traditions rise and fall. Americans of all stripes have invented new spiritualities just as they have forgotten old ones. They have evangelized for long-defunct beliefs and battled for long-forgotten spiritual causes.

Phillis Wheatley believed “the palace of the thundering god” evoked awe, fear, and mystery. But above all, it inspired imagination. To understand American religious history is not to embark upon an empty recitation of dead facts, but is, instead, to view the world from the wider vistas of historical imagination. “From star to star the mental optics rove, / Measure the skies, and range the realms above,” Wheatley wrote. American religious history can be both beautiful and terrible, revolting and transcendent. But, above all, it is essential.

The Palace of Thundering Gods is an open-source resource that has been created through the collaboration of over 100 scholars. Believing that historical knowledge should be free, we have brought together specialists in the history of American religion to create an accessible yet rigorous history of religion in the United States. We are excited to share it with you.

And if you have ideas on how to improve this book, please share them here.