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I. Introduction

American religion has become more diverse, more global, and more politically polarized. Christianity has declined. Evangelical and non-denominational churches have muscled out mainline denominations to redefine the nature of American Protestantism, a tradition claiming roughly four in ten Americans. One in five Americans identify with a Catholic Church caught between domestic and global currents. Although still small in overall number, non-Christian traditions—Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others—have proliferated. Meanwhile, “the nones”—those expressing no religious preference—have exploded in number, claiming more than one quarter of all Americans.

But the nature, too, of American religion is in flux. New religious communities have emerged and grown by adapting to new social realities. Meanwhile, Americans, both religious and not, have debated the role of religion in public life. Global technologies have reshaped how Americans understand and experience religion, further fueling polarization.  Religion in the New Age has driven both hate and compassion. It has been shaped by both global developments and local politics. It ignited the streets through social movements and thundered in the courts through legal battles. Religion remains at the center of cultural and political conflict, a source for dialogue, and a lived presence in the everyday reality of millions of Americans.

II. Beyond “Protestant, Catholic, Jew”

Amidst crises and backlashes, many religious groups have grown considerably in the recent past. In some ways, the most notable growth in an American religious group comes from a group that is really neither religious nor a group. The so-called “nones,” or religiously unaffiliated, make up a sizeable and influential part of the religious landscape in the United States. That isn’t to say that other religious groups have not seen important growth in recent years. Mormonism, the largest religious tradition born in the United States, has expanded and transformed dramatically in recent years. African-heritage and South Asian religious traditions likewise have blossomed recently in the United States. And religious dialogue and interfaith initiatives also became more prominent. New technologies enabled many of these changes while also challenging some time-honored traditions.

Nones

In 1993, about 9% of Americans identified as not having any religious affiliation. By the early 2020s, that number ballooned to nearly 30% of all American adults. Among younger Americans, the proportions are even higher. Millennials and Generation Z have become the least religiously affiliated generations in modern American history.¹

Nones are not necessarily atheists or agnostics, although those groups have certainly grown—comprising more than ten percent of the population—and, for a time, became more vocal. A new generation of fundamentalist atheists gained considerable popularity in the early twentieth century, as a raft of best-selling books encouraged atheists to be proud and forceful in their unbelief. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion was the most commercially successful book about atheism produced in the period, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith also spent 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and work by Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett defended atheism as more moral or scientific than religious belief.² The “New Atheism,” however, had largely declined in prominence by the second decade of the twenty-first century, subsumed, perhaps, by Christian nationalism on the right and multicultural tolerance on the left.

The bulk of American “nones,” however, do not identify as atheists or agnostics. Many, if they don’t believe in God, believe in a spiritual power. They describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” and may even engage in prayer or celebrate religious holidays while rejecting organized religion.³

The rise of the “nones” has several causes. First, since the 1960s, Americans have reported a generally eroding trust in all forms of institutional authority, including churches, government, corporations, media, and more.⁴ This decline has sped up in recent years. Scandals within religious institutions, including most notably sex scandals and abuse revelations, have furthered this mistrust. Many Americans now see religious bodies as irrelevant to their daily lives and rife with corruption or greed.⁵

Changing patterns in the American family have also fueled these trends. Americans now marry later, divorce more frequently, and live farther away from family. This mobility strains long-term congregational involvement and limits generational religious practice among families. For many Americans in the past, religious identity was inherited and formed an important aspect of family identity. Today, Americans are more likely to see it as a matter of individual choice.

Immigration and globalization have also exposed Americans to more religious traditions. This increased interaction with other faiths has caused some to question the narrow religious worlds of their parents. Some respond by embracing religious pluralism, borrowing elements of spiritual practice from a host of different traditions. Others simply disengage from religion altogether.

Political polarization also plays a key role. For many Americans who came of age after the rise of the religious right, “religion” seemed less about community, faith, or belief than about a peculiarly partisan form of culture war around issues such as abortion and gay rights. Younger people have tended to be more liberal than older Americans—although the maturation of Generation Z has challenged this assumption— and, rejecting these politics, many younger Americans rejected organized religion altogether. The mainline denominations, declining in demographic strength, have attempted to maintain the adherence of younger generations, and movements such as Deconstructed Christianity and the Exvangelical movement have attempted to retain elements of Christian practice while spurning the seemingly dominant political conservatism of American evangelicalism.⁶

At the same time, the rise of the “nones” does not always mean a less spiritual America. Many Americans search for meaning through yoga, meditation, social activism, volunteer work, personal wellness, or psychology and self-help. Others have turned to New Age spirituality or astrology, tarot, and other practices once described as the occult. These practices have boomed among many Americans. While large numbers of Americans have joined the “nones,” they still constitute a minority of the population. And overall religious decline masks shifting dynamics. Within the larger mass of American religious adherents, specific religious communities have gained and lost ground.

Mormonism

In the last few decades, few American religious communities have grown and globalized more dramatically than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The recent history of the Church in the United States has been marked by two connected trends: first, the expansion of the Church in the rest of the world, and the consequent reform of church practice and procedure to accommodate non-American norms; second, a grapple with polarization and controversy over issues of gender that dominated American politics.

By 2024, of the world’s 17 million Mormons, approximately nine million lived outside the United States. In the twenty-first century, Church leadership began altering Church policies and procedures to facilitate this international expansion. Those decisions also transformed American Mormon life through bureaucratic consolidation called “correlation.”⁷ Correlation meant that by the twenty-first century, Mormons took it for granted that in any house of worship around the world the same art hung on the walls, worshipers wore American business dress, American hymns would be sung from the official hymnbook, and local leadership used a common manual.⁸

Russell M. Nelson became president of the Church in 2018, accelerating reform by announcing a new hymnbook with diverse music, severing the Church’s relationship with the Boy Scouts of America, shortening the length of regular Sunday worship services, simplifying local organization, and appointing non-Americans to positions of high responsibility.

The Church has shifted from a primarily regional, Western subculture toward a denomination like other Christian groups. The Church demanded less time and resources from its members in 2024 than it had fifty years prior, but it also offered a less comprehensive community.

This bureaucratic consolidation also solidified the authority of its male priestly hierarchy. In 1995, the Church’s highest leadership issued a document entitled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” which affirmed complementarian gender roles and the heterosexual nuclear family.

In 2008, the Church threw organizational and financial weight behind the California ballot initiative Proposition 8, which opposed same-sex marriage in the state. But some things changed quickly. By 2015, the Church was working on a Utah state law that simultaneously offered nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ citizens and preserved the Church’s ability to prohibit same-sex marriage among its own employees and members on the campus of Church-owned Brigham Young University. Church leaders’ firmness in rejecting same-sex marriage led to a 2015 policy deeming same-sex marriage grounds for excommunication and forbidding children in such families from baptism—though young Mormons are normally baptized at age eight; this policy was eventually reversed in 2019.⁹

The controversies surrounding same-sex marriage were mirrored in other debates over gender By the early twenty-first century, Church leadership no longer taught that women should not work outside the home or counseled its members to avoid birth control—both positions commonly taught until the 1980s; however, the Church continued to maintain that women could not be ordained to priestly office, which excluded them from the most important leadership positions. In the early 2010s, a movement among Mormon women, called Ordain Women, gained national publicity, and one of its leaders was excommunicated in 2014. By the early twenty-first century, Mormons in the United States identified as politically conservative and members of the Republican Party by a near two-to-one margin, largely due to the Republican Party’s position on issues of gender.¹⁰

But those positions on gender also contributed to the Church’s loss of younger members at a higher rate than in previous generations.¹¹ Thus, in the twenty-first century, the Church’s efforts to retain members overseas were matched with a struggle to retain young people in the nation where the religion was born. Like many Christian religions, the Church faced a future largely based in the global South where they frequently competed with another rapidly growing religious movement.

Pentecostalism

In 1993, Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson, the prominent charismatic televangelist, gave a speech to a gathering of religious broadcasters. “We cannot continue to see this nation sink into oblivion,” he lamented, noting that “every index of national health is in decline.” A one-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Robertson went on to lambast then-President Bill Clinton for a series of perceived offenses. Instead of “compelling the Armed Forces to accept homosexuals into their ranks,” for instance, Robertson insisted that the President should “take a stand against the ungodly lifestyle that destroys all it touches.” Robertson was absolutely convinced that religious conservatives could take matters into their own hands and redirect the trajectory of society.¹²

Robertson by no means spoke for all Pentecostals. But his Southern Baptist roots and Pentecostal blossoming reveal how American Pentecostalism had made inroads against more established American religious traditions. In addition to formal Pentecostal denominations such as the Church of God in Christ and the Assemblies of God, Pentecostal-style emphases were part and parcel of many loosely affiliated religious networks, such as the Vineyard USA and other “third wave” evangelical groups. At the same time, numerous charismatic individuals remained connected to the Catholic Church and to well-established Protestant bodies including Methodist and Lutheran churches.

Media outlets, including Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Charisma Media, and Daystar, all spread Pentecostal cultural influence. Taken together, these various institutions and organizations exposed countless Americans to the Pentecostal-charismatic tradition, especially in relation to divine healing, “spiritual warfare,” exuberant worship, and prophetic proclamations regarding current events.¹³

The diversity of Pentecostal expressions of religiosity highlighted how the movement prioritized religious experiences over rigid doctrine. Proponents of the prosperity gospel, for instance, combined Pentecostal themes with New Thought-style teachings regarding the power of positivity. The result was a brand of Pentecostal religiosity that thrived through consumer and therapeutic ethos.¹⁴ “Something is going to break in the heavenlies,” the prominent televangelist Paula White-Cain promised her million-plus followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) in June of 2024. White-Cain exclaimed, “Your want is going to change to prosperity! I declare it by the prophetic anointing!”¹⁵

A minority of believers, meanwhile, argued for the compatibility of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity with various left-leaning social justice causes, challenging many adherents’ participation in the Religious Right since the 1970s.¹⁶ At the same time, high-profile individuals tied to the apostolic and prophetic movement, like C. Peter Wagner and Cindy Jacobs, cultivated robust theories of Christian-initiated social change, championing spirit-empowered individuals who could promote conservative visions of family life and social order.¹⁷

Adherents also participated in myriad global networks, contributing to the explosive expansion of Pentecostal-charismatic religiosity in the Global South.¹⁸ American Pentecostals and charismatics functioned as far more than just missionaries, however. When the faithful gathered in Jerusalem in support of the state of Israel, for example, North Americans increasingly represented just one contingent among many from around the globe.¹⁹ Believers from other parts of the world also established ministries in the United States, as was the case when Rory and Wendy Alec decided to expand GOD TV in 2003 following its initial launch in Britain. Similarly, churches such as the Nigeria-based Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) sent out their own missionaries to the United States to counteract perceived failures in North American Christianity. In the words of the RCCS minister Samuel Sorinmade, “The United States has become very slack, so God is making us bring worship and praise to them.”²⁰

Other Africans had different messages for the United States, and religious growth in the New Age was not confined to Christianity. Various religious traditions experienced growth and revival in America at the turn of the twenty-first century, including African-heritage religions and South Asian religious traditions.

African-heritage Religions

African-heritage religions, which are non-Abrahamic and originate from Africa, are extensively practiced in the United States.²¹ The two religious lineages African Americans primarily practice are Orisa / Ifá traditions and Hoodoo. Orisa / Ifá traditions include Isese/Ifá and Lucumí, also known as Santeria. These religions derive from the Yoruba people from what is now Nigeria and parts of Benin and Togo. Within Orisa traditions, there is one god, called Olódùmarè, and a collective of 401 deities known as Orisa. These Orisa govern particular areas of life and the natural elements and assist people in navigating life’s difficulties. For example, the Orisa Ọṣun is associated with the river, yellow, love, fertility, and beauty, and is also a fierce protector of her devotees. 

Enslaved Africans brought what they remembered of these Orisa from their homelands, but enslavers suppressed African-heritage religions. Enslaved Africans were forced to hide many of their religious beliefs. In the twentieth century, however, many African Americans no longer wanted their Orisa associated with Catholic saints, and so they traveled directly to West Africa to learn from priests and priestesses. This tradition is called Isese. Today, there are many temples, also called iles, around the country where devotees gather to honor the Orisa through dance, song, and ritual. In Atlanta, Georgia, for example, at one of the longest-running women-led iles, Ile Ori African Cultural Center, participants gather on the first Sunday of each month, dressed in their finest African-inspired garb, and dance to drums, sing in Yoruba, offer food and money at the elaborate altar, and share knowledge about the characteristics and stories associated with the Orisa.²²

In recent years, there has also been a surge of African Americans expressing interest in Hoodoo, an amalgamation of what African Americans remembered from their African homeland, some Christian and occult practices, and Indigenous plant medicine. Devotees of Hoodoo honor their blood-related ancestors as well as African American figures who contributed to the tradition and Black people’s liberation, such as Zora Neale Hurston. Through prayers and petitions, requests are made to the ancestors, who are believed to be able to alter events on a physical plane. Plants, bones, and personal concerns such as hair, nails, and dead skin are used in rituals to produce the desired result. For example, rose is used to call in romantic love, chamomile produces luck, bones are used in divination, and personal concerns signal to whom the work is directed. Hoodoo was used for protection, manifestation, justice, and healing for a people living under chattel slavery, Jim Crow South, and enduring racial inequality.²³

In the twenty-first century, social media and YouTube have allowed practitioners to share rituals and best practices, offer spiritual services like tarot divination, and create online and offline communities. Many books for practitioners have been written, including Tayannah Lee McQuillar’s Rootwork and, more recently, Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani’s Conjuring the Calabash and Juju Bae’s The Book of Juju. Practitioners also gather at conferences such as the Detroit Hoodoo Festival and the 9 Minds Annual Hoodoo Conference.²⁴

Buddhism

In 1990, The Tricycle Foundation registered itself as a non-profit, publishing its first issue of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle in 1991.²⁵ Helen Tworkov credited white Buddhists for the creation of American Buddhism, while writing that Asian Americans had “not figured prominently in the development of something called American Buddhism.”²⁶ Asian-American Buddhists, who made up two-thirds of Buddhists in America and had built crucial American Buddhist infrastructure, immediately protested.²⁷

A few years later, in 1994, bell hooks contributed to a Tricycle special issue on diversity and race and criticized the type of cultural imperialism that privileges white Buddhist practice as more authentic and “American” while neglecting not only Asian American Buddhists, but also Black Buddhists.²⁸ These two articles set the tone for some of the critical issues facing American Buddhism from the 1990s to the present day.²⁹

Asian American, Black, and LGBTQ+ Buddhists have been at the forefront of these changes.³⁰ Their trailblazing work led to a growth of publications bridging Buddhist philosophy and practice with queer and racial theory. For example, the 1990s saw the publication of multiple anthologies by LGBTQ+ Buddhists.³¹ Efforts to increase inclusion created refuge sanghas, like the East Bay Meditation Center in 2007, which includes the Alphabet Sangha for queer practitioners.³² The first publicly transgender Buddhist teacher, Caitriona Reed, published an article on her experience in 1998, and the first anthology of transgender and nonbinary Buddhist writings was published in 2019.³³

As a result of several sexual abuse scandals in the 1980s, many communities actively sought to combat abuse and incorporated survivor-oriented practice.³⁴ Buddhists have also increased their engagement with the intersection between class, race, gender, and sexuality.³⁵ Some communities have experienced a conservative reactionary response. This has resulted in the formation of far-right white communities—mainly operating online—who object to such initiatives and who attempt to reclaim a masculine Buddhist past.³⁶

On May 4, 2021, a diverse group of Buddhist clergy representing different lineages, ethnicities, and races gathered in Los Angeles at the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple for the May We Gather ceremony. Organized by Dr. Funie Hsu, Chenxing Han, and Rev. Dr. Duncan Ryūken Williams, the event commemorated the 49^th day after the death of the victims of a mass shooting in Atlanta, Georgia that killed eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, including Korean Buddhist Yong Ae Yu. The act represented the culmination of widespread anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ceremony, along with the three-year commemorative pilgrimage held on March 16, 2024, utilized rituals to memorialize the victims of racism and to heal from this history.³⁷

In his pronouncement of intentions at the start of the ceremony, Duncan Ryūken Williams proclaimed that the “lineage of hurt” felt by Asian Americans was connected to that of African Americans, including George Floyd. In doing so, Williams forged connections between Asian Americans and other communities, calling on Buddhists to “join together to repair the racial karma of this nation, because our destinies and freedoms are intertwined.”³⁸

With these comments, Williams referred to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. After a video of the incident went viral, a surge of Black Lives Matter protests emerged throughout the country. Among Buddhists, it resulted in a renewed commitment to racial justice.³⁹

Interfaith Initiatives

The Black Lives Matter protests drew more than just Buddhists. Religious leaders from virtually every religious tradition in the United States joined millions of Americans in the street to promote racial justice. Religion has been at the center of various recent initiatives to promote peace and dialogue.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a new movement emerged among religiously inclined liberals that aimed at healing social divisions through the pursuit of cooperation among people of different religious traditions. This phenomenon, often called the “interfaith movement,” spread through nonprofit organizations, city-wide interreligious councils, grassroots initiatives led by community members, and institutional programming in universities and other public institutions.

Between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, the number of interfaith councils in the United States went from a scant two dozen to over one thousand: a forty-fold increase in thirty years.⁴⁰ With this proliferation, Americans learned new ways to engage religious difference and to imagine a nation marked by harmonious pluralism. These initiatives built on Christian liberalism, which had roots in the late nineteenth century.⁴¹ In the late twentieth century, these long-lasting trends met an increasingly optimistic outlook at the end of the Cold War and a growing effervescence regarding the social promise of the internet.⁴² Civil society was hailed as a vital changemaking force for good in American society, thus spurring a growing number of religious progressives into action.

Increasingly larger networks of interfaith organizing spread across the country, galvanized by a few long-standing initiatives such as the New York City-Based Temple of Understanding.⁴³ In November 1988, the first gathering of the newly established North American Interfaith Network took place in Wichita, Kansas, and brought together nearly 250 participants of 12 different religious traditions.⁴⁴ In 1993, Chicago’s faith communities organized a massive centennial celebration of the 1893 Parliament. The 1993 Parliament gathered about 8,000 attendees and Dalai Lama as a distinguished guest.⁴⁵ In the same years, a new grassroots interfaith network, called the United Religions Initiative, took shape in the Bay Area, inspired by the world-uniting vision of Episcopalian Bishop William E. Swing, who was set on creating a religion-based equivalent of the United Nations.⁴⁶ In 2002, Hindu activist and religion scholar Eboo Patel officially founded Interfaith Youth Core, which aimed to spread interfaith education across U.S. college campuses.⁴⁷

Despite some unavoidable organizational conflict, many organizers saw these developments as signs of a radical evolution in human global consciousness. “We have entered the Interspiritual Age, the Second Axial Age. Interspiritual Community is an essential, defining reality of this age. The unfolding and expanding of this community will gradually dissipate the fears collected over the millennia, and it will reveal the precious gift of interspiritual wisdom,” argued George Cairns and Brother Wayne Teasdale, the editors of a collected volume on the 1993 Parliament.⁴⁸

Weak affiliation with organized religious communities, however, was also part of the emerging challenges and limitations of the movement. Nested outside of the financial infrastructure of large religious communities, many interfaith organizations struggled to fundraise, and even large networks like the Parliament of the Worlds’ Religions nearly collapsed.⁴⁹ At the local level, initiatives remained largely run by individual volunteers, meaning they often reflected the priorities of systemically privileged groups, especially the white upper-middle class who had time and resources for such activities.⁵⁰ Critiques of the movement emphasize the overall ineffectiveness of the movement because of its elitism and naively optimistic vision of religion.⁵¹ By the mid-2010s, the movement was both well-established across the United States but also struggling to assert itself in an increasingly polarized religious and political landscape.

Digital Religion

A deeper shift in the very medium of religion itself undergirded nearly all of this growth—from Mormonism’s global outreach to Pentecostal broadcasting to Buddhist communities organizing online to interfaith networks coordinating across cities and continents.

To some extent, the COVID-19 pandemic helped catalyze the development of the phenomenon known as digital religion. The scope of digital religion is vast and diverse, encompassing a wide array of online religious communities, forums, and virtual sacred spaces.⁵² These digital environments can include virtual churches, temples, and other religious sites where individuals can gather, worship, and engage in spiritual practices regardless of their physical locations. Digital religion has, in turn, given rise to virtual rituals and ceremonies, allowing participants to engage in religious observances and rites through digital means.⁵³ Importantly, the concept of digital religion is not confined to established or institutionalized religions but extends to new religious movements, emerging spiritual practices, and novel forms of religiosity shaped by digital technology. This expansive scope ultimately reflects the dynamic and evolving relationship between religion and technology.⁵⁴

A key conceptual framework within the study of digital religion is the distinction between “religion online” and “online religion.”⁵⁵ Religion online typically refers to the transfer of traditional religious content and practices to digital platforms, such as live-streaming religious services or providing access to sacred texts through mobile apps. In contrast, online religion encompasses new forms of emergent religious expression and community that are uniquely enabled and shaped by digital technologies, including seemingly secular ideas that explore themes of transcendence and ultimate meaning. Examples include online communities centered around the concept of the technological singularity, which envisions a future where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence.⁵⁶ Other manifestations include virtual reality experiences designed to simulate mystical or out-of-body states, and techno-spiritual movements that blend transhumanist philosophy with religious concepts of salvation and eternal life through technological means.⁵⁷

The field of digital religion continues to evolve rapidly, mirroring the dynamic nature of both technological advancements and religious practices in the contemporary world. As digital technologies become increasingly integrated into everyday life, the boundaries between online and offline religious experiences are becoming increasingly blurred.⁵⁸ This convergence presents both opportunities and challenges for religious institutions, individual practitioners, and researchers.⁵⁹

III. Sexuality

The battles over sexuality ignited in the late twentieth century and spilled over into the twenty-first. In 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the fundamental right to marry included same-sex couples in the Obergefell v Hodges decision. Religion has always been at the center of the same-sex marriage debate, and religious attitudes on the subject have shifted drastically. In 2007, only 37% of religiously affiliated people in the U.S. supported same-sex marriage. By 2018, this number had ballooned to 67% in favor, making same-sex marriage the fastest-moving socio-religious issue that social science has ever measured.⁶⁰

Even before this shift, efforts to secure legislative recognition of sexual and gender minorities featured coalitions of religious leaders, including four state ballot measures on same-sex marriage in 2012. For example, Maryland’s marriage equality law was upheld through support from evangelical leaders, led by Reverend Delman Coates, Bishop Donte Hickman, and Sister Jeannie Gramick.⁶¹

As religious attitudes and support for legal protection for same-sex marriages has grown, so too has support for same-sex bylaws among significant mainline Protestant denominations. In July 2005, the United Church of Christ (UCC) became the first mainline Protestant denomination to support marriage equality and allow for its ministers to officiate same-sex weddings when its General Synod passed the “Equal Marriage for All” resolution. In the years since, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (2009), the Presbyterian Church USA (2015), the Episcopal Church (2015), and the United Methodist Church (2024) have each made similar changes to their denominational bylaws. Also during this time, these same denominations allowed for the ordination of qualified individuals regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity—with the exception of the UCC, which allowed for the ordination of gay ministers much earlier, becoming the first major Protestant denomination in the U.S. to ordain an openly gay minister in 1972.

Rising acceptance of queer people has led to some surprising developments. Some queer religious people began to shape a rising conservatism within the LGBT community. For example, the Catholic author and political commentator Andrew Sullivan and the Log Cabin Republicans began articulating a vision of queer-affirming conservatism. Similarly, the openly gay billionaire Peter Thiel has used his wealth and influence to support a host of conservative and libertarian causes.⁶²

In the twenty-first century, the conservative Christian agenda in the United States has centered on the rhetoric of “the family.” The institutions spawned by the Religious Right in the 1970s and 1980s continue to shape American religious life. By the 2000s, Focus on the Family had its own publishing house and the organization received so much mail that it warranted its own zip code.⁶³ Each person who sent a letter would then automatically begin receiving newsletters and copies of Focus on the Family with James C. Dobson magazine each month.⁶⁴ Simultaneously, Dobson frequently appeared on Fox News commenting on culture and presidential politics, highlighting his relationship with the Republican Party and melding his vision for the family and the country into national policy-making.

Through the many books and broadcasts promoted by Focus, the organization influenced how its audience and their families behaved in schools, at work, and, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, at the voting booth. Using its literature on child-rearing, marriage, retirement, and the like, Focus helped nurture conservative American evangelicalism.

In 2009, Dobson stepped down from his position at Focus on the Family. Jim Daly, a sixteen-year veteran of the organization, became CEO. Although Daly offers occasional commentary on Fox News, he does not carry the public political weight that Dobson once did.⁶⁵ By the 2020s, Focus’s membership had dramatically decreased because it had failed to connect with younger evangelicals; and the availability of various religious, political, parenting, and marriage advice online led to a decrease in Focus’s prominence.

Conflict around the family has frequently been taken to court. From same-sex marriage to reproductive rights, conservative Christian plaintiffs have opposed rights in the name of religious freedom. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the Court ruled that the privately held, for-profit corporation was exempt from covering certain contraceptives for its thousands of women employees. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that “the exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities.” A few years later, a baker in Lakewood, Colorado, asked to be exempt from non-discrimination laws in the name of the First Amendment. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the U.S. Supreme Court granted bakery owner Jack Phillips the right to refuse to design a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Crises of sexuality exposed in the late twentieth century continued to haunt the twenty-first. Beginning in January 2002, the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” reports demonstrated how church leadership enabled abusers to evade prosecution. The first Spotlight report detailed the case of a single notorious priest, John J. Geoghan, who had targeted young boys for three decades across six parishes. Over 130 victims had come forward to testify that Geoghan—who had been laicized by the time he stood trial in 2002—had sexually abused them as children.⁶⁶ The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put in place the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People—commonly known as the Dallas Charter. Issued in June 2002, the Charter established procedures for handling reports of abuse, mandated safe environment training for church personnel who work with minors, and created a National Review Board of Catholic laity to annually evaluate the Charter’s implementation.⁶⁷ The John Jay Report—a study commissioned by the board published in 2004—found allegations of sexual abuse against 4,392 priests between 1950 and 2002 (about four percent of priests active during this period).⁶⁸

In 2016, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro convened a grand jury to investigate clergy sexual abuse in six of the state’s eight dioceses. The grand jury released its report in August 2018 and found that over the course of 70 years, bishops and other church leaders had covered up the abuse of more than 1,000 victims by over 300 priests. Certain states temporarily suspended statutes of limitations for the reporting of sex crimes, giving victims the opportunity to file lawsuits against the church. The largest such suit was settled in October 2024, when the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay nearly $880 million to 1,353 victims.⁶⁹

Globally, reckonings with clerical abuse have unfolded in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, France, the Philippines, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and beyond. In Canada and the United States, survivors and descendants of church-run residential schools for Indigenous children have testified to the multiple forms of violence they endured at the hands of church officials. In a gesture of recognition of the global scope of the crisis, in February 2019 Pope Francis convened a global summit on The Protection of Minors in the Church at the Vatican. The meeting was followed by the release of Vos Estis Lux Mundi, a document in which Francis established universal norms for the prevention and reporting of sexual abuse against minors and other vulnerable people.⁷⁰

IV. Religious Nationalism

For many Americans, the Catholic sexual abuse crisis shattered public trust in religious authority. Yet even as mistrust in religious authority rose, new forms of religious nationalism created new conflicts in American life. In many ways, American religion became both less common and more visible. For much of the twentieth century, Americans invoked a shared national faith. In the twenty-first century, these invocations grew sharper and coincided with assertions of the sacredness of American military power and authority. An ascending change in American evangelicalism—what scholars call Christian nationalism—embodied these trends and twice carried Donald Trump into the White House. Yet dissent continued from many corners, including the descendants of the first Americans who continue to challenge assumptions of what constitutes American religion.

9/11 and Islamophobia

Arguably the biggest crisis of the New Age was the deadly attacks carried out by 19 members of Al-Qaeda at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In the years and decades following, the prevailing rhetoric was that all Muslims were responsible for 9/11, that they were susceptible to violence and terrorism, and that Islam as a religion promoted violence. These beliefs encompass what academics, governments, and rights activists have termed Islamophobia.

Islamophobia (or anti-Muslim racism) is prejudice, hatred, and/or fear of Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim. It relies on racist stereotypes and dangerous tropes, and often manifests in the forms of hate speech, discriminatory policies, and violence. While there are instances of Islamophobia throughout American history, anti-Muslim racism intensified following 9/11. Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim experienced harassment, surveillance, hate crimes, discrimination, and deadly violence. Since 9/11, Islamophobic sentiments in society and government policies have severely impacted the civil and human rights of Muslims in America and around the world.

Addressing Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, President Bush stated, “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”⁷¹ This language amplified Islamophobia as it conflated Muslim identity and Islam with terrorism, and constructed a narrative that framed all Muslims as potential terrorists and Islam as a source of terrorism. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that nearly one million people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence.⁷² Along with military operations, the War on Terror involved secret CIA black sites and the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where American authorities exclusively detained and tortured Muslim boys and men. In 2009, former Vice President Dick Cheney described those imprisoned at Guantanamo as “the worst of the worst.”⁷³ In total, the prison held 780 Muslim boys and men, the vast majority of whom were either innocent or illegally detained without charge or trial.⁷⁴

Domestically, the War on Terror involved counterterrorism measures that disproportionately targeted Muslims. The Patriot Act gave law enforcement surveillance powers that were used to target Muslim Americans and their places of worship. Additionally, the post-9/11 period witnessed a significant increase in hate crimes targeting Muslims and those perceived to be Muslims, including Sikhs and South Asians. Thus, between 2000 and 2009 the percentage of hate crime incidents directed toward Muslims increased by over 500%.”⁷⁵

In American politics, Islamophobia has been promoted by both Democrats and Republicans.⁷⁶ In 2016, Islamophobia reached new levels with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Days after his inauguration, President Trump signed an Executive Order banning individuals from several Muslim-majority countries, delivering on his campaign promise for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”⁷⁷

While legitimizing hate crimes, this period also saw a growth of activism amongst the American Muslim public. Much of this work was animated by students, including those who participated in the encampment movement spawned by protests against Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the October 7, 2023, attacks from Hamas. Israel’s actions both galvanized American Muslims and split Jewish Americans, as younger Jewish Americans increasingly oppose the actions of Israel, epitomized by the fact that many pro-Gaza encampments included Jewish students who held seders and celebrated Passover.⁷⁸ Recent years have also seen a surge in American Muslims running for public office, and in 2026, the first Muslim Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, took office.

American Civil Religion

9/11 opened a new chapter in the national narrative of the United States. Prior to World War II, American civil religion communicated national values of freedom, liberty, and civic virtue and laid claims for the nation’s exceptional place in history as authored by god. However, following World War II, the Cold War introduced a new, militaristic nationalism to American civil religion.⁷⁹

Prior to 9/11, President George W. Bush promoted a “Compassionate Conservatism” that reflected a more traditional American civil religion. However, following the attacks, Bush reinterpreted the religious nationalism of the Cold War to frame a narrative for the War on Terror. In his speech on the evening of September 11, 2001, Bush declared that those who plotted and executed the attacks were “enemies of freedom” and that the United States would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Bush would continually interpret the War on Terror through the post-WWII lens of American religious nationalism as he compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor and cast Islamic terrorists as “successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists, and other totalitarians of the 20th century,” and promised that this twenty-first-century war would end in “victory for the cause of freedom and liberty.”⁸⁰

The result was a “holy war” that targeted majority Muslim nations and led to many civilian deaths. Between 2001 and 2020, the United States would execute military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, totaling 363,939 civilian deaths in these nations.⁸¹ This shift to religious nationalism in the United States would not end with President Bush, nor would it be limited to the War on Terror.

Donald Trump and American Christian Nationalism

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 marked a new phase in the history of American religion. If the divorced actor Ronald Reagan strained the expectations of personal piety advocated by evangelical Christians, Donald Trump smashed them. Trump almost never attended church, struggled to speak about the Bible, had earlier supported the right to abortion, was in his third marriage, and had decades of sexually explicit commentary and public actions. Despite this, he won the overwhelming support of white evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, Latter-day Saints, and other religious conservatives. He likely won a greater share of the evangelical vote than any candidate in American history.

Trump’s appeal had less to do with his personal faith and more to do with his promises. For example, as he campaigned in 2016, he promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v Wade. He did just that, and all three of his appointed justices—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—joined the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the federal constitutional right to abortion.

President Trump’s first term came to an end amidst the rise of a new public health crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic presented a huge global challenge, with a high death toll and extreme economic and social impacts. Religious responses to the crisis ranged from refusal to wear masks, vaccinate, and shut down religious services during lockdown, to adapting religious rituals, organizing soup kitchens and other mutual aid initiatives, and otherwise responding to the needs of communities by religious communities and institutions. More and more people were laid off or worked from home, K-12 schools shifted to online learning, colleges and universities sent students home, and frontline workers risked their lives through long shifts at hospitals, supermarkets, and public transportation. Religious institutions had to adjust as well: services were conducted online and fellowship almost completely disappeared. As more and more people were infected with the virus, lost loved ones, became isolated, and struggled to afford rent and food, religious leaders and communities provided much-needed support. Religious communities offered food distribution, attended to the sick, supported vulnerable communities, and offered night shelters to the unhoused.

Conservative religion transformed itself during the Trump years. Commentators spoke less and less of the “religious right” and more and more about “Christian nationalism,” a vaguely defined term that nevertheless captured a new aggressive form of American religious warfare. Abandoning a narrow slate of culture war issues—abortion, gay marriage—Christian nationalists now worked more broadly to impose themselves upon the political and cultural life of the nation. Armed with invented histories of a Christian founding peddled by historian-activists such as David Barton, they dismissed the separation of church and state as a myth. President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, for instance, explicitly advocated for “Building Bridges Between Church and State.”⁸² Some embraced specific Christian nationalist theologies, such as the New Apostolic Reformation’s Seven Mountain Mandate, which urged Christians to exercise “dominion” over the nation. Others were far less systematic in their thinking, but Christian nationalists of all stripes fully blurred the lines between nationalist politics and religious identity.

For many conservative believers, nationalist politics had become the primary measure of religious commitment. Support for Christian curricula in public schools, taxpayer funding for private religious schools, blocking the construction of Islamic centers, abortion bans, restrictions on transgender rights, and punitive immigration laws became the defining expressions of religious commitment.⁸³ Donald Trump lost his 2020 reelection campaign yet refused to allow a peaceful transfer of power. After denying the results of the election, Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to take matters into their own hands.

On January 6, 2021, as Congress convened to certify the 2020 election results for president-elect, supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempted coup d’état. Five people died in the events, hundreds were injured, and $2.7 million in property damage occurred.

Among the many religious symbols and references of the day stood Jacob Chansley—better known as the QAnon Shaman—who was “playing Indian,” outfitted in a headdress made of buffalo horns, coyote fur, face paint, feathers, and beads, and beating a fake drum.⁸⁴ As Cherokee scholar Joseph Pierce wrote at the time, this was “an image of violent appropriation—a warning and a reminder. White supremacists like [Chansley] pose as Indians in order to create an image of themselves as inseparable from the land itself.”⁸⁵ As cultural and religious appropriation of Native traditions continued, so did Indigenous resistance to appropriation and ongoing attacks on Native land.

Indigenous Spiritual Activism

In April 2016, Lakota elder LaDonna Brave Bull Allard posted a video to Facebook asking people to join her at her family’s land at Standing Rock to help protect the water and the land from a proposed pipeline.⁸⁶ A handful of people formed a camp soon after with a small water ceremony, and some offered prayers.⁸⁷ Within months, the Sacred Stone Camp would grow to thousands. After the original route for the 1172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline was roundly rejected by the people of Bismarck due to fears of water contamination, the route was moved closer to Standing Rock and nearby Lake Oahe.⁸⁸

The rerouted pipeline would traverse lands promised to the Lakota by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, including 380 federally protected archeological, historical, and sacred sites.⁸⁹ Brave Bull Allard described this confrontation as not only a fight to protect Native American rights and sovereignty, but also for collective survival, saying, “We are fighting for our rights as the Indigenous peoples of this land; we are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Unci Maka, Mother Earth. We want every last oil and gas pipe removed from her body. We want healing. We want clean water. We want to determine our own future.”⁹⁰

The Sacred Stone Camp dedicated itself to holding ceremonies around the clock.⁹¹ Indigenous peoples from across the Americas, the Pacific, Asia, and beyond gathered at the camp to collectively honor these ethical truths and pray for the water’s healing.⁹² Although the pipeline was eventually completed, the religious work produced through months of ceremony affirmed the sovereignty of the lands themselves and the sacred commitments made by a new generation of Indigenous stewards.⁹³

Conflicts over sacred Indigenous lands have led to court cases centered on religious freedom. The case of Apache Stronghold v. United States (2024) centered on sacred land in Arizona. According to Apache belief, Chí’chil Biłdagoteel (known in English as Oak Flat) is where Ga’an—guardians or messengers between Apache peoples and the Creator, Usen—reside.

Since 2014, a proposed copper mine has threatened to permanently alter the area.⁹⁴ Apache Stronghold, a grassroots organization, challenged the proposed mining plan in court, arguing that destroying their sacred sites would infringe on their free exercise of religion.⁹⁵ Despite recognizing the land’s spiritual value to the Apache peoples, the court ruled in favor of its economic value to American peoples. The Supreme Court refused to hear their case. Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a dissenting opinion, referred to this refusal as “a grave mistake.”⁹⁶

Despite these conflicts and backlash, Native American religion has also recently experienced growth and revival, with earlier activism leading to the legislation of the Native American Language Act (NALA) and the Native American Grave Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). These have helped revitalize Native languages and return bodily remains and sacred materials housed in museums or archives to their tribes. These were a product of on-the-ground efforts from activists invested in Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty who advocated for reconnecting people and future generations with traditional language, medicine, spirituality, food, and more.

V. Conclusion

The story of American religion is a roller coaster of reinvention. Indigenous traditions, African religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Mormonism, and other faith traditions have collided and competed in the United States. They have divided amongst themselves, innovated new traditions, adapted to new worlds, and rolled their way across the American landscape. Recent history exposes that kinetic world of American religion. By many measures, contemporary Americans are individually less religious than those from previous generations, and yet religion is no less a part of American public life today than in years past. One therefore cannot make sense of American life without first understanding American religion. From the Indigenous traditions of the land’s first peoples to the spiritual cacophony of the twenty-first century, religion has thundered across the American landscape. It remains for us only to listen, and to understand.

VI. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Dana Lloyd with content contributions from Natalie Avalos, Matthew Bowman, Sarah Dees, Seth Dowland, Marcelitte Failla, Amanda Furiasse, Jon Garcia, Travis B. Hill, Dana Lloyd, Joseph L. Locke, Adeana McNicholl, David J. Neumann, Mónica Isabel Rey, Faatimah Shamim, Mobashra Tazamal, Valeria Vergani, Joseph Williams, and Ben Wright

Recommended Reading

• Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
• James Brooke-Smith, Accelerate!: A History of the 1990s (The History Press, 2022).
• Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (University of California Press, 2006).
• Brad Christerson and Richard Flory, The Rise of Network Christianity: How Independent Leaders Are Changing the Religious Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books, 2019).
• Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Beacon Press, 2003).
• John Fahy and Jan-Jonathan Bock, eds., The Interfaith Movement: Mobilising Religious Diversity in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2019).
• Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Ann Gleig, American Dharma: Buddhism beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019).
• Dan Gilgoff, The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture Wars (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008).
• Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2010).
• R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017).
• Tim Hutchings, Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media (Routledge, 2017).
• David Mislin, Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Cornell University Press, 2015).
• Scott Mitchell, The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2023).
• Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism (Liveright, 2024).
• Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010).
• Jana Reiss, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Daniel Vaca, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard University Press, 2019).
• Neil J. Young, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Notes

1. Pew Research Center, “How U.S. Religious Composition Has Changed in Recent Decades,” in Modeling the Future of Religion in America (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, September 13, 2022). ↩︎
2. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, 2007); and Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking, 2006). ↩︎
3. Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but not Religious Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford, 2001). ↩︎
4. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000). ↩︎
5. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010). ↩︎
6. Kathryn Post, “Church for nones: The anti-dogma spiritual collectives emerging across the US,” Christian Century 141, no. 2 (2024): 17-18; Blake Chastain, Exvangelical and Beyond: How American Christianity Went Radical and the Movement That’s Fighting Back (Tarcher, 2024). ↩︎
7. Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (Random House, 2012), 184-216; Gregory Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (University of Utah Press, 2005), 139-159. ↩︎
8. Philip Jenkins, “Letting Go: Exploring Mormon Growth in Africa,” Journal of Mormon History 35, no. 2 (2009): 1–25. ↩︎
9. Neil J. Young, “Mormons and Same-Sex Marriage: From ERA to Prop 8,” in Patrick Q. Mason and John G. Turner, eds., Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2016), 144-173. ↩︎
10. David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 77-103. ↩︎
11. Jana Reiss, The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church (Oxford University Press, 2019), 172-174. ↩︎
12. Pat Robertson, “Religious Broadcasters Must Be Salt and Light,” National Religious Broadcasters Convention, Tampa, FL, February 16, 1993, https://www.patrobertson.com/speeches/ReligiousBroadcastersSaltand%20Light.asp. ↩︎
13. For a helpful overview of the history of the pentecostal movement in the United States and its relationship to charismatic groups, see R.G. Robins, Pentecostalism in America (Praeger, 2010). ↩︎
14. See Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩︎
15. Paula White-Cain [@Paula_White], “Something Is Going to Break in the Heavenlies. CAN YOU BELIEVE WITH ME?? Your Want Is Going to Change to Prosperity! I Declare It by the Prophetic Anointing!,” x.com, June 8, 2024, https://x.com/Paula_White/status/1799415363471655419. ↩︎
16. See Robins, Pentecostalism in America, 108–19. ↩︎
17. See Brad Christerson and Richard Flory, The Rise of Network Christianity: How Independent Leaders Are Changing the Religious Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2017), 74–104. ↩︎
18. See Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2013). ↩︎
19. See Donald M. Lewis, A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century (IVP Academic, 2021), 316–43. ↩︎
20. Quoted in Julia Lieblich and Tom McCann, “Africans Now Missionaries to U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, June 21, 2002. ↩︎
21. Dr. Dianne Stewart coined the term African-heritage religions. These traditions are also referred to as African-traditional and African-derived religions. ↩︎
22. “Home,” ileoriafricancc, https://www.ileori.com. ↩︎
23. Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (University of California Press, 2006), 1-34. ↩︎
24. Tayannah Lee McQuillar, Rootwork: Using the Folk Magick of Black America for Love, Money, and Success (Simon & Schuster, 2003); Mawiyah Kai El-Jamah Bomani, Conjuring the Calabash: Empowering Women with Hoodoo Spells & Magick, First edition (Llewellyn Worldwide ltd, 2023); Juju Bae, The Book of Juju: African Spirituality for Healing, Liberation, and Self-Discovery (Sterling Ethos, 2024); “Detroit Hoodoo Festival – Michigan’s Annual Hoodoo Festival,” https://detroithoodoofestival.com/; “The 9 Minds | Instagram, Facebook, TikTok,” Linktree, https://linktr.ee/the9minds. ↩︎
25. Tricycle, “About,” https://tricycle.org/about/. ↩︎
26. Helen Tworkov, “Many is More” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, winter 1991, https://tricycle.org/magazine/many-more/; Chenxing Han, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic Books, 2021), 21. ↩︎
27. Based on the Pew Forum research study published in 2012, a revision of the much-criticized 2008 report, which undercounted Asian-American Buddhists due to the survey only being conducted in English and Spanish and not including Hawai’i. See Pew Research Center, “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths,” Washington, DC, July 19, 2012. https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2012/07/Asian-Americans-religion-full-report.pdf and Han, Be the Refuge, 8, 285–286 n. 8 and 10. See also Scott Mitchell, The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2023). ↩︎
28. bell hooks, “Waking Up to Racism,” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Fall 1994; Han, Be the Refuge, 11. ↩︎
29. On the recent turn in American Buddhist practice see Ann Gleig, American Dharma: Buddhism beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019). ↩︎
30. Sheridan Adams, Mushim Ikeda-Nash, Jeff Kitzes, Margarita Loinaz, Choyin Rangdrol, Jessica Tan, and Larry Yang, eds., Making the Invisible Visible: Healing Racism in our Buddhist Communities (self-published, 2000). On critiques of white supremacy within Buddhist communities see Adams et al. Making the Invisible Visible; Gleig, American Dharma; Han, Be the Refuge; Adeana McNicholl, “Buddhism and Race in the United States,” Religion Compass 15, no. 8 (2021): 1–13; George Yancy and Emily McRae, eds., Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections (Lexington Books, 2019). ↩︎
31. Winston Leyland, ed., Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists Vol. 1 (Gay Sunshine Press, 1998); Winston Leyland, ed., Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists Vol. 2 (Gay Sunshine Press, 2000). ↩︎
32. Ann Gleig, “Queering Buddhism or Buddhist De-Queering?: Reflecting on Differences Amongst Western LGBTQI Buddhists and the Limits of Liberal Convert Buddhism,” Theology & Sexuality 18, no.3 (2012): 198–214; Amy Langenberg, “Gender and Sexuality in American Buddhism,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, eds., Ann Gleig and Scott Mitchell (Oxford University Press, 2024), 74–91. ↩︎
33. Langenberg, “Gender and Sexuality in American Buddhism,” 86; Caitriona Reed, “Coming Out Whole,” Inquiring Mind 14, no. 2 (1998); Kevin Manders and Elizabeth Marston, eds., Transcending: Trans Buddhist Voices (North Atlantic Books, 2019). ↩︎
34. “Sex, Scandal, and the Shadow of the Roshi” in Gleig, American Dharma, 84–110; Langenberg, “Gender and Sexuality in American Buddhism,” 87–89. ↩︎
35. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender (Wisdom Publications, 2015); Vesely-Flad, Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition; Jacoby Ballard, A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation (North Atlantic Books, 2021); Amy Langenberg, “Gender and Sexuality in American Buddhism,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, eds., Ann Gleig and Scott Mitchell (Oxford University Press, 2024), 74–91. ↩︎
36. Ann Gleig and Brenna Artinger, “#BuddhistCultureWars: BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas,” Journal of Global Buddhism, 22, no.1 (2021): 19–48; McNicholl, “Buddhism and Race in the United States.” ↩︎
37. Mihiri Tillakaratne, “‘May We Gather’ Buddhist Memorial Ceremony Offers Asian American Community Space to Heal,” Lion’s Roar, May 5, 2021. ↩︎
38. “May We Gather: A National Buddhist Memorial Ceremony for Asian American Ancestors,” 2021; “May We Gather: A National Buddhist Pilgrimage for Asian American Ancestors,” March 16, 2024.. ↩︎
39. “Buddhist Justice Reporter: The George Floyd Trials,”; Ward, America’s Racial Karma; Yetunde and Giles, Black & Buddhist; Some of the projects published in 2020 had already been in production when George Floyd was killed and the incident was incorporated into the final product. ↩︎
40. John Fahy and Jan-Jonathan Bock, eds., The Interfaith Movement: Mobilising Religious Diversity in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2019), 2. ↩︎
41. David Mislin, Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Cornell University Press, 2015). ↩︎
42. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2010); James Brooke-Smith, Accelerate!: A History of the 1990s (The History Press, 2022). ↩︎
43. Juliet Hollister, Living My Dream: The Remarkable Story of the Temple of Understanding (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010). ↩︎
44. “North American Interfaith Network (NAIN),” https://hwpi.harvard.edu/pluralismarchive/north-american-interfaith-network-nain. ↩︎
45. Abe Masao, “A Report on the 1993 Parliament of World’s Religions,” The Eastern Buddhist 26, no. 2 (1993): 73–75; Katherine Marshall, “The Parliament of the World’s Religions: 1893 and 1993,” Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. ↩︎
46. William E. Swing, A Bishop’s Quest, First Edition (Xoxox Press, 2015). ↩︎
47. Eboo Patel and Cassie Meyer, “Building Religious Pluralism: The Interfaith Youth Core Approach,” International Journal of Curriculum and Instruction 7, no. 1 (2010): 167–72. ↩︎
48. Wayne Teasdale and George F. Cairns, eds., The Community of Religions: Voices and Images of the Parliament of the World’s Religions (Continuum, 1996), 13. ↩︎
49. Parliament of the World’s Religions, “SAVE THE PARLIAMENT,” 2013, https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=15d4f7de1064a5171ce87bc0e&id=f30df6ab9c. ↩︎
50. C. Melissa Snarr, “Elaborating Faith,” Journal of Religious Ethics 45, no. 2 (2017): 255–77. ↩︎
51. Russell T. McCutcheon, “The Economics of Spiritual Luxury: The Glittering Lobby and the World’s Parliament of Religions,” in Critics Not Caretakers: Redefining the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2001). ↩︎
52. Tim Hutchings, Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media (Routledge, 2017). ↩︎
53. Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan, eds., Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet (Routledge, 2004). ↩︎
54. Adam Possamai and Murray Lee, Handbook of Digital Religion (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019). ↩︎
55. Christopher Helland, “Online-Religion/Religion-Online and Virtual Communitas,” in Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises, eds. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan (JAI Press/Elsevier Science, 2000), 205-223: “Religion-online provides information about religion, while online-religion provides a location for participating in religious activity” (205). ↩︎
56. Oliver Krueger, “Gnosis in Cyberspace? Body, Mind and Progress in Posthumanism,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 14, no. 2 (2005): 55-67. ↩︎
57. Robert M. Geraci, Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life (Oxford University Press, 2014). ↩︎
58. Heidi A. Campbell and Giulia Evolvi, “Contextualizing Current Digital Religion Research on Emerging Technologies,” Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies 2, no. 1 (2020): 5-17. ↩︎
59. Campbell and Evolvi, “Contextualizing Current Digital Religion Research on Emerging Technologies.” ↩︎
60. Ryan P. Burge, “Religion and Support for Gay Marriage,” Religion in Public: Exploring the Mix of Sacred and Secular, December 11, 2018. ↩︎
61. William N. Eskridge, Jr., “American Religion and the Marriage Debate,” Yale University Press, August 25, 2020. ↩︎
62. Neil J. Young, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press 2024); Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Beacon Press 2003); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007). ↩︎
63. Dan Gilgoff, The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture Wars (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008), 39, 168. ↩︎
64. Robert Waterman McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (Monthly Review Press, 2008), 428–30. ↩︎
65. “Jim Daly—Focus on the Family,” http://www.focusonthefamily.com/about_us/profiles/jim_daly.aspx. ↩︎
66. Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes, “Church allowed abuse by priest for years,” The Boston Globe, January 6, 2002. ↩︎
67. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” Washington, DC (2002). The charter was revised in 2005, 2011, and 2018. ↩︎
68. “The Nature and Scoop of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002,” The John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City of New York, February 2004 (June 2004). ↩︎
69. Ruth Graham and Orlando Mayorquín, “Archdiocese of Los Angeles Agrees to Pay $880 Million to Settle Sex Abuse Claims,” New York Times, October 16, 2024. The 2024 settlement was on top of the then-record setting $660 million the archdiocese had agreed to pay 508 victims in 2007. ↩︎
70. Francis, “Vos Estis Lux Mundi,” Apostolic Letter Issued Motu Proprio, May 7, 2019. ↩︎
71. George W. Bush “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” Speech, September 20, 2001, The White House Archives, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html. ↩︎
72. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, “Costs of War,” The Costs of War, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/. ↩︎
73. The Associated Press, “Cheney: Gitmo holds the worst of the worst,” NBC News, June 1, 2009, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna31052241. ↩︎
74. The Bridge Initiative, “Guantanamo Bay Data Project,” November 4, 2020, https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/guantanamo-bay-data-project/. ↩︎
75. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, “Racial Profiling and Islamophobia,” The Costs of War, September 2023, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/social/rights/profiling. ↩︎
76. Cristina Marcos, “Tlaib: There’s Islamophobia in the Democratic Party,” The Hill, November 3, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/house/433522-tlaib-theres-islamophobia-in-the-democratic-party/. Hannah Allam and Talal Ansari, “State and Local Republican Officials Have Been Bashing Muslims. We Counted.” ↩︎
77. Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” The White House, January 27, 2017, https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research-publications/reports/the-muslim-and-african-bans/. ↩︎
78. Ella Daniel and Paloma Chapa, “UNM encampment stands in solidarity with Palestine, other universities,” Daily Lobo, April 30, 2024; Viet Thanh Nguyen and Karen Tongson, “USC: This is a teachable moment,” Daily Trojan, April 26, 2024; Emily Chen and Joyce Zhang, “‘Solidarity materialized’: A look into the art and community born out of the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’,” Columbia Spectator, April 28, 2024; Kristin Merrilees, “Revolutionary film collective cinemóvil nyc shows ‘Columbia Revolt’ and ‘Between Two Crossings’ at ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’,” Columbia Spectator, April 28, 2024. Gabriella Gregor Splaver, “In Focus: 120 Hours into the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’,” Columbia Spectator, April 23, 2024. See also Oren Kroll-Zeldin, Unsettled: Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine (NYU Press, 2024); Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025); and Marjorie N. Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism (NYU Press, 2024). ↩︎
79. Ryan T. O’Leary, “The freedom narrative and the War on Terror: Civil-religious idolatry for the 9/11 generation,” Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research 48 (July 24, 2023): 298-312. ↩︎
80. George W. Bush, “Speech on National Security,” (Speech, Charleston, SC, December 11, 2001); George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” (Speech, Washington, DC, February 2, 2005); George W. Bush, “President Bush Addresses American Legion National Convention,” (Speech, Salt Lake City, UT, August 31, 2006). ↩︎
81. Cost of War project, Watson Institute, Brown University. ↩︎
82. Religious Liberty Commission, Draft Report (June 2026). ↩︎
83. Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020). ↩︎
84. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998). ↩︎
85. Josep Pierce, “The Capitol Rioter Dressed Up as a Native American Is Part of a Long Cultural History of ‘Playing Indian.’ We Ignore it at Our Peril” 2021. ↩︎
86. Mikki Halpin, “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Historian LaDonna Brave Bull Allard on DAPL Protests and Seventh Generation Activists,” Teen Vogue, April 26, 2017. ↩︎
87. Halpin, “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Historian.” ↩︎
88. ABC (American Broadcasting Company) News, “Why a Previously Proposed Route for The Dakota Access Pipeline Was Rejected,” November 3, 2016. ↩︎
89. Chief Edward John, Expert Member of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, “Firsthand Observations of Conditions Surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline (North Dakota, USA),” Nov. 1, 2016. ↩︎
90. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, “How Powerful Could We Be if We Agree to Stand Our Ground on Our Treaty Land,” Yes Magazine, February 4, 2017. ↩︎
91. Brave Bull Allard, “How Powerful Could We Be.” ↩︎
92. Halpin, “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Historian.” ↩︎
93. Halpin, “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Historian.” ↩︎
94. Anna V. Smith, (2022) “At Oak Flat, Courts and Politicians Fail Tribes,” High Country News, July 26, 2022. ↩︎
95. Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993), 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb-2000bb4. ↩︎
96. Apache Stronghold v. United States, 605 U. S. ____ (2025), 2. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

The optimism and upheaval of the 1960s did not simply disappear from the world of American religion. Americans continued to draw on religion to challenge the perceived injustices of the 1970s and 1980s. Many praised these developments; others feared they spelled the death of American life and culture. Social turbulence prompted questions about the fundamental nature and fate of the nation, questions that many Americans understood in spiritual terms. Some understood their world through a spiritual lens that prioritized racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, women’s equality, gay liberation, global human rights, or environmental preservation. Others, however, saw these movements as desecrations of biblical mandates and corruptions of a Christian nation. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the latter group—a newly coalesced alliance of conservative Christian activists popularly styled as the religious right–would take the reins of power and set a social and political agenda for the coming decades.

II. Black and Indigenous Movements

In 1966, James Meredith began a 220-mile walk through Mississippi. He called it the March Against Fear and hoped to encourage Black voters to participate in elections. On the second day of his march, a white supremacist shot and killed him. Civil rights leaders rushed to his bedside and then vowed to complete the march. Among these leaders was Stokely Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture). Carmichael responded to Meredith’s death by calling for “Black Power.” 

Carmichael’s call ushered in a movement that found its roots in the Black radical tradition and inspired a new generation of young Black Americans organizing their communities against oppression. While the Black Power movement embraced diverse philosophical traditions, ranging from Pan-Africanism to revolutionary Marxism, and took expression in a range of forms from artwork to armed resistance, its activists created organizations that incorporated various religious traditions.

One such organization was the Black Panther Party. As an organization of revolutionary Marxists, the Black Panthers implemented a series of “survival programs” designed to meet the needs of oppressed people while raising their political conscience toward the need for revolution. Churches proved crucial to the success of these survival programs. The Panthers’ most significant survival program, their free breakfast for school children program, began in the basement of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, and grew into a nationwide program relying on the support of dozens of churches.¹ Many religious leaders also leant their moral weight to the Panthers’ cause. For example, the rector of St. Augustine’s, Rev. Earl Neil, spoke at the Panthers’ United Front Against Fascism conference, and joined the Panthers’ lawsuit against the federal government following the public disclosure of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program.² In turn, the Panthers bestowed on Rev. Neil the title “Minister of Religion of the Black Panther Party.”³ Indeed, the Panthers understood the power of churches, and, in 1971, Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton told a gathering of seminarians that the Panthers would begin attending church regularly.⁴

Other religious leaders across the country contributed to the Black Power movement directly from the pulpit. In Detroit, Albert Cleage preached a message of Black Christian nationalism centered around an interpretation of Jesus as a Black revolutionary.⁵ In Cairo, Illinois, Baptist minister Charles Koen led the United Front of Cairo in a strategy of armed self-defense against the White Citizens Council.⁶ And in Chicago, Black Catholic priests held “Black Unity Masses” which incorporated African aesthetics and urged attendees to be proud of their Blackness.⁷

Still others within the Black Power movement found strength in non-Christian religious traditions. For example, Black Panther leader Ericka Huggins found comfort and strength in yoga while incarcerated as a political prisoner, and Huey Newton discussed Buddhism with Richard Baker-Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center and spent time at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.⁸ While the Black Power movement drew significantly on secular ideologies such as Marxism, Black Nationalism, and Pan-Africanism, the movement was also intricately bound to a range of religious traditions.

Similar movements within Indigenous American communities also drew on religious roots. In November 1969, a group known as the Indians of all Nations, composed of many Indigenous college students in the Bay Area, made headlines with their occupation of Alcatraz in San Francisco.⁹ They hoped to turn this space into a cultural, ecological, and spiritual center for generations to come, and in return, they offered President Nixon “24 dollars in glass beads and red cloth,” which they noted was the buying price of another small island by previous white colonists.¹⁰ Quickly, the American Indian Movement (AIM), another important movement at this time, came to support and publicize the occupation. For 19 months, the activists took hold of the island, inspiring many more occupations and protests across the United States.

That same year, Vine Deloria Jr. published Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Deloria wrote on the disconnect between the actions of the AIM and the Red Power movement, who were fighting for self-determination and sovereignty, and how non-indigenous peoples were less interested in these struggles and far more interested in appropriating elements of Indigenous religion for their own gain. It is no accident that Deloria found it important to dedicate an entire book to reintroducing how Native people understood the sacred during this moment. The activists who were a part of the Indians of All Nations and AIM, among many other groups in the Red Power movement, drew deeply from their cultural and religious practices.

In response to this activism came a cluster of acts, such as the 1974 Indian Self-Determination Act, which endorsed tribal sovereignty, and in 1978, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which allowed the practice of traditional Indigenous religious practices.¹¹ Many of the religious practices and materials foundational to Indigenous ceremonies, like peyote and the use of certain feathers, were still technically illegal before this act.¹² Within the same year, on Thanksgiving Day, ten leaders of various Christian denominations in the United States also issued an apology and asked for forgiveness for the “longstanding participation in the destruction of traditional Native American spiritual practices.”¹³ A similar moment happened in the 1990s in response to more pressure from Indigenous activists when acts such as the Native American Language Act (NALA) and the Native American Grave Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) were passed.¹⁴ These helped revitalize Native languages and return bodily remains and sacred materials housed in museums or archives to their tribes. These were a product of on-the-ground efforts from activists invested in Indigenous self-determinacy and sovereignty who advocated for reconnecting people and future generations to come with traditional language, medicine, spirituality, and food, amongst many other things.¹⁵ Through reconnection with the past, they are better suited for issues the present and future world brings.

The spirit of social activism manifested on the right as well, and the 1970s birthed a new movement which would soon capture American religion and American politics.

III. The Religious Right

On July 5, 1976, Reverend Jerry Falwell thundered, “our country has left God.” Perhaps surprisingly, he blamed his audience, claiming, “if America falls, it will be because of people like you and me” and that “judgement begins at the house of God.”¹⁶ Falwell pointed to the removal of Bible reading and prayer from public schools, the rise in national debt, the decline of the nation’s military might, the nation’s entertainment and media outlets becoming more liberal, political scandals, and the growing acceptance of homosexuality. Falwell called Christian listeners to vote for Christian candidates.

Conservative evangelical leaders like Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Tim LaHaye helped turn the Christian Right into a sophisticated movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Capitalizing on developments in television broadcasting, these ministers used television to reach American living rooms. They also created religiopolitical organizations such as the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and the Council for Christian Policy to turn conservative Christian voters into a solid voting bloc for Republican candidates.

With increasing political assertiveness in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative Christians took ownership of the phrase “Family Values” to define their core concerns, which included opposition to abortion, feminism, public education, and gay rights.¹⁷ While evangelical Protestants made up its core, the new Christian Right also included conservative Catholics, like activist Phyllis Schlafly, who worked together with Protestants to mount grassroots action against perceived liberal threats, including and especially against abortion.

In the same year that Jerry Falwell called the nation to return to its Christian heritage, another southern evangelical Christian was elected president of the United States. The election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 culminated in several religious forces and launched still others. Carter promised to redeem a nation reeling from scandals and a disastrous war. Watergate and Nixon’s shameful retreat from public life soured Americans’ faith in their institutions. Similarly, the massive casualties and psychological consequences of the failed war in Vietnam left Americans eager for a moral renewal. Jimmy Carter, a southern Sunday School teacher and proud “born again Christian,” promised just that.

Carter’s political rise coincided with other social trends that led TIME Magazine to mark 1976 as “the year of the evangelical.” Black Christians played an essential role in Carter’s victory and would help to secure several of his administration’s key goals. Many Catholics also supported him, and Americans saw Carter as a continuation of the long era of the New Deal. Some conservative Christians celebrated his election, inclined to see an evangelical in the White House as proof of their movement’s rise. Yet, Carter’s priorities differed sharply from those of most conservative Christians. 

Carter’s faith emphasized peacemaking, racial healing, concern for the poor, environmentalism, and personal morality. President Carter appointed an unprecedented number of women, African Americans, and other minorities to positions in his government. His administration coincided with major economic challenges. Wars in the Middle East, namely the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979, both skyrocketed the price of oil. Carter lectured the nation on the moral imperative of conservation and installed solar panels on the White House. 

Carter also attempted to bring peace and stability to the Middle East, brokering the Camp David Accords in 1978 between Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Carter also prioritized human rights in his foreign policy, condemning authoritarian regimes, many of which had earlier been empowered by American actions. 

Carter’s election was thus both the culmination and a new beginning. It marked the end of the era of New Deal Liberalism and launched the conservative Christian politics of the New Right. Much of the New Right drew on debates over race and gender.

IV. Fighting Feminism

Reactions against feminism provided much of the energy that animated the Religious Right. In the 1970s, it appeared that the feminist movement was on a roll. Over the preceding decade, feminists had helped to shift conversations about gender roles, sexual freedom, women’s healthcare, and domestic violence in major ways. Their efforts coincided with major demographic shifts. More women were working outside of the home than ever before, and it was becoming more common for women to stay in the workforce even after marrying and having children.¹⁸

Conservative Christians objected to these changes on religious and political grounds. They believed God had designed the male-headed, nuclear family (and the gender roles that went with it) as the bedrock of a healthy society. Any effort to change these arrangements, they argued, could destabilize society as a whole.¹⁹ Activists referred to these models as the “traditional family” and “traditional gender roles” because they reflected long-standing ideals in American culture.

Since conservative Christian leaders and activists opposed the feminist movement so strongly, many people assumed that the New Christian Right was mostly a movement led by and for men. However, women—especially middle-class, suburban white women—provided a driving force, both as leaders and grassroots activists.²⁰

Among their first targets was the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This amendment to the Constitution, originally written by suffragists in 1923, would prohibit sex-based discrimination. When feminists reintroduced it to Congress in 1971, it initially had bipartisan support. In less than eighteen months, it had passed through the House and Senate, and been ratified by twenty-two states.²¹ To be added to the Constitution, an amendment needs support from ¾ of the states (38 states in total).

Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic lawyer and activist from Missouri, launched the STOP ERA (“Stop Taking Our Privileges, ERA”) campaign.²² She argued that the broad wording of the ERA could result in unintended consequences, like overruling laws that had been specifically designed to protect women. She warned that the amendment could disadvantage housewives, make it possible to draft women into the military, and eliminate the expectation that women would receive alimony and custody in divorce cases.²³

Schlafly mobilized tens of thousands of women across the country. They emphasized their identities as housewives, often baking homemade treats for legislators, accompanied by handwritten poems like: “You can have your cake / And eat it, too / STOP ERA and / See Us Through.”²⁴ They succeeded. Despite an extended deadline, the congressional vote to support the amendment expired in 1982. Only 36 states had ratified the ERA, 5 of which later voted to withdraw their support. The ERA was not added to the U.S. Constitution.

Other women came to the New Christian Right through church networks. Beginning in the 1970s, more women became celebrities in a growing evangelical Protestant subculture. Many wrote advice books for other women. One of the most prominent was Beverly LaHaye, whose early books promoted conservative Christian gender theology, including the ideas that women should dedicate their lives to motherhood and be submissive to their husbands. Like most conservative evangelical authors, she initially presented her views as apolitical and then later got involved in formal politics.²⁵

In 1979, LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America (CWA) to “end the monopoly of feminists who claim to speak for all women.”²⁶ She acknowledged that some conservative Christian women might be uncomfortable with political activism, especially those who had been raised to believe that their place was in the home. But she argued that getting involved in politics was an essential part of their duty as women and as mothers. As women, they had a unique power to demonstrate that not all women agreed with contemporary feminists. She insisted that mothers had a responsibility to fight for conservative values in the communities where their children would grow up. LaHaye also saw politics as a part of every Christian’s religious duty: “If we are truly committed to Jesus Christ,” she wrote, “we have no alternative but to wage warfare against those who would destroy our children, our families, our religious liberties.²⁷ Like many others in this movement, she believed that the United States was a Christian nation and that Christians had to fight to keep it that way.

While women were often the driving force of religious grassroots activism against the feminist movement in the 1970s, evangelical men also took up the charge in various ways. In response to the feminist movement and permissive childrearing of the late 1960s, evangelical psychologist James C. Dobson wrote Dare to Discipline in 1970. The book sought to promote his version of the traditional family, one that he claimed could withstand the pressures of modern life because it was rooted in the Bible rather than the whims of contemporary culture. Dobson made it clear to his largely female audience that a strong family began with women rejecting feminist demands to enter the workforce and adhering to what he defined as their God-given role of submitting to their husbands, which meant, in part, devoting themselves to their children. Dobson’s recipe for a stable family appealed to many Christians—Protestant, Catholic, and Latter-day Saint—in the early 1970s.²⁸

By 1977, readers were sending Dobson so much mail that he decided to create an organization to answer letters and disseminate Christian-centered material on childrearing, marriage, and family to parents. Dobson created a far-reaching parachurch clearinghouse for materials supporting a particular version of Christian family life. He called this new organization Focus on the Family. Although positioned as advice for the domestic sphere, Dobson’s purpose was always political. As early as 1983, for example, Dobson showed his support for the Reagan administration by having Susan Baker, the wife of then–Secretary of the Treasury James Baker, join the Focus on the Family Board of Directors.

Many Americans read Dobson’s column in over 550 newspapers in the United States and Canada, listened to his ninety-second radio spots on more than 230 stations, and became absorbed in the explicitly Christian half-hour broadcast carried on over four thousand stations by the mid-1990s. The organization influenced how users and their families behaved in schools, at work, and, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, at the voting booth. By the 2000s, Dobson frequently appeared on Fox News commenting on culture and presidential politics.

In the battle over parenting, schools became particularly important battlegrounds, especially after Supreme Court decisions altered education across the nation. Brown v. Board and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg changed the racial makeup of public schools by demanding racial integration.²⁹ Other decisions like Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp outlawed mandated Christian prayers in schools.³⁰

In order to circumvent the ban on racial segregation, conservative Protestants began creating white-only private schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The curriculum here reflected the conservative Christian values of the developing Christian Right. By 1968, forty-two such segregated private schools were receiving state tuition vouchers in Mississippi alone. Many of these schools appealed to conservative evangelicals by banning the teaching of evolution, sex education, and secular humanism. Additionally, conservative Christian school associations—like the American Association of Christian Schools (1972) and the Association of Christian Schools International (1978)—were created to provide accreditation, professional training, curriculum, and insurance protection to these like-minded schools.³¹

For some conservative Christians, these private schools were not the solution. Prior to 1980, fewer than 20,000 children were homeschooled in the U.S. By the end of the decade, however, over 300,000 American school children were homeschooled. Around 90 percent of those homeschoolers were conservative Christians.³²

Raymond Moore, a Seventh-day Adventist, and developmental psychologists argued that children were not developmentally ready for school until age eight to ten. Versions of this research appeared in periodicals in the 1970s, including Reader’s Digest, which caught the attention of Christian psychologist James Dobson, who invited Moore and his wife, Dorothy, to host a series of radio shows promoting homeschool education for Focus on the Family in 1977. Between 1982 and 1988, twenty-eight states passed new homeschooling legislation, and the practice was legalized in all fifty states by 1993.³³

Homeschooling cannot be understood without recognizing the broader politics of the late-twentieth century. Debates over education were rooted in disagreements about race, religion, gender, family, and the role of the state in modern life. As we have seen, so many of these divisions grew from arguments about sexuality.

V. Sexual Politics

The emergence of the modern gay rights movement felt like salvation to many Americans who had lived lives of quiet fear. For others, it marked proof of the cultural damnation that Jerry Falwell promised. As one of the latter Americans, the singer Anita Bryant spearheaded the “Save Our Children” campaign in 1977, which successfully overturned a city ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in Dade County, Florida, through a public vote. This was the first public confrontation between the emerging Christian Right and the gay rights movement. In 1981, with support and mobilization from Falwell’s Moral Majority, Congress attempted to pass the Family Protection Act, which would, among other things, prohibit government support for homosexuality. As the Christian Right began to turn to voting, legislative, and judicial strategies to combat the gay rights movement, the movement adapted its strategies in various directions, which included a religious activism of its own.

While gay activists in the 1950s and 1960s labored to recruit the help of sympathetic, straight religious leaders to their cause, starting in the 1970s, LGBT people began to create their own religious institutions and demanded acceptance of their sexuality from existing religious organizations.³⁴ Their work furthered LGBT cultural acceptance and provided crucial infrastructure—financial support, a volunteer base, meeting space, seasoned leaders, and so forth—for the nascent gay rights movement.

Perhaps no religious figure was more influential in this regard than Rev. Troy D. Perry, founder of the United Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), a Christian denomination with special outreach to the LGBT community.³⁵ A Pentecostal preacher born in 1940 in Tallahassee, Florida, Perry came out as gay in 1963, causing him to lose both the church he pastored and his family. Called to start a church accepting of LGBT people, Perry held the first service of what would become the UFMCC in his living room in Huntington Beach, California, in October of 1968 with twelve people in attendance. By the time of the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in October 1979, however, the UFMCC had expanded to more than one hundred churches and missions in seven countries, upwards of 20,000 members, with an operating budget of $230,000—making it, by far, the largest grassroots gay organization in the world.³⁶

UFMCC members and leaders provided crucial support to emerging gay organizations in the 1970s at both the local and national levels, including local Gay Activists Alliances and the Gay Rights National Lobby (predecessor to the Human Rights Campaign). The emergence of the UFMCC also helped inspire the inauguration of similar groups across most major Christian denominations, like the Catholic group, Dignity, and supported the establishment of the first gay Jewish synagogues, Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles and Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York—all founded in the early 1970s.³⁷

Still, many within the broader LGBT community viewed the UFMCC as primarily a white, male-centric, middle-class project. Lesbians and bisexual women, like Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, and Gloria Anzaldúa, often found their spiritual inspiration in women-centered communities and lesbian-feminist enclaves,³⁸ as well as through eclectic forms of spirituality like Wicca and goddess worship.³⁹ Meanwhile, transgender women, like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, frequently found their spiritual sustenance in African and Latin American religious traditions like Santería and Vodou.⁴⁰

In the 1980s, queer religious people and institutions continued to play an important role in queer politics, especially during the AIDS crisis, establishing and leading new political and service organizations emerging in response to the crisis.⁴¹ This was especially true in communities of color. Throughout the 1980s, people of color in the LGBT community pioneered new cultural and political institutions aimed at better representing the experiences and needs of LGBT racial minorities—organizations like the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (NCBLG) and the Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization (LLEGO). Several of these organizations were founded and led by UFMCC members and clergy, like Gilberto Gerald, Renee McCoy, Darlene Gardner, and Delores Berry.⁴² For these gay and lesbian religious activists of color, religion was political and political action was spiritually inspired.

Perhaps no religious figure better represents this intersection of race, religion, sexuality, and politics than Baltimore, Maryland native and former Motown singer, Rev. Carl Bean.⁴³ In the midst of the AIDS crisis, Bean founded both the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, one of the first gay churches in the U.S. to meld together Afro-centric forms of spirituality and Christian praxis, and the Minority AIDS Project (MAP), one of the first community-based AIDS service providers prioritizing communities of color—both founded in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Like Rev. Perry a decade earlier, Bean went on to become a nationally recognized gay religious leader, co-founding the National Minority AIDS Council in Washington, DC, in 1987, and serving on the organization’s board of directors.

The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which is caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and particularly devastated gay communities. Gay religious leaders responded with new forms of organization and resistance. Formed in 1987, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) engaged in mass demonstrations outside state and federal buildings to protest the government’s inadequate response. They also targeted prominent Catholic churches to protest the church’s public stand against safe sex education and condom distribution. ACT UP was deeply indebted to the large number of Jewish participants in the organization and to Jewish history, thought, and terminology, which influenced ACT UP’s comparison of AIDS to the Holocaust and the use of the pink triangle and the slogan “Silence = Death” as the movement’s iconography.⁴⁴ Catholic symbolism was also a common feature of both ACT UP protests and artistic production.⁴⁵

In an interview for the 1983 Diagnosis AIDS documentary, conservative evangelical Christian leader Jerry Falwell expressed the beliefs of many in the evangelical conservative Religious Right movement when he stated that the AIDS epidemic was the result of gay men “violating the laws of decency and morality.”⁴⁶ Many Christian churches reflected this sentiment in the late 1980s by excluding individuals living with AIDS from their congregations or denying them access to pastoral care.⁴⁷

In September 1987 Father John W. Lord, a Catholic priest in Orange County, California, was diagnosed with AIDS. In an act of support, and to dispel any perceived risk to their parishioners, Lord’s superior, Father Eamon O’Gorman, decided that, moving forward, he and Lord would celebrate Mass together and drink from the same communion cup in public.⁴⁸ Religion informed both understandings of and responses to the crises that AIDS brought. But it was not the only crisis surrounding sexuality in the era.

As homosexuality became a more visible part of American culture in the twentieth century, Protestants were forced to grapple with an uncomfortable reality: some of their leaders appeared to be part of the increasingly recognizable sexual minority. As the midcentury ushered in a new era of social conservatism, Protestant leaders were worried about what they saw as loosened sexual mores and looked for ways to protect pastors’ reputations from accusations of sexual immorality. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, two high-profile scandals undermined Protestants’ claims to sexual innocence.

Billy James Hargis had risen to fame as an anti-communist preacher in the 1950s. By 1971, having denounced secular education, Hargis founded American Christian College, which sought to train the next generation of pious leaders. In 1976, Time magazine revealed that several students—both male and female—had accused Hargis of sexual impropriety.⁴⁹ The minister denied all accusations and denounced fellow Christians for not defending him. Hargis’s ministry survived, but the college closed its doors in 1977.

Meanwhile, a young charismatic preacher, Jim Bakker, and his wife Tammy Faye were building a Christian media empire. Their satellite television broadcasts reached millions of viewers with a message of salvation and prosperity. In 1987, the public learned that the Bakkers’ lavish lifestyles were supported, in part, by fraudulent financial machinations. Worse, the ministry had paid Jessica Hahn, a church secretary, $265,000 to stay silent about a 1980 sexual encounter with Bakker, which Hahn now characterized as assault.⁵⁰ At first, the Bakkers attempted to deny the accusations in hopes of swiftly returning to their lucrative ministry, but after several men anonymously accused Bakker of “bisexual activity,” the Assemblies of God church defrocked the minister. The secular realm was no more forgiving. In 1989, Bakker was sentenced to a $500,000 fine and forty-five years in prison, though the sentence was later reduced.

While Protestants were responding to fallout of sexual impropriety and infidelity and same-sex sexual activity among the ranks of some of their most visible public figures, the Catholic Church was dealing with a more sinister and perhaps more systemic sexual abuse issue.

At the same time as the AIDS crisis unfolded, the Catholic Church confronted a crisis of its own—one rooted not in an external epidemic, but in decades of concealed abuse within its own institutions. In the mid-to-late 1980s, it was revealed that, for decades, bishops and other church leaders had disregarded, downplayed, and covered up the sexual abuse of minors by thousands of priests, urging silence from victims while protecting abusers.

On May 23, 1985, The Times of Acadiana published the first of a two-part exposé under the headline “The Tragedy of Gilbert Gauthe.” The eleven-page feature, written by journalist Jason Berry, detailed the case of a Roman Catholic priest from the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, who had admitted in court to sexually abusing 37 young boys. The articles traced how, for years, church authorities ignored and buried reports about Gauthe, keeping him in active ministry even as he continued to victimize more children.⁵¹

The scale and notoriety of the Gauthe case marked a turning point in the life of the Roman Catholic Church. It was the first in what would become a worldwide cascade of revelations that, for decades, bishops and other church leaders had disregarded, downplayed, and covered up the sexual abuse of minors by thousands of priests, urging silence from victims while protecting abusers. The crises would corrode many Catholics’ trust in their institutions and undermine the credibility of its leaders, catalyze calls for greater transparency and accountability within the church hierarchy, give rise to decades of victims’ lawsuits, force the massive public disclosure of internal church documents, bankrupt more than three dozen U.S. dioceses and religious orders, and prompt gradual revisions in church policy.⁵²

VI. Reagan and Religion

As he campaigned for President, Reagan famously told a collection of evangelical leaders, “I know this is nonpartisan, so you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.”⁵³ It worked, and indeed many conservative Christian religious leaders did endorse Reagan and encouraged others to do so as well, even as he sought to oust the southern evangelical Jimmy Carter. When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, the newly empowered Religious Right took it as their victory, and they worked to press that victory as far as they could.

Ronald Reagan’s election marked a repudiation of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and announced a new era in American politics, one suffused with a triumphant conservative Christianity. Unlike Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan did not have an active faith life. He was a former actor, a divorcee, and seemingly tainted by the sins of Hollywood. Yet Reagan proved highly effective at courting conservative Christians, and he adopted many policies that pleased the new religious right, including opposing abortion, supporting school prayer, and calling for a more confrontational militaristic response to the Soviet Union.

Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and ended the policy of “detente” that was pursued during the 1970s. Some religious Americans, including mainline Protestants, Catholic bishops, Jewish groups, and ecumenical organizations, opposed Reagan’s militarism, particularly his opposition to the movement to freeze the production of nuclear weapons and Reagan’s embrace of some authoritarian governments in Latin America. Conservative Christians, however, supported the muscular assertion of the United States as the world’s sole superpower. Reagan developed close ties with Pope John Paul II, who shared Reagan’s opposition to Soviet communism, if not his emphasis on military coercion.

While most American Jews remained primarily aligned with the Democratic Party, some Orthodox and more conservative American Jews began moving toward the Republican Party due to support for Reagan’s policies in support of Israel and in opposition to global communism. Some expressed disappointment, however, when Reagan suspended delivery of F-16 fighter jets after Israel struck a nuclear reactor in Iraq. He also criticized Israel’s actions in its 1982 war against Lebanon. The Reagan administration also angered Israel after selling military aircraft to Saudi Arabia. Reagan’s strong stance against the Soviet Union included condemnations of Soviet mistreatment of Jews, and eventually hundreds of thousands of Jewish people fled the Soviet Union for the United States, further bolstering Reagan’s confrontational foreign policy.⁵⁴

Many in the grassroots of the Religious Right prioritized the attack on abortion in their politics. As governor of California, Reagan had earlier signed one of the nation’s most permissive abortion laws. However, over the 1970s, he slowly changed his tune, and his presidency backed restrictions on federal funding for abortion and attempted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Still, many in the religious right were disappointed in Reagan’s failure to ban abortion.⁵⁵

By the end of Reagan’s presidency, the religious right had become a seemingly permanent fixture in American politics. The Republican Party adopted policy proposals from religious organizations, and candidates courted religious leaders with zeal. A culture war was born with fronts at the ballot box, in media, and in schools. Yet the nation was also becoming more diverse, both challenging and galvanizing conservative Christian activists.

VII. Seeking Ummah

Muslims had lived among Americans long before the United States came to be. In the first half of the twentieth century, Muslim immigrants largely settled in the Northeast, Midwest, and West and largely assimilated quietly into those communities. The changes brought by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act would create new patterns for American Muslims who quickly began to build their own institutions. 

Many new immigrants in the 1970s arrived from recently colonized parts of the world. Familiar with decolonization struggles, they tended to defend their cultural and religious identities and resist acculturation. The Muslim population continued to grow in the 1980s. Many older immigrants who had come as students graduated and settled permanently in America. To accommodate Muslims beyond college campuses, the Muslim Student Association (MSA) created the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which took over the MSA’s national responsibilities in 1983. As the decades progressed, Muslim communities spread out across the U.S., amassing a significant concentration in the South for the first time since the antebellum era. 

During the 1970s and 1980s, especially after the 1979 “Islamic” revolution in Iran, Muslim Americans also became increasingly religious. In the postcolonial Muslim world, Islam symbolized resistance to Western colonialism, and the success of an “Islamic” revolution invigorated Muslim faith. Many began to seriously study the Qur’an and Sunna and understand it for themselves, embodying the individualism of their American homeland. Some scholars, such as Fazlur Rahman, also introduced new ways to read and interpret the scriptures. This awakening would continue through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. 

The religious revitalization extended beyond scholarship to include institution-building.  The 1970s were especially significant for building local masjids or mosques. In the 1970s, Muslim American communities established five times more Masjids than they had in the 1950s and 1960s. This continued in the 1980s, although at a slower rate. At times, local communities received financial support from national organizations or foreign governments, but most often Masjid-building was a local, independent venture. 

The 1970s were also important for multi-racial and multi-ethnic cooperation. As Warith D. Muhammad brought the Nation of Islam (NOI) closer to mainstream Sunni religious practice in the mid-1970s, the NOI began to work together with immigrant organizations such as the MSA. Together, these Muslims strove to minimize ethnic and racial divides and identify themselves as a religious community under the unified banner of ummah. 

For ummah-building, the MSA also promoted a scripturalist version of Islam where Qur’an and Sunna guided religious practice rather than culture. Islamic practice within America was growing increasingly diverse as immigration increased. Immigrant Muslims arriving from all over the world brought localized Islamic practices that reflected the history and culture of their places of origin. However, tensions persisted between different ethnic groups, and most Muslims continued to identify with their ethnic cohorts.

Interracial tensions also simmered, even as interracial cooperation increased throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Class also played into the new dynamic. As Cold War priorities led the U.S. to favor high-skilled immigrants, the economic demographics within the Muslim American community shifted towards middle-class populations. Cold War U.S. politics allowed these immigrants access to higher education and white-collar jobs. These immigrants, in turn, separated themselves both residentially and socially from black communities. Immigrant Muslim communities seldom intermarried with black Muslims. Thus, racism and classicism significantly obstructed American ummah-building. 

Tensions within Muslim America also extended to generational tensions. Newer immigrants denounced early twentieth-century immigrants for overly assimilating and viewed their practices as un-Islamic. However, despite their objections to assimilation, foreign developments pulled newer immigrants further into the American system.

U.S. Foreign policy catalyzed Muslim American activism by the end of the 1970s. For transnational Muslims, events abroad were integral to their identities and experiences. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the MSA to add political activism to their agenda. Muslim American leaders increasingly called on their communities to vote and participate in the political process to affect U.S. foreign policy. They hoped to stem U.S. support for Israeli occupation and increase U.S. support for Afghanistan. 

The 1980s also mainstreamed American Islamophobia. Many Americans began to think of events in the Middle East through a religious lens. Although the FBI had begun surveilling Muslims as early as the 1960s, the Iranian Revolution led more Americans to view Muslims as threats. The 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis became newly dubbed as “Islamic terrorism” rather than “Arab terrorism.” 

American Muslims experienced two oppositional forces during the 1970s and 1980s. A surge in migration led to a rise in institution-building. At the same time, cultural forces seemed to align against them, particularly as the Religious Right gained strength and came to see Islam as fundamentally un-American. 

VIII. Cults and New Religious Movements

On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department bombed the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania resulting in the destruction of 61 homes. The target of the PPD was the MOVE organization, a new religious movement that the police department had been seeking to evict from a home in the neighborhood. Originally founded in 1972 under the name Christian Movement for Life, MOVE was a religious communalism organization that synthesized Christian theology with Black nationalism, the Rastafari movement, and anarcho-primitivism and advocated for Black liberation, animal rights, nature laws, and natural living.

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of numerous new religious movements (NRMs), referred to broadly as “cults.⁵⁶ Like MOVE, many NRMs of the 1970s and 1980s were syncretistic, drawing from and combining elements from different religious and cultural traditions. The Children of God, one of the most controversial of 1970s NRMs, combined Evangelical Christian theology with 1960s hippie counterculture. Group members dressed like the flower children of Woodstock and practiced free love, but also held conventional evangelical Christian views of salvation, such as the need for a personal relationship with Jesus, and an expectation of a literal fulfillment of the prophecies foretold in the Book of Revelation.⁵⁷

Other groups transplanted religion to American shores in new ways, such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), known more popularly as the Hare Krishnas. Dressed in Indian robes, chanting Sanskrit prayers, and distributing English translations of sacred Hindu literature, the group represented a transplantation of a form of Hinduism called Chaitanya Vaishnavism. But ISKCON appealed to many North Americans involved in psychedelics and spiritual seeking, offering a permanent high and ultimate spiritual trip through the practice of chanting and ritual devotion to the God Krishna.⁵⁸

Both these examples—and many others—shared religious, sociological, and historical commonalities despite broad theological differences. NRMs of the late twentieth-century United States tended to embrace forms of millennialism, what scholar Catherine Wessinger identifies as “the belief in an imminent transition to a collective salvation” by means of divine or superhuman agents.⁵⁹  For Hare Krishnas, this was the creation of a new society based on ancient Indian values. For the Children of God, it was the Second Coming of Jesus.

Numerous groups appealed to these millennial visions, with frequent turns to either the Christian Book of Revelation (e.g. the Branch Davidians, the Unification Church, the Twelve Tribes) or Asian religious models of salvation (3HO, Rajneesh movement).⁶⁰ Other NRMs had alternative millennial expectations, such as the Communist utopia of the Peoples Temple, or the extraterrestrial outer space millennialism of Heaven’s Gate.⁶¹ NRMs also included confessional Satanists such as the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set. Esoteric and Neopagan NRMs proliferated as well. The rise of such NRMs revealed the tensions present in late twentieth-century cultural shifts, and the attraction to forms of alternative or radical spirituality in a rapidly changing world. Adherents longed for spiritual solutions to what they perceived as the pressing needs of modern life.

Such groups struck outsiders as deviant. NRMs often appealed to young people, who then rejected higher education and promising careers to drop out and join high-demand religious movements that their parents and broader society considered weird, if not heretical. Parents’ associations, churches, mental health advocates, and law enforcement latched onto the idea of “brainwashing” to explain why the youth would join such NRMs.⁶² The brainwashing model, based on a limited study of terrorized prisoners of war held in military prisons, provided a foundation for the rise of the anti-cult movement (ACM). A number of NRMs did in fact pose significant threats to members and outsiders, most notably the Peoples Temple, which culminated in a mass casualty event in 1978. The ACM eventually imploded due to the legal and ethical problems inherent in “forced deconversions” or “deprogrammings,” which generally involved kidnapping members of NRMs and holding them against their will.

IX. Conclusion

The rise of evangelicalism that coincided with Jimmy Carter turned into something quite different. The Religious Right remade American politics. The New Deal coalition had been shattered by the realignment that came after desegregation and through the rise of the culture war. Christian schools, homeschooling, megachurches, televangelism, and a rapidly growing network of conservative talk radio stations created an infrastructure for a religious and political movement that would capture the nation for decades.

Yet some of the trends of the 1960s continued. The nation continued to become more diverse and many of the liberalizing and secularizing currents in American culture gained strength. The movement for gay rights liberation advanced. Many women refused to surrender the social changes wrought by feminism. New immigrants developed infrastructures to nurture their communities. And Black and Indigenous Americans defended and sought to extend the advances of civil rights movements. All of these forces both drew on various forms of American religion and transformed them in turn.

X. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Travis B. Hill with content contributions from Danny Ballon-Garst, Nicole Carroll, Matthew J. Cressler, Megan Goodwin, Travis B. Hill, Emily Suzanne Johnson, Joseph L. Locke, Suzanna Krivulskaya, Michael McLaughlin, Susan B. Reynolds, Susan B. Ridgely, L. Benjamin Rolsky, Jeffrey Sánchez, Faatimah Shamim, Taurean Webb, Ben Wright, and Benjamin E. Zeller

Recommended Reading

1. Randall Balmer, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter (Basic Books, 2014).
2. William Sims Bainbridge, The Endtime Family: The Children of God (State University of New York Press, 2002).
3. Lilian Calles Barger, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018).
4. Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton University Press, 2005).
5. Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2017).
6. Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
7. Angela Denise Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
8. Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America (University Press of Kansas, 2007).
9. Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W. W. Norton, 2011).
10. Emily Suzanne Johnson, This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right (Oxford University Press, 2019).
11. J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2021).
12. David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013).
13. R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (University of California Press, 1997).
14. R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017).
15. Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Power and Politics in the New Christian Right (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
16. Joel W. Martin, The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2001).
17. Michael McNally, Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment (Princeton University Press, 2020).
18. Anthony M. Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015).
19. E. Burke Rochford, Hare Krishna Transformed (New York University Press, 2007).
20. Susan B. Ridgely, Practicing What the Doctor Preached: At Home with Focus on the Family (Oxford University Press, 2016).
21. Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2014).
22. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford University Press, 2010).
23. Heather R. White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
24. Daniel Vaca, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard University Press, 2019)
25. Benjamin E. Zeller, Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion (New York University Press, 2014).

Notes

1. Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 172; Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (University of Alabama Press, 2007), 30–32. ↩︎
2. Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Duke University Press, 2016). ↩︎
3. “Black Panther Revolutionary Wedding,” Black Panther, May 11, 1969, 7. ↩︎
4. “Statement By Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense Black Panther Party Servant of the People To the Black Odyssey Festival”, Black Panther, May 29, 1971, 9-14. ↩︎
5. Angela Denise Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2007). ↩︎
6. Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (University of Kentucky Press, 2017). ↩︎
7. Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2017). ↩︎
8. Diane C. Fujino and Matef Harmachis, eds., Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (Haymarket Books, 2020), 81–84; Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. collection, M0864. Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif., Series 2, Box 54, Folder 1. ↩︎
9. Troy Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and The Rise of Indian Activism (University of Illinois Press, 1996). ↩︎
10. ALCATRAZ Proclamation, https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=ALCATRAZ_Proclamation ↩︎
11. Michael McNally, Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment (Princeton University Press, 2020). ↩︎
12. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present (Riverhead Books, 2019). ↩︎
13. “A Public Declaration to the Tribal Councils and Traditional Spiritual Leaders of the Indian and Eskimo Peoples of the Pacific Northwest” published in The American Rights Fund Legal Review, Winter 1988, National Indian Law Library, https://narf.org/nill/documents/nlr/nlr13-1.pdf ↩︎
14. Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024). ↩︎
15. Joel W. Martin, The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (Oxford Academic, 2001). ↩︎
16. Jerry Falwell Sr., “America Back to God,” July 5, 1976, Jerry Falwell Library, https://liberty.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p17184coll4/id/3828 ↩︎
17. Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 8; Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy (Hill and Wang, 2012), 3, 8–10, 309–366. ↩︎
18. Ruth Milkman, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality (University of Illinois Press, 2016), 36; “Women in the labor force: a databook,” BLS Reports (Washington, DC: Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2023), https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2022/home.htm;  See especially table 1 (“Employment status of civilian noninstitutional population, 16 years and older, by gender, 1948–2021 annual”). ↩︎
19. Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Power and Politics in the New Christian Right (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 52–77; Dowland, Family Values, 3-16, 44–45. ↩︎
20. Emily Suzanne Johnson, This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right (Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩︎
21. Ronnee Schreiber, “Anti-Feminist, Pro-Life, and Anti-ERA Women,” in Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women’s Social Movement Activism, eds. Holly J. McCammon, Verta Taylor, Jo Reger, and Rachel K. Einwohner, (Oxford University Press, 2017), 320. ↩︎
22. Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton University Press, 2005). ↩︎
23. Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics (Bloomsbury, 2017), 71–113. ↩︎
24. Quoted in Robin M. Morris, Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Rise of the New Right  (University of Georgia Press, 2022), 111. ↩︎
25. Johnson, This Is Our Message, 60–61, 68–92. ↩︎
26. Johnson, This Is Our Message, 68; Beverly LaHaye, Who But A Woman? (Thomas Nelson, 1984), 122. ↩︎
27. Johnson, This Is Our Message, 77–78; LaHaye, Who But A Woman?, 136–137. ↩︎
28. Susan B. Ridgely, Practicing what the Doctor Preached: At Home with Focus on the Family (Oxford University Press, 2016). ↩︎
29. J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2021). ↩︎
30. Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America (University Press of Kansas (2007). ↩︎
31. Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education (The New Press, 2017). ↩︎
32. Milton Gaither, Homeschool: An American History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 142. ↩︎
33. Gaither, Homeschool. ↩︎
34. Heather R. White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants at the Rise of Gay Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2015); John D’ Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1983). ↩︎
35. For an account of the UFMCC’s founding told from Perry’s perspective, see Troy D. Perry, The Lord Is My Shepherd & He Knows I’m Gay (Universal Fellowship Press, 1972); Troy D. Perry and Thomas L. P. Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore: The Story of the Revered Troy Perry and the Metropolitan Community Churches (St. Martin’s Press, 1990). For a more academic account of the UFMCC’s history, see Mark D. Jordan, Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality (Chicago University Press, 2011), 103-128; Melissa M. Wilcox, Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community (Indiana University Press, 2003), Melissa M. Wilcox, “Of Markets and Missions: The Early History of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 11, no. 1 (2018): 83-108. ↩︎
36. UFMCC, Reports and Directives of General Conference IX (Los Angeles: UFMCC, 1979). ↩︎
37. For a history of Dignity, see Mark D. Jordan, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 248-253. For a history of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, see Moshe Shokeid, A Gay Synagogue in New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). ↩︎
38. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984); Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Beacon Press, 1973); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987). ↩︎
39. Melissa M. Wilcox, Queer Women and Religious Individualism (Indiana University Press, 2009). ↩︎
40. Ahmad Greene-Hayes, “Street Evangelists and Transgender Saints: Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and the Religions of the Afro-Americas,” QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion, no. 1 (2024): 32-52. ↩︎
41. Dan Royles, To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS (University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Lynne Gerber, “We Who Must Die Demand a Miracle: Christmas 1989 at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco,” in Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States, eds. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 253-276. ↩︎
42. Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, eds., Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism (University of Texas Press, 2015); Monique Moultrie, Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership (Duke University Press, 2023). ↩︎
43. Carl Bean, I Was Born This Way: A Gay Preacher’s Journey through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ (Simon & Schuster, 2010). ↩︎
44. Gillian Frank, “The History of Sexuality Has a Jewish Problem,” Notches, April 6, 2017; Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). ↩︎
45. Anthony M. Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press 2015), 137-185; Anthony M. Petro, “Ray Navarro’s Jesus Camp, AIDS Activist Video, and the ‘New Anti-Catholicism,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85, no. 4 (2017): 920-956. ↩︎
46. Diagnosis: AIDS, KCTS, October 6, 1983, American Archive of Public Broadcasting, https://americanarchive.org/primary_source_sets/aids-epidemic/4-526-2z12n50j78. ↩︎
47. “1980s: AIDS Epidemic and Queer Ministry,” Rainbow History Project. ↩︎
48. Lynn Smith, “County Priest Dies of AIDS; Known as Articulate Activist,” Los Angeles Times, Feb 18, 1989. ↩︎
49. “The Sins of Billy James,” Time 107, no. 7 (February 16, 1976): 68. ↩︎
50. John H. Wigger, PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017), 297. ↩︎
51. Jason Berry, “The Tragedy of Gilbert Gauthe,” The Times of Acadiana, May 23, 1985. See also Jason Berry, Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children (University of Illinois Press, 2000). ↩︎
52. Between 2004 and 2024, 37 U.S. Catholic dioceses and three religious orders have filed for bankruptcy protection. For an updated list of these filings, see “Bankruptcy Protection in the Abuse Crisis,” BishopAccountability.org, https://www.bishop-accountability.org/bankruptcy.htm. ↩︎
53. William Martin, With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (Broadway Books, 1996), 216. ↩︎
54. Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. Chapter 4, “The Right to Leave: Soviet Jewish Emigration.” ↩︎
55. Robert Mason, “Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party: Responses to Realignment,” in Ronald Reagan and the 1980s, eds., Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies(Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 151–72. ↩︎
56. Douglas E. Cowan and David G. Bromley, Cults and New Religions: A Brief History (Wiley Blackwell, 2015); Lydia Willsky-Ciollo, ed., New Religious Movements in North America (Bloomsbury, 2022). ↩︎
57. William Sims Bainbridge, The Endtime Family: The Children of God (State University of New York Press, 2002). ↩︎
58. E. Burke Rochford, Hare Krishna Transformed (New York University Press, 2007); Edwin F. Bryant and Maria Ekstrand, eds., The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (Columbia University Press, 2004). ↩︎
59. Catherine Wessinger, “Millennialism in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Oxford Handbook of Millennialism, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. ↩︎
60. See especially James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco?: Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (University of California Press, 1997). ↩︎
61. See Rebecca Moore, Peoples Temple and Jonestown in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022); Benjamin E. Zeller, Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion (New York University Press, 2014). ↩︎
62. Massimo Introvigne, “The Anti-Cult Movement in North America,” in New Religious Movements in North America, ed. Lydia Willsky-Ciollo (Bloomsbury, 2022), 58-62. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

In 1960, Billy Graham and Martin Luther King travelled together to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the 10^th Baptist World Congress. The message of Christ’s love and salvation was a familiar one, but the two ministers stood at the precipice of a new age in American religions. Some things would change drastically. Supreme Court rulings, the emergence of diverse pluralism, a racial revolution, progressive theological interventions, and a critique of institutions would create a new society. But others would continue—the witness of the Black church, the eclectic search for the divine, the endurance of conservative evangelicalism. Throughout the tumultuous 1960s, American religions shaped the nation’s political, social, and cultural transformations.

II. Kennedy and the Courts

In 1960 America approached a decade of drastic change.  “History rarely follows the decimal system as neatly as it did in 1960,” one historian put it.¹ Embodying this spirit of optimism was the charming 43-year-old recently elected to the Presidency. “The torch has been passed to a new generation,” John F. Kennedy intoned in his aristocratic Boston accent. But it hadn’t been an inevitable handoff. The last Catholic to run, Al Smith in 1924, had faced virulent opposition and lost badly, as headlines warned the election amounted to a battle between “Protestant Americanism versus Rum and Romanism.”² By 1960, those sentiments had softened, but many Americans still questioned electing a Catholic to the nation’s highest office. 

Billy Graham, who had developed a close friendship with Kennedy’s Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, promised not to publicly denounce Kennedy’s Catholic faith. Still, he met with Norman Vincent Peale and other Protestant ministers in Montreaux, Switzerland, determined to “do all within [their] power to help [Nixon].”³ Kennedy decided to address the “so-called religious issue” directly. At the September convening of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Kennedy stated, “I am Catholic,” and “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” He went on, “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish… where religious intolerance will someday end… and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews [will] promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.”⁴ It was just enough, and Kennedy won one of the closest elections in American history. 

In his inaugural address, the President championed a new era, one of  “defending freedom” against the “common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself,” exhorting his fellow Americans from Paul’s epistle to the Romans to be always “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation.”⁵

When Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, Billy Graham lamented. “He was always interested in the moral and spiritual welfare of the country,” he began, “he was one of the most affable, winsome men I ever met. I never agreed with everything he did,” Graham went on, but said that the young President had been “very anxious to heal the religious breach in this country.” Graham, like so many other Americans, admitted: “I couldn’t keep the tears back.”⁶

The 1960 Election echoed the Cold War invocation of “one nation under God.” This theologically unspecific Judeo-Christian identity, created and wielded in opposition to godless communism, had earned broad appeal.⁷ Americans sought solace in religious institutions. According to the Yearbook of American Churches, 63% of Americans reported being church members, the highest number since statistical recording started in 1850.⁸ “Whether we judge by religious identification, church membership, or church attendance, whether we go by bestseller lists, the mass media, or writings of intellectuals,” sociologist Will Herberg wrote, the conclusion is the same: there is every sign of a notable ‘turn to religion’ among the American people today.”⁹ But Herberg lamented what he saw as a simultaneous secularity. Religion, whether of the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish variety, had “lost much of its Christian (or Jewish) content.” It has also lost much ethnic distinctiveness, as decades of restrictive immigration laws, postwar assimilationism, and suburbanization led to a flattening of expression.

Civil religion proliferated, as did institutions of faith like the National Council of Churches and the National Evangelical Association, even as many Americans wrestled with individual belief.¹⁰ A minority also questioned religion’s role in the public sphere and the country’s commitment to pluralism.¹¹  “It is this secularism of a religious people, this religiousness of a secularist framework, that constitutes the problem posed by the contemporary religious situation in America,” Herberg concluded.¹² It was a problem that would soon be addressed by the courts. 

In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court took up a series of questions examining religion and public life: Did “blue laws,” which closed businesses on Sundays, constitute a religious establishment or interfere with the rights of shopkeepers? Did the state owe unemployment benefits to someone fired for practicing their religious beliefs? Did a state requirement for public officials to swear they believed in the existence of God violate the First Amendment? Did voluntary prayers in schools violate the Establishment clause? What about daily recitations of the Bible? 

In Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), the Court unanimously held that states could not deny atheists public office by demanding professions of belief, reasoning that a religious test for office “unconstitutionally invades the appellant’s freedom of belief and religion.”¹³  But blue laws which banned alcohol were deemed acceptable, as a majority of justices ruled in McGowan v. Maryland (8-1). Braunfield v. Brown (6-3) determined that a day of rest was neither an establishment of religion nor an infringement on the religious freedom of Jews or other non-Christians who wanted to do business on Sundays.¹⁴ While these 1961 cases produced only a mild response, two cases about religion in public schools loomed on the docket. These two cases “fell like a meteor” on American society.¹⁵

Every day, students in public schools in the state of New York recited the Pledge of Allegiance as well as an ecumenical prayer written by the Board of Regents that acknowledged “dependence” on Almighty God and asked for “blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our Country.” In 1959, parents in New Hyde Park sued the School Board over the prayer, which, though voluntary, they felt violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. By 1962, Engel v. Vitale had worked its way up to the Supreme Court. Writing for the 6-1 majority, Justice Hugo Black wrote that the proscribed prayer constituted a “religious activity…a solemn avowal of divine faith and supplication,” and as such was “wholly inconsistent” with the Constitutional provision against establishing a state religion.¹⁶ 

But what about the Lord’s Prayer or a reading from the Bible? The following year, the Court considered that question in the case of Abington v. Schempp. As for Pennsylvania’s requirement that “at least ten Bible verses be read, without comment,” and the “Lord’s Prayer recited” at the start of the school day, the Court found that, despite the possibility of student exemption, “the religious exercises and the [state] law requiring them are in violation of the Establishment Clause.” Writing for the 8-1 majority, Justice Tom C. Clark acknowledged that “religion has been closely identified with our history and government,” but also insisted that this reality “is not to say, however…that religious freedom is not likewise as strongly embedded.”¹⁷ Reactions to Engel and Abington were immediate and vehement. The Supreme Court received more hate mail than ever before.¹⁸ Gallup found that 85% of respondents disagreed with the decisions, which, Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge railed, “put God and the Devil on equal plane.”¹⁹ 

III. Civil Rights

In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court sought to clarify the legal relationship between religion in public life with a “strong” establishment clause jurisprudence and a stronger free exercise clause jurisprudence.²⁰ But the Court’s rulings on religion and education were invoked in a surprising and important way—to oppose the Brown decision and the ongoing civil rights movement. As Alabama Congressman George Andrews put it: “they put the Negroes in schools; now they put God out of the schools.”²¹

Of course, for Black proponents of freedom and equality, they felt God was on their side in the struggle for full social and political rights as Americans and as children of God. The grassroots Black protest movement of the 1960s was anchored within the structures and traditions of the Black church and powered by religious ideals.

At the 1960 founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in North Carolina, students declared: “We affirm the philosophical or religious idea of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from a Judaeo-Christian tradition seeks a social order of justice permeated by love.”²² In Albany, Georgia in 1961, ordinary men and women engaged in direct action, challenging white supremacy and asserting, “We believe in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man…[and] our beliefs have consequences.”²³

Believing that they possessed inherent dignity in the imago Dei, many Black Christians in the South engaged in nonviolent collective action designed to confront the sin of racism, convert the oppressor, and forge a beloved community. This is why, when Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi organizer, first left the cotton fields of the Delta for the Movement, she said she was going to “work for Jesus.”²⁴ This work would soon transform the nation. The well-known Montgomery Bus Boycott, marking for many the beginning of the grassroots civil rights struggle, was “decidedly more faith oriented” than politically oriented, constituting, in historian David Garrow’s words, a “mass witness.”²⁵ Activist Bayard Rustin agreed, stating that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was “strong because it is religious as well as political. It has been built upon the most stable institution of the Southern Negro community—the Church.”²⁶

For generations, the Black Church had cultivated a source of both organizational and theological power. Relatively autonomous within the Jim Crow South, the church offered the primary space for civil rights organizing and for the development of Movement leaders. Many mass meetings were held in churches, combining political will and spiritual power. As Prathia Hall, an activist from Pennsylvania, recounted, “you could hear the rhythm of the feet, and the clapping of the hands from the old prayer meeting tradition…it was just about the most powerful thing I’d ever experienced.”²⁷

Black ministers also provided important leadership. Often trained in seminaries and connected within university and denominational structures, they formed what Dennis C. Dickerson has called a “cadre of religious intellectuals” who provided the freedom struggle’s theological underpinnings and usable praxes.²⁸ Figures such as the Revs. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Lawson, Fred Shuttlesworth, Kelly Miller Smith, Joseph Lowery, Wyatt Tee Walker, and many others together comprised an impressive leadership network, collaborating in groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

But the Black church —the A.M.E., C.M.E., Black Baptist Church, Black Presbyterians and Catholics, along with Pentecostal brothers and sisters like those in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)—offered more than independent space, leadership, and resources. As Aldon Morris has stated, it “supplied the civil rights movement with a collective enthusiasm…the songs, testimonies, oratory, and prayers that spoke directly to the needs of an oppressed group.”²⁹ It should come as no surprise, then, that white supremacists, many claiming to be fellow Christians, burned Black churches to the ground during the 1960s, in places like Mt Olive Baptist Church in Terrell County, GA, and Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, MS, and bombed the 16^th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four young girls attending Sunday School. 

Proponents of the racial status quo white were also motivated by religion. In 1961, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover expressed the Bureau’s “Christian purpose” to defend America against the threats of communism, including, in his mind, agitators at home. These included civil rights activists like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr., who Hoover considered a “clerical fraud,” and had investigated and wiretapped.³⁰ Well into the 1960s, many white congregations passed official “closed door” laws, proclaiming their sanctuaries segregated.³¹ L. Nelson Bell, Billy Graham’s father-in-law, endorsed a statement that “voluntary segregation in churches, schools, and other social relations…is not unchristian.”³² “Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, when we stand to sing ‘In Christ there is no East or West,’” Dr. King famously put it, “is the most segregated hour in America.”³³ Other white moderate clergy stopped short of endorsing racial segregation in ecclesiastical space, but urged gradualism and moderation. Billy Graham urged his “good personal friend” to “put the brakes on a little bit.”³⁴

In Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, eight Alabama clergy representing Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish congregations appealed for “law and order and common sense.” They acknowledged “racial problems” and “the natural impatience” of those denied rights, but nevertheless urged “restraint” and criticized even nonviolent direct action as the work of “outsiders” which “incite[s] hatred and violence.”³⁵

An incensed and incarcerated King responded. He not only defended nonviolent demonstrations and civil disobedience against unjust laws but pleaded for a theological reckoning over racial injustice. “In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities,” King scrawled out on scraps of paper and newspaper margins, “In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, “Those are social issues with which the Gospel has no real concern,” and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely other-worldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.” The civil rights movement demanded that religious people and institutions apply their beliefs to a racially divided America, that they answer King’s questions: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?”³⁶ As the grassroots civil rights movement sat in, prayed in, kneeled in, and marched from Montgomery to Albany, Birmingham to Washington, D.C., to Selma, it therefore transformed “ordinary Southern towns” into “theaters of complex theological drama.”³⁷

While the majority of grassroots Black Americans who participated in the Southern freedom struggle identified as Protestant Christians, there were other religious traditions present, from the Nation of Islam to the Greek Orthodox Church, to the Baháʼí Faith, pushing and pulling the movement in productive directions. Many Jewish college students came to the South with SNCC and CORE to work for change, people like Howard Zinn, Joni Rabinowitz, Zev Aelony, as well as Michael Schwerner and Andy Goodman, who were both killed in Mississippi in 1964.³⁸ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel offered theological power to arguments for racial equality. After marching alongside Black activists, he remarked, “my legs were praying.” Yarmulkes were so ubiquitous during marches that one rabbi joked they were “becoming fashionable”; the so-called “freedom cap “was the “hottest item” in Selma.³⁹ Sister Mary Antonia Ebo also marched in Selma, declaring, “I am here today because I am a Negro, a nun, a Catholic, and because I want to bear witness.”⁴⁰

The Catholic Church had issued a statement on civil rights in 1963, “On Racial Harmony,” which proclaimed, “the heart of the race question is moral and religious.” “No Catholic with a good Christian conscience,” it stated, five days before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, “can fail to recognize the rights of all citizens to vote…. equal opportunity for employment, full participation in our public and private educational facilities, proper housing, and adequate welfare assistance when needed.”⁴¹ While individual Catholics did not all embrace this moral call, the Church had made its position clear. It was not the first time it had done so in the 1960s.

IV. Vatican II

In 1962, Pope John XXIII convened more than 2,000 bishops from around the world for a meeting that became known as the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II. For more than three years, even after the Pope’s death, a remarkably unified group of Church leaders debated doctrinal reaffirmations and changes from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. With “a new enthusiasm, a new joy,” the ecumenical council sought that “certain and immutable doctrine…be studied afresh and reformulated in contemporary terms.”⁴² The 16 documents that emerged from Vatican II were stunning, invigorating, and, in some cases, controversial. They included defenses of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), calls to ecumenicism (Unitatis Redintegratio) and religious dialogue (Nostra Aeate). They also radically altered Catholic practice, opening and simplifying the sacramental rites, loosening dietary requirements, and allowing for more musical styles and instrumentation, the so-called “guitar masses.”

Most importantly, though, Vatican II called for a vernacular mass, so that people could hear the prayers and the gospel in their native languages. The priests, now facing the people versus populum, spoke directly to the laity, who assumed a much more active participatory role in the life of the Church. “I was 12 or 13 when the changes at Vatican II began,” Jeanne McDermott recalled, “it had a big impact…you had more of a connection to what was going on. The Mass became more meaningful, more real to me.”⁴³ 

Some factions resisted the changes, like the Catholic Traditionalist Movement, founded in 1964, which insisted on the strict use of Latin. Anita Nelson of Encino, CA described this tension. “In the old days as a little girl I had to read my missal to know what the priest was saying,” she remembered. Vatican II “alienated some people[who] really wanted that strong Latin rite,” but also meant that “children growing up now can hear what the priest is saying. And turning the priest to facing us made him part of us.”⁴⁴ Catholics began embracing new “spiritual gifts,” including those associated with movements of the Holy Spirit, setting off a small but significant Catholic charismatic movement. By the time, Vatican II concluded in 1965, the Church was transformed, even as it retained traditional views on many social doctrines, including around gender and sexuality.

V. New Migrants

1965 proved to be a year of massive change not only in the Church but also in American politics. After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Texan Lyndon B. Johnson had assumed the Presidency and championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, after the March from Selma to Montgomery, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. But there was another piece of legislation adopted that year: the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, or Hart-Celler Act. 

This massive immigration reform bill abolished the racial quotas established in the 1924 Immigration and National Origins Quota Act and instead set a total limit on migration regardless of nationality, with preference given for family unification and those possessing skills “advantageous” to the United States. It also set a limit on migration from the Western Hemisphere, for the first time. When President Johnson signed the bill into law on Liberty Island in New York, he proclaimed it “abolished…the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system.” Vice President Hubert Humphries declared that the reform, along with recently passed civil rights legislation, dispelled the notion that “there are second-class people” in America.⁴⁵ But few lawmakers anticipated the seismic shift in demographics that would accompany Hart-Celler, in particular the long-term effects of family visas. For instance, in 1960, there were just 11,000 Koreans in the United States, 1,700 Pakistanis, and 17,000 Indians; by 2000, these groups would experience increases of 7755%, 13018%, and 5782% respectively.⁴⁶ 

Without intending to, Congress had created an opening for the migration and citizenship of people possessing not only new national origins, but diverse religious commitments, including Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Taoists, and Hindus, as well as Christians and Jews from around the world. 

In 1963, Muslim graduate students at eleven land grant universities across the rural Midwest, who were recruited into scientific and technological fields from across South Asia and the Middle East, founded the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Initially, this small group gathered together simply to fulfill their basic religious obligations, namely communal prayer on Fridays. But following the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, the organization expanded rapidly. By 1968, the MSA had nearly 100 branches in universities across the United States. 

In this period, the MSA emphasized protecting cultural practices, resisting Americanization, particularly around consumerism and gender, and creating an immigrant umma, a religious community undivided by sectarian and ethnic divisions. Energized by this vision of a more universalist Islam, early MSA members worked outside of American universities to start mosques and schools, to offer social services for Muslims in America and fundraise for Muslims around the world suffering from poverty, suppression of religion, and war. They imagined Islam as providing a “third way” between Soviet communism and liberal democratic capitalism, open to partnerships with other religious Americans.⁴⁷ 

More and more, those religious Americans included practitioners of Asian religions. While many of these religious traditions had existed in the United States previously, their prevalence and influence increased significantly in the 1960s. For example, Sikhs, from the Punjab region of India, had been present in America in small numbers, as was the case with Bhagat Singh Thind, who petitioned for citizenship in 1923, and Iate Dalip Singh Saund, of California, who became the first Asian elected to the House of Representatives in 1957. But after 1965, Sikhs migrated in higher numbers. In 1965, Sikhs in New York City established a Sikh Cultural Center and later a gurdwara, or temple, in what had once been a Baptist Church.⁴⁸

In 1968, Harbhajan Singh Puri, known as Yogi Bhajan, immigrated to the United States, starting a movement to help people become “healthy, happy, and holy” and also teaching the practice of yoga and meditation. Taoism similarly experienced growth post-1965. Though the Taoist Tin Hou Temple in San Francisco was initially constructed in the 1850s, immigration exclusion led to its closure until Hart-Celler, after which it was able to reopen due to new arriving practitioners.

In 1963, James R. Ware published a new edition of The Sayings of Chuang Tzu, popularizing Taoist ideas. Buddhist practice, too, experienced a resurgence in the 1960s. In 1965, Philip Kapleau published The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice and Enlightenment, which introduced a broad audience to Buddhism, and in 1966, Sri Lankan monks founded the Washington Buddhist Vihara in D.C., the first Theravada Buddhist community in the United States. British-born Alan Watts played a large role in popularizing what he referred to as Eastern religions, which captured his attention following an encounter with Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki. After moving to California and joining the American Academy of Asian Studies, Watts wrote The Way of Zen in 1957, which would become a bestseller. In 1960, he recorded a TV show, “Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life,” which aired on KQED in San Francisco. 

Korean newcomers were overwhelmingly Protestant, namely Presbyterian and Methodist. And while they had had churches in Hawaii since the turn of the century, in the 1960s, Korean immigrants founded numerous ethnically Korean churches that held services in Korean throughout the country. The same was true for Japanese American Christians. Take Paul Nagano, the Los Angeles-born minister who, during internment, preached on “the Circuit” from camp to camp, and afterwards founded the Japanese Baptist Church in Boyle Heights, CA.⁴⁹ Ethnic congregations eventually came together to form “Asian caucuses” within several Protestant denominations.⁵⁰

The expression of religious identity often converged with political movements for ethnic recognition, like the Asian American Movement (formerly the Asian American Political Alliance), founded by Yugi Ichioka and Emma Gee at Berkeley in 1968.  Lloyd Wake and Roy Sano were both Japanese American ministers, and later bishops, in the United Methodist Church who joined the Asian American Movement not in spite of their religious beliefs, but “as a part of their faith witness as Asian Americans.”⁵¹ It started after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Wake was 20 and Sano a teenager. Despite the fact that both men were US-born citizens, they were rounded up and sent with their families to the Poston Internment camp in Arizona.

This experience of state-sponsored incarceration stayed with them as they began their ministries. Wake left Poston for Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, later transferring to Berkeley Baptist Divinity School. Sano, after Quakers helped him leave the camp, began as a youth minister in Pennsylvania before going to Union Theological Seminary in New York. But as they studied theology and ministered to others, they integrated their Japanese American identities and experiences. So, in 1968, when the Asian American Movement began on the Berkeley campus, Wake and Sano joined in protesting for ethnic studies programs, despite being decades older than the students. Wake framed it in terms of his faith; he was practicing “real religion” by “doing justice and living out one’s commitment to a better society.”⁵² For Wake and Sano, their experiences of racial oppression and incarceration informed their understanding of Christianity and its practice. They were not alone in this conclusion.  

VI. Liberation

Liberation theology is a theological movement that insists on interpreting Christianity through the lived experiences of the oppressed. As Gustavo Gutierrez wrote in A Theology of Liberation, it is “based on the gospel and the experiences of men and women committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land of Latin America…to build a different society, freer and more human.”⁵³  While Gutierrez’s ideas emerged out of an anticolonial context in Latin America, notions that God was on the side of the poor and oppressed soon took hold in the United States. 

In March 1966, striking California farmworkers and their supporters began a 25-day pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento. Led by a fasting Cesar Chavez, the grape harvesters were not just requesting labor rights, but were on a “religious march,” walking under banners that read “Pilgrimage, Penance, Revolution,” and ones bearing Our Lady of Guadeloupe, a cross, and the star of David.  The farmworkers framed their struggle for economic justice, in this case increased wages and better working conditions, as fundamentally religious.⁵⁴ 

For decades, farmworkers had faced harsh working conditions, low wages, no benefits, and a lack of union protection. But in 1962, experienced union organizer Dolores Huerta, along with Chavez and Gilbert Padilla, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Based in Delano, the union organized a successful strike on behalf of rose grafters and soon attracted around 1200 members.  When Chuck McDew, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, arrived in California, he was excited to hear about the NFWA. While Huerta knew how to organize workers and negotiate with companies, McDew offered advice about nonviolent protest and garnering attention for the cause. “SNCC people were the only ones that really had any kind of concept about what to do,” farmworker Eliseo Medina recalled, “particularly in things like marches and demonstrations and all those tools of the Civil Rights movement, hell, we didn’t have a clue.”⁵⁵

That changed in 1966. The previous year, Filipino grape pickers in the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) faced a series of labor issues and in September of 1965 decided once again to go on strike. This time they were joined by the NFWA, forming a broad movement for workers’ rights (later the United Farm Workers) that culminated with the pilgrimage. Chavez hoped that the religious exercise, which ended on Easter Sunday 1966, would “call the entire nation to penance.”⁵⁶  In his “Plan of Delano,” Chavez quoted Pope Leo XII’s admonition that “it is neither just nor human to oppress men with excessive work” and added, emphatically, “We seek, and have the support of the Church in what we do. At the head of the pilgrimage, we carry LA VIRGEN DE LA GUADELOUPE because she is ours, all ours, Patroness of the Mexican people. We also carry the Sacred Cross and the Star of David…GOD SHALL NOT ABANDON US.”⁵⁷

Recently, Chavez’s sexual abuse of women and girls, including Dolores Huerta, has become publicly known, marring his reputation and also illuminating the persistent misogyny present in the 1960s, even in justice movements. The women who came forward told the New York Times that “the story of Chavez was their story,” pointing attention to “the women who marched beside the men, worked in the fields, took care of the children.”⁵⁸

This sense of being overlooked and mistreated was echoed by women in the Black freedom struggle and others who began to reconsider Christianity in light of their gendered experience. Following the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s landmark The Feminine Mystique, women began to more openly discuss the stifling expectations and societal limitations they faced. Soon the “problem that has no name” had one: sexism.⁵⁹

This critique extended to the male-dominated church, which had marginalized women in leadership and denied their full humanity. In 1968, Catholic theologian Mary Daly published The Church and the Second Sex, in which she made a “case against the church.”  The Catholic church, she said, had refused “to adapt its structures to the condition of modern women, still preaching to them the passive virtues of obedience, submission and meekness, while seeming to refuse or ignore the profound aspirations of half the human race to liberty and full personhood.”⁶⁰ Protestant women joined Daly in her critique, pressing for new theological perspectives and ordination. The challenges of sex discrimination were compounded for racially marginalized and LGBTQ Americans who also began asserting liberationist theologies and reinterpreting the Bible to include their lived experiences.

One of these was Pauli Murray, a multiracial Black, queer lawyer, activist, writer, and later, Episcopal priest. Raised in North Carolina, Murray left for college in New York at 16, where she was exposed to Marxist organizing. Her interest in equality led her to the nascent fight for civil rights. Murray challenged segregation in higher education, wrote about discrimination, earned a law degree, and joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, CORE, and the NAACP, though she was sidelined by organization leaders because of suspicions around her sexuality. 

In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Murray to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Even as she worked for Black freedom alongside leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph, Murray continued to identify the ongoing sidelining of women. A few months after the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King had famously intoned, “when we let [freedom] ring … we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last,”⁶¹ 

Pauli Murray gave a speech of her own. Upset by the omission of women in the March (and in the speech), Murray called out “the dual burden of Jim Crow and Jane Crow.” She noted “the tendency to assign women to a secondary, ornamental or ‘honoree’ role instead of the partnership role” within the civil rights movement and encouraged Black women to “no longer postpone or subordinate the fight against discrimination because of sex to the civil rights struggle” but to “carry on both fights simultaneously.”⁶²

Pauli Murray’s relentless pursuit of human equality–and her complex personal identity– meant that she was forced to confront intersectional discrimination; her faith provided a compelling response. “When I truly believe that God is my Father and Mother, in short, my Creator, I am bound also to believe that all men, women, and children of whatever race, color, creed, or ethnic origin are my sisters-and-brothers-in-Christ,” she said. “To think of oneself as a child of God is a liberating experience—it is to free oneself from all feelings of inferiority—whether of race, or color, or sex, or age, or economic status, or position in life.”⁶³

In A Black Theology of Liberation, Union Seminary theologian James Cone agreed that Christianity “is essentially a religion of liberation,” but, he explained, “in a society where persons are oppressed because they are black, Christian theology must become black theology.” Black theology, according to Cone, who also wrote Black Theology and Black Power (1967), “is unreservedly identified with the goals of the oppressed,” since God is a God “of and for those who labor and are overladen.” Throughout Scripture, God not only identified with the poor and oppressed Israelites but had intervened to free his covenant people, from the Exodus through exile, to reveal his character. Jesus, as God’s full revelation, likewise came to save and to liberate, to offer spiritual salvation and also to heal the sick, liberate the shackled, and bring good news to the poor.⁶⁴ Other Black theologians, like Albert Cleage of the Shine of the Black Madonna in Detroit and J. Deotis Roberts of Howard University, joined Cone in developing an expansive theology that honored the Black experience. Cleage excavated a historical Jesus who was, in his description, a “non-white leader of a non-white people struggling for national liberation against the rule of a white nation” while Roberts pressed for “liberation and reconciliation.”⁶⁵

While specific applications varied, Black Christians grappled with understanding Christianity in relationship to mounting calls for Black Power. In 1966, at a march in the Mississippi Delta, SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael defiantly shouted “Black Power!,” a phrase previously uttered by fellow activist Willie Ricks, marking a turning point in the freedom struggle from interracialism towards separatism. 

That same year, around fifty Black clergy calling themselves the National Committee of Negro Churchmen signed a statement, published in the New York Times, entitled “Black Power.” In it, they expressed sympathy for the historical conditions that created the “anguished” call for Black Power and condemned “the failure of American leaders to use American power to create equal opportunity in life as well as in law.”  The way forward, these clergy insisted, was for white American political leaders and church leaders to begin sharing power with Blacks equally.⁶⁶ In 1969, the (renamed) National Committee of Black Churchmen, which then boasted over 300 members from 12 denominations, issued another statement, “Why Black Theology?” Black theology, they explained, “seeks to plumb the black condition in light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ,” it is “the affirmation of black humanity that emancipates black people from white racism,” and it is one that Christ “requires” since “Jesus is the Liberator!”⁶⁷

For these clergy, Cone, and others, Black liberation theology sought to answer the question, using biblical revelation, of what God “has to say about the Black condition…more importantly, what is God doing about it?” Or, as Howard Thurman put it, to address what the religion of Jesus has to say to “the masses of men with their backs constantly against the wall?”⁶⁸ Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, many Black Americans still found themselves with their backs against the wall. While some looked to Cone’s liberationist gospel, others embraced the ethos of poet Claude McKay, “like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”⁶⁹

VI. Countercultures

In some ways, Black theology was a response not only to segregationist white Christianity, but to separatist movements like the Nation of Islam. Years before Albert Cleage wrote The Black Messiah or James Cone declared “Jesus is Black,” Malcolm X had already dismissed “a white Christ.”⁷⁰

Born Malcolm Little to a father who was both a Baptist minister and a follower of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Marcus Garvey, the tension between Christianity and Black separatism was always present. Then, while serving a 10-year prison sentence, Malcolm encountered the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI). Drawing upon Islam, as well as influences from the Moorish Science Temple, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the UNIA, founder Wallace D. Fard (Farad Muhammad) began teaching his neighbors in Detroit in the 1930s that Christianity was a white religion and that they, as Moors and Afro-Asians, should rightfully follow Muhammad and reject white culture and beliefs.

Elijah Poole, later Elijah Muhammad, was convinced and later took over the movement after Fard’s disappearance. He spread the NOI’s message of Black self-determination and communal power throughout Chicago, established numerous businesses for followers, and published a paper. The paper, Muhammad Speaks, circulated ideas that captivated Malcolm and caused him to dedicate his life to the cause upon being released from prison in 1952.⁷¹ Minister Malcolm X was a zealous convert and an eloquent evangelist. He lambasted “the devil white man” and his Christianity, which had taught Blacks to “worship an alien God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes” and to “always turn the other cheek.”⁷²

Thus, Malcolm was critical of the nonviolent civil rights struggle and of Martin Luther King’s efforts. “Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms… singing ‘We Shall Overcome ‘?” he asked an audience in 1963. “You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging…A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for any nation – they’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.”⁷³ Instead, he called on Blacks in America to arm themselves and fight back, famously claiming that it would need to be “the ballot or the bullet.”⁷⁴ In 1964, though, Malcolm X broke with Elijah Muhammad and, following a hajj to Mecca, with the NOI’s Black supremacist version of Islam, though he remained committed to Pan-Africanism. He embraced a more universal Islam and also began to move towards King’s nonviolent interracial vision, though how far is unknown, since he was murdered in 1965. By then, his ideas and those of the Nation of Islam promoting Black separatism had already proven influential.  

Across the United States, the Black Panther Party (BPP), a majority female organization of revolutionary Marxists, established dozens of chapters.  The BPP aimed to raise the political conscience of Black People toward revolution, while implementing a series of “survival programs” designed to meet the material and care needs of the community. 

Perhaps surprisingly, churches proved crucial to the success of these programs. The notable free breakfast for school children program, for instance, began in the basement of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California and expanded nationally due to support from dozens of churches.⁷⁵ The rector of St. Augustine’s, Rev. Earl Neil, the “Minister of Religion of the Black Panther Party,” spoke at the Panthers’ United Front Against Fascism conference and joined the Panthers’ lawsuit against the federal government when the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) became known.⁷⁶ 

Other religious leaders across the country contributed to the Black Power movement directly from the pulpit. In Illinois, Baptist minister Charles Koen led the United Front of Cairo in a strategy of armed self-defense against the White Citizens Council, while in Chicago, Black Catholic priests held “Black Unity Masses.”⁷⁷ Still others within the Black Power movement found strength in non-Christian religious traditions. Black Panther leader Ericka Huggins adopted yoga while a political prisoner, while Huey Newton explored Zen Buddhism.⁷⁸ Various religious traditions contributed to the Panthers’ rejection of racial inferiority and embrace of Blackness as powerful and beautiful.

They were not the only group to do this in the late 1960s. While a smaller movement, American Indians, too, celebrated their Indigeneity and ancestral religious practices. In 1964, five Sicangu Lakota Indians declared Alcatraz Island rightfully Indian Land, a short-lived precursor to a longer occupation of the island in 1969. These “Indians of all Tribes,” led by Richard Oakes, told the authorities: “The choice now lies with the leaders of the American government—to use violence upon us as before to remove us from our Great Spirit’s land, or to institute a real change in dealing with the American Indian.”⁷⁹ These activists declared their intention to “reinforce the traditional Indian way of life” which included, among other cultural retentions, founding a “religious and spiritual center.”⁸⁰ 

Retaining religious practices was an important part of what became known as the American Indian Movement (AIM).  Following decades of persecution, forced conversion, and misunderstanding, American Indians in 1918 had formed the Native American Church, an invented, syncretic structure that codified diverse beliefs and coalesced various practices into one religion for the purpose of gaining protections under the First Amendment. One of these practices was the sacramental use of peyote, a cactus that contains the hallucinogen mescaline, so much so that the Native American Church sometimes adopted the name the Peyote Road.

It wasn’t just American Indian practitioners who used peyote in the 1960s; the so-called hippies did too. In the late 1960s, many young people spurned the institutions and mores of their parents and formed a counterculture. Though this counterculture encompassed a range of social movements and causes, it united around a rejection of materialism, traditionalism, and the establishment, including, of course, the church. Hippies emphasized authenticity, personal freedom, and experimentation, flocking to what became known as New Religious Movements (NRM). ⁸¹

Many of these religious movements were not new at all, but eastern philosophies and religions transplanted to the West Coast by new immigrants, which white Americans perceived as offering a more authentic and experiential form of spirituality. For example, the Hare Krishna movement, formally known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and founded by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, introduced many Americans to the devotional practices of Hinduism, including chanting, meditation, and vegetarianism.⁸² Hare Krishna gained even more popularity after poet Allen Ginsberg and Beatle George Harrison both publicly aligned themselves with the movement. The Beatles also expressed interest in The Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement popularized by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which promised inner peace and a higher state of consciousness.⁸³

Other ancient and esoteric spiritual traditions, such as mysticism, occultism, and paganism, garnered newfound interest. Countercultural Americans also viewed the use of mind-altering drugs, such as peyote, LSD, or mushrooms, as a way to experience authentic religious experience or transcendence. Taken together, for many hippies, new religious movements offered deep fulfillment as an appealing spiritual alternative to Western materialism and staid institutional religion.

But many within traditional religions also questioned American institutions in the 1960s, particularly around the ongoing war in Vietnam. In April1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King began, with John Bennett, the President of Union Seminary, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel sitting beside him. “A time comes when silence is betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” The war had revealed the United States to be, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King stated. It was a “demonic destructive suction tube” taking resources from the American poor and stealing precious lives, both American and Vietnamese. Addressing his critics, King pledged allegiance not to his country but to his God: “Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?”⁸⁴ 

King was speaking on behalf of the Clergy Concerned about Vietnam, a group of around 100 religious leaders founded in 1965.⁸⁵ Mainline denominations and organizations were involved, including Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, United Church of Christ, and the National Council of Churches.

One of the most prominent members was Father Daniel Berrigan. A Jesuit priest ordained in 1955, Fr. Berrigan served in WWII before becoming active in the civil rights struggle and adopting Christian pacifism.  He was arrested several times, including, notoriously, when he and other anti-war activists, including his brother Father Phillip Berrigan, known as the Catonsville Nine, made homemade napalm and burned hundreds of draft records from a draft board in Maryland.⁸⁶ In a statement, Berrigan defended “the burning of paper instead of children,” saying, “We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. And for thinking of that other Child, of whom the poet Luke speaks.”⁸⁷ 

Though initially excluded from the CCVA, religious women, like Sister Elizabeth McAlister, were also actively involved in anti-war activities. In Los Angeles, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary had protested the war since 1964. Carrying signs that read “God Likes Me,” and “Give us our Daily Bread,” nuns strummed guitars and called for “Peace, Peace, Peace.” Some critiques were more biting. In 1963, folk hero Bob Dylan penned the haunting “Masters of War,” in which he asked those who “build the bombs” and “hide behind desks,” “Is your money that good?/ Will it buy you forgiveness/Do you think that it could?” Dylan offered a scathing answer:” there’s one thing I know/Though I’m younger than you/ That even Jesus would never/Forgive what you do.”⁸⁸

Ted Wise gave a presentation about the music of Bob Dylan in 1967—during a Wednesday night prayer meeting.⁸⁹ A Bay Area native, Wise, along with his wife Elizabeth, had been early to the hippie scene, living on a “Beat commune,” doing drugs, and discussing art and philosophy with others in the counterculture. But while Ted was tripping and carousing, Elizabeth began quietly attending the First Baptist Church of Mill Valley in 1964. “She came back from church just glowing,” Ted claimed, while he was becoming increasingly convinced, usually while high, of his own defects in character. He decided to read the New Testament. “I just got fascinated with Jesus,” Ted recalled of his reading, “Jesus knocked me off my metaphysical ass.” One night in 1965, Ted and Liz, tripping on LSD, went to a party where Ted just started informing his fellow revelers that “Jesus is Lord.” Still high, he did the same thing the next morning in the middle of the service at First Baptist, befuddling the pastor, John MacDonald, who had been a classmate of Billy Graham’s at Wheaton.⁹⁰  

The Wises continued to go to the church and brought their friends, “a nucleus of hip, Bible-fixated, evangelically inclined Christians,” that blossomed into a movement known as the Jesus People, or the “Jesus Generation.”⁹¹ These Jesus people identified the counterculture’s desire for authenticity and community in Christianity, preaching to fellow hippies in Haight Ashbury and on the California beaches and living in Christian communes where, like the early church, “all things were held in common.”⁹² Evangelical churches like His Place on the Sunset Strip, Hollywood Presbyterian Church, the Alamo Foundation in LA, and Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa began welcoming thousands of young hippies flashing the “One Way” sign rather than the peace. The Jesus Generation not only captured a surprised public, as when a psychedelic Jesus appeared on Time magazine’s cover in 1971, but spawned much of contemporary Christian music and evangelical culture.

It produced, too, a new cadre of evangelical Christian ministers in different types of churches. The so-called “New Paradigm” churches and “seeker-friendly” megachurches rejected the liturgies, organs, and sportcoats of traditional Protestantism for a “come as you are” aesthetic where guitars strummed as blue-jean-clad pastors emphasized the gifts of the Holy Spirit.⁹³ New ministries to college students emerged, as did works of intellectual apologetics promoting a Christian “worldview,” like Francis Schaeffer’s.⁹⁴ Many of these congregations, though notably casual in style, were Fundamentalist in theology, producing in generations to come a powerful conservative cultural and political resurgence. 

VII. Conclusion

This had already begun by 1968, when Richard Nixon ran a Republican campaign appealing to the “Silent Majority” of Americans who wanted an end to the revolutionary change of the 1960s and a return to “law and order.” Billy Graham, a close friend of Nixon’s, concurred. “The choice is ours,” he told American Christians, “with the election year coming up, American people want law, order, and security.”⁹⁵

The theological civil rights movement, Vatican II, new immigrants and new religious movements, liberation theologies, and the counterculture had utterly transformed the nation over the previous years– leading to great freedom but also great instability. By the decade’s end, John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were dead, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were dead, TIME magazine even suggested “God is dead.”⁹⁶

But the story of American religions was not. In 1969, when the Apollo 11 mission became the first to land on the moon, Buzz Aldrin quietly celebrated the sacrament of Holy Communion on the lunar surface. Perhaps he was remembering not only the crucifixion of Jesus but the invocation of President Kennedy at the decade’s beginning: “we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”⁹⁷

VIII. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Ansley Quiros, with content contributions from Chris Babits, Lilian Calles Barger, Matthew J. Cressler, Justine Howe, Andrea S. Johnson, Connor Martini, Michael McLaughlin, Ansley Quiros, Ronit Y. Stahl, and Ben Wright

Recommended Reading

• Edwin Bryant and Maria L. Ekstrand, eds., The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (Columbia University Press, 2004).
• Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017).
• Edward E. Curtis, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
• Angela Denise Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
• Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, Justice, Power, and Politics (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
• Carol George, God’s Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (Oxford University Press, 1993).
• Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2010).
• Cheryl Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton University Press, 2006).
• Stephen Haynes, The Last Segregated Hour (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• Felipe Hinojosa, Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio (University of Texas Press, 2021).
• Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God (Basic Books, 2015).
• Carter Dalton Lyon, Sanctuaries of Segregation (University Press of Mississippi, 2017).
• Lerone Martin, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover (Princeton University Press, 2023).
• Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, 1997).
• Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (The Free Press, 1984).
• Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (Yale University Press, 2003).
• Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (University Press of Kentucky, 2017).
• Leslie Ribovich, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York Public Schools (NYU Press, 2024).
• David Sehat, This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism (Yale University Press, 2022).
• High B. Urban, New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements: Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America (University of California Press, 2015).
• Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion (NYU Press, 2010).

Notes

1. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam Books, 1987), 81. ↩︎
2. Congressional Record (January 28, 1928), 1st Session, 70th Congress, vol. 69, pt. 2, 1654-55, 1658. ↩︎
3. Carol George, God’s Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking, (Oxford University Press, 1993). See: Jon Butler, Grant Wacker & Randall Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History, second edition (Oxford, 2011) 364. ↩︎
4. John F. Kennedy, Address to Protestant Ministers, Sep 12, 1960, John F. Kennedy Library. ↩︎
5. Inaugural Address, Kennedy Draft, 01/17/1961; Papers of John F. Kennedy: President’s Office Files, 01/20/1961-11/22/1963; John F. Kennedy Library, National Archives and Record Administration. ↩︎
6. Billy Graham, interview by Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, CBS, November 22, 1963. ↩︎
7. See: Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God (Basic Books, 2015). ↩︎
8. Yearbook of American Churches Edition for 1960, 28^th Issue, ed. Benson Y. Landis, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, 1959. The Catholic Church claimed almost 40% of the 109 million American worshippers, while 61% were Protestant, with Methodists and Southern Baptists leading the way. ↩︎
9. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Doubleday & Company, 1955), 1-3. ↩︎
10. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 134, no. 4 (October 1, 2005): 40–55. ↩︎
11. See: Leslie Ribovich, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York Public Schools (NYU Press, 2024).  ↩︎
12. Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 3. ↩︎
13. Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961), at 496. ↩︎
14. Braunfield v. Brown, 366 U.S. 599 (1961); McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961). ↩︎
15. See: Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2010), 86; Paul G. Kauper, Prayer, Public Schools and the Supreme Court, 61 MICH. L. REV. 1031 (1963); https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol61/iss6/2. ↩︎
16. Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). ↩︎
17. Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963). The court consolidated Schempp with a comparable case from Maryland, Murray v. Curlett. As historian David Sehat has observed, the Unitarian Schempp family was far more sympathetic than the Madalyn Murray, a divorced mother who appeared like a caricature of what “conservative religious leaders [w]ould invent [as] an antireligious zealot.” David Sehat, This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism (Yale University Press, 2022), 161. ↩︎
18. Bruce J. Dierenfield, “Engel v. Vitale,” in The Public Debate over Controversial Supreme Court Decision, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky (CQ Press, 2005). ↩︎
19. Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America (University Press of Kansas, 2007), 138; Ansley L. Quiros, God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942–1976 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 137. ↩︎
20. Ira C. Lupu, “Trouble with Accommodation,” George Washington Law Review 60, no. 3 (March 1992). See: John Witte Jr. and Eric Wang, “The New Fourth Era of Religious Freedom,” Hastings Law Journal 74, no. 6 (2023); Richard Schragger, Micah Schwartzman, and Nelson Tebbe, “Reestablishing Religion,” University of Chicago Law Review 91 (2024); David Sehat, This Earthly Frame; Gordon, The Spirit of the Law. ↩︎
21. Interview, 1963, quoted in Dierenfield, Battle Over School Prayer, 147. ↩︎
22. SNCC Statement of Purpose, April 17, 1960. See: Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (Basic Books, 2005). ↩︎
23. Handbill, “Albany Nonviolent Movement,” November 9, 1961. ↩︎
24. Marsh, The Beloved Community, 4. ↩︎
25. David J. Garrow, “Religious Resources and the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” Criterion 34, nos. 2-9 (1995): 2-9, 7, 9. ↩︎
26. Quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2004), 79. ↩︎
27. Quoted in Roger Bruns, Martin Luther King Jr.: A Biography (Greenwood, 2006), 70 ↩︎
28. Dickerson, Dennis C. “African American Religious Intellectuals and the Theological Foundations of the Civil Rights Movement, 1930-55.” Church History 74, no. 2 (2005): 217–35. ↩︎
29. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (The Free Press, 1984),4. ↩︎
30. Lerone Martin, The Gospel of J. Edgar The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 2023), 229-233. ↩︎
31. See: Carter Dalton Lyon, Sanctuaries of Segregation: The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign(University Press of Mississippi, 2017); Stephen Haynes, The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation (Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
32. Quoted in Lerone Martin, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover, 222. ↩︎
33. King, “Address Delivered at Albany Movement Mass Meeting at Shiloh Baptist Church,” Aug. 15, 1962, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. ↩︎
34. “Billy Graham Urges Restraint in Sit-Ins,” New York Times, April 18, 1963. ↩︎
35. “A Call for Unity,” April 12, 1963; see also: S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” (Louisiana State University Press, 2001). ↩︎
36. King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963. ↩︎
37. Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, 1997), 2 ↩︎
38. See; Cheryl Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton University Press, 2006); A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (Rutgers University Press, 1998). ↩︎
39. Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Rabbi Albert Hoschander Friedlander, quoted in Kate Collins, “Jewish Voices from the Selma to Montgomery March,” The Devil’s Tail: Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Books & Manuscript Library, Duke University Libraries (2015). ↩︎
40. Shannen Dee Williams, Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke University Press, 2022), 2. See also: Amy Koehlinger, “Are you the White Sisters or the Black Sisters? Women Confounding Categories of Race and Gender,” in The Religious History of American Women, ed. Catherine Brekus (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). ↩︎
41. “On Racial Harmony,” National Catholic Welfare Conference, August 23, 1963. See also: Karen Johnson, “Another Long Civil Rights Movement: How Catholic Interracialists Used the Resources of their Faith to Tear Down Racial Hierarchies,” American Catholic Studies 126, no. 4 (2015): 1–27. ↩︎
42. The Encyclicals and Other Messages of John XXIII (TPS Press, 1964), 423-435. ↩︎
43. “Other Reactions to Vatican II,” National Catholic Reporter, October 4, 2002, https://www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives/100402/100402k.htm. ↩︎
44. “Other Reactions to Vatican II” National Catholic Reporter, October 4, 2002. ↩︎
45. Tom Gjelten, A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story (Simon & Schuster, 2016), 114. ↩︎
46. Gjelten, A Nation of Nations, 139. ↩︎
47. Kambiz Ghanea Bassiri, A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2010); al-Ittihad, Muslim Students’ Association of the United States and Canada; A Handbook of the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada, Its Objectives, Functions, and Activities, Muslim Students’ Association of the United States and Canada, 1968; Maryam Kashani, Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023). ↩︎
48. “Growing Sikh Community Celebrates 505^th Anniversary of Founder’s Birth,” New York Times, Dec. 2, 1974. ↩︎
49. See: Paul Nagano, “Paul M. Nagano’s Journey of Love and Community,” Journal of Asian and Asian American Theology 6 (2006); Karen Yonemoto, “Religion and Resistance: Reconstructing Ethnic Identity in Postwar Los Angeles, 1945–1950,” Journal of Asian and Asian American Theology 6 (2003–2004): 180–89. ↩︎
50. Jane Hong, “How post 1965 migration changed US Christianity,” Center for Asian American Christianity, Princeton Theological Seminary, May 3, 2023. ↩︎
51. Jane Hong, “The Asian American Movement and the Church: Laying the Foundations for Asian American Theology,” Theology Today 79, no. 4 (2022). ↩︎
52. Helen Jin Kim, “Niseis of the Faith: Theologizing Liberation in the Asian American Movement” (B.A. Thesis, Stanford University, 2006), 55. ↩︎
53. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Orbis Books, 1971. ↩︎
54. Lloyd Barba, “Pilgrimage and Revolution: How Cesar Chavez married faith and ideology in landmark farmwokers march,” The Conversation, March 28, 2023. See also Barba, “More Spirit in that Little Madera Church,” California History 94, no. 1 (2017): 26-42. ↩︎
55. “National Farm Workers Association (NFWA),” SNCC Digital Gateway; See: Lauren Araiza, To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). ↩︎
56. Barba, “Pilgrimage and Revolution.” ↩︎
57. Cesar Chavez, “Plan of Delano,” (1966), https://chavez.cde.ca.gov/modelcurriculum/teachers/lessons/resources/Documents/plan_of_delano.pdf ↩︎
58. Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes, “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years,” The New York Times, March 18, 2026. ↩︎
59. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (W. W. Norton & Company, 1963). ↩︎
60. Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Harper and Row, 1968), 11. ↩︎
61. “I Have a Dream,” Speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the “March on Washington,” 1963. ↩︎
62. Pauli Murray, “The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality,” November 1963. ↩︎
63. Pauli Murray, “Father’s Day Sermon,” June 15, 1975, in To Speak a Defiant Word, 30. ↩︎
64. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 1970). ↩︎
65. Albert Cleage, The Black Messiah (Sheed and Ward, 1968); J. Deotis Robert, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology, (Westminster Press, 1971). See also: Angela Denise Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2007). ↩︎
66. “Black Power: Statement by National Committee of Negro Churchmen,” The New York Times, July 31, 1966, E5. ↩︎
67. Statement by the National Committee of Black Churchmen, June 13, 1969, “Why Black Theology?” in African American Religious History: A documentary Witness, 2^nd Edition. ed. Milton C. Sernett (Duke University Press, 1999), 564-566. ↩︎
68. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Beacon Press, 1949). ↩︎
69. Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” (1919). ↩︎
70. Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Grove Press, 1965), 220. ↩︎
71. See: Edward E. Curtis, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, Justice, Power, and Politics (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). ↩︎
72. Malcolm X and Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X , 220. ↩︎
73. Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” 1963. ↩︎
74. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” April 12, 1964, C. Eric Lincoln Collection. Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. ↩︎
75. See: Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 172; Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (University of Alabama Press, 2007), 30–32. ↩︎
76. “Black Panther Revolutionary Wedding,” Black Panther, May 11, 1969, 7.  ↩︎
77. Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (University of Kentucky Press, 2017); Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2017). ↩︎
78. Diane C. Fujino and Matef Harmachis, eds., Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (Haymarket Books, 2020), 81–84; Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. collection, M0864. Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif., Series 2, Box 54, Folder 1. ↩︎
79. Richard Oakes, Message to the San Francisco Department of the Interior, 1969. ↩︎
80. “The Letter,” Indians of All Tribes, December 16, 1969. ↩︎
81. See: Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (Yale University Press, 2003); Damon Bach, The American Counterculture: A History of Hippies and Cultural Dissidents (University Press of Kansas, 2020); Joseph Laycock, New Religious Movements: The Basics (Routledge, 2022); High B. Urban, New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements: Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America (University of California Press, 2015). ↩︎
82. Edwin Bryant and Maria L. Ekstrand, eds., The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (Columbia University Press, 2004). ↩︎
83. Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion (NYU Press, 2010). ↩︎
84. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967, a speech given at Riverside Church, New York, NY. ↩︎
85. Later, the group included laypeople and changed its name to the National Emergency Committee of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV). ↩︎
86. See: Shawn Francis Peters, The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
87. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., “Catonsville 9 Statement,” 1968. ↩︎
88. Bob Dylan, “Masters of War,” The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963. ↩︎
89. Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America, (Oxford University Press, 2013), 27. ↩︎
90. Eskridge, God’s Forever Family, 12-15. ↩︎
91. Eskridge, God’s Forever Family, 21. ↩︎
92. Acts 2:44-45. ↩︎
93. Erskine, God’s Forever Family, 274-277. ↩︎
94. See: Barry Hankins, Francis Shaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Eerdmans, 2008). ↩︎
95. Quoted in Aaron Griffith, God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America (Harvard University Press, 2020), 141. ↩︎
96. “Theology: The God is Dead Movement,” Time, October 22, 1965. See also:  Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). ↩︎
97. John F. Kennedy, “Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort” (speech, Houston, TX, September 12, 1962), John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the World War II era of the 1940s, and the early Cold War in the 1950s, many Americans turned to religion to cope with the hardships they faced. Most religious leaders spoke with overtones of enduring faith throughout these times of uncertainty, and they offered religion as an antidote for an ailing nation. However, not all religions were accepted as legitimate expressions of Americanism. From 1931-1959, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Native American religions were marginalized and persecuted by majority Protestant Christians in the United States.

II. Depression

The 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Depression plunged Americans into despair. The Great Depression and the corresponding Dust Bowl, in particular, proved deadly. One pastor reported performing ten funerals in eleven days as American suffering deepened.¹ Unsurprisingly, many turned to religious ideas and religious institutions for aid. By 1933, nearly a quarter of the U.S. population was unemployed.² Families faced hunger and eviction. But many Christian activists took to the streets and countryside to provide relief for suffering Americans. Protestant ministers launched grassroots alternatives to the federal New Deal, such as cooperative farms in the Mississippi Delta, directed by former YMCA missionary Sherwood Eddy. Eddy spent years ministering to the poor in China and India, where he found it more effective to work with locals in fellowship rather than to impose one’s beliefs and customs upon them. After serving as a chaplain in World War I, Eddy developed a critique of capitalism and imperialism, which he argued precipitated strife and undermined the Kingdom of God on earth. He became an outspoken socialist, not of the atheistic Soviet kind, but a spiritual socialist who emphasized the Christian ethics of goodwill, peace, and social justice. Eddy recognized the plight of displaced tenant farmers who were ineligible for federal relief in the 1930s. His solution was radical, especially in the segregated South, as he established two interracial communes. The Delta Cooperative Farms, though short-lived, represented a challenge to American capitalism and American racism.³

Catholic lay activist Dorothy Day also helped meet the needs of the poor. Day co-founded the first Catholic Worker settlement house in New York City, where volunteers served meals and provided housing to those on the margins of society. She was a single mother with a history of working for socialist organizations. In 1927, she converted to Catholicism.⁴ When the stock market crashed in 1929, conditions for working people and those living in poverty worsened. In 1932, while working as a freelance Catholic writer, Day met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant and itinerant Catholic intellectual.⁵  They founded the Catholic Worker movement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and promoted a radical, activist interpretation of Christianity that was personalist (respecting the dignity of each individual), anarchist (unfettered from government), and pacifist (nonviolent). Catholic Worker was simultaneously a newspaper, a community of people committed to the works of mercy, and a network of urban houses of hospitality and rural farming communes. 

The newspaper Catholic Worker launched May 1, 1933, to radicalize its readership with an alternative to atheistic Marxism.⁶ It argued that works of mercy should be central practices of every Christian life: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, shelter the homeless, give alms to the poor, visit the sick, visit the prisoner, bury the dead, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, admonish sinners, bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses, comfort the afflicted, and pray for the living and the dead. Later known for houses of hospitality that fed and housed the destitute, the Catholic Worker movement was not intended merely to ease poverty; it hoped to prevent it. The movement democratized moral aspirations and promoted the most egalitarian strands of Catholic teaching about private property.

Day was disappointed by the inadequate response of Catholic dioceses, which, she believed, failed to follow Jesus’ example of directly ministering to the poor. She also objected to federal programs like the New Deal, since they elided the interpersonal aspects of Christian charity. Citing St. Teresa of Avila, Day wrote, “the only way we can measure the love we have for God, is the love we have for our fellows.”⁷ Day believed that the government should not provide the basic care that churches and Christian communities should provide locals in need.

Catholic theologian John Ryan also spoke about the problems of capitalism, as did Detroit-based Catholic radio host Father Charles Coughlin, who reached beyond his local congregation to build a national following through his broadcast “Shrine of the Little Flower,” highlighting the injustice of banks exploiting workers. Coughlin’s criticisms, however, came laced with bigotry against Communists and Jews — those he blamed for the global crisis — and opposition to President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Though Catholics increasingly raised a public voice in the 1930s and 1940s, they were not immune from bigotry.

The Depression brought more than social activism, however. For some religious groups it was a time of great growth. Pentecostalism, particularly grew rapidly, especially in the South. Reiff wrote in a Pentecostal magazine that “Nineteen hundred years ago, holy men foretold just such events as are now transpiring, to be fulfilled in the ‘end’ time.” She claimed however that “men of finance and affairs” would not lead the nation to deliverance because she believed that “there is no human remedy for present conditions.”⁸ Fundamentalists blamed the nation’s woes on decades of sin and what they saw as the anti-Christian drift of American liberalism. After largely retreating from the national spotlight after the embarrassment of the Scopes Trial, American Fundamentalist leaders focused their energies on the grassroots and established the infrastructures for their eventual ascendance.⁹

III. Antisemitism and the Holocaust

Catholics were not the only religious group to suffer persecution during the Depression. The Ku Klux Klan also targeted Jews who faced increasingly violent attacks around the world, especially in Germany. The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in the early 1930s put Jews in danger of violence, oppression, exile, and genocide. Millions of Jews were killed in concentration camps and throughout Europe, even as refugees mostly unsuccessfully sought safety in the United States and elsewhere. For Jewish refugees fleeing to the United States in the 1930s, the Immigration Act of 1924 limited their options. The Act assigned quotas for annual immigration from each country, prioritizing Western over Eastern Europeans and nearly barring immigration from non-European countries.

In the federal government, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins was the most consequential advocate for German-Jewish refugees. In 1933, she found a loophole in the Immigration Act of 1917. Perkins could allow refugees beyond the restrictive quotas if Americans agreed to sponsor a “charge bond” that promised a refugee would not burden the American economy. Her proposal led to a legal battle against the State Department, which she eventually won.¹⁰

Under the leadership of Jewish immigration activist Cecilia Razovsky, the German-Jewish Children’s Aid Inc. collaborated with the Labor Department to facilitate the immigration of nearly a thousand German-Jewish children from the mid-1930s to early 1940s. While providing new lives and safety for children, the program often meant permanent separation from parents who were murdered by the Nazis.¹¹

In 1938, Nazi Germany began expanding its territory by annexing Austria, and immigration applications to the United States increased from Jewish people across Europe. In July 1938, President Roosevelt called the Evian Conference, in which thirty-two countries brainstormed solutions to the German-Jewish refugee crisis, achieving little besides creating the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Later that year, on November 9, the Kristallnacht pogrom terrorized Jewish communities in Germany and Austria and made headlines across the world, garnering sympathy for an escalating refugee crisis.¹²

The Wagner-Rogers bill of 1939 aimed to expand child refugee programs by allowing 20,000 children over two years, beyond the quota system. The bill was the brainchild of Clarence Pickett, a Quaker and Director of the American Friends Service Committee. Following committee discussions and hearings, Senator Robert Reynolds proposed allowing the 10,000 children per year in exchange for cutting off all other immigration. Wagner refused and pulled the bill.¹³

The next effort came from the Interior Department, where Secretary Harold Ickes supported a plan to settle Jewish refugees in the colonized territory of Alaska. This idea became the King-Havenner bill, proposing a separate quota outside the American quota law for a Jewish settler colony in Alaska. However, antisemites doomed the King-Havenner bill, signifying a rare example of American imperialism losing to a different social force: antisemitism.¹⁴

In December 1941, the United States joined World War II to defeat the Axis Powers, including the Nazis, who waged both a world war and a systematic campaign to murder Jewish people. The newly formed War Refugee Board directly supported refugees directly during wartime and saved tens of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish people over the course of seventeen months from 1944 to 1945.¹⁵ Still, American antisemitism hampered efforts to do more. American quota laws epitomized a long history of American xenophobia. Rabbi Stephen Wise connected American civil rights to events in Europe, warning, “what is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any other land on earth unless it is challenged and rebuked.”¹⁶

Many Christians continued to see Jews as a threat to American society. Christian fundamentalism reinforced the vision of America as a white, Christian nation that had strayed from strict adherence to biblical truth. The economic crisis of the 1930s fueled their belief that the nation had to renounce a liberal, secular society. However, some Christian evangelicals and dispensationalists considered Jews an important part of God’s plan to bring the world to Christ. Baptists Jacob Gartenhaus and J. Frank Norris called for a Zionist state to reclaim the promised land and fulfill prophecies that predicted the widespread conversion of Jewish people to Christianity. According to Gartenhaus, to oppose Zionism was “to oppose God’s plan.”¹⁷ These evangelicals also supported a Jewish-Christian coalition against Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims.

IV. A Nation within a Nation

Though populations from these groups were limited by US immigration bans, Muslims in the 1930s began to build mosques and gain converts, including Black Americans of the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam (NOI), in fact, began in Detroit’s Black neighborhoods during the Great Depression. The religion’s founder, W.D. Fard, worked as a peddler by day and preached to African Americans at night. Most of his listeners came to Detroit from the South during the Great Migration.¹⁸ His religion borrowed teachings from the Moorish Science Temple and Black nationalist organizations.¹⁹

Fard taught that the original human beings (Asiatics or Original People) had been created by Allah (God) in His racial image (Black) and taught them His true religion of Islam. He also argued that there was a “religio-racial” connection between skin color and one’s godliness (Blackness) or demonic nature (whiteness). Fard believed that Allah would return to the earth and destroy white people and once again elevate Black people.²⁰ He attracted many followers despite, or perhaps because of, his radical teachings on religion and race.²¹

Fard’s theology stressed male headship in family units. Men were expected to financially provide for their wives and children and physically protect them from danger. In this gendered system, women were subservient to men and cared for the family. The patriarchal system appealed to many women because it “promised” to transform men who did not fulfill traditional masculine duties, which was better than living in patriarchal systems that did not demand male breadwinning or physical protection.²²

The NOI’s leadership changed when W.D. Fard was arrested in connection to one of his followers committing murder in 1932.²³ The Chicago police likely gave Fard the option to either leave town or face charges related to the crime. Other than a brief visit to his common-law wife shortly after, no one reported seeing him again.²⁴

In Fard’s stead, Elijah Muhammad became the NOI’s leader. He oversaw the establishment of schools, founded a newspaper, and pushed the religious group to identify itself as a distinct political entity from the United States, wholly apart from white society and influence. They called themselves a “nation within a nation.” Demanding racial separation marked the NOI apart from other Black religious groups who sought integration into American society. It also set the Nation of Islam apart as a nation of religious people rather than a constellation of congregations.²⁵

The NOI’s identity as a “nation within a nation” led them to side with Japan following Pearl Harbor. Their opposition to the United States and support of Japan triggered a massive movement against the organization by law enforcement. Thousands of Muslims were arrested for sedition or draft avoidance during World War II, leaving the organization with few non-incarcerated male members by 1945.²⁶

After World War II, the Nation of Islam sought to convert Black men through proselytizing efforts they called “fishing,” especially targeting prisons through letter-writing.²⁷ Malcolm Little (the future Malcolm X or el-Hajj el-Shabazz) was one such convert. In the early 1950s, he became a national and international spokesman for the NOI, sharing and defending Elijah Muhammad’s teachings in print, radio, and television.²⁸

The release of the Mike Wallace-produced 1959 television program The Hate That Hate Produced, in which Wallace interviewed Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, put their philosophy side-by-side with those who fought for integration. In doing so, Wallace made an argument for what would happen if the white United States did not move to assimilate Black people into the United States. In practicality, it pitted the NOI as a radical non-Christian group against Christian integrationists, making the integrationist movement appear much less radical compared to the NOI’s racial separatism.²⁹ Though Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. are often framed as opponents, they worked to promote Black civil rights through different methods and through different religious worlds.³⁰

Religion and racial prejudice affected the civil rights of other minority groups as well. Japanese Americans, many of them Buddhists, were incarcerated in detainment camps during World War II. The FBI labeled Buddhist leaders as “known dangerous Group A suspects” and arrested them first. As the word spread that the government was targeting Buddhists, some converted to Christianity in attempt to escape internment. Yet many more held fast in their faith despite the persecution, and many Christian converts will still arrested and interned out of racist suspicion.³¹ Internment devastated Japanese-Americans. Many were given one week to sell all of their property, usually for only pennies on the dollar. Buddhist temples opened their doors and allowed some adherents to store valuables during the period of their incarceration. Many others lost everything they owned as they were absent for years in the detention camps, located in the interior of the United States. Like other Americans of various faiths, Japanese American Buddhists turned to their religion to get them through the upheaval that they faced. At the Manzanar Internment Camp in California’s Owens Valley, interned Buddhists erected a cemetery shrine in 1943 to, as its inscription reads, “console the souls of the dead.”³²

V. Reviving Indigenous Religion

Native Americans, meanwhile, were caught in the limbo between increasing religious tolerance and continued religious persecution. On January 3, 1934, Indian Commissioner John Collier issued Circular 2970, “Indian Religious Freedom and Indian Culture,” which specified that Indian Service (Bureau of Indian Affairs) employees would not interfere with “Indian religious life or ceremonial expression.” Another circular on January 15 eliminated compulsory religious training at government boarding schools. Christian converts who followed the Jesus road, however, perceived Collier’s tolerance toward Native rites as reverting to paganism and heathenism.³³ By the 1930s, about one-half of the Kiowas were Christians. Like other formerly nomadic Plains peoples, many converted around the turn of the century because of the missionaries and field matrons who tended to the sick and taught basic home industries that helped them adapt to a sedentary lifestyle. Moreover, Indigenous concepts of animistic dream spirits and power were fused into Christianity, thereby Indigenizing the new religion as it was interpreted through Native lenses.³⁴

Relaxed federal Indian policy towards Indigenous religious practices led to cultural revival in the Northern Plains, where the Cheyennes opened the Medicine Hat and Sacred Arrow bundles, the Sioux Sun Dance revived, and the Shoshoni version of the Sun Dance, replete with Christian syncretisms, spread to the Crows in 1941.³⁵ Throughout the Plains, variants of the Grass Dance, or War Dance became popular in the intertribal arena, then spread to larger venues at Indian fairs and expositions. The annual American Indian Exposition in Anadarko, Oklahoma, for instance, began in 1934. Cultural revival among the Kiowas resulted in reviving two near-defunct warrior societies in 1958: the Black Leggings and Gourd Clan. Today, the Gourd Dance is performed at many intertribal powwows in Oklahoma and beyond.³⁶

During the 1930s, the Peyote religion was at an inflection point. Peyote (Lophophora williamsii), a small, green, spineless cactus that grows in clusters of “buttons” attached to taproots, grows naturally near Laredo, Texas. Peyote contains mescaline, a vision-inducing alkaloid. The Half Moon variant of the nascent Peyote rite originated in southwestern Oklahoma among the Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches sometime in the 1880s and spread throughout the Trans-Mississippi West by the 1930s. It emerged as an all-night form of worship led by a Roadman sitting at the west side of the Peyote tipi, with a Fireman by the door. Celebrants eat dried Peyote buttons, sing and pray accompanied by a rattle and water drum that circulate clockwise among those sitting cross-legged around the perimeter of the tipi. The Peyote rite became popular because Peyote is known to be a healer, teacher, and protector. Peyote, or tipi meetings, are held to celebrate holidays, birthdays, returning veterans, and to treat sickness.³⁷ Legislation proposed in 1937 threatened to restrict interstate transportation of Peyote from Texas. Anthropologists and others testified on behalf of the Peyote religion and successfully defeated the bill, though anti-narcotics laws in Texas, California, and Idaho continued to pose issues for those who possessed Peyote through the 1950s.³⁸ The Peyote religion was prohibited at Taos Pueblo until 1934, though the Navajo Tribal Council—influenced by missionaries and reformers—banned the “new religion.” Approximately 500 Peyotists were arrested for possession on Navajo reservation lands through the 1950s.³⁹

VI. War

Beyond personal faith and church services, religious rhetoric was also utilized at the highest levels of the U.S. government in the 1930s and 1940s. Franklin D. Roosevelt attended Dutch Reformed and Episcopalian churches throughout his life, but as president, he employed a broad, inclusive religious language and biblical imagery to inspire Americans during the Depression and World War II. He was influenced by the social gospel movement of the early twentieth century that emphasized the Christian obligation to help others in need. In his first inaugural address in 1933, Roosevelt referred to a “plague of locusts” and “unscrupulous moneychangers,” which devout Christians would have recognized from the Old and New Testaments. He also assured his country that “our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men.”⁴⁰  In 1936, he defended the morality of New Deal programs, stating that “your government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.”⁴¹

Though he spoke in specifically Christian terms, Roosevelt believed in widespread religious freedom and diversity, which he included in his Four Freedoms speech of 1941.⁴² In this speech, he listed the freedom to worship among the liberties worth fighting for during World War II. President Roosevelt and Vice President Henry A. Wallace also framed the conflict as a spiritual battle. As Wallace put it in his 1942 speech “The Century of the Common Man,” “the people’s revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels can not prevail against it. They can not prevail, for on the side of the people is the Lord.” Wallace was truly eclectic in his religious views, as he explored a number of different spiritual expressions and denominations including Presbyterianism, Episcopalian, Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christian Science, and Native American religions attuned with nature.⁴³

Christianity, however, remained the dominant religion in the United States during the war, and it had a significant role to play in the American war effort. Many GIs recalled that they prayed in foxholes and during battle or made pacts with God to do something significant in their lives if they survived. Some soldiers, however, did not want to be close to their chaplain or attend religious services. Others channeled their religious beliefs into bravery, putting themselves in more dangerous situations because they believed God would keep them safe as they fought for a righteous cause. Diaries, letters home, and memoirs of American GIs reflect their fervent religiosity. They prayed to God not only to protect them, but also because praying provided them with an emotional and psychological benefit. Praying helped many get through the war experience.⁴⁴

Some Americans were members of “peace churches,” which did not believe in violence or military service. They based their arguments on pacifist grounds and registered with the draft boards as conscientious objectors. They typically served in non-combatant roles, which included medics and chaplains.⁴⁵ About 70,000 American men of draft age received conscientious objector status with alternative service in non-combatant roles.⁴⁶

Christian ministers and chaplains aided the war effort by giving sermons to increase morale, praying with the troops, and comforting soldiers. They also supervised burials as chaplains on the battlefield, where they were assigned to combat units.⁴⁷ There were over 20,000 chaplains who served the needs of millions of American men and women in the armed forces. Only men could become chaplains, and they were categorized by religious affiliation. All Government Issued (GI) soldiers and chaplains were classified as either Jewish, Protestant, or Roman Catholic.⁴⁸ The American government poured many resources into prompting the religiosity of American GIs to prevent them from being corrupted by amoral military life, and to set American religious culture against the atheism of dictatorships.

Jewish rabbis had to meet the needs of both Reform and Orthodox Jews, even though most of the rabbis during the war were Reform. However, chaplains tried to meet the needs of any soldier regardless of their religious affiliation. Historian G. Kurt Piehler argues that the mass armies housed individual religious identities among the combatants. The legacy of this was a movement toward more religious tolerance during and after the war. A soldier’s success and survival on the battlefield sometimes depended on an individual who was of a different faith.⁴⁹ Indeed, religious ecumenicism largely had its watershed moment during and after World War II. 

VII. Ecumenism

What became known as the ecumenical movement was a Protestant effort at the start of the twentieth century to encourage a greater spirit of collaboration among the various Christian denominations in the United States. This led to the creation of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) in 1908, which brought under one umbrella many leading white Protestant denominations of the mainline tradition. Though a minority within the organization, some Black churches also joined, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The FCC carried out work on multiple fronts, including promoting evangelism, home and foreign missions, social reform, and church expansion, and publishing the weekly periodical Christian Century.⁵⁰ In 1950, following the organization of the World Council of Churches two years earlier, ecumenical leaders in the United States established the National Council of Churches (NCC) to succeed the FCC. Under the banner “This Nation Under God,” organizers in 1950 saw the NCC as a response to godless communism during the early Cold War. In this regard, ecumenical Protestants were part of the broader postwar revivalism that swept the country.⁵¹

By midcentury, ecumenical Protestants had developed a social justice platform drawing in part upon the principles of the earlier social gospel movement. They called for an end to segregation and racial discrimination and promoted Race Relations Sundays to draw awareness to the racial divide in America.⁵² Speaking in 1958, Martin Luther King, Jr., turned to ecumenical Christians for support during the early years of the civil rights movement: “You must come to see that God is not a Baptist, God is not a Methodist, God is not a Presbyterian, God is not an Episcopalian. God is bigger than all of our denominations…. [A]lthough we differ in certain credal systems and certain doctrinal forms, there is a unity that makes us all one.”⁵³

Some ecumenical leaders also petitioned for immigration reform, helping put pressure on Congress to overturn Chinese exclusion in 1943 and the discriminatory quota system in 1965.⁵⁴ Despite their earnest attempts, however, much of mainline Protestantism still reflected a white demographic reluctant to change. Ecumenical leaders and theologians were often more liberal and progressive than local church communities. And while women gained an increasing role in the ecumenical movement, they found greater autonomy within separate organizations and auxiliaries, such as the United Council of Church Women.⁵⁵ 

By 1950, liberal Protestants were stretching the notion of ecumenism and working to collaborate with other faith traditions, most notably Jews and Catholics. Promoting what some have called “Tri-Faith America,” there was a growing recognition that Catholics and Jews, alongside Protestants, comprised a Judeo-Christian culture that distinguished the nation from its Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union.⁵⁶ Sociologist Will Herberg concluded in 1955 that for many Americans, “Not to be . . . either a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew is somehow not to be an American.”⁵⁷ The earlier formation of the National Conference of Christians and Jews set a precedent for the more capacious ecumenical movement that followed. The young evangelist Billy Graham found common cause with ecumenical Protestants when promoting a revival in New York City in 1957, despite opposition from more conservative Christians. The apparent, persistent divide between evangelicals and the ecumenical movement, seen as more liberal or progressive, would only grow during the 1960s and 1970s with the continued growth of evangelicalism and the rise of the Religious Right.⁵⁸

VIII. Red Scare

Despite signs of tolerance and ecumenicism, bigotry still permeated the 1940s and 1950s, fueled by the Cold War and Red Scare. Red scares—widespread panics about the possibility that communism would subvert social order in the United States—have punctuated American history. The Red Scare or Second Red Scare usually refers to the period between 1946 and 1954 when intense political persecution of supposed communists or suspected Soviet spies led to the blacklisting of innocent people. An earlier Red Scare, the First Red Scare, occurred between 1918 and 1921 in the wake of the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution. The First Red Scare also involved government raids, investigative judicial committees, and mass deportations. Both periods were characterized by rampant paranoia and suspicion of a broader communist conspiracy. Although these two periods reflect the greatest escalation of anti-communism within the American government, they belie a longer history of anti-communist activism in the United States that stretches beyond and between their chronological boundaries.⁵⁹

Red scares and anti-communism generally have always been construed in moral and religious language. In a social environment defined by suspicion, religion—particularly Protestant Christianity—was used as a litmus test to gauge one’s loyalty to the United States. Couched in religious language, the United States was upheld as a bastion of Christian purity against the transgressive atheism of communism.⁶⁰ The allegation of communist atheism was not unmerited: in the Soviet Union especially, the state denigrated religious practice and destroyed religious buildings. As more Russian immigrants entered the United States in the period between 1880 and 1924, some Americans feared that they would import communist ideology and mete out a similar fate to American religious institutions. In 1954, Congress modified the pledge of allegiance to include the phrase “under God” between “One nation” and “indivisible.” This addition reinforced the role of religion in distinguishing the United States from the Soviet Union.

Many targets of anti-communist persecution before World War II were Catholic and Jewish immigrants who came from Eastern and Southern Europe.⁶¹ The Bolshevik influence in the United States was blamed for everything from intemperance to lack of Sunday observance.⁶² In 1935, Abraham Vereide invoked the power of prayer to combat “subversive forces” creating labor unrest.⁶³ Irish and Italian Roman Catholics were also considered susceptible to communist propaganda due to their European roots and representation in the labor movement.⁶⁴

Throughout the Second Red Scare in the 1950s, American evangelical leaders attacked the communist threat in both the press and the pulpit. The conservative coalition between Christian organizations and anti-communist political actors reached new heights during this Second Red Scare, also imprecisely termed McCarthyism after the Wisconsin Senator who launched an anti-communist witch hunt. Specific interest groups like Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and Schools of Anti-Communism sprang up in the 1950s and 1960s to promote the incompatibility of communism with Christianity.⁶⁵ Popular preachers like Billy Graham invoked the spiritual battle between Christianity and communism in communications with presidents, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet members.⁶⁶

Religious and political leaders thus collaborated in the spiritual war against communism. Protestant Christianity and a broader religious revival were considered the best defense against communist threats to capitalism, freedom, and democracy. The shared European roots of transatlantic immigrants and communist ideas placed Catholic and Jewish foreigners under suspicion in an environment that saw potential enemies everywhere. These symbolic allegiances continued to manifest real social divisions as anti-communism persisted throughout the Cold War and beyond.

IX. Graham and Niebuhr

Religious leaders used various forms of media to reach the masses. Billy Graham, a Southern Baptist minister, was one of the most successful modern evangelists in the United States. He commanded stages and airwaves across the country, and during the 1940s, Graham traveled the world as an itinerant preacher delivering sermons at public venues. He led revivals and “crusades” to bring “born-again-Christians” back to the church, and he promoted evangelical Christianity on his radio show Hour of Decision in the early 1950s. He represented the ecumenical movement in some ways by advocating for racial integration, civil rights, and Christian mercy toward all human beings, regardless of religious affiliation. But he differed from many members of the ecumenical movement by also promoting biblicism and traditional values. With his ability to project the gospel via popular technology, Graham was a predecessor of the televangelists who appeared on religious broadcasts later in the twentieth century.

Known as the “Protestant Pope,” Graham influenced ordinary Americans, and quickly became the face of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). In 1942, a collection of religious leaders sought to find a middle way between Fundamentalism and liberal Protestantism. The result was the NAE, which skewed closer to Fundamentalism than liberalism. The NAE was influential in promoting Billy Graham’s radio programs, extending his voice and their message. 

Graham and the NAE also caught the ear of prominent politicians like Richard Nixon who investigated suspected communists in the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the Red Scare. Graham also met with President Harry S. Truman and gave advice to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Presidents regularly sought Graham’s counsel throughout the 1960s and 1970s, knowing that Graham’s association with their administration or policies would convince many Americans that they were morally sound.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was also courted and cited by politicians in the mid-twentieth century. In his popular 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr argued that nations need not abide by interpersonal norms of morality when facing international threats like fascism or communism. Christians, he believed, had to leverage force, even violence, to apply justice and thwart evil. “Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the good of the whole,” he explained, “it must be destroyed by coercive methods.”⁶⁷

Niebuhr supported social justice and civil rights, but he was a “Christian Realist,” who believed that the harsh realities of international power and the brutalities of dictatorships made staunch pacifism impractical. Though he identified as a socialist in the 1930s, he soured on communist regimes as their undemocratic and atheistic policies became more apparent. In the 1940s, Niebuhr was active in politics as a supporter of President Roosevelt and his intervention in World War II. Niebuhr was also a co-founder of the Union for Democratic Action (later known as the Americans for Democratic Action). His religious rationalizations for warfare to defend or advance democracy were adopted by presidents and foreign policy advisors from World War II to the Vietnam War.

X. Reactions to the Red Scare

Niebuhr and Graham gathered considerable attention and praise for their efforts to right communism. Other religious leaders and organizations took actions that their critics labeled as subversive. Christian organizations that drew these charges insisted that their work in promoting the Gospel would prove to be the most effective deterrent to communism. Still, self-proclaimed patriots who supported McCarthy’s witch-hunt would not be deterred in their crusade.

Following World War II, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations (YMCA and YWCA) were best known for supporting the U.S. military and promoting democracy through religious education. African American YMCA and YWCA leaders combined their patriotic fervor with visions of a desegregated homefront. Sometimes these organizations embraced this message by hosting African American speakers who emphasized anticommunist rhetoric. Three of the most prominent Black anticommunists in the country were affiliated with the Y movement as speakers or as national leaders: the educator and political strategist Mary McLeod Bethune, the attorney and diplomat Edith Sampson, and the NAACP trustee Channing Tobias.⁶⁸ For example, Edith Sampson headlined two YMCA events between 1950 and 1965, and she spoke about collaborating with the US State Department and the United Nations to counteract Soviet messages about American anti-Black prejudice.⁶⁹ Yet the National Student Council of the YMCA and YWCA also encouraged the academic study of communism and discouraged the exclusion of suspected subversives.⁷⁰ The reasons why such dissimilar goals could coexist within the Y movement can be found in Cold War-era racism and antiracism.

Channing Tobias, the former supervisor of the “Colored Work Department” of the YMCA, championed a patriotic racial justice message that helped hasten the desegregation of the Y Movement in 1946. His message included a four-step plan for the U.S. military and the American press to reward African Americans’ loyalty to the nation, and he advanced that plan by joining the NAACP board as a YMCA minister. But pressure to embrace anticommunism compelled Tobias to limit his support for African decolonization and the fight against state-sponsored racial violence.⁷¹ Most notably, he followed US State Department guidance and issued a disapproving statement about a 1951 United Nations petition claiming official US genocidal acts against African Americans.⁷² Nevertheless he along with other NAACP members still faced allegations of communist sympathies, particularly as a backlash against the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.⁷³

As anticommunist fervor expanded through the early and mid-1950s, several Christian ministers and laypeople used denominational affiliation and doctrinal appeals to protect their community members from allegations. Mary McLeod Bethune became a high-profile example in 1952 when she faced temporary blacklisting. NAACP Chairman Walter White highlighted Bethune’s Methodist Church membership in his protest letter after a New Jersey Anti-Communist League succeeded in getting her banned from speaking at a local school.⁷⁴ Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt followed up by arguing that Bethune’s Christian faith was secure enough to withstand and to dismantle subversive communist messages. As Roosevelt wrote, “If she went to [any Communist-front organizations] to speak, she undoubtedly did them good. Mary McLeod Bethune would meet the devil and confront him with Christ, and I would feel quite sure that she and Christ would triumph.”⁷⁵

Individual church congregations sometimes helped American Christians facing the consequences of the Second Red Scare. Bethel Presbyterian Church supported Bethune by agreeing to host her speech despite the accusations.⁷⁶ Black churches continued to host many of the NAACP meetings at local levels, despite the risk of legal and economic consequences in several southern states.⁷⁷ The United Church Women issued a public statement in defense of NAACP members who were blacklisted from teaching positions in southern states.⁷⁸ Likewise, Pastor Adam Clayton Powell Jr. preached in 1953 that McCarthyism was itself a religious heresy, calling it a “cult of deceit” that threatened the nation’s future. ⁷⁹

Perhaps the most impactful response to McCarthyism came from the National Conference of Christians and Jews against the J.B. Matthews, the executive director of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigations committee. After Matthews published a July 1953 article titled “Reds in Our Churches,” three leaders from the National Conference of Christians and Jews convinced President Dwight Eisenhower to condemn the accusations against Protestant ministers (and any unsubstantiated redbaiting) in writing. This high-level rebuke was perceived as the beginning of McCarthy’s decline from political power.⁸⁰ 

XI. Conclusion

Church attendance from the 1930s through the 1950s fluctuated as religious institutions struggled to attract followers. However, religion in the United States remained popular and populist. Americans relied on their faith traditions to get them through the hard times of the Great Depression and World War II. Politicians used religious rhetoric to comfort and inspire the American public. Though that rhetoric was mostly couched in Christian Protestant terms, and Protestants constituted 69% of the populous in 1949, the American religious landscape expanded to include Jews and Catholics.⁸¹ Americans also had to reckon with the increasing presence of minority religions like Islam and Buddhism, as well as new Christian denominations that broke off the mainline churches. Liberal Protestants, Christian fundamentalists, evangelicals, radical and conservative Catholics, and militant Muslims like the Nation of Islam all vied for a voice in American culture in the mid-twentieth century. 

XII. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Vaneesa Cook, with content contributions from Vaneesa Cook, Carolyn R. Dupont, Rebecca Brenner Graham, Kimberly Hill, Travis Hill, Benjamin R. Kracht, Nicholas Pruitt, Jon Kara Shields, Emily Stolken, Joseph Stuart, David Trevino, and Ben Wright.

Recommended Reading

• Margaret Bendroth, Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920–1980 (Oxford University Press, 2022).
• Vaughn A. Booker, Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (NYU Press, 2020).
• Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Vaneesa Cook, Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
• Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books, 2019).
• Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2011).
• Curtis J. Evans, A Theology of Brotherhood: The Federal Council of Churches and the Problem of Race (New York University Press, 2024).
• Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W. W. Norton, 2011).
• Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Reshape America (Simon & Schuster, 2017).
• K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
• Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2010).
• Rebecca Brenner Graham, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington Books, 2025).
• David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013).
• David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017).
• Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Gale L. Kenny, Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024).
• Helen Jin Kim, Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022).
• Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015).
• Angela M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
• Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Ula Taylor, Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
• Paul Harvey, Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
• Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Gene Zubovich, Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

Notes

1. Randall J. Stephens, “The Dust Bowl, the Depression, and American Protestant Responses to Environmental Devastation,” Church History 92, no. 2 (2023): 313. ↩︎
2. https://www.fdrlibrary.org/great-depression-facts. ↩︎
3. See Vaneesa Cook, Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 42-55, 59-69. ↩︎
4. Dorothy Day. The Long Loneliness, reprint (HarperCollins, 2017 [1952]). ↩︎
5. Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (University of Alabama Press, 2006). ↩︎
6. Dorothy Day, “To Our Reader,” Catholic Worker, May 1, 1933, 1. ↩︎
7. Dorothy Day, From Union Square to Rome (Faith Press, 1938). ↩︎
8. Heather D. Curtis, “’God Is Not Affected by the Depression’”: Pentecostal Missions during the 1930s,” Church History 80, no. 3 (2011): 582. ↩︎
9. Joel A. Carpenter, “Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929–1942,” Church History 49, no. 1 (1980): 62–75. ↩︎
10. Rebecca Brenner Graham, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington Books, 2025), 65-82. ↩︎
11. German-Jewish Children’s Aid Records (RG 249) YIVO https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/7/resources/549. ↩︎
12. For statistics, see “How Many Refugees Came to the United States from 1933-1945?” Americans and the Holocaust, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/how-many-refugees-came-to-the-united-states-from-1933-1945. ↩︎
13. Graham, Dear Miss Perkins, 103-110. ↩︎
14. Graham, Dear Miss Perkins, 159-79. ↩︎
15. Rebecca Erbelding, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (Doubleday, 2018), 7. ↩︎
16. Stephen Wise, American Jewish Congress, 1933. ↩︎
17. Jacob Gartenhaus, The Rebirth of a Nation: Zionism in History and Prophecy, 1936. ↩︎
18. Erdmann Doane Beynon, “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit,” American Journal of Sociology 43, no. 6 (1938): 897-98. For more on the Great Migration and African American New Religious Movements, see Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2016). ↩︎
19. Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 320-21. ↩︎
20. “Religio-racial identity” is defined as the co-constitutive relationship of racial identity and religious identity in Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming, 5-6. For more on race and embodiment in the NOI, see Stephen C. Finley, In & Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Duke University Press, 2022). ↩︎
21. Ed Beynon mentions “hundreds” of converts. See Ed Beynon, “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit,” 897. For more on Fard, see Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 20-22. ↩︎
22. Ula Y. Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 1-7. ↩︎
23. Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming, 63-66. ↩︎
24. Clegg III, An Original Man, 34-35. ↩︎
25. Joseph R. Stuart, “Freedom, Justice, and Equality for Black Men in America: Race, Masculinity, and the Nation of Islam in the Black Freedom Movement, 1931-1975″ (PhD Diss., University of Utah, 2022), 51. ↩︎
26. For more on the Nation of Islam in the historiography of religion and law, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Belknap Press, 2010), 96-97; Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 16-49. Hatin Sahib writes that there were only thirteen active participants in the NOI at the war’s end. See Hatin A. Sahib, “The Nation of Islam,” reprinted in Contributions in Black Studies: A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies 13 (1995): 62. ↩︎
27. Ula Taylor, Promise of Patriarchy, 72-73. ↩︎
28. The best recent biography of Malcolm X is Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright, 2020). Another excellent biography is Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Penguin, 2011). ↩︎
29. Vaughn A. Booker, “The Hate that Hate Produced: Representing Black Religion in the Twentieth Century,” in Benjamin E. Park, ed., A Companion to American Religious History (Wiley, 2021), 299-316. ↩︎
30. Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic Books, 2020). ↩︎
31. Duncan Ryuken Williams, “Camp Dharma: Japanese-American Buddhist Identity and the Internment Experience of World War II,” in Westward Dhamra: Buddhism beyond Asia, eds. Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann. (University of California Press, 2002), 192, 194. ↩︎
32. Duncan Ryuken Williams, “Complex Loyalties: Issei Buddhist Ministers during the Wartime Incarceration,” Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies no. 5 (2003), 268. ↩︎
33. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 1984). ↩︎
34. Benjamin R. Kracht, Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas: The Ghost Dance, Peyote, and Christianity (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 225-29. ↩︎
35. C. Adrian Heidenreich, Native American Studies: An Introduction (McGraw-Hill, 1991); C. Adrian Heidenreich, Smoke Signals in Crow (Apsáalooke) Country: Beyond the Capture of Horses from the Lewis & Clark Expedition (2006). ↩︎
36. Benjamin R. Kracht, Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas; Kracht, Kiowa Belief and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). ↩︎
37. Thomas C. Maroukis, The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 59-90; Kracht, Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas, 25, 72-73. ↩︎
38. Kracht, Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas, 165-68, 184. ↩︎
39. Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 203-8, 294-310. ↩︎
40. Franklin Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” March 1933. ↩︎
41. Franklin Roosevelt, Democratic National Convention, 1936. ↩︎
42. Franklin Roosevelt, “Four Freedoms speech,” State of the Union Address, January 6, 1941. ↩︎
43. Cook, Spiritual Socialists, 109-11, 117-31. ↩︎
44. Nicholas Pelligrino, “Embattled Belief: The Religious Experiences of American Military Combatants during World War II and Today,” Journal of Military Experience 3, no. 2 (2013). ↩︎
45. “Religion on the World War II Homefront,” National Park Service. ↩︎
46. Dayna Barnes, “Gods at War: Religion and the Pacific Theater in World War II,” Garnet: Global Affairs and Religion Network, February 12, 2023. ↩︎
47. Dayna Barnes, “Gods at War.” ↩︎
48. Steve R. Waddell, Review of A Religious History of the American GI World War II, by G. Kurt Piehler, Journal of Arizona History 64, no. 3 (2023). ↩︎
49. G. Kurt Piehler, A Religious History of the American GI in World War II (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). ↩︎
50. Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩︎
51. Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2011). ↩︎
52. Christopher H. Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History (NYU Press, 2017); Curtis J. Evans, A Theology of Brotherhood: The Federal Council of Churches and the Problem of Race (NYU Press, 2024); James F. Findlay Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970 (Oxford University Press, 1997). ↩︎
53. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” June 3, 1958, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/pauls-letter-american-christians-sermon-delivered-commission-ecumenical#fn2 (accessed July 31, 2024). ↩︎
54. Nicholas T. Pruitt, Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism (NYU Press, 2021). ↩︎
55. Gale L. Kenny, Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024); Margaret Bendroth, Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920-1980 (Oxford University Press, 2022). ↩︎
56. Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford University Press, 2011); K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019). ↩︎
57. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Doubleday, 1955), 274. ↩︎
58. David A. Hollinger, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton University Press, 2024). Gene Zubovich, Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). ↩︎
59. See Robert Justin Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares”: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921-1946 (Routledge, 2016). This volume addresses American anti-communism between the two “great” red scares. ↩︎
60. Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2011), 47. ↩︎
61. See Robert F. Zeidel, Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse: Ethnic and Class Dynamics During the Era of American Industrialization (Cornell University Press, 2020), especially Chapter 8, “Addressing the Reds: Immigrants and the Postwar Great Scare of 1919-1921.” ↩︎
62. Anderson R. Rouse, “Keeping Up With the Joneses: Progressive-Era Revivalism in the South and the Rise of the Christian Right” (PhD Diss., The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2024), 207. ↩︎
63. Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015), 42. ↩︎
64. Nick Fischer, Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism (University of Illinois Press, 2016) , 101 and 155. ↩︎
65. Nick Fischer, Spider Web, 148. ↩︎
66. Nick Fischer, Spider Web, 80. ↩︎
67. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Scribner’s, 1932), 21. ↩︎
68. Kenneth R. Janken, “From Colonial Liberation to Cold War liberalism: Walter White, the NAACP, and Foreign Affairs, 1941–1955,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 6 (1998): 1090; Gerald Horne, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (University of Illinois Press, 2014), 1-3, 130. ↩︎
69. Helen Laville and Scott Lucas, “The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NAACP, and African American Identity in the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 4 (1996): 574-576, 579. ↩︎
70. National Student Council of the YMCA and YWCA, “Memo on Political Responsibility,” October 1953, Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, 1952-55, NAACP Youth File, Proquest History Vault: NAACP Papers, 1-3. ↩︎
71. Channing H. Tobias, “The Negro in Our Democracy: Address at Cooper Union Forum,” 23 March 1943, Board of Directors Channing Tobias General File, 1943-49, Proquest History Vault: NAACP Papers, 2-7. ↩︎
72. Janken, “From Colonial Liberation to Cold War liberalism,” 1087; Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide, second edition (International Publishers, 1970). ↩︎
73. Cherisse Jones-Branch, Crossing the Line: Women’s Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II (University Press of Florida, 2014), 64. ↩︎
74. Walter White to William J. Fitzpatrick, Englewood Board of Education, 25 April 1952, Bethune, Mary McLeod, Englewood, NJ Incident, 1952-53 File, Proquest History Vault: NAACP Papers, 47; Re: Englewood Meeting – Mrs. Bethune – April 24, 1952, Bethune, Mary McLeod, Englewood, NJ Incident, 1952-53 File, Proquest History Vault: NAACP Papers, 8. ↩︎
75. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Vehement Protest,” unnamed newspaper, undated (April or May 1952), Bethune, Mary McLeod, Englewood, NJ Incident, 1952-53 File, Proquest History Vault: NAACP Papers, p. 41. ↩︎
76. Re: Englewood Meeting – Mrs. Bethune – April 24, 1952. ↩︎
77. “What is the NAACP?,” Information Service 36:8 (23 February 1957), 1, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A, in the Church Department Correspondence File, 1957-63, Proquest History Vault: NAACP Papers. ↩︎
78. Cherisse Jones-Branch, Crossing the Line, 84. ↩︎
79. Herbert Robinson Marbury, “Exodus in the Civil Rights Era: Returning the Struggle to the Black Church,” in Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation (NYU Press, 2015), 149; Jones-Branch, Crossing the Line, 67, 149. ↩︎
80. “McCarthy Takes Over,” The Progressive (April 1954), 47-50, in McCarthy, Joseph 1954, NAACP File 1940-1955, Proquest History Vault: NAACP Papers. ↩︎
81. See Pew Research Center data, https://www.pewresearch.org/collections/religious-landscape-study/. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

On Sunday May 21, 1922, Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick stepped into the pulpit of First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and delivered the defining sermon of his era. The title of the sermon was not a proclamation but a question: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” As Fosdick explained, “A great mass of new knowledge has come into man’s possession—new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its force, its laws; new knowledge about human history and in particular about the ways in which ancient peoples used to think in matters of religion…; and new knowledge, also, about other religions….” In an era of intellectual and political transformation, Fosdick was a leading voice among Protestant modernists (or liberals) who, he argued, “must be able to think our Christian faith clear through in modern terms.” Not all American Protestants were eager to embrace these changes. Fundamentalists who championed a literal interpretation of the Bible were, according to Fosdick, “thinking in ancient terms that leave ideas of progress out.”

For Fosdick, modernity presented an opportunity for collective spiritual progress. Modern science, which he deemed “an intellectual adventure for the truth,” brought the radio to an increasing number of American homes. The spiritual sounds of countless choirs and impassioned evangelists would soon overtake the airwaves. But technological modernity had also, just four years earlier, made possible the deadliest war the world had ever seen. Fosdick reminded those in the First Presbyterian pews of that devastation, asking, “If, during the war when the nations were wrestling upon the very brink of hell and at times all seemed lost, you chanced to hear two men in an altercation about some minor matter of sectarian denominationalism, could you restrain your indignation?” Fundamentalists, on the other hand, aimed to “set up in Protestantism a doctrinal tribunal more rigid than the Pope’s.” Even as he criticized sectarianism, Fosdick employed the anti-Catholicism that then pervaded Protestant America. Fosdick’s famous sermon made clear the nation’s religious reality: American modernity would incentivize progress and also empower prejudice; it would animate religious innovators and also activate indignant defenders of tradition; it would germinate new multifaith coalitions and also generate new intra- and inter-faith conflicts that would persist for decades.¹

II. A World at War

In the summer of 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the tinderbox of European nationalism. France and the United Kingdom led the Allies against the Central Powers—the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires in the “Great War.” At first, most Americans favored staying out of the European conflict. But in 1915 a German U-Boat submarine sank the British ocean liner the Lusitania and killed 128 American citizens on board.

Some Americans began to call for American entry into the war, but President Woodrow Wilson only went as far as issuing a demand that Germany cease unrestricted attacks on vessels with American citizens. Even this was too much for Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan; the longtime anti-imperialist and staunch pacifist resigned from the cabinet. This marked the end of Bryan’s significant power within the Democratic Party after nearly two decades as the standard-bearer of the party’s populist wing. It similarly marked the decline of the Presbyterian Bryan’s unique fusion of Social Gospel progressivism and fundamentalist “old-time religion.” President Wilson, also a devout Presbyterian but a bookish theological moderate, championed a new brand of democratic internationalism instead of pacifist anti-imperialism.

Wilson was re-elected in 1916 behind promises to keep America out of the war. However, German U-Boats continued to attack American merchant ships. Further, British intelligence intercepted a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann encouraging Mexico to attack the United States. So, on April 6, 1917, Congress voted to declare war on Germany as requested by President Wilson.

Over two million American soldiers were sent to Europe. Many of these soldiers and many American civilians were quick to cast the war as a religious mission to protect and spread Christian civilization. They claimed their German enemies were cruel “Huns,” descendants of the pre-Christian warlike nomads of the 4th to 6th centuries. Stars and Stripes, the newspaper created by and for the armed forces, frequently amplified the Christian stakes of the war. One article compared atrocities in German-occupied Belgium to the killing of infants ordered by King Herod, as detailed in the biblical book of Matthew. In an even bolder claim of divine support, one cartoon showed the German Crown Prince saying to the Kaiser of Jesus on the cross, “Oh, Look, Papa! Another of those Allies.”² As British forces began to defeat the Ottoman Empire in Palestine, Stars and Stripes celebrated Christian control of the Holy Land as a successful latter-day crusade. American soldiers faced the realities of a deadly war from which 116,516 would not return (with over half lost off the battlefield to causes like the deadly “Spanish flu”). Countless soldiers turned to faith to identify noble sacrifice in death and to Christian national identity as comfort in the face of mass tragedy.³

For many fundamentalist Protestants, the unprecedented devastation of the Great War seemed to portend the apocalypse. Most fundamentalists were premillennialists who believed that the crises described in the book of Revelation would occur before Jesus’ thousand-year reign on Earth. For them, the British control of Palestine created the potential for the return of Jews to the Holy Land, which was another purported step toward Armageddon, a prophesied end-times battle between Israel and its enemies.⁴

Many Black soldiers also framed the war as a religious crusade for the soul of Europe and a chance to purify the sins of American racism. Many Black Americans hoped that the Christ-like sacrifice of Black soldiers on the battlefield would lay bare the sins of a nation that treated them as second-class citizens. But few white Americans took this lesson from the Great War. In fact, even as the Southern-born Woodrow Wilson insisted on democratic sovereignty abroad, he amplified white supremacist government at home. He instituted segregation of the federal bureaucracy and increased discrimination in government employment.

Meanwhile, German Americans also faced dramatically increased suspicion and prejudice. Several states passed laws banning German language instruction in schools. In 1918, Iowa Governor William Harding issued the Babel Proclamation, a state ban on any non-English speech in public—including in churches. While some German American Lutheran Churches in the United States changed to English language worship to prove their patriotic bona fides, others refused to comply with what they deemed a violation of their constitutional rights. The Supreme Court agreed in 1923 in Meyer v. Nebraska, and the ban was overturned. 

Many members of the Quakers, Brethren, and Anabaptists, later dubbed the “peace churches,” found themselves outside the crusading consensus. The Selective Service Act of 1917, which created a national draft, included a provision allowing conscientious objection for members of “well-recognized religious groups.” Of the 24 million men who registered for the draft by November 1918, 64,693 claimed to be conscientious objectors. 3,989 persisted in their claims even after being selected and sent to military camps.⁵ Many conscientious objectors left to join the military in noncombatant roles, such as the medical field or logistics. Quakers created the American Friends Service Committee in 1917 to provide an avenue for conscientious objectors to assist with relief and reconstruction efforts in Europe. Still, those who remained firm in their stance were often abused. One Quaker recounted being beaten and strangled by peers at Camp Cody in New Mexico. Some who resisted all forms of military service were imprisoned. Only in 1933 was the last person detained for resisting conscription finally pardoned and released. After World War I, regret over the war’s carnage led to a surge in pacifism among mainline and liberal Protestants. Peace groups within denominations and the interdenominational Fellowship of Reconciliation provided a way for pacifists to gather and work together to lobby politicians and agitate for peace.

Indeed, the end of the Great War in November 1918 was hardly the end of its impact on American religion. In 1919, American veterans in Paris founded the American Legion, which worked to commemorate the Christian sacrifice of American soldiers and counter the claims of Christian pacifists. At the same time at the Paris Peace Conference, President Wilson proposed a League of Nations, an international organization dedicated to maintaining world peace. For many liberal Protestants, the League of Nations promised the Social Gospel writ global. For many fundamentalists, however, the League of Nations threatened yet another prophesied step toward apocalyptic disaster. Many of these fundamentalists supported Republican Warren Harding as he campaigned against American participation in the League of Nations and in favor of an isolationist “return to normalcy” on his way to White House in 1920.

III. Progress and Prejudice

In 1917, one year before his untimely death due to the global influenza pandemic, Baptist minister and theologian Walter Rauschenbusch published A Theology for the Social Gospel. In it, he contended that “the social gospel is a permanent addition to our spiritual outlook and that its arrival constitutes a stage in the development of the Christian religion.” “The social gospel has become orthodox,” he optimistically proclaimed.⁶ In reality, Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel was far from standard , as was his long commitment to alleviating urban poverty and advocating for Christian socialism. Nevertheless, the notion that Protestant morality should reshape American politics and culture was widespread even across denominations with increasingly divergent theologies. Indeed, the most significant changes of the late Progressive Era were consistently marked by both Protestant proclamations of progress and persistent Protestant prejudices.

In the nineteenth century, many Protestant ministers and influential laywomen had organized around the cause of temperance. In 1893, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) was founded in Oberlin, Ohio. During this time, Wayne Wheeler was a student at the nearby Oberlin College, a Protestant school with a long history of social activism. Wheeler began working for the ASL the following year. By 1917, Wheeler was the head of the ASL, which had already successfully led state-level Prohibition efforts and established itself as a powerful force in both major parties. In December, both Congress and the Senate overwhelmingly voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to prohibit the “manufacture, sale, or transportation” of alcohol. On January 16, 1919, the necessary state ratifications led to the Eighteenth Amendment. The era of Prohibition began one year later when the Volstead Act enforced the Amendment.

Protestant motivations for supporting Prohibition were varied. Some viewed the measure as an essential social reform necessary to counter alcohol’s public health ramifications, domestic violence, and urban poverty. Others based their support on a pietistic theology in which consumption of alcohol and drunkenness were inherently sinful practices and associated with a host of other vices. From either perspective, Prohibition proved at least somewhat successful. Alcohol consumption decreased substantially, as did rates of liver cirrhosis.⁷

Not all Protestant zeal for Prohibition was high-minded, however. German-Americans had brought and maintained large-scale beer production in the United States. Anti-German sentiment during World War I thus amplified calls to eliminate the beer industry as an internal enemy of the United States. Even more significantly, anti-alcohol activism was often targeted at the immigrant communities of Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics in American cities. The Roman Catholic Church rejected Protestant pietism with respect to alcohol. (Still, the Volstead Act did create an exception for sacramental wine.) This religious difference underlay Protestant claims that working class immigrants were a source of national moral decay. Prohibition and other Protestant reform efforts thus often blended xenophobia, classism, and religious prejudice into notions of progress.

Prohibition was not an isolated political movement. Since the nineteenth century, Protestant women—like Methodist Frances Willard, who led the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union—often combined the fight for temperance with calls for greater political rights for women, particularly the right to vote. Alcohol, many Prohibitionists argued, was a driver of domestic abuse and financial neglect that disproportionately harmed women. Indeed, support for Prohibition and women’s suffrage often overlapped and intertwined. American women had long demonstrated consistently higher levels of religious adherence than American men. To many Protestants, if American women were the moral and religious engine of the family, they might also prove the moral engine of the nation once they obtained the right to vote (as evidenced by their leadership and grassroots importance to the temperance movement.) Thus, calls for women’s suffrage invoked both social progress and Protestant moralism.

Some suffragists, like National American Women Suffrage Association president Carrie Chapman Catt, offered strategic religious arguments to advance their cause. Others, like National Women’s Party founder and devout Quaker Alice Paul, insisted on gender equality as a central faith tenet. In 1917, Paul and her more radical NWP organized the two and a half year “Silent Sentinels” protest at the White House gates. They carried signs that turned President Wilson’s Protestant paeans to democracy abroad during the war against him. Paul and many protestors were arrested, but their hunger strike in prison helped to sway public opinion and pressure the president. In 1919, an amendment passed through Congress and the Senate with Wilson’s support. In August 2020, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and American women finally gained the right to vote after decades and decades of political mobilization.

Many Americans resisted women’s suffrage. Women, especially wealthy women, led anti-suffrage organizations in many states. Many American Catholic clergy also took strong theological stances against women’s suffrage and encouraged women in their parishes to lead the fight against suffrage. As Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore explained, “Woman is queen indeed but her empire is the domestic kingdom.”⁸ Still, the fight for women’s suffrage brought together unusual religious bedfellows. Lucy Burns, co-founder of the National Woman’s Party, was a devout Catholic from an Irish background. Still racism divided the movement. Black suffragists like Presbyterian journalist Ida B. Wells were consistently and intentionally excluded from or sidelined in a movement that continued to appeal to White Protestant prejudice as well as egalitarian notions of progress.

Paul and other progressive Protestants pressed, but the reformist tide had begun to ebb. Paul and her National Women’s Party drafted the Equal Rights Amendment to ensure full equality for men and women under the Constitution. Though the amendment was introduced in Congress every year beginning in 1923, it would not pass through Congress until 1972 (and even then fall short of ratification.) The 1920 Smith-Towner Bill, which would have created greater funding for public schools and a Federal Department of Education, similarly failed to pass through Congress, and the Department would not be fully established until the 1970s.

Opposition to child labor had long been a keystone of Social Gospel Protestantism, and in 1924 an amendment granting Congress the power to regulate or prohibit labor for Americans under eighteen finally passed through both houses of Congress. However, business leaders committed to laissez faire economics joined with conservative Catholics and key fundamentalist leaders in organizations like the Sentinels of the Republic to argue that the amendment was a communistic threat to the traditional patriarchal family. Though twenty-eight states ratified the amendment, these arguments persuaded enough Americans that it fell short of the three-fourths of the states needed. The dominant Protestant progressivism had begun to erode. Meanwhile, the dominant Protestant xenophobia continued to grow.

The Great War was not the only international conflict to send shockwaves through the American religious landscape. In 1917, a revolutionary war broke out in Russia that toppled the monarchy and brought the communist Bolshevik Party to power. In reaction, a wave of anti-radical panic swept through the United States. Thus began what came to be known as the “First Red Scare”. Little distinction was made between dissenting socialists, communists, and anarchists who were the targets of President Wilson’s wartime Sedition Act of 1918. Many Americans understood communism not primarily as an economic and political ideology in opposition to capitalism, but as a competing anti-Christian religion committed to atheism. In fact, this deep theological anticommunism united religious traditions and communities that otherwise often found themselves at odds.

Still, Americans brought very different perspectives even to their shared anticommunist panic. Many of the premillennialists among fundamentalist and Pentecostal Protestant churches understood communism and its rise in Russia as yet another sign of biblical prophecy that pointed to the coming apocalypse. For example, an article in the Pentecostal Evangel posited that communism was the “great red dragon” or the “scarlet colored beast, full of the names of blasphemy” from the book of Revelation.⁹ More liberal Protestants, both white and Black, as well as socially-conscious Catholic leaders, took a more practical approach to their anticommunism, arguing that the United States would need progressive policy for the improved welfare of the working class if it hoped to avoid the proletarian upheaval that had brought communism to power in Russia.¹⁰ Catholics and Mormons contended that their committed anticommunism proved their oft-questioned patriotism.

Americans propagated a range of theories about who and what was to blame for the global rise of communism and its alleged threat to American society. In the summer of 1919, white supremacist riots in several American cities, most notably Chicago and Washington D.C., featured white-led attacks on Black civil rights leaders. Both the police and religious leaders blamed an alleged infiltration of communism as causing the violence. Seventh-Day Adventist and amateur geologist George McReady Price blamed the spread of communism on the growing acceptance of the naturalistic theory of evolution. Price’s writings, foundational to the growing creationist movement, met a receptive audience in fundamentalist Protestantism. Theologically conservative Protestants who had once joined in reformist political crusades with modernist Protestants began to emphasize evolution as an intolerable heresy and a reason to suspect liberal Protestants of holding communist sympathies.¹¹ Catholics went on the ideological offensive as well. A 1919 article in the Catholic Telegraph stated, “We sometimes wonder whether there is not a causative relationship between Protestantism and Bolshevism. There can be no doubt but that the underlying basic principles of both isms are remarkably similar, if not identical.”¹²

But the most common targets of anticommunist scapegoating were Jews. In the United States, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe bore the brunt of this prejudice. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, anti-Bolshevik Russian émigrés introduced The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the United States. The Protocols were conclusively proved fraudulent by a British journalist in 1921, but many antisemitic Americans wanted to believe their lies, which told of an alleged Jewish plot to achieve world domination that began with the communist takeover of Russia. Belief in a “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy quickly spread in the United States. For many fundamentalist premillennialists, this narrative suited both their religious prejudice and their apocalyptic expectation of an evil global government.The most influential purveyor of the Protocols in the United States was the influential industrialist and automaker Henry Ford. Ford printed and distributed copies of the Protocols. His newspaper The Dearborn Independent also published a series of articles, written by lay preacher William J. Cameron, collectively titled “The International Jew.” Cameron’s articles spread antisemitism in America and, once translated into German, later fostered Nazi ideology. Cameron was also a proponent of Anglo-Israelism, the belief that Anglo-Saxons, not modern Jews (allegedly descended only from the tribe of Judah), were the true descendants of ancient Israel. This far-right antisemitic ideology made inroads in various American religious traditions including Pentecostalism, Adventism, Mormonism, and Christian Science and would remain a feature of the far right in the decades that followed. However, by the mid-1920s, the largest explicitly antisemitic organization was the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1915, William Joseph Simmons of Alabama re-founded the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia. He was inspired by the silent film The Birth of a Nation, which valorized the white supremacist vigilante organization that had terrorized Black Americans and their allies in the post-Civil War South. (The Birth of a Nation was also the first film shown inside the White House, further evidence of President Wilson’s Lost Cause sympathies.) At first, the Second Klan grew slowly. However, it aggressively recruited from Protestant churches, and membership soon began to grow. The Second Klan shared the anti-Black commitments of its predecessor, but shifted its focus to anti-Catholic, antisemitic, and anti-immigrant activism as well. While the First Klan had primarily operated in the South, the Second featured key leadership and outsized growth in states like Indiana and Oregon. The Klan insisted that white, native-born Protestants were and should remain the core of the nation. This claim held broad ecumenical appeal within white Protestant communities. While the so-called “Invisible Empire” maintained secretive practices and membership, in many places it also sponsored community events like parades and picnics.

In fact, the 1920s Klan harmonized with the politics of many other contemporary Protestants. The Klan supported Prohibition and acted in parallel with the Anti-Saloon League to provide extralegal vigilante enforcement where federal enforcement fell short.¹³ The Klan offered free membership for Protestant ministers and claimed that (a likely inflated) 30,000 of them joined. One Klan ritual was to interrupt church services with a procession of hooded figures, donate some money, and file out. Some ministers accepted the money and thanked the Klan; others chased them out of the building. 

Between 1922 and 1924, many Klan-affiliated candidates won local, state, and federal office, particularly in Indiana, Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Texas. At its height, the Klan had between two million and five million members nationally (due to its secret nature, exact numbers are impossible). Hiram Wesley Evans, the Klan’s national leader from 1922 to 1939, emphasized anti-Catholicism and political engagement. Yet the Klan’s claim to uphold traditional morality crumbled with high-profile power struggles and scandals, such as when Indiana Klan chief David Curtis Stephenson was tried and convicted of kidnapping, rape, and murder in 1925. Klan membership, reportedly in the millions by 1924, had fallen to 37,000 by 1930.¹⁴

Nevertheless, the anti-Catholic and ethnonationalist positions that the Klan shared with many Protestants left a lasting mark on American law. In 1922, Oregon passed the Compulsory Education Act mandating public school attendance for all children in the state. The law was aimed at the less than 10% of the state’s children who attended parochial Catholic schools. On an even larger scale, American isolationism reached new heights with passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, the law banned immigration from Asia and set severe quotas on the number of immigrants who would be admitted from Southern and Eastern Europe. The anti-Catholicism and antisemitism of Protestant America had proved more durable than its progressivism.

IV. Immigrants and Innovators

It is difficult to identify an integrated narrative about a segregated society. But many of the era’s targets of religious and racial prejudices nevertheless carved out new opportunities for expansion, organization, and innovation. Northern US cities became the prime location for new religious organization and innovation due to their substantial populations of Jewish and Catholic immigrant communities from Europe and their growing Black population arriving from the South in the ongoing Great Migration.

There were vibrant Jewish communities in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. But by 1927, approximately forty-four percent of all American Jews lived in New York City. In fact, New York had the largest Jewish population of any city in the world.

Even after the conspiratorial antisemitism of the Red Scare, Jews faced exclusion in many facets of American life. They were prevented from owning homes in certain neighborhoods, belonging to various social clubs, or staying at specific hotels. Quotas kept Jews out of universities and professional schools (medical, dental, and law schools, for instance). In 1922, Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell wrote to Julian Mack, a Harvard alumnus and Chicago judge, asking whether he would approve of a plan limiting the percentage of entering Jews to fifteen percent of the total class. “I think we have found a way by which we can limit the Jews in Harvard College to the number that we can really benefit,” explained Lowell, who also suggested that this proposed quota system “would be for the greatest interest of everyone concerned.” While some Jewish Americans changed their names to avoid discrimination, many more supported antidiscrimination laws, civil rights organizations, and intentionally Jewish social spaces that ranged from restaurants to resorts.

Conservative and Orthodox Jews shared an emphasis on tradition, observing the Sabbath, following Jewish dietary laws, and promoting religious education. In 1926, they even considered a merger between the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) and Yeshiva College (Orthodox). However, as Conservative Judaism began to adapt Jewish tradition to modern American life through the greater inclusion of women in synagogue life and services in English as well as Hebrew, the movements began to diverge. Conservative Judaism saw astonishing growth through this period. In 1913, it contained 22 member synagogues; by 1929, it boasted 229.¹⁵

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan had been educated at Jewish Theological Seminary and later worked as a rabbi for Orthodox congregations. In 1922, however, he left his pulpit to form the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, which would serve as the epicenter for a new Jewish religious movement that became known as Reconstructionism. Kaplan insisted that Judaism should evolve with modernity and not be bound by historical tradition. As later recorded in his 1934 book, Judaism As A Civilization, Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life, Kaplan argued that Jews should view “Judaism not merely as a religion but as a civilization.” They could, he promised, “bring to bear creative intelligence upon whatever task they will undertake, whether it be the upbuilding of Palestine, the campaign against discrimination, the organization of communal life, the establishment of congregations, the fostering of religion or the encouragement of Jewish art.” Kaplan’s modernist Reconstructionism was the first major movement within Judaism to originate in the United States but would not be the last.

Like American Jews, American Catholics faced a choice between attempted assimilation and institutional separation in response to religious prejudice. But they approached the choice with a far larger share of the nation’s population. Immigrants, particularly those from Ireland, Italy, and Poland, had long relied on the Catholic Church to anchor ethnic enclaves in America’s urban North. Even within American Catholicism, inter-ethnic tensions often ran high. For example, more established Irish American Catholics complained of the unruliness of the growing Polish American Catholic community, while American clergy despaired of the lack of religious devotion among Italian Americans.¹⁶ Still, Catholic leadership in the United States identified new opportunities to stake a claim in American public life.

In 1917, American Catholic leaders met for the first time in decades to found the National Catholic War Council and coordinate the Church’s efforts to financially and spiritually support American soldiers in the Great War. In 1919, in response to American political threats to Catholic practice and Pope Benedict XV’s call for social justice, War Council leaders organized the permanent National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC) so American Catholics could coordinate their political and social efforts. Bishops led departments for Education, Legislation, Social Action, Lay Organizations, and Press and Publicity. The following year the NCWC added a Bureau of Immigration to assist incoming immigrants in navigating legal requirements and gaining financial security. Anti-immigrant Protestants often assumed that new arrivals from predominantly Catholic nations were committed to the faith, but that was not always reality. The American Catholic Church won and secured new adherents with their outreach efforts.¹⁷

The NCWC brought specific Catholic concerns to the United States government at the same time that it brought a new level of national coordination to a previously balkanized American Catholic Church. Not everyone was enamored with this pivot. Many laypeople resented the top-down efforts to meld distinct and sometimes antagonistic communities in American cities. Many laypeople wanted their church to remain the source of their particular religio-ethnic identity, not an overarching faith that washed out longstanding differences. Many European leaders in the Roman Catholic Church had the opposite concern. They worried that the frequent meeting of American Catholic leaders could undermine the Vatican’s authority and that an interest in assimilating into American society could lead to an embrace of liberalism and rejection of Church doctrine. After Pope Benedict XV died in early 1922, the Consistorial Congregation (a body that assisted the Pope in governing the global Church) ordered the immediate dissolution of the NCWC. NCWC leaders petitioned Pope Pius XI to stay the decree and then sent a delegation that succeeded in convincing the Consistorial Congregation to reverse its decision. The NCWC did still accept the suggestion to replace the “Council” in its name and became the National Catholic Welfare Conference.

In the summer of 2026, at the request of Cardinal George Mundelein, the Archbishop of Chicago, and with the approval of Pope Pius XI, Chicago hosted the 28^th International Eucharistic Congress. Over the course of five days, more than a million Catholics participated in open-air Masses centered on the Eucharist, also known as Holy Communion or the Blessed Sacrament. The massive Congress simultaneously proved the growing influence of Catholicism in American cities like Chicago, and the growing significance of American Catholicism for the global Catholic Church.

American Catholics were not alone in finding themselves at odds with national political powers. When Plutarco Elías Calles of the secularist Institutional Revolutionary Party became the 47^th president of Mexico in 1924, he increased legal enforcement of the church-state separation article of the Mexican Constitution of 1917. His new policies sparked the Cristero War of 1926 to 1929 between the anticlerical government and Catholic rebels. This created a new wave of emigration to the United States that featured many priests, nuns, and other Cristero supporters. Many settled in the American Southwest in cities like El Paso and San Antonio. They often understood themselves as religious exiles, and, like many immigrants before them, they looked to the Church to reinforce their specific communal identity and concerns, not supersede them.

Black Catholics also looked to carve out a distinct space within a purportedly universal Church. During the war, Black Catholics were often excluded from the Church largesse directed at their white coreligionists. In response, Black Catholic Thomas Wyatt Turner, a Cornell-trained botanist, Howard University professor, and founding member of the NAACP, created the Committee Against the Extension of Race Prejudice in the Church. After the war, this became the Committee for the Advancement of Colored Catholics. In 1925, Turner reorganized the group as the Federated Colored Catholics. The organization’s stated goals included: “to advance the cause of Catholic education throughout the Negro population, to seek to raise the general Church status of the Negro and to stimulate colored Catholics to a larger participation in racial and civic affairs.”¹⁸ The FCC goals made plain what a growing number of Black Americans felt during these decades: a unique religious identity within a racial community, a unique racial identity within a religious community, and a unique religio-racial identity that underwrote distinct modes of engagement with American society at large.¹⁹

In the 1910s and 1920s, large numbers of Black Americans left the rural South to settle in the urban North and West. Over the next sixty years, this exodus, known as the Great Migration, would include the relocation of roughly six million Black Americans. By leaving behind Jim Crow and a lagging rural economy and heading to growing industrial cities like New York, Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago, Black Americans found new freedoms and new opportunities. They did not, however, find a full reprieve from bigotry and persistent inequity. Instead, they faced discrimination in both employment and housing. And, on both fronts, they often came into competition with the working-class immigrant Catholics of Northern cities. In the summer of 1919, race riots in Chicago left thirty-eight people (twenty-three Black and fifteen white) dead. The following year, three Black men stabbed and killed an Irish-American after exchanging insults, then sought refuge in St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church while the priest, Father Thomas Burke, barely persuaded an encircling crowd to abandon their plans to lynch the men. Black neighborhoods frequently abutted and overlapped with the Catholic parishes that anchored white ethnic neighborhoods. Despite inter-ethnic tensions, many of these Catholics claimed a shared whiteness and marshalled it against Black inclusion within and even near their churches.²⁰ As sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois wrote poignantly in 1925, “Because Catholicism has so much that is splendid in its past … it is the greater shame that ‘n—-r’ haters clothed in episcopal robes should do to black Americans in exclusion [and] segregation … all that the Ku Klux Klan ever asked.”²¹

Though some Black Americans, like Thomas Wyatt Turner, carved out a place within Catholicism, it was the Black Protestant churches of Northern cities that swelled the most during these years. Many migrants joined the pews of longstanding predominantly Black denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The biggest gainers, however, were Black Baptist churches, both independent congregations and those affiliated with the National Baptist Convention. In 1926, roughly two-thirds of Black Americans claimed religious adherence, a number well above the national average.²² Faith offered migrants social solidarity alongside metaphysical meaning. The various corners of what came to be known as the “institutional church” offered social services and social advocacy for new and growing Black communities. But while the institutionalists predominated, there were also religious innovators forging new faiths and articulating more radical identities in the same urban environment.

Arguably the most influential of the radical leaders was Marcus Garvey. In 1914, the Jamaican Garvey founded his Pan-Africanist organization, Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In 1916, he moved to New York City and started a branch of the UNIA in Harlem. Garvey was a Black nationalist who advocated for a Black return to a unified Africa and the end of European imperialism there. Garveyism grew rapidly as an increasing number of Black Americans found northern cities less welcoming than they had expected and concluded that exiting American society might prove more possible and productive.

Garvey’s separatism proved controversial with other Black leaders and activists, particularly after he met with the Imperial Wizard of the Klan in 1922. He found common ground with the Klan on their shared racial separatism and conspiratorial prejudice against Catholics and Jews. But UNIA offered new perspectives as well. In 1921, the UNIA published the Universal Negro Catechism, a sourcebook for the movement’s religio-racial theology. One portion read: “Q. If, then, you had to think or speak of the color of God, how would you describe it?; A. As black; since we are created in His image and likeness.”²³ The UNIA crafted a Christianity of specific Black pride to contrast with claims of both racial hierarchy and universal inclusion.

The UNIA taught that God could be described as Black because he made Black people. Less than a hundred miles away on Long Island, an apparently Black man known to his followers as Father Divine claimed that he was God—but not “black.” The self-named leader of unknown origins had moved his predominantly Black religious commune to Sayville, NY where he hosted weekly banquets for an increasingly multiracial community, helped joiners find jobs, and showed off his Cadillac and other signs of wealth. Unlike Garvey, Father Divine was an advocate for integration and argued that racial labels should be suppressed and universal brotherhood emphasized to uplift marginalized people. Father Divine’s International Peace Mission movement pulled from Christianity, Judaism, and New Thought in its teachings.

Back in Harlem, Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew claimed a syncretic Judaism for his community. Black people, he taught, were descended from Ethiopians who were a lost tribe of Israel descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Matthew founded his Commandment Keepers Church as a Christian congregation in 1919, but Commandment Keepers soon shifted to adopting and adapting Orthodox Jewish practices and beliefs. Unlike Father Divine and his followers, the Commandment Keepers did not reject racial difference and taught elements of separatism. But they asserted that their identity was “Ethiopian Hebrew” rather than “black” or “Negro.”

In Chicago, members of Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple of America followed a similar logic to a different conclusion. They too rejected labels like “black” and “Negro” and asserted that they were descended from the Moabites and thus were “Moorish American” by nationality and Muslim by religion. They carried nationality cards to proclaim their religio-racial identity. Drew Ali had founded the movement in New Jersey in 1913, but it saw its meteoric growth when he moved to Chicago. By the late 1920s, there were an estimated 35,000 members in seventeen temples.²⁴ Members who wore fezzes and turbans stood out as they publicly displayed their religio-racial pride. Drew Ali died in 1929 and a turbulent succession fight ensued. The following year, in Detroit, Wallace Fard Muhammad founded the Black nationalist Nation of Islam after coming into contact and adapting the teachings of the Moorish Science Temple.

Black Americans were hardly alone in finding religion essential in pushing back on America’s racial hierarchies. In 1921, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles Burke issued “Circular No. 1665: Indian Dancing” encouraging federal agents to use education and punitive measures to end “degrading” dancing on reservations. This was a response to missionary complaints that tribal dances, particularly those of the Pueblos in New Mexico, were sexual pagan practices. In reality, the Pueblo dances commemorating New Year’s Day, the Feast of the Epiphany, the corn harvest, and more united traditional Pueblo rituals with Catholicism. Two years later, Burke added to his circular to allow agents further latitude to limit or outright ban such practices. Burke and the missionaries who backed his policy carried forward decades of the assimilationist approach that aimed to eradicate Native American distinctiveness.

Pueblo leaders and their modernist allies—particularly anthropologists—quickly pushed back against the policy. The Pueblo dances, they argued, were not just rituals that could be eliminated by a hegemonic white Christianity. Rather, they were part of a “religion,” and therefore the dance practitioners were entitled to continue because of their First Amendment religious freedom. In the face of this pressure, Burke reluctantly backed down from the policy for the Pueblos in 1924, and optimistic observers could begin to imagine a liberal future of Native American rights beyond assimilationism. But for American modernists who embraced religious difference in the light of history and anthropology, the victories kept coming.²⁵

V. Fundamentalist Fighters

In his 1925 book, The Faith of Modernism, Shailer Matthews, Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, offered an outline of his theological movement: “Modernism is a projection of the Christian movement into modern conditions. It proceeds within the religious limits set by an ongoing Christian group; it distinguishes permanent Christian convictions from their doctrinal expression; it uses these convictions in meeting the actual needs of our modern world.” Modernists embraced and championed the social and intellectual changes of the era and abandoned a faith rooted in timeless dogma. “A religion that cannot meet the deepest longings of restless hearts,” Matthews proclaimed, “that fears freedom of speech, that distrusts social reconstruction, that makes respectability its morality, that would muzzle scientific inquiry will be ignored by a world that has outgrown it.” Here, Matthews took aim at modernists’ fundamentalist foes.²⁶

Princeton Seminary Professor J. Gresham Machen had written a broadside from the fundamentalist side, Christianity and Liberalism, just two years earlier. “The chief modern rival of Christianity is liberalism,” he wrote. “The two movements are in direct opposition.” Christianity, he argued, was and should remain “essentially dogmatic.”  “In the intellectual battle of the present day,” he predicted, “there can be no ‘peace without victory’; one side or the other must win.”²⁷

With the growth of modernist Protestantism and the growing number of non-Protestant Americans, conservative Protestants became more vocal and explicit in their defense of what they identified as the “fundamentals” of Christianity. Indeed, the term “fundamentalist” came from the series of essays by conservative Protestants titled The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915. Both The Fundamentals and fundamentalists opposed liberal theology, but they also opposed political movements like socialism and communism that they identified as products of liberal theology.

Fundamentalism was never a monolithic movement. In 1919, Minneapolis Baptist pastor William Bell Riley, known as the “Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism,” founded the World Christian Fundamentals Association, which insisted on premillennialism, the belief that Jesus would physically return to earth before a thousand-year age of peace. (Riley later expanded his focus to include antisemitic conspiracies, anticommunism, and opposition to evolution in the years that followed.) Most fundamentalists proclaimed premillennialism, but others, particularly conservative Presbyterian Calvinists, did not adopt the position or downplayed the importance of apocalyptic beliefs. Consequently, later fundamentalist organizations like the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (founded in 1930) emphasized a slightly broader understanding of biblical inerrancy.

Fundamentalists and modernists offered new ideological lines of demarcation within American Protestantism that would last over a century. But institutional lines had to be drawn as well, and that proved a key point of conflict in the 1920s. Many denominations included both fundamentalists and modernists among their clergy and laity. To wit, Harry Emerson Fosdick and Shailer Matthews were Northern Baptists, but so was William Bell Riley. As fundamentalists accused modernists of heresy and modernists accused fundamentalists of closed-minded dogmatism, a battle for control of every major Northern Protestant denomination ensued. This included Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and, most notably, Presbyterians.

This rift in Protestantism was not a small conflict confined to the clergy. Major newspapers like the New York Times covered the denominational battles in detail for interested readers. In each denomination, modernists ultimately prevailed. Many Protestant clergy and laypeople were moderates, neither modernists nor fundamentalists. They did not follow modernists in completely rejecting many traditional doctrines and completely embracing modern scholarship, but they saw no need to expel those who did so, and many did not insist on biblical inerrancy. Ultimately, moderates in many of the denominations were resistant to the schismatism of fundamentalists who wanted to expel modernists and double down on rigid orthodoxy. Some fundamentalists remained as a resistant theological force in what eventually became known as the “mainline” Protestant denominations, but many fundamentalists left to form separate denominations, seminaries, and organizations.

American Protestantism had bifurcated once before—in the nineteenth century when many denominations split between North and South over slavery. Modernism made far greater inroads in the northern denominations. As a result, the “fundamentalist” label, which emerged in reaction to modernism, was far more common in the North as well. Still, as theological debates over topics like evolution gained increasing cultural and political significance, many Southern Protestants sprang into action to defend fundamentalism’s core tenets regardless of labels. At the same time, while the major institutional Black denominations were not wracked by theological conflict, some number of Black Protestants also defended fundamentalist faith and even adopted the fundamentalist moniker. However, their political commitment to racial equality and their exclusion from white-controlled fundamentalist organizations, particularly in the Jim Crow South, also limited their visibility within and impact on the movement.

The most famous skirmish of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy was the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. At the urging of the World Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) and its affiliates, Tennessee passed the Butler Act banning the teaching of evolution in the state’s public schools. John T. Scopes of Dayton, Tennessee, was charged with violating the law. The case became a national spectacle when the WCFA recruited William Jennings Bryan to serve as attorney for the prosecution and the American Civil Liberties Union recruited famed defense attorney and noted agnostic Clarence Darrow to serve as attorney for the defense. Though Bryan had lost his once-unrivaled power in the Democratic Party, his religious crusade against evolution and involvement in the fundamentalist fight for the Presbyterian Church had maintained his celebrity.

In one of the wildest moments in American legal history, Darrow and the defense called Bryan, lead attorney for the prosecution, as a witness on the Bible. In the ensuing examination, Darrow tried to show that the Bible contained scientific errors and internal contradictions. Bryan did a poor job defending inerrancy even in the eyes of many fundamentalists. When Darrow pressed Bryan on the date of the biblical flood, Bryan explained “I do not think about things I don’t think about.” Darrow’s rejoinder “Do you think about things you do think about?,” elicited laughter in the courthouse and throughout the nation.²⁸  Bryan technically won the trial, but the critical coverage in the press together with his seemingly poetic unexpected death five days later gave the impression that the anti-intellectual fundamentalist movement had been browbeaten into submission.

But Bryan’s folksy “old-time religion” with its rejection of academic expertise was not the only form of fundamentalism, and even that version remained stronger than its triumphant opponents realized. Bryan had invited J. Gresham Machen, his ally in Presbyterian denominational politics, to serve as an expert witness in the Scopes trial.  The Princeton Theological Seminary theologian and leading intellectual in American fundamentalism demurred. He disliked the prosecution’s majoritarian and sometimes utilitarian framing of the validity of the Butler Act. Unlike Bryan and many fundamentalist leaders, Machen aimed to defend inerrancy, particularly Jesus’ virgin birth and literal resurrection using–not rejecting–the academic methods he had learned at Princeton and in graduate studies in Germany. Before passing, Bryan had left money to found a new fundamentalist college in Dayton, Tennessee. In a sign of the shifting center of gravity within fundamentalism, the presidency of the college was first offered to Machen.

Machen, too, lost to the modernists in the short term. When moderates gained control of Princeton Theological Seminary, he left to found his own Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929. A few years later, he left the Presbyterian Church in a dispute over modernist missionaries and founded the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. But despite these institutional setbacks, at Westminster, Machen trained fundamentalist pastors like Carl McIntire, Harold Ockenga, and Francis Schaeffer, who would become the leading figures of fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and the New Christian Right. Fundamentalists had lost in the modernist moment, but the groundwork for greater influence had been laid.

VI. Radio, Rights, and Realignment

In January 1921, the crackling sounds of the Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh came across the airwaves and into American homes. It was the first religious radio broadcast in American history, but countless others would soon follow. It was also an indicator that pastors, prophets, and theologians would not be the only sources of innovation to reshape the American religious landscape.

Americans had mixed feelings about this new medium for worship. Some feared that it would keep people from attending church; others celebrated the ability to evangelize further, reach shut-ins, and break down religious and racial prejudice. Religious services soon became a regular part of radio schedules. The pairing benefited both. Religion reached larger audiences, and radio appeared less trivial than it might have otherwise. As radio grew more popular and became more common in American homes, religious programming expanded dramatically. Indeed, the percentage of stations owned by religious institutions increased fivefold from 1923 to 1925.

While parish boundaries and regional resettlement literally remade America’s religious landscape, radio offered new opportunities to exceed spatial limitations. It thus offered a path to American celebrity and elevated new voices. The first great religious radio celebrity was Aimee Semple McPherson, or Sister Aimee. McPherson was a Pentecostal evangelist and faith healer who lived in the growing city of Los Angeles. She was ordained by the Assemblies of God in 1919. In 1922, she became the first woman to preach over the airwaves. The following year, she founded her own Pentecostal denomination, the Foursquare Church and opened the Angelus Temple megachurch where she preached and healed. In 1924, the Foursquare Church established the KFSG radio station, which made Aimee McPherson a staple on the airwaves. A mysterious disappearance in 1926–she claimed she was kidnapped, but others suspected a scandal–added to her notoriety. Thanks to radio, McPherson exposed many Americans to Pentecostalism and women’s religious leadership for the first time.

Radio brought many religious “outsiders” inside American homes. Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) began weekly broadcasts of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from Salt Lake City, Utah, which eventually became one of the longest-running programs in radio history. Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, an African American holiness minister, even garnered international fame through his broadcasts on CBS and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Michaux featured Black gospel music which many white audiences heard for the first time over the airwaves, and a step in religious integration proved influential for popular music as well.

Large networks like CBS and the National Broadcast Company (NBC) came to dominate the industry. They gave free airtime to Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders. NBC mandated that its religious programs appeal to broad audiences by focusing on shared truths and not criticizing other religions. CBS later adopted a similar policy. Network broadcasting helped make ministers like modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick and the unusually ecumenical Catholic priest Fulton Sheen into national celebrities and stamped their brand of religion as the nation’s “best.” These stations helped to foster ecumenical and interfaith cohesion.

Not everyone won under this arrangement. Fundamentalists were excluded from networks due to their insistence on a rigid definition of Christianity but later found success by creating independent radio networks of their own. Collectively, these independent stations helped take the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy national. Uncoincidentally, the 1925 Scopes trial was the first trial ever broadcast nationally as listeners tuned in to the religious conflict.

While the actual legal ramifications of Scopes were minor, that same year brought the landmark Supreme Court decision Pierce v. Society of Sisters. The Court overturned the Klan-backed 1922 Oregon Compulsory Education Law banning private education as a violation of the liberty of parents to direct their children’s education protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. American Catholics rejoiced at the demise of a law born of Protestant nativism. Even as most fundamentalists continued their anti-Catholic bromides, J. Gresham Machen celebrated the decision as well. An opponent of any government interference with education, Machen even testified before a joint Congressional committee against the creation of a Federal Department of Education in 1926. In his public writing and private correspondence with Catholic leaders, he suggested that theologically conservative Catholics and fundamentalists might make common political cause against the liberal Protestants and their secular allies who held so much power in American society. This suggestion would come to fruition decades later.

In the latter half of the 1920s, American Catholics could boast new legal rights and political power. This became abundantly clear when New York Governor Alfred E. Smith won the 1928 Democratic presidential nomination. Smith, from Irish-American and Italian-American ancestry, became the first Catholic to receive a major party’s nomination. He ran against Prohibition as its popularity slowly eroded. Smith consolidated the white ethnic Catholic vote for the Democratic Party. He also won some of the urban Northern liberal Protestants who had begun to turn away from anti-Catholicism.

Republican Herbert Hoover had the advantage of enduring anti-Catholic prejudice and a strong Republican-led economy. Fundamentalists like J. Frank Norris, a Texas Baptist with a large radio audience, made anti-Catholic attacks on Smith a central feature of their preaching in the run-up to the election. Democrats lost ground in the rural Protestant North and the deeply Protestant South. Smith’s candidacy thus became a bellwether of rising Catholic power and a reminder of its limits.

VII. Conclusion

Smith’s primary success had been bolstered by the support of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a blue-blood Episcopalian who succeeded Smith as governor of New York and would soon rise to the presidency himself. Roosevelt was well-versed in the call for social progress preached by liberal modernist Protestants but was also popular with the urban Catholics and Jews of New York City. In October 1929, the stock market crashed, and the United States entered the Great Depression. Roosevelt became the first governor to call for unemployment insurance and created a state agency to distribute relief funds. A new economic reality called for a new type of progressive government, and a new religious coalition was essential in making it a national reality. Still, the fault lines of prejudice continued to haunt both American religion and American society.

VIII. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Austin Steelman with content contributions from Austin Clements, Janine Girodano Drake, Connor Kenaston, Kristina I. Lizardy-Hajbi, Isaac Barnes May, Brenden J. Payne, Austin Steelman, Amy Weiss, and Ben Wright

Recommended Reading

• Paula Abrams, Cross Purposes: Pierce v. Society of Sisters and the Struggle Over Compulsory Public Education (University of Michigan Press, 2009)
• Daniel R. Bare, Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (NYU Press, 2021)
• Richard E. Burnett, Machen’s Hope: The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton (Eerdmans, 2024)
• Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
• Jonathan Ebel, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton University Press, 2010)
• Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Tradition (Liveright, 2017)
• Gale L. Kenny, Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024)
• Bradley Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, & Moderates (Oxford University Press,1993)
• Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)
• John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
• Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Scribner, 2010).
• Shari Rabin, The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton, 2025).
• Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2009)
• Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press, 2014), Chapters 2 and 3
• Carl Weinberg, Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America (Cornell University Press, 2021)
• Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity in the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2017)
• Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
• Julia G. Young, Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford University Press, 2015)
• J. D. Zahniser and Amelia Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Notes

1. Henry Emerson Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” May 21, 1922, available at https://digital.history.pcusa.org/islandora/20611. ↩︎
2. The Stars and Stripes, 22 February 1918, 2; The Stars and Stripes, 14 June 1918, 8. ↩︎
3. Jonathan Ebel, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton University Press, 2010). ↩︎
4. Matthew Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press: 2014). ↩︎
5. Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (Oxford University Press, 2008), 56. ↩︎
6. Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (Macmillan Company, 1917), 2. ↩︎
7. See, e.g., Jeffrey Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 1991; Angela Dills and Jeffrey Miron, “Alcohol Prohibition and Cirrhosis,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2003. ↩︎
8. See “Vote NO on Women Suffrage,” The Cranford Citizen, October 7, 1915. ↩︎
9. “Red Terror,” Pentecostal Evangel, February 2, 1924, 5. ↩︎
10. See, e.g., David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery, Bolshevism: Its Cure (Boston School of Political Economy, 1919). ↩︎
11. Carl Weinberg, Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America (Cornell University Press, 2021). ↩︎
12. “Is There a Connection?” The Catholic Telegraph, April 10, 1919, 4. ↩︎
13. Thomas R. Pegram, “Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 1 (January 2008): 89-119. ↩︎
14. Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Ivan R. Dee, 2011). ↩︎
15. Benjamin J. Elton, “New York Orthodoxy Between the Wars,” Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals 20 (Autumn 2014). ↩︎
16. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 9-13. ↩︎
17. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (Rutgers University Press, 2005), 117. ↩︎
18. “Conflicting Visions of Race and Power in the FCC,” American Catholic History Classroom, The Catholic University of America, https://guides.lib.cua.edu/c.php?g=1403556&p=10387386. ↩︎
19. See Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity in the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017). ↩︎
20. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996). ↩︎
21. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Catholic Church and Negroes,” The Crisis 30 (July 1925): 121. ↩︎
22. Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, 191-193. ↩︎
23. Universal Negro Catechism (Universal Negro Improvement Association, 1921). ↩︎
24. Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1929. ↩︎
25. Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). ↩︎
26. Shailer Matthews, The Faith of Modernism (Macmillan Company, 1925), 2, 4. ↩︎
27. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, revised edition (Eerdmans, 2009 [1923]), 5, 45, 120. ↩︎
28. The Scopes Trial: Examination of William Jennings Bryan by Clarence Darrow, https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1160. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

Industrialization transformed the United States in the decades after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Concentrated wealth and new communications technologies forever altered the scale and scope of American religion. Meanwhile, Americans innovated new traditions and reinvented old ones. Immigrants adapted Old World faiths to their New World lives. Economic titans wondered at the morality of their wealth as those trapped in overcrowded slums and caught within generational cycles of poverty—those for whom “progress” was an illusion—redefined the parameters of old theologies. Theologians battled over tradition, and, breathing in a new scientific age, many rejected old faiths altogether. For the worlds of American religion, the decades around the turn of the twentieth century were an era of reinventions.

II. New Currents

As the nineteenth century bred new ideas about science and scholarship, new methods of biblical interpretation questioned long-held assumptions about the authorship and authority of Scripture. German scholars began to apply historical criticism to both the Old and New Testament. Using literary analysis, archaeology, and other contemporary sources, they disputed the literal historicity and purported authorship of many portions of the Bible, particularly the accounts of supernatural miracles.

The bonds of orthodox creeds loosened across the United States. In 1867, Unitarians, Universalists, Quakers, Jews, freethinkers, and spiritualists met in Boston and organized the Free Religious Association. Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson was its first member. “Free religion” flourished, finding adherents from New England liberals to Texas Populists. Unitarians and Universalists, borrowing in part from Eastern religious traditions, rejected orthodox Christian notions about the Trinity and Christ’s divinity. Spiritualists borrowed from Swiss theologian Emanuel Swedenborg and communed with the spirits of the dead. Mediums held seances across the country. Borrowing from the same impulses that animated American free religionists, Mary Baker Eddy argued that spiritual perfection could overcome material suffering including sickness and even death, and founded the Christian Science movement in 1879.

Others rejected religion altogether. In what one historian called the “Golden Age of Freethought,” celebrity-skeptics such as Robert Ingersoll–“The Great Agnostic”—barnstormed the nation, speaking to sell-out crowds about the corrosive impact of religion on the world, the primitive ideas of believers, the hypocrisies of religious leaders, and the grand histories of atheism and agnosticism. Secularists founded their own periodicals, such as the Truth-Seeker and The Iconoclast, and organizations such as the National Liberal League and the American Secular Union.¹ Freethinkers and secularists pushed for the removal of religious influence in public life. In 1875, these impulses combined with a potent anti-Catholicism to propel the Blaine Amendment, a proposal by Representative James Blaine to constitutionally bar taxpayer support for sectarian schools, to within two senate votes of the necessary two-thirds needed for passage. Although the national amendment failed, more than a dozen states inserted similar clauses into their own constitutions, barring state support of religious schooling for more than a century before being overridden by the Supreme Court. Freethinkers preyed on the imaginations of American religious leaders. In 1890, Henry Carroll, a Methodist minister who directed the U.S. Census of Religious Bodies, estimated that only a small portion of Americans, roughly ten percent, were formally affiliated with any church. Among working people, participation was even lower. As he described it, large numbers of Americans were “active atheists, skeptics, secularists and infidels.”²

Christian theologians, meanwhile, grappled with modernity from within their own denominations. A number of German Protestant theologians, such as Wilhelm Herrman, began to articulate a new liberal theology based on historical insights.³ The core of Christianity, they contended, was not belief in a past reality about Jesus Christ but rather the experience of love at the core of the gospel and embodied by a socially-engaged church. Higher criticism, as it was often called, and theological liberalism slowly made their way across the Atlantic and into American colleges and churches. Conservative Protestants balked at this demythologizing turn in Christian theology and particularly resisted those who came to question the virgin birth of Jesus, his divinity, the miracles he performed, his Second Coming, the atoning nature of his crucifixion, or the literalness of his resurrection.

Advocates of what later came to be called fundamentalism emphasized the authority and inerrancy of Scripture and rejected evolutionary theory as incompatible with Christian belief. Many liberal Christians rejected Social Darwinism for its heartlessness; conservative Christians rejected Darwinism for its godlessness. The term “fundamentalist” emerged from a series of essays by conservative Protestants titled The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915 and funded by Los Angeles oil magnate Lyman Stewart and his brother Milton.⁴ Conservative theologians and culture warriors took up the mantle. The work of conservative faculty, for instance, established Princeton Theological Seminary as the intellectual center of fundamentalist theology. At the same time, others worked to reconcile Christianity and modern thought. Often described as modernists, they emphasized the ethical teachings of Jesus and argued that religion must adapt to remain meaningful in a changing world. Theological tensions strained American religious institutions, presaging fault lines that would rupture Protestant Christianity in the coming decades.

III. New Americans

It wasn’t just foreign ideas that shocked conservative theologians. Between 1895 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, fifteen to eighteen million immigrants, mostly (but not exclusively) from Southern and Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. This demographic shift transformed the country’s religious landscape. New immigrant communities, many of them Roman Catholic or Jewish, altered the religious composition of American society, especially in its cities. Catholicism became the largest single denomination by the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Protestant churches—long dominant in American cultural life—faced new challenges. The diversity of urban populations and the fast-paced, often secular character of city life weakened their traditional authority and forced them to compete within the religious marketplace.⁵

Immigrants transformed urban religious life. While many peoples brought many traditions to American shores, the experience of Jewish immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reveals much about immigration and American religious history. Jews had been in the United States since well before its founding, but new Jewish migrants arrived in large numbers and transformed the social and religious landscape of American cities. The implementation of anti-Jewish measures and government-sanctioned violence in Russia caused Jews to seek safety beyond the empire’s borders.⁶ Between 1881 and 1924, more than 2.5 million Jews immigrated to the United States, often fleeing persecution and seeking economic opportunity. In the years from 1899 to 1910 alone, approximately 700,000 Jews left the Russian Empire, a migration that represented nearly one-seventh of its Jewish population.⁷ These immigrants settled primarily in urban centers, where they established dense and vibrant communities. By 1900, approximately one million Jews lived in the United States, and by 1910 Jews made up roughly one-quarter of New York City’s population, making it the largest Jewish city in the world.⁸ Other cities—including Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland—also became important centers of Jewish life.⁹

As they adapted to life in the United States, American Jews built a wide range of institutions to support their communities and respond to social challenges. In 1906, an elite group of Reform-minded, politically centrist, and non-Zionist Jews founded the American Jewish Committee to combat antisemitism and advocate for Jewish rights. Louis Marshall, one of the group’s founders, stated that this group sought “to promote the cause of Judaism” and to prevent the spread of anti-Jewish hate.¹⁰ The pogroms, or state-sanctioned violence, that spread to hundreds of towns throughout the Russian Empire between 1903 and 1905 served as the latest example of the potential danger that Jews faced around the globe.¹¹ This was followed by the establishment of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, in 1912, and the Anti-Defamation League in 1913, each reflecting growing concern with both global Jewish welfare and discrimination within the United States. Despite these efforts, Jewish Americans faced persistent forms of exclusion. They were often barred from certain neighborhoods, hotels, and social clubs, and universities began experimenting with informal quotas to limit Jewish enrollment. These experiences of discrimination shaped the development of Jewish communal life and reinforced the importance of collective organization and advocacy.

American Judaism itself also evolved during this period. Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism—each established in the nineteenth century—expanded and adapted to new social conditions in the early twentieth century. Conservative and Orthodox Judaism shared many of the same goals in the early 1900s. These included maintaining Jewish tradition, observing the Sabbath, following Jewish dietary laws, and maintaining Jewish religious education. To this end, the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) and Yeshiva College (Orthodox) even considered a merger in 1926. Although this union never came to be, it highlighted the similar ideologies of early American Conservative and Orthodox Judaism. Yet, these two Jewish religious movements ideologically grew apart during the interwar period.

Jews were not the only new Americans filling its urban centers. Immigration also remade American Catholicism. Already the largest religious group in the United States before the Civil War, waves of new migrants exploded the population of American Catholics, straining the church in new ways. Millions of immigrants arrived in the United States from southern and eastern Europe, including from nations like Italy, Poland, and many more. Many settled amidst large Catholic populations in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. These new arrivals shifted American Catholicism away from its earlier German and Irish dominance, creating tensions over language, ethnicity, and power.

Catholic parishes remained segregated by ethnicity and language, due in part to a nineteenth-century Church law that allowed people to plant and attend parishes based on similar language and culture, not geographic location alone. These were known as national parishes.¹² The establishment of national parishes provided important comfort and continuity for new arrivals. They also hindered interaction between different populations and strained the authority of the larger Church over these parishes since they often applied institutional policies inconsistently. Some leaders in the Church wanted to “Americanize” these parishes in terms of language and religious practices.¹³ This led to a 1917 Code of Canon Law that essentially halted the establishment of any new national parishes. Still, existing national parishes continued to thrive and retain unique rituals, customs, and practices.

Religious leaders struggled to maintain religious identity in an increasingly urban, industrial, and pluralistic society. American Catholic leaders, for instance, including James Gibbons, John Ireland, and others believed that Catholicism could blend and thrive with American democracy. European critics remained suspicious of what they saw as American innovations and in 1899 Pope Leo XIII condemned elements of “Americanism.”¹⁴

Outside of the Church hierarchy, immigrants were already busy remaking their religious lives. In his study of Italian immigrants in New York City, historian Robert Orsi captured the lived reality of immigrant faith. Studying religious celebrations—primarily the annual festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel on East 115th Street—Orsi showed how the popular Catholicism of Italian immigrants marked the distance between the organized church and the lived realities of faith.¹⁵ Religion was not confined to mass and confession. It bled into the world. Family life, recreation, work: religion cut through it all.

The transformation of American religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reshaped not just the lives of urban Americans, but the very physical landscape of American cities. From the 1890s through the early decades of the twentieth century, religious architecture reflected growing diversity in American society, as new communities built spaces that translated traditions into the vernacular of a new industrial, urban nation. This period did not produce a single dominant architectural style. Religious buildings varied widely, shaped by economic resources, available materials, local regulations, and the specific needs of different communities. In rapidly expanding cities, congregations sometimes constructed new buildings to assert their presence, while others adapted existing structures, purchasing and repurposing buildings left behind by shifting populations. The result was a dynamic and constantly evolving religious landscape.

Jewish immigrants, for example, adapted urban space in new ways, constructing an eruv—a symbolic enclosure that allowed certain activities otherwise restricted on the Sabbath. By linking existing utility poles, fences, and other urban features into a ritual boundary, eruvin transformed ordinary city infrastructure into a sacred geography that enabled observant Jews to carry objects and generally move more freely through city streets while maintaining their religious obligations. One of the first such enclosures was established in St. Louis in 1896, followed by another in New York City in 1907.

After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, Hindu immigrants constructed the Old Vedanta Society Temple, one of the first Hindu places of worship in the United States. In 1912, construction began on the Baháʼí House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois, a project that would not be completed until 1953 but signaled the growing presence of new religious traditions. In 1915, Sikh immigrants built the Gurdwara Sahib in Stockton, California, the first Sikh temple in the country.

In the rapidly expanding American Southwest, new waves of Mexican immigrants joined Mexican Americans and others who practiced their historical faiths in their historical communities. Long-standing Catholic parishes tended to their parishioners, while the families of ranchers and ranch-workers tended home altars. Ethnic Mexicans venerated the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Marian figure associated with the Mexican Church, whose image defined Mexican American Catholicism. As the ubiquity of the Virgin testified, potent folk traditions coexisted alongside formal practice.

At the same time, railroad construction and agricultural expansion pulled large numbers of Mexican workers northward, and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 saw a massive wave of migrants fleeing the war’s violence and dislocations. Migrants swelled the borderlands, bringing with them Mexican religious practices. Many Mexicans and Mexican Americans sought the aid of curanderos, or folk healers, who blended Indigenous traditions and Catholic practice to treat emotional, mental, and physical maladies. Some curanderos, such as Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedro Jaramillo, achieved renown across the Southwest.¹⁶

Not all Mexican Americans were Catholic. Many embraced Protestantism. Elite and influential families, such as the Canaleses and the Idars of South Texas, affiliated with Protestant churches. Protestant missionaries, meanwhile, worked throughout the borderlands winning souls for Protestant churches. Still, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Presbyterians and Methodists planted many churches and schools in Mexican majority geographical areas such as California, New Mexico, Arizona, southern Colorado, and Texas. These expanding networks of Protestant mission work laid the groundwork for new religious expressions within Latine communities, even as they introduced new tensions around language, culture, and authority. In 1910, for example, twenty-four congregations organized the Convención Bautista Mexicana de Texas (Mexican Baptist Convention of Texas), which eventually established new churches, an institute to train Mexican and Mexican American pastors, and a children’s home.¹⁷

Mexican Americans, of course, were not the only Latino populations in the United States. The conclusion of the Spanish-American War, for instance, brought the Catholic populations of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam into the American orbit. Migrants from the Caribbean had already established population centers in New York City and other sites on the East Coast, implanting their formal practices and folkways. Protestant churches quickly turned New York City into a hub of mission activity.¹⁸ The early twentieth century also saw an increase in Mormon Latines through evangelization by LDS (Latter Day Saint) settlers in Utah.¹⁹ While early mission efforts of Jehovah’s Witnesses within Latine communities can be traced back to John Wahlberg’s presence in Puerto Rico, with migration to the U.S. mainland, the number of Witnesses grew in subsequent decades.²⁰

American faiths were adapting to new worlds. Native Americans practiced Indigenous faiths, adopted Christianity, or blended traditions. Architecture reveals religious adaptation: Indigenous religious traditions continued to rely on mobile or non-durable structures. The Native American Church, established around 1913, often used tipis for worship. These structures were designed to be assembled, disassembled, and relocated as needed, which reflected their longstanding relationship between religious life, mobility, and the natural environment. Americans also began to preserve older sacred spaces. The Antiquities Act of 1906 authorized the protection of historic sites, including Indigenous kivas and mission churches in the Southwest. These developments reveal how religious communities adapted to the conditions of modern America not only through belief and reform but through the built environment itself. Churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and other sacred spaces were more than spiritual sites. They manufactured identity, belonging, and social change. In this way, architecture served as both a reflection of religious diversity and a tool for shaping the communities that inhabited an increasingly urban and industrial society.

IV. The Crisis of Industrial America

By the late nineteenth century, American industry had produced a new and unsettling reality. “Long ago it was said that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives,” journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis wrote of life in American cities at the turn of the twentieth century. Riis’s writing and photography exposed the nation’s ballooning economic inequality. As corporations and a small number of families accumulated a staggering amount of wealth, there were millions of workers and families whose lives were marked by unsafe working conditions, low wages, and overcrowded, dilapidated housing.

American cities swelled with migrants from rural America and immigrants from abroad. Newcomers brought different languages, religious traditions, and cultural practices that reshaped urban life. Protestants and Catholics grappled over questions of assimilation and national identity, and, as inequality became more visible, racial tensions also deepened as African Americans searched for opportunity within and beyond the South.

The Social Gospel emerged from these anxieties. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a diverse group of religious leaders, reformers, workers, and migrants grappled with the social ills wrought by industrial society. Drawing on competing visions of Christianity, they sought to redefine, and in some cases make real, their religious ideologies in American public life.

In the winter of 1907, John Meishell left Baltimore with his wife and five young children and traveled to St. Louis, Missouri in search of work. He and his family found employment at the Peerless Oyster Company. His children—all under ten years of age—worked alongside him in the oyster sheds. Even Meishell’s infant child remained on site, cared for in the same space where the others labored. The three-year-old helped as best they could. The family’s day began at three in the morning and stretched until late in the afternoon. Recruiters promised the family would secure a living wage. Instead, the work was irregular and the pay meager. At best, the Meishell family earned six dollars a week, a paltry sum for an American family.²¹ Their experience was not unusual. American laborers could expect long hours, low wages, and unsafe working conditions. Americans disagreed about the source of inequality some interpreted poverty and suffering as urgent social problems, while others interpreted them as natural and even necessary consequences of progress.

 Such disagreements arose amid transformations in American understandings of science and religion. When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he introduced a theory of evolution based on natural selection, arguing that species developed over time through competition for survival.²² Although the book initially attracted limited attention in the United States, its implications became more apparent in the decades that followed. Darwin’s ideas raised difficult questions about the role of God in creation and whether the natural world reflected divine order or blind competition. Over time, Darwin’s ideas were adapted and extended beyond evolutionary biology. Thinkers such as Herbert Spencer applied the concept of evolution to human society, arguing that competition determined success or failure not only among species but also within individuals and groups. This interpretation—later known as Social Darwinism—legitimized inequality.²³ Wealth and success appeared as evidence of strength and fitness, while poverty suggested weakness or failure.

Many religious Americans refused to surrender the principles of charity and justice to the whims of mechanistic systems. Appalled at the raw cruelty of the industrial system, they applied their old theology to the new “social” worlds of industrial capitalism. But others embraced the logic of Social Darwinism. In his widely circulated lecture “Acres of Diamonds,” Baptist preacher Russell Conwell argued that “People ought to get rich and make money. Money should be used to buy Bibles and send out missionaries. Those with money are generally honest, good people.”²⁴ Conwell’s logic rendered money a sign of virtue and usefulness. Similar ideas appeared in academic circles. The influential Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) used Social Darwinist thought to argue, “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be.” This, Sumner wrote, was how “Nature […] removes things which have survived their usefulness.”²⁵ For Social Darwinists, efforts to regulate industry or assist the poor could be seen as interfering with the natural order. These ideas influenced both public policy and religious thought. Some ministers embraced Social Darwinist reasoning, interpreting economic success as a sign of moral virtue.

Theological liberals within the Social Gospel movement prioritized structural change over individual salvation, critiquing the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism and advocating social justice reform. The Social Gospel reflected the belief that Jesus’s teachings needed to be applied to all of society’s institutions, including economic systems, to realize God’s Kingdom on Earth.²⁶ No figure articulated this vision more clearly than the Baptist minister, Walter Rauschenbusch. Drawing on his experiences in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, Rauschenbusch argued that Christianity must confront what he called “social sins”—injustices rooted in economic systems, political institutions, and patterns of inequality. As the pastor of Second German Baptist Church, Rauschenbusch lamented having to hold the “tiny boxes” of children who had died as a result of malnutrition, dangerous living conditions, and other avoidable conditions of the new industrial era. In his seminal 1907 work, Christianity and the Social Crisis, he rejected the idea that religion should focus solely on saving individual souls. He insisted that the teachings of Jesus demanded the transformation of society itself, which would allow for a “free, just and brotherly social order.”²⁷  

These ideas did not remain confined to sermons or theological debates. They took shape in communities across the country, where reformers sought to apply Social Gospel principles to the challenges of urban life. Among the most influential figures in this movement was Jane Addams. In 1889, alongside Ellen Gates Starr, Addams founded Hull House in Chicago, one of the most prominent settlement houses in the United States. Located in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood, Hull House embodied the Social Gospel’s emphasis on engaging directly with the conditions of everyday life. Rather than offering charity from a distance, Addams and her colleagues lived among the communities they served. They established educational programs, childcare services, and cultural institutions designed to support immigrant families and bridge class divides. This approach reflected a broader belief that meaningful reform required not only moral concern but sustained social engagement. Addams’s work also challenged earlier models of charity. As she argued in Democracy and Social Ethics, traditional charitable efforts often reflected the biases of those offering aid rather than the needs of those receiving it.²⁸ Reformers, she insisted, needed to understand the lived realities of working-class communities and approach their work with humility.

The theological innovations of the Social Gospel extended beyond abstract ideas and reshaped how reformers understood knowledge itself. Increasingly, religious leaders turned to emerging disciplines such as sociology, economics, and political science to better understand the conditions of modern life. Rather than relying solely on Scripture or personal experience, they sought empirical evidence about poverty, labor conditions, and urban life. This shift reflected a belief that Christianity should engage directly with the realities of the modern world using the tools of modern knowledge. One of the clearest expressions of this approach was the rise of the social survey movement. Reformers mapped urban neighborhoods, documenting patterns of employment, housing, and vice in an effort to identify the causes of poverty and inequality. These surveys were not merely academic exercises—they were used by churches and reform organizations to guide action. Figures such as Jane Addams and W.E.B. Du Bois participated in these efforts, demonstrating how religious conviction and social investigation could work together. This blending of religion and social science reflected a broader transformation in how reformers understood the mission of the church. For some, Christianity was no longer confined to the salvation of individuals; it became a framework for diagnosing and addressing the structural problems of modern society.

As religious communities addressed inequality in daily life, their work began to intersect with wider political movements aimed at turning moral ideals into public policy. In 1908, the Federal Council of Churches adopted the Social Creed of the Churches, a statement that outlined a collective Christian response to the conditions of industrial society.²⁹ As the Creed declared, churches must stand “for equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life” and “for the abolition of child labor.” The document also called for the establishment of a living wage, protections for women workers, and a guaranteed day of rest each week. It also endorsed arbitration in labor disputes and affirmed the principle of equal justice across social classes. The language of the Creed translated the theological insights of the Social Gospel into concrete social and political demands.

These ideas took on political significance in a broader international context. The Second International, the international socialist party formed in Paris in 1889, envisioned a future in which abused workers stopped believing in “miracles” and forged their primary identity in their status as “proletarians.” In the United States, the great geographical and cultural diversity of working people, in combination with the violent and repressive system of Jim Crow in the South, made the promise of a unified, international, “proletarian” identity both less conceivable and less appealing. Roman Catholic Churches in the United States strongly opposed “socialism” and heavily invested resources in stalling its advance. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), which became the largest federation of trade unions in the early twentieth century, acted pragmatically when they officially opposed “socialism.” AFL President Sam Gompers, a secular Jewish cigarmaker, worked closely with the Roman Catholic Church and the Federal Council of Churches to bolster trade union participation, end child labor, limit work days, improve working conditions, and achieve a minimum wage. He believed that the trade union movement would be more successful if it worked with rather than against the American churches.

Churches often had a conservative influence on the American labor movement.³⁰ In the 1910s, when socialist labor participation was at a height around the world and many American workers supported some semblance of social democracy, American churches used their alliances with trade unions to grow their own power and influence over public space. Both Catholic and Protestant denominations built large church complexes with gymnasia, auditoriums, schools and athletic fields to make the statement that they supported working people. Rural migrants to cities, both Catholic and Protestant, participated in robust intellectual life in churches, combatting the perception that because they participated in “unskilled” work they were ignorant. In many respects, it was the Social Gospel movement which restored and grew the power of churches in the United States.³¹

V. American Vice

In response to this growing distance between churches and working-class communities, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a wide range of moral reforms that both continued and adapted earlier traditions associated with the earlier “benevolent empire” of the Second Great Awakening. Rapid urbanization and mass migration often intensified not moral concern for the human costs of inequality, but anxieties about rising urban vice. As a burgeoning working class crowded into cities such as New York and Chicago, gambling, saloons, and prostitution proliferated, alarming white middle-class moral reformers.

The perceived proliferation of sin alarmed Anthony Comstock, a devout member of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Comstock was deeply frustrated by the government’s unwillingness to suppress titillating “dime novels,” pornographic photos, racy playing cards, as well as “free-love” advocates like Victoria Woodhull. In 1873, with the support of wealthy associates, Comstock helped found the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and lobbied Congress to pass stricter laws against sending “obscene” material through the mail. The resulting Comstock Act empowered the U.S. Postal Service to inspect mail and confiscate lewd materials as well as information relating to abortion and contraception. Offenders faced heavy fines and even prison sentences. Like many post-Civil War reformers, Comstock was keen to employ the coercive power of the government to advance a moral agenda. After all, if force and the law had abolished the evils of slavery, it might rid the United States of other sins too, such as gambling, polygamy, and Sabbath-breaking, all of which Christian activists sought to legislate against.³²

Alcohol was another supposed source of moral decay that reformers sought to tackle. Before the Civil War, temperance advocates succeeded in getting some states to briefly ban alcohol while convincing large numbers of Americans to temper their drinking or abstain altogether. The decades following the Civil War saw the rise of a new generation of anti-drinking activists and organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), founded in 1893. Prohibitionists championed politics, rather than individual moral suasion alone, as the most effective weapon against alcohol and the larger “liquor traffic.”³³ Groups such as the WCTU and ASL lobbied for local, state, and national prohibition laws.³⁴

One WCTU member, Carrie (or Carry) A. Nation won notoriety for destroying saloons with a hatchet.³⁵ While mostly an evangelical Protestant endeavor, some Catholic organizations, like the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America, also pushed for temperance.³⁶ The WCTU, adopting a “do everything” strategy under the leadership of Frances Willard, championed women’s suffrage (the right to vote) and other women’s causes. Willard grew the WCTU into a juggernaut. Willard became an international women’s leader, and the WCTU emerged as the most powerful women’s organization in the United States during the late nineteenth century.³⁷

Alongside these attempts to change laws, many evangelical Protestants continued to emphasize personal regeneration as the means to overcome social sin, perpetuating the “moral suasion” paradigm of earlier antebellum reformers. This was the approach taken by a new generation of urban revivalists, such as Dwight Moody, who described the “great misery and suffering” in American cities as the result of people’s “sinful” behavior.³⁸ The Salvation Army, for instance, sought to extend individual conversions while offering food and shelter to the homeless, unwed mothers, and needy children. As an alternative to the saloon, the YMCA sought to provide a positive moral environment for young transplants in urban centers.

The evangelical emphasis on personal responsibility over systemic injustice mirrored the larger “bootstrap” ideology of the American capitalism. Social improvement would emerge from individual reform. And yet, organized religion did not withdraw in the face of larger systemic realities. Religious leaders and churches expanded their presence in industrial centers and reshaped their message to address the needs of working-class communities. Their work raised a central question: what should Christianity mean in an industrial society riven by vast inequalities? Some found the answer in a defense of traditional beliefs against modern challenges. Others created wholly new traditions.

VI. The Black Church

Buffeted by both Jim Crow and wrenching economic changes, Black churches nourished independent spiritual worlds. While movements such as the Social Gospel and the Azusa Street Revival offered new approaches to addressing the crises of industrial America, African American religious communities had long pursued social reform, functioning as central sites for addressing the material, social, and spiritual needs of their communities.

In the American South, where the threat of violence could meet any demonstration of Black political power, Black churches emerged as sites of strength. Pastors naturally doubled as community leaders and political activity flowed naturally from congregational organization. Black religious institutions affirmed a moral vision that rejected racial hierarchy, even as they navigated the realities of segregation and discrimination. Leaders associated with social reform within Black religious life urged congregations to more fully realize the emancipatory dimensions of their faith. Some black leaders, such as Booker T. Washington, mocked the otherworldly pretensions of Black ministers, but few individuals were better positioned to weather the assaults of Jim Crow upon Black organizational life. When the Great Migration followed American entry into World War I, Black Southerners took their churches with them, spreading their Southern faith to Northern cities.

Black churches recognized the twin challenges of Jim Crow segregation and economic privation. The African Methodist Episcopal minister Reverdy C. Ransom articulated his vision of what came to be seen as the Black Social Gospel in a 1901 article in the Christian Recorder. Describing the role of the church in Chicago, Ransom wrote that the institutional church existed “to meet and serve the social conditions and industrial needs of the people, and to give answers and solutions to many grave problems which confront our Christianity in the great centers of population of our people.”³⁹ For Ransom and others, Christianity demanded engagement with the full range of social problems confronting Black communities.

Black women reformers played a central role in this work. Figures such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell combined religious conviction with activism, addressing issues such as lynching, education, and racial inequality. Christianity was deeply important to Ida B. Wells. She was raised Methodist and attended Rust College, a Black institution formed by Methodists. She was married at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago, and her experience leading Bible classes at Grace Presbyterian Church inspired her to form the Negro Fellowship League. Her tireless journalism forced the nation to confront the brutal reality of lynching. Mary Church Terrell insisted that Christianity required confronting racial injustice and, through the National Association of Colored Women, she called on others to uplift others, or as she put it “lifting as we climb.”⁴⁰

As the American South descended further into Jim Crow segregation—with the tacit or explicit support of southern white churches—and the United States entered what many historians have called “the nadir of American race relations,” many Northern white churches stayed silent. Frederick Douglass, after reading Ida Wells’s Southern Horrors, her devastating account of American lynching, wrote to Wells and said, “If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half Christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.”⁴¹ If American Christian ethics could not address human suffering, Douglass asked, then what good was the mass of American Christianity?

While white Social Gospelers framed their efforts as a new response to industrial society, African American communities had long practiced forms of social Christianity rooted in necessity and survival. Black religious life consistently linked spiritual practice with social transformation, even as it operated within—and against—the constraints of segregation and racial violence. In this sense, Black churches did not simply participate in the Social Gospel, they expanded and redefined it.⁴² Their work revealed that addressing inequality required not only institutional reform or spiritual renewal but sustained engagement with the realities of race, labor, and community life in modern America.

While Black churches labored under the onslaughts of Jim Crow, Black Americans invented new traditions, too, especially as the Great Migration, the mass movement of Black Southerners to areas outside of the South, began in earnest  In an age of remaking, Black Americans used religion to create new racial identities and to better and grapple with the world around them.⁴³ Followers of the Prophet Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple claimed their identity as “Moors” rather than seeing themselves as Black or Negro. But perhaps no Black religious innovator so changed the history of American religion than William Seymour, a Black Southerner who taught the world how to speak in tongues.

VII. Speaking in Tongues

In April 1906, a multiracial group of worshippers gathered in a converted livery stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. The building itself was unremarkable—once used to house horses and equipment—but it became the site of one of the most influential religious movements of the twentieth century. Under the leadership of William J. Seymour, a Black southerner, participants met in a space that lacked the permanence and prestige of traditional religious institutions but nonetheless created something that would echo across the globe.

Perhaps no religious tradition embodied the spirit of reinvention more than Pentecostalism. From the Midwest to the Deep South to the West, and thence across the continent and into Latin America, it embodied the colliding geographies of a now-closely knit industrial nation. Bridging white theologians, Black revivalists, Latino evangelists, and stressing the limits of Jim Crow and turn-of-the-century race relations, its captured American racial fractures. And led often by women, it represented evolving American gender norms.

The origins of the Azusa Street Revival were closely tied to Seymour’s own life and experiences. Born in Centerville, Louisiana, in 1870 to a formerly enslaved couple, Seymour came of age in a society structured by the legacies of slavery. In his early twenties, he worked as a hotel waiter and traveled widely before relocating in 1903 to Houston,⁴⁴ where he encountered Lucy Farrow, a Black preacher in the Holiness movement, a Methodist offshoot that emphasized a second work of grace after baptism. Farrow taught that a direct, personal experience with God could be achieved through a baptism of the Holy Spirit and encouraged Seymour to study under Holiness theologian Charles Fox Parham, who operated a Bible school in Houston. Seymour attended. Parham lectured to white students about the coming of the Pentecost, the power of sanctification, and glossolalia (speaking in tongues) as evidence of a third blessing. Seymour, owing to the dictates of Jim Crow, sat in the hallway, quietly listening through the the open doorway.⁴⁵

Seymour arrived in Los Angeles in 1906, and freed from restrictions of Jim Crow Texas, quickly developed a reputation for his teachings, which focused on healing, the immanent presence of God, and speaking in tongues. On April 9, 1906, Seymour preached from Acts 2:4 on the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and participants reported that “the fire came down.”⁴⁶ As attendance grew, the meetings moved to a building on Azusa Street, where the revival quickly attracted an interracial following. Worship services were marked by glossolalia, healing, and ecstatic prayer, drawing participants from across racial, ethnic, and national lines. The Los Angeles Times described the revival as a “weird babel of tongues,” portraying participants as “fanatical” and emphasizing the presence of “colored people and a sprinkling of whites.”⁴⁷ But it was precisely this interracial character that distinguished Azusa Street from most American churches. At a time when segregation structured nearly every aspect of public life, the revival created a space, however fragile, where those boundaries were crossed.

Azusa Street offered an alternative vision of religious community and social reform. Institutional reform movements such as the Social Gospel often worked within existing structures. Seymour’s revival, on the other hand, reimagined those structures altogether. What had been denied to him in Houston, where he stood outside the classroom door, was transformed in Los Angeles into a multiracial community gathered within a former stable. This improvised space challenged both the social and religious boundaries of early twentieth-century America. That transgressive social space also provided the Black working class with an opportunity to convene and cultivate caring relationships while also challenging and reimagining restrictive social boundaries.⁴⁸ The Social Gospel’s concern for social injustice did not translate into a sustained challenge to segregationist norms. By contrast, the Azusa Street Revival created spaces of worship that, at least temporarily, crossed racial and ethnic boundaries in ways that were rare in the early twentieth century.

Pentecostalism was on its way to becoming a hemispheric and global faith. William Seymour ordained Abundio L. López and Juan Navarro Martínez in 1909 as the first Latine Pentecostal ministers in the U.S. They helped to transform the revival from a largely biracial, English-speaking, and Americanized gathering to a more diverse, multilingual, and global movement.⁴⁹ What attracted Latines to Azusa—and what enabled the longstanding growth of Pentecostalism in Latine communities in the United States and across Latin America—was its belief and practice of an egalitarian Holy Spirit, accessible to anyone who would seek its power and promise of salvation regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, citizenship status, education, or economic standing, ideas that resonated deeply among communities navigating displacement, labor exploitation, and racialization.

VIII. Conclusion

By the early twentieth century, the United States had been reshaped by industrialization, migration, and the expansion of its overseas and domestic empires. Cities grew denser and more diverse. Work became more precarious. Inequality became more visible. In response, Americans turned to religion not only as a retreat from modern life, but as a means of confronting its challenges. Americans transformed religious practice by innovating new traditions and ideas and adapting older ones to a changing old. The Social Gospel emerged as one of the most influential efforts to reconcile the demands of living in an industrial society. Reformers sought to apply Christian ethics to labor, poverty, and public life, translating theological ideas into political reform. Their efforts, however, were neither uniform nor complete. The Social Gospel often struggled to confront the racial hierarchies that shaped American society, even as other religious movements offered alternative paths. Black religious institutions weathered the violence and indignities of Jim Crow, practicing forms of social Christianity innovated long before the rise of the Social Gospel. But they, too, adapted to new worlds. At Azusa Street, worshippers crossed racial and ethnic boundaries in ways that challenged segregation, while Latine and immigrant communities reshaped religious life through their own institutions and practices.

No single movement fully resolved the tensions they confronted. Efforts to align Christian ethics with modern society achieved meaningful reforms, but they often stopped short of dismantling the deeper structures of inequality. The result was not a unified moral awakening, but a contested and uneven transformation—one that expanded the possibilities of spiritual engagement while leaving fundamental religious questions about the world unresolved.

IX. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Cori Tucker-Price with content contributions from Paul A. Anthony, Janine Giordano Drake, Lisa Jane de Gara, Chanhee Heo, Jenny Wiley Legath, Kristina I. Lizardy-Hajbi, Joseph L. Locke, Everett Messamore, Barry Stiefel, Austin Steelman, Cori Tucker-Price, Amy Weiss, and Ben Wright

Recommended Reading

• Estrelda Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (InterVarsity Press, 2011).
• Tricia Colleen Bruce, Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015).
• Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024).
• Keri Day, Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2022).
• Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (University of California Press, 2004).
• Janine Giordano Drake, The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement (Oxford University Press, 2023).
• Gastón Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (MacMillan, 2004).
• Joseph L. Locke, Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Gale Kenny, Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the American West (New York University Press, 2020).
• Juan Francisco Martinez, The Story of Latino Protestants in the United States (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2018).
• Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (Columbia University Press, 1981).
• Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism (Norton, 2024).
• Alison M. Parker, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
• Amanda Porterfield, Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation (Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press, 2004).
• Ann-Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Duke University Press, 2003).
• Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2016).

Notes

1. Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (MacMillan, 2004). ↩︎
2. Henry Carroll, The Religious Forces of the United States (Christian Literature Company, 1893), xi; Henry Caroll, Report of the Statistics of Churches in the United States at the Eleventh Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894), xvi-xviii; Janine Giordano Drake, The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement (Oxford University Press, 2023), 31. ↩︎
3. J. Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian God (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906). ↩︎
4. Lyman Stewart. The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (Testimony Publishing Company, 1910) ↩︎
5. Kyle B. Roberts. “Religion in the American City, 1600-1900,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History , ed. Jane Dailey (Oxford University Press, 2014). ↩︎
6. Jessica Cooperman and Shira M. Kohn, “Jews and Jewish Americas, 1870 – 1940” in Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration, ed., Elliott Robert Barkan (Bloomsbury, 2013), 460. ↩︎
7. Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 – 2000 (University of California Press, 2004), 88. ↩︎
8. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press, 2004), 375. ↩︎
9. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews. (Columbia University Press, 1981), 3. ↩︎
10. Quoted in Marianne R. Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945 – 2006 (Brandeis University Press, 2007), 6. ↩︎
11. Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong, 3–6. ↩︎
12. Tricia Colleen Bruce, Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church (Oxford University Press, 2017), 15. ↩︎
13. Timothy Matovina, “Mexican-Descent Catholics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Latinx Christianities in the United States, ed. Kristy Nabhan-Warren (Oxford University Press, 2022). ↩︎
14. Pope Leo XIII, Apostolic Letter Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (Concerning Americanism) (January 22, 1899), Acta Sanctae Sedis 31 (1898–99): 471, Vatican Archive. ↩︎
15. Robert Orsi, Madonna of 115^th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950, third edition (Yale University Press, 2010). ↩︎
16. Jennifer Koshatka Seman, Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo (University of Texas Press, 2021). ↩︎
17. Juan Francisco Martinez, The Story of Latino Protestants in the United States (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2018), 47. ↩︎
18. Martinez, The Story of Latino Protestants, 49. ↩︎
19. Sujey Vega, Mormon Barrio: Latino Belonging in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (NYU Press, 2026). ↩︎
20. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel A. De La Torre, Introducing Latinx Theologies, revised edition (Orbis Books, 2020), chapter 1. ↩︎
21. “Child Labor in the Canning Industry of Maryland.” Lewis. Hine, July 1909. National Child Labor Committee Collection. ↩︎
22. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (John Murray, 1859). ↩︎
23. James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 160-163; Michael Ruse, Charles Darwin (Blackwell, 2008), 299; Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (W.W. Norton, 1991), 594-595. ↩︎
24. Russell Conwell, Acres of Diamonds, (Harper and Brothers), 1915. ↩︎
25. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (Harper & Brothers, 1883), 131. ↩︎
26. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, 1972), 786-87. ↩︎
27. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (Macmillan, 1908), 104. ↩︎
28. Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Macmillan, 1902), 67-69. ↩︎
29. Federal Council of Churches, “The Social Creed of the Churches,” December 4, 1908, National Council of Churches. ↩︎
30. Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015). ↩︎
31. Drake, The Gospel of Church. ↩︎
32. Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920 (University of North Carolina, 2002). ↩︎
33. Ian Tyrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Ann-Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Duke University Press, 2003), 19. ↩︎
34. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 27-29. ↩︎
35. Jack S. Blocker, “Nation, Carry (1846-1911), temperance reformer.” American National Biography 1 (February 2000); Carry A. Nation, The Use of Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (F. M. Steves & Sons, 1909). ↩︎
36. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 53. ↩︎
37. Tyrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire, 221, 232-35; Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 50-51; Kenneth D. Rose, American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition (NYU Press, 2020), 21-22. ↩︎
38. Dwight Moody (1876). ↩︎
39. Reverdy C. Ransom, “The Institutional Church,” Christian Recorder, 1901, 1. ↩︎
40. Alison M. Parker, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). ↩︎
41. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893 (Donohue & Henneberry, 1895). ↩︎
42. Gary Dorrien, A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK (Yale University Press, 2023). ↩︎
43. Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2016). ↩︎
44. Estrelda Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (InterVarsity Press, 2011), 111. ↩︎
45. Gaston Espinosa. William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History. (Duke University Press, 2014), 50-57. ↩︎
46. Espinosa, William J. Seymour, 55. ↩︎
47. “Weird Babel of Tongues,” The Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1906, 111. ↩︎
48. Keri Day’s work has advanced the idea that Azusa’s religious life critiqued America’s racial-capitalist order. See, Keri Day, Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2022). ↩︎
49. Gastón Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action (Harvard University Press, 2014), 51, 36. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

Americans have generally resisted describing the nation as an empire. Yet the metaphor has proved irresistible. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the nation as an “Empire of Liberty.” Historians have characterized the Protestant reform movements of the antebellum era have as a “Benevolent Empire,” and Protestant influence in America as a “Righteous Empire.”¹

In the decades after the Civil War, the United States maintained at least four imperial or proto-imperial projects: Westward expansion and settlement, segregationist white supremacy, foreign intervention, and the importation of foreign labor.² Religion suffused all four. Westward expansion and settlement fostered new types of Christianity and spawned conflict with Indigenous religions, segregation enforced legal white supremacy and inspired black religious resistance, foreign intervention facilitated globe-spanning networks of missionaries, and immigration brought new Catholics, Jews, and members of non-Western religious communities to the United States. These developments prefigured some of the most significant themes of American religion in the following century.

America’s new birth of empire invoked both Christ’s call to be “born again” and Abraham Lincoln’s promise that the Civil War offered “a new birth of freedom.”³ Yet what seemed new had older roots. Westward expansion, American involvement in the wider world, and immigration were all features of American history before the Civil War and Reconstruction. Many religious patterns continued, including the maintenance of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism among the nation’s cultural elite, the religious sanctification of capitalism and inequality, and the sense of exceptionalism in both the nation’s mission to save the world and the role of Christianity in that mission. At the same time, this era was one of growing institutional and social consolidation for Black Christians, expansion for Catholics, and the beginning of deep division among Protestants. It was an era of expansive global missions and shifting norms for women in religious leadership. It also brought new levels of diversity and pluralism not just in politics but in religious life, as well.

II. Religion in the North

In the wake of Reconstruction, Christianity helped reshape the nation’s political, cultural, and social makeup. Many Northern whites were eager to, in the words of one historian, “reforge the white republic” and emphasize common bonds between Northern and Southern whites through a shared Protestant Christianity.⁴ The sentiment came to dominate the preaching of Henry Ward Beecher, a New York City Congregationalist pastor and the most popular postwar speaker until his death in 1887. He urged leniency for the South and called for a “new era of liberty” in which white Southerners would be “believed and trusted” for their good intentions.⁵ Similar hopes were shared by the era’s most popular revivalists, including Dwight L. Moody in Chicago and Sam Jones in Georgia.

It was Moody, however, who most ably set the Northern trajectory. Moody was typical of white Northerners who personally disliked the rising segregation in the South that became known as “Jim Crow” but took no action in resisting it. In one account of an 1876 revival in Augusta, Georgia, Moody remarked that he did not like a “dividing fence” to segregate non-white attendees. “I see you have not gotten over your rebellious feelings yet,” he lamented to a white Southern organizer, who proudly responded that he would be a “rebel until I die.” Though disapproving, Moody dropped the matter. Twenty years later, near the end of his career, Moody continued to allow dividers when preaching in the South, even as he complained about “so plain a distinction.” In one 1895 Texas revival he created an impromptu Black choir of the Black attendees who sang for the crowd of 8,000.⁶

Moody’s personal opposition to segregation was subdued in part because he shared in the common white American tendency toward racism. But his life’s work was to rally white Protestants in both the North and South to global missions and revivalism. To do this, he believed, white Northerners and Southerners had to transcend, or otherwise put aside, their sectional differences. Moody urged whites to turn away from racial politics and toward “mercy and grace.” He wanted to eliminate barriers for white Christians cooperating, even if this came at the expense of racial reform and integration. “Talk not of this sect and that sect, of this party and that party,” he enjoined his fellow Chicagoans, “but solely and exclusively of the great comprehensive cause of Jesus Christ.”⁷ This reconciliation agenda pushed Northern white Protestantism to accept both Jim Crow in the South and the de facto segregation in the North.

Moody’s reach was wide in the 1880s. He founded his own church in Chicago, the Moody Bible Institute and other educational institutions, an annual conference called the Northfield Conference, a press called the Moody Colportage Book Association, and multiple revival circuits. And he empowered an entire generation of leaders to follow in his stead, from gospel hymnist Ira B. Sankey to Reuben Torrey, the foremost revivalist of the first decade of the 1900s. During the Civil War, Moody had worked for the United States Christian Commission, which was part of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). His connections to the YMCA and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) remained deep throughout his career and helped spread his revivals. His influence was massive. By the time of his death in 1899 he was claimed as an inspiration by theological conservatives, liberals, Social Gospel leaders, and even Unitarians.

This broad sweep of Moody’s popularity reveals what one historian has called the “Spirit of the Age” in American Christianity: that the Holy Spirit was working through revivals, missions, organizations like the YMCA, and advances in Biblical studies to propel Protestant Christianity into a global religion. Many Protestant leaders in the 1870s and 1880s were convinced that their movement was an ascendant force for good in the world.⁸

Yet the era also brought developing critiques of received traditional Protestantism. Intellectual currents from Europe, including Darwinian evolution and Biblical higher criticism, challenged Protestant orthodoxy. The “Spirit of the Age” began to dissipate through doctrinal and theological controversies that divided white Protestants into modernist and conservative camps, especially in the Northern Baptist and Northern Presbyterian denominations. Arguments over Darwinism, higher criticism, the growing popular doctrine among conservatives of premillennialism, and the emerging defense of Biblical inerrancy animated denominational seminaries like Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago Divinity School. There, conservatives like Charles Hodge at Princeton and modernists like William Rainey Harper at Chicago sought to synthesize and unify doctrinal stances and postures in the face of developing scientific and historical findings.

Liberal Protestants like John William Draper and Andrew Dickson claimed that there was an inherent conflict between “religion and science,” by which they meant traditional religious beliefs skeptical of modern science and their preferred, scientifically informed Protestantism. In order to rescue Christianity, they believed that they must liberate the gospel from narrow-minded dogmatics who insisted on traditional forms of biblical literalism.

These beliefs inspired a serious backlash. For example, in 1892-93, the Presbyterian theologian Charles Augustus Briggs was tried, acquitted, and eventually defrocked for heresy by the presbytery of New York for his views of Biblical authority and authorship that were deemed too liberal to conform to Presbyterian standards.⁹ American Protestantism strained against itself.

These arguments had serious consequences. For instance, the rise of premillennialism among conservative Protestants significantly shaped popular religious culture. This doctrine held that Jesus would return soon to establish the prophesied millennial kingdom described in Revelation 20. Many Protestants after the Civil War, including Dwight Moody, adopted a version of premillennialism influenced by dispensationalism, which interprets God’s relationship with humanity through two chosen peoples: Israel and the Church.

These ideas fueled American interest in early Zionism—the migration of Jews to the Holy Land to establish a political presence. One notable early American supporter was evangelist William E. Blackstone from Chicago, who was so dedicated to this view that he organized the 1891 Blackstone Memorial. This petition, signed by hundreds of prominent Americans, urged President Benjamin Harrison to help establish a humanitarian Jewish refuge in Palestine, especially for those suffering pogroms in Eastern Europe under the Russian Czar. The widespread signatures reveal not just the influence of dispensationalism during this period but also America’s longstanding fascination with Jews and the Holy Land. In this way, dispensationalism grew amid a fertile cultural environment, where it would exert significant influence in subsequent decades.¹⁰

Outside the white Protestant North, other religious communities grew, too, even amid discrimination. Immigration from Germany and Eastern Europe meant that the population of American Jews grew from around 15,000 in 1850 to more than 250,000 by 1880 and nearly half a million just ten years later in 1890. In Europe, antisemitism was often couched in explicitly religious terms, such as the fabricated practice of blood libel, the allegation that Jews killed Christian babies to use their blood in religious rituals. By contrast, American prejudice more often attacked Jewish communities’ perceived wealth, connections to the banking sector, or influence over the American economy. In 1877, the Hilton-Seligman Affair enshrined in law the right to discriminate against Jews staying in hotels, and the law remained in effect until the 1950s. Antisemitism permeated American politics, even reaching beyond Jewish communities. For example, in the 1896 presidential election, Grover Cleveland was accused of enriching Jewish syndicates against the popular interest during a banking crisis.¹¹

Despite antisemitism, Jews established a distinct Jewish-American identity and importantly shaped the wider culture in the period. In 1875, the Hebrew Union College was established in Cincinnati. It was the United States’ first rabbinical seminary and became the site of debates within the Jewish community between more assimilation-friendly Reformed Jews and more traditional Jews who adhered to Biblical and cultural distinctiveness. These tensions were laid bare in 1883, when the first graduating class of rabbis was treated with a non-kosher banquet: shrimp, frogs’ legs, and dairy-meat dishes, all forbidden in Jewish religious law. While the particulars of the menu have been subject to debate over the years, this “Trefa” (non-kosher) banquet became notorious in Jewish media. Many who heard of the event felt it had strayed too far from Jewish tradition, leading some moderate leaders to found the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1886 to train rabbis in a more traditional, historically grounded Judaism and forming the core of what would become the American Jewish Conservative Movement.¹²

Jews also began to influence American culture beyond their own communities. In 1883, Emma Lazarus composed her poem “The New Colossus,” while working at the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society. Celebrating the unique features of American pluralism, the poem ended with its famous lines:

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!¹³

A poignant symbol of America’s openness to immigrants of all faiths and backgrounds, the poem remains affixed to the base of the Statue of Liberty.

The most dramatic demographic shift in American religion during this period was the explosive growth of Roman Catholicism. Fueled by successive waves of immigration, the Catholic population in the United States roughly tripled between 1860 and 1890, growing from approximately three million to nine million. Irish and German Catholics had dominated in earlier decades, but by the 1880s they were joined by growing numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans whose arrival further diversified the American church.

This rapid expansion required substantial institutional infrastructure. At the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, fourteen archbishops and over sixty bishops ordered each parish to set up its own school. This decree helped to develop 3,500 parochial schools by the end of the century and what became the largest private educational system in the U.S. The Council also approved a standardized English catechism and planned for the Catholic University of America, which opened in Washington D.C. in 1889. These initiatives created a parallel institutional world—a Catholic counterpart to the Protestant establishment—that elicited both admiration and concern among Protestants. Nativists saw the Catholic growth as confirming fears of a “Romanist” threat to republican values. Conversely, Catholic leaders like Archbishop James Gibbons believed that the church’s expansion showed that American institutions were, as the Council’s pastoral letter stated, highly favorable to Catholic growth.¹⁴

III. Religion in the South

The Confederate defeat of 1865 lingered, and in many ways became central to Southern identity. The “Lost Cause” became the name for a powerful myth, developed by white Southerners immediately after the war. In the 1870s this myth grew into something of a civil religion. The Lost Cause romanticized the Confederacy. It rewrote the cause of the war from the protection of slavery to the pursuit of states’ rights, and it legitimized the continuation of racial segregation through Jim Crow laws. For white Southern Christians, the Lost Cause was not just a political myth but was also theological. The Confederacy’s loss was reinterpreted not as divine judgment on slavery but as divine testing of a righteous people. Southern ministers routinely cast the defeated Confederacy as God’s chosen people undergoing divine chastisement — tested, as ancient Israel had been, but not forsaken. No figure embodied this fusion of faith and Confederate memory more vividly than Father Abram Ryan, the Catholic “poet-priest of the Confederacy,” whose poem “The Conquered Banner” (1865) — set to the meter of a Gregorian hymn — rendered the Confederate flag as a sacred relic and its defenders as holy martyrs.¹⁵

This version of Southern civil religion combined Protestant imagery and language with Confederate remembrance. Its “saints” included Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (the latter’s chief of staff, Robert Lewis Dabney, was a Presbyterian minister and key figure along with Ryan in Christianizing the Lost Cause myth). Sacred days involved Confederate Memorial Day observances, and “liturgies” featured monument dedications and reunion speeches with Christian themes of sacrifice, martyrdom, and divine purpose. The United Confederate Veterans was founded in 1889 and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1894. Both of these popular organizations received endorsements and support from ministers and staged quasi-religious rituals to establish the boundaries of historical memory and religious meaning. By 1885, ninety-four Confederate monuments had been erected and dedicated across the South, with an additional 406 established by 1912. Most of these included speeches by ministers or used Christian language centered on sacrifice and resurrection. They also justified segregation and white supremacist terrorism.

The growing civil religion of white Southerners was accompanied by growing institutional religion, as well. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was created in 1845 after a sectional split with Northern Baptists largely over the issue of slavery. The SBC originally had about 300,000 members. By the 1890s, its membership exceeded 1.5 million. The growth is more stunning because it happened amid a mass exodus of Black Baptists. Back in 1845 nearly a third of Southern Baptists were Black. By the 1890s, there were almost no Black people left in the SBC. The state of Georgia exhibited perhaps the most dramatic version of this history. The Georgia Baptist Convention went from 95,000 members in 1860 to just 37,500 by 1870 due to war losses, economic devastation, and the departure of Black congregations. Yet a half century later, it had nearly 300,000 members and 2,500 churches.¹⁶

Like Southern Baptists, Southern Methodists had also split in the 1840s and did not reunify after the war. Instead, they consolidated as a distinctly regional denomination, professionalizing their operations and building centralized bureaucracies for missions, publishing, and education. Despite periodic overtures, Southern Methodists rejected reunion with the Methodist Episcopal Church until 1939, nearly a century after the 1844 split. The regionalism that dominated in both white Baptist and Methodist circles was itself a form of institutional consolidation, functioning as pillars of white Southern identity. The white Protestant denominational borders reinforced sectional distinctions.

 White Southern churches provided a theology that functioned as the moral framework for the emerging Jim Crow order. They did not merely fail to resist segregation but actively blessed it as consistent with divine order. Robert Lewis Dabney, the Lost Cause mythmaker and a onetime moderator of the Southern Presbyterian denomination, argued that racial hierarchy was scripturally mandated and that granting Black clergy equal standing would corrupt the church. In this sense, white Southern Protestantism—Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian—was building an empire of its own: a comprehensive institutional infrastructure that mirrored and reinforced the racial and social hierarchy of the New South.

Black Americans increasingly fled this white Southern Protestant “empire” over the 1870s and after. They also moved toward greater independence and autonomy in their church life. Black Baptists began forming independent churches immediately after emancipation, then organized their own state conventions. North Carolina was the first in 1866. These state conventions finally consolidated into the National Baptist Convention in 1895. The same pattern happened among the Southern Methodists. For example, in 1860, the Methodist Episcopal Church (South) counted about 207,000 Black members, nearly all enslaved. By 1866, only 49,000 remained. By 1870, most of those had departed on relatively amicable terms to form the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church). They joined a competitive religious marketplace for Black Methodism that also included the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion, which combined counted more than half a million members by the end of the century.¹⁷

By the 1880s Black Christians had established new denominations, especially in the South, and become leaders in the holiness (and later Pentecostal) forms of Christianity. Denominations began establishing independent colleges, such as Lane College, founded by the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and Morris Brown College by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

This institutional growth enabled Black Protestants to further distinguish their religious beliefs and practices and for churches to become the center of Black culture. Churches and denominations created their own presses, missions’ agencies, and reform societies. For many white Protestants, the independence allowed them to tolerate, even bless, the work so long as segregation was maintained. For other whites, particularly in the South, Black Christianity of any form was resisted and treated with violence. In other church settings where institutional separation was not so easy, white leaders resisted Black Christian growth. A group of Black Catholics meeting in Washington, DC in 1889 lamented “the fact that the sacred rights of justice and humanity are still sadly wounded” in light of Jim Crow segregation.¹⁸

Although the South was predominantly Protestant, a distinct Catholic presence persisted, mainly in Louisiana and Maryland. New Orleans hosted the most established Catholic community, influenced by French and Spanish colonial history and featuring a complex racial hierarchy with notable Creole Catholics. The 1884 Third Plenary Council of Baltimore—the same 1884 gathering of bishops that mandated parochial schools—largely adapted to regional racial norms, allowing Southern dioceses to maintain segregated parishes and schools. Catholic religious orders, such as the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, provided education for Black and Native American Southerners despite resistance from white Catholics. The same order also helped found Xavier University in New Orleans, the only historically Black and Catholic university in the U.S.

Southern Jews, a much smaller group than Catholics in the South, held a complex and often contradictory social position. They were sometimes more welcome in Southern white civic than they were in the North, yet they also remained vulnerable to antisemitism and the region’s racial hierarchy. Those who owned enslaved people before 1865 often identified strongly with the Confederacy and the Lost Cause mythology. However, acceptance was uncertain, and lynch mobs targeted American Jews; for example, Samuel Bierfield, a merchant, became the first American Jew to be lynched on August 15, 1868, in Franklin, Tennessee. These acts of violence contributed to the appeal of Reform Judaism among Southern Jews, who appreciated its Americanizing approach and relaxed dietary laws as a means of integrating into Southern civic culture while preserving their religious identity.

IV. The West

The historian Fredrick Jackson Turner’s famously observed at the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair that the American frontier had “closed.” The decades leading up to Turner’s declaration witnessed continued expansion of white settlement in the lands west of the Mississippi River, and especially west of the Rocky Mountains. Colorado achieved statehood in 1876, while North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming entered the union in 1889 or 1890. Utah, whose first white settlers were Mormons in the 1840s and their descendants, finally gained statehood in 1896.

Compared to both the Northern and Southern United States, western lands were far more sparsely populated—with less infrastructure, religious or otherwise—and far more pluralistic in religious and ethnic makeup. In addition to the Mormons, who comprised the largest new religious movement in the US at some 150,000 in 1880, western lands were also inhabited by Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Rim immigrants. This meant that Protestantism, while remaining the dominant form of religion, existed alongside a wide range of other Christian traditions, like Catholicism and Mormonism, as well as other religious practices and beliefs like Indigenous spiritualities and Buddhism.

The last decades of the 19th century brought major changes to Mormonism. During this period the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shifted from isolation or hostility to the federal government to increasing accommodation with the United States government. In 1879, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that religious belief could not justify polygamy. Some Mormons responded through resistance and hiding. For example, church president John Taylor went into hiding to avoid being arrested. Others insisted that the church should change. In 1890 the church announced that it would no longer authorize plural marriage. This decade also brought many Mormons into national political culture, and in 1894, Congress allowed Utah to draft a state constitution. By the end of the 1890s, many Mormons saw themselves as both fully Mormon and fully American. Others continued to struggle with the loss of plural marriage and viewed the nation with suspicion.

Mormons were not alone in the West, as the Catholics, the nation’s largest group, also exerted considerable influence. A case study on Catholic sisters illustrates the complex relationships between gender, religion, and economic realities in the region. Few sisters served in western territories during the colonial period, but when the Vatican realigned its governance structures after the Mexican-American War in 1848, the territory fell under the purview of the U.S. Catholic Church. Pope Pius IX appointed new bishops to meet the needs of both the resident Spanish-speaking population and the rapid influx of European immigrants who sought land, minerals, and economic opportunity. They recruited European priests and sisters to participate in the daunting task of strengthening the church in this vast new territory, building churches, schools, hospitals, and other facilities described by one historian as “an empire of interlocking institutions that constituted Catholic social services.”¹⁹ Sisters served in cities, mining towns, farming communities, and on newly established government reservations for indigenous people. Often the first to establish social services in many western communities, sisters shaped the institutions that laid the foundation for, eventually, the welfare state.²⁰

While bishops connected them with sympathetic donors when they could, sisters in western territories were often left to their own devices to sustain themselves and their institutions. In Los Angeles, the Daughters of Charity built relationships with the German, Californio-Mexican, Irish, and American elite to raise funds for their school and orphanage. They also contracted with the county’s board of supervisors to care for indigent patients at the Los Angeles Infirmary, which later became St. Vincent’s Hospital.²¹ Sisters in other locales followed similar patterns, building relationships with local residents and government officials who wished to cooperate on issues of mutual interest.

While most Catholic sisters came from working-class backgrounds, the experiences of Mother Katharine Drexel illustrate the impact that a well-funded religious community could have in the west. The daughter of a Philadelphia banking tycoon, Katharine Drexel founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People (SBS) in 1891. Dedicating her inheritance to the work of educating African American and Native American Catholics, Drexel donated between 15 and 20 million dollars to fund the construction of dozens of schools, convents, and churches. Drexel’s business sense, political acumen, and philanthropic business model influenced the development of the entire system. Through her contributions and expertise, Drexel shaped Catholic Native American policy for five decades. Drexel believed that Catholic residential schools could save souls and help produce educated American citizens. But her actions had unintended consequences. Removing students from their families and requiring them to renounce their language, culture, and traditions caused incalculable damage, individually and collectively.

These religious and economic realities were felt in a different, but no less illustrative way by Native Americans, many of whom resisted the US government and white settlement. Yet Indigenous responses were also complicated by overlapping influences, including new, old, and blended religious traditions. The blending, sometimes called syncretism, can be seen in Peyotism, the set of religious beliefs and practices among some Native Americans that utilize the hallucinogenic effects of the dried tops of cactuses growing in northern Mexico and south Texas. Peyote “buttons” are considered both a sacred medicine for healing purposes, and when ingested produce a mild hallucinogenic sensation to serve as an aid in ritual worship. The complex of religious practices associated with peyote began in ancient Central America and spread, over centuries, to North American tribes, especially in the Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa-Apache what would become Oklahoma.²²

By the nineteenth century, the peyote ceremony that developed among the Comanche and Kiowa became known as the “Half Moon” ceremony, named for the crescent shape of the altar for the peyote. As Peyotism spread among tribes located on reservations in Oklahoma Territory and parts of Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma), Christian elements began to be added to the ceremony by various peyote leaders. A Caddo-Delaware spiritual leader named John Wilson stretched the arms of the crescent altar, so his version became known as the “Big Moon” ceremony.  This syncretic ceremony included a cross, new songs, and concrete ethical teachings that appealed to Christian Native Americans located in northeast Oklahoma and Kansas.

As Peyotism continued to spread to the Northern Plains, a Winnebago named John Rave continued to modify the Big Moon ceremony with the overt addition of Christian symbols and meaning. His peyote ritual became known as the “Cross Fire” ceremony. Rave also added Christian texts and Christian hymns into the peyote ceremony. Winnebago Albert Hensley added the presence of an open Bible displayed on the altar next to the peyote cactus. The Christian elements of the peyote ceremonies spread further west. Native American beliefs often allowed an individual to be both a Peyotist and a member of a specific Christian church, rather than adhering to a single religious practice.

Even as Peyotism accommodated Christian symbols and teachings, white federal officials became aware of the religious practice in the 1880s, especially after the widespread implementation of the reservation system and the Dawes Allotment Act in 1887. Peyotism became a target of Native American religious identity that federal officials and reformers, both white and Native American, wanted to eradicate. Even as the cultural and racial frontiers had expanded for Christian Native Americans themselves in this period, the concept of pluralism was far more limited for Indigenous people.

A third scene of religious innovation in the West was the growing presence of Eastern religions, especially Buddhism. By 1880 more than 100,000 Chinese people were living in the United States, most in California. Anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant and motivated congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.²³ The law banned the entry of Chinese laborers into the United States and forbade people of Chinese descent already living in the United States from becoming American citizens via naturalization, but not, importantly, through birthright citizenship. Although the act originally prohibited immigration and naturalization for only ten years, a series of later laws first broadened the immigration ban to include “all persons of the Chinese race’ and later extended its provisions indefinitely.”²⁴ As intended, the Chinese Exclusion Act brought a significant decline in the population of Chinese Americans. The act was not repealed until the passage of the 1943 Magnuson Act.

Exclusion was grounded in deeper cultural and religious prejudices of the period. Bret Harte’s 1870 poem “The Heathen Chinee” gained popularity and became a shorthand for stereotyping Chinese people despite the author’s satirical intention. Some politicians, such as California senator Eugene Casserly, recited the poem as part of their justification to prevent Chinese immigration to the United States.²⁵ In a report to the California State Senate by its special committee on Chinese immigration, politicians repeated well-known missionary Rev. S. V. Blakeslee’s warnings about the danger of the Chinese presence in the United States: “… in a few years, … these Chinese, yet being heathen, must surely become enfranchised as citizens … to shape the government to their preferences, and this, too, while they retain their heathen religion, prejudices, vices, and clannish spirit.”²⁶ The label of “heathen” and its associated qualities, such as ignorance, deceit, and an inability to assimilate, became attached to all Asian immigrants.

Two remarkable essays in the 1887 North American Review illustrated how these debates were understood by Chinese Americans. Wong Chin Foo, a journalist, rejected the idea that Christianity was superior to the Confucian ethics with which he was raised. He noted the widespread American traditions of warfare, racism, and economic exploitation and juxtaposed those with the values he was taught including honesty, self-discipline, and reciprocity. Ultimately, Wong called for a multireligious nation, claiming that Chinese religious traditions deserved respect.²⁷ Yan Phou Lee agreed that Americans treated Chinese immigrants unjustly. Yet he advanced the opposite argument regarding religion. Lee explained his Christian conversion and why he found Christianity to be superior to Chinese religions.²⁸

“Heathenism,” positioned as an antonym of Christianity, framed the Buddhism of Asian immigrants as false for some, but as an intriguing for others.²⁹ Throughout the late nineteenth century, scholarly and popular fascination with Buddhism and knowledge from the “Orient” continued unabated. White American and European scholars expanded Western knowledge of Buddhism through studies and translations. On the East Coast, in New York City, these interests led a group that included Henry Steel Olcott, a discharged US Army Colonel, and Helena Blavatsky, an author and spiritualist medium, to form the Theosophical Society in 1875. As one historian explains, “The Society devoted itself to the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science; the promotion of universal brotherhood; and the investigation of unexplained natural and psychic phenomenon, especially the latent powers of the human mind…The Theosophical Society argued a kind of perennialism that was part of larger religious discourses of the time, a strategy aimed at reconciling apparent differences between religious traditions by proposing universalistic alternatives.”³⁰ Within a decade, the Theosophical Society had shifted its headquarters to India. While some American Theosophists remained loyal to the Adyar-based Theosophical Society, the movement split into different branches and theosophical lodges could be found across the United States.

Back on the West Coast, Japanese immigration had started in the 1860s and increased significantly by the late nineteenth century. Japanese immigration to both Hawai’i and the West Coast was influenced by the social, cultural, and political changes taking place during the Meiji era (1868–1912) in Japan.³¹ Beginning in 1890, the number of Japanese immigrants and natural-born citizens in the United States increased over the next 20 years from 2,000 to 127,000. These Buddhist organizations, like the Japanese immigrants themselves, were primarily of the Jōdo Shinshū tradition of Buddhism (Shin Buddhism).³² By the turn of the century, Shin Buddhist priests would found the Young Men’s Buddhist Association. This organization would eventually become the Buddhist Church of San Francisco and the North American Buddhist Mission (renamed Buddhist Churches of America during World War II).³³

In these three case studies of the Catholic sisters, Peyotism, and the growth of Buddhism, we see the openness and limits of the West. With less infrastructure and more fluid religious practices, these communities adapted to the land, laws, and norms in new ways. These examples illustrate how the West produced and limited religious innovation.

V. Missionaries

In the decades before the Spanish-American War (1898), American missionaries played a key role in expanding American influence abroad by challenging local customs and advocating for religious liberty in regions such as China, Japan, Hawai’i, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Mexico. In their efforts to promote Christianity (most often forms of Protestantism), missionaries often clashed with local authorities, criticizing local religious practices and laws. When conflicts arose, these missionaries turned to their government for aid, often dragging the U.S. government into complex diplomatic entanglements. This involvement sometimes led to the establishment of new U.S. consulates, further extending American influence. As one diplomat, Whitelaw Reid claimed, missionaries were both “troublesome and influential.”³⁴

 In Japan, for instance, missionaries contributed to the lifting of the ban on Christianity. Following Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1850s gunboat diplomacy, which ended Japan’s maritime restrictions and imposed an unequal treaty, the Japanese government was eager to transform the nation. Japan allowed some Protestant missionaries to serve as agents of westernization. The Meiji Restoration, beginning in 1868 and culminating in the Meiji Constitution in 1889, furthered this westernization. Yet the Japanese grew suspicious of American missionaries, further restricting their role and access in the 1870s. American missionaries responded by urging President Ulysses Grant to fight these restrictions in the name of religious freedom. When Japanese envoys visited Grant to showcase Japan’s progress, he emphasized the American values of “freedom of thought & of conscience, & a liberal toleration in matters of religion,” suggesting that Japan adopt similar principles.³⁵ This contributed to lifting the ban on Christianity in Japan in 1873. In the following decade, American missionaries produced the first Japanese translations of the Bible and achieved the highest recorded rates of conversion in Japan. Their success, in turn, prompted a sharp rise in Japanese nationalist and anti-Christian sentiment in the late 1880s and 1890s, among both Japanese officials and the nascent Japanese Christian community.³⁶

West of Japan, American missionaries in China became deeply entangled in the contradictions of overseas religious and geopolitical activism. Here, again, American missionaries called for religious liberty while sheltering under the protection of unequal treaties imposed by Western military force. This contradiction eventually made missionaries targets of anti-imperialist backlash. All the while, they invested in creating the infrastructure of churches, schools, and charities that became vital to the growth of Chinese society. The “treaty port” system, formalized after the Opium Wars that ended in 1860, gave American missionaries legal protection on Chinese soil under extraterritoriality clauses—meaning missionaries operated under American rather than Chinese law. This complex relationship between religious and political status implicated missionaries in the growing Chinese distrust of foreign religious and commercial presence. This distrust would explode in 1899 with the Boxer Rebellion that targeted Chinese Christians and Western missionaries. In the years before the rebellion, these same missionaries were active in pressing the Qing government for religious liberty protections for Chinese converts. Evan after the two-year rebellion forced major changes, missionaries continued to encourage the use of Western imperial pressure to pursue increased access under the rhetoric of individual conscience.³⁷

A third example of Hawaii offers the starkest case of missionary activity collapsing into outright political conquest. In Hawaii, the children and grandchildren of New England Protestant missionaries became the sugar planters and political actors who overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani in 1893, raising questions about where religious influence ended and imperialism began. American missionaries had been on the island since 1820, and many also invested in the sugar industry. Partly due to the interests of sugar planters, a constitution was forced on the monarchy in 1887 nicknamed the “Bayonet Constitution.” In 1893, Queen Lili’uokalani, a native Hawaiian and a Christian, introduced a new constitution that would have significantly relocated power to the monarchy and to Hawaiians.

She was deposed in January 1893 by American businessmen who formed a “Committee of Safety” meant to protect their privileges. American Marines were deployed to the island the day before the coup and ensured armed resistance by the queen was impossible. The queen protested her deposition to the U.S. government, and the Cleveland administration concluded that the Marines had acted improperly and that the queen should be restored. But Congress refused. The tangling of religious, racial, and economic factors had driven the monarchy from power, paving the way for Hawaii’s annexation by the U.S. in 1898 as part of the Spanish-American War.³⁸

These examples reveal a broader pattern of how Christianity, American values, and U.S. influence intertwined during this period. In American hands, religious liberty was both a genuine belief and a tool of imperialism. In Japan, missionaries invoked religious freedom to open a closed society, leading to American commercial and diplomatic opportunities. In China, missionaries relied on treaties gained through military force and then used those treaties to defend converts, making the church structurally reliant on imperial power, despite individual missionaries’ dislike of this dependence. In Hawaii, the missionary movement became an entrenched class, with its initial descendants becoming sugar barons who prioritized economic interests in the 1893 overthrow of the island’s Christian queen.

The broader pattern is that Americans in this period genuinely believed that religious liberty, American democracy, and Christian civilization were identical. The coherence of this view meant that missions and American power felt like two harmonizing aspects of the same Christian imperial cause, which made it difficult for missionaries or their supporters to recognize when they had crossed from persuasion into coercion, or from conversion into conquest. The same Protestant establishment that blessed, or at least acquiesced to, Jim Crow at home was simultaneously exporting its version of religious liberty abroad.³⁹

These same patterns would produce tensions on the mission field itself. For example, the influential Missionary Review of the World repeatedly highlighted acts of lynching and connected the plight of Black Southerners to Black South Africans oppressed by the British and Boers. Its longtime editor beginning in 1892 was Arthur T. Pierson, a close associate of Dwight Moody and an early advocate of the Student Volunteer Movement.⁴⁰ In addition to editing the Review, Pierson helped to found Africa Inland Mission in 1895, which would become one of the largest Protestant missions in Africa in future years. Pierson was convinced that the poor treatment of Blacks in the U.S. had stunted the effectiveness of American missionaries abroad. “The Christian missionary makes slow progress in Africa,” he wrote in 1887, “because he can offer the negro no true brotherhood except in another world.”⁴¹ While Pierson’s perspective was not necessarily prevalent, his logic pointed to a deeper challenge experienced by Americans inside and outside the Christian missions—legally enforced white supremacy in the United States were inseparable from American actions outside the United States.

VI. Women and Power

Inequalities haunted American religion beyond Protestantism as well. American Catholics and Jews each had their own histories, while also sharing similar tensions and patterns with the Protestant majority. The distinctive roles of women in religious life are a key example. Women participated in religiously and racially distinct (if not outright segregated) institutions. Yet they were aware of each other’s efforts, and their work shared commonalities. As Americans erected colleges, hospitals, and houses of worship in the late nineteenth century, women played roles as fundraisers and creators of associations. American women exercised outsized influence on religious and social life through organizations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Methodist deaconess homes, Catholic religious orders, Jewish Reform sisterhoods, and the Woman’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention.

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, to take the era’s most consequential example, was founded in 1874 to unite the power of female moral influence and political action in protesting the dangers of alcohol. Its first president, Frances Willard, a Methodist laywoman, argued that promoting temperance, especially among men, protected women and children from domestic violence. She led the WCTU into a “do everything” policy that linked temperance with other efforts such as labor reform and women’s suffrage. Meanwhile, in her own church, Willard was among five women elected as lay delegates to the 1888 Methodist Episcopal General Conference. The Conference refused to seat the women but did authorize a deaconess program for unmarried women to serve the church. These women were to be set apart, ideally living together in community, wearing a uniform garb, and receiving for their services only a small allowance.⁴²

The imperial moment opened an unexpected avenue for women’s religious authority: the foreign mission field. Barred from ordination and formal leadership at home, Protestant women found that overseas missions offered a space where their labor was indispensable and their authority harder to circumscribe. The new Woman’s Foreign Missionary Societies allowed women to fundraise, organize, and ultimately direct their own missionary operations largely independent of male denominational control. Methodists founded their society in 1869 (which expanded into multiple Methodist denominations) while Baptist women organized in 1871. By 1890, women constituted the majority of American Protestant missionaries abroad. Yet this expansion of female agency was inseparable from the racial, gendered, and imperial assumptions of the age. Women missionaries frequently framed their work as the rescue of non-white and non-Christian women from patriarchal Asian or Pacific cultures, positioning American Protestant womanhood as the civilizational standard. The result was a genuine but circumscribed role: women gained real institutional authority and public voice through missionary work, but largely by embracing rather than challenging the imperial framework that made that work possible.⁴³

It is not a coincidence that these Protestant deaconesses and missionaries resembled the image of Catholic nuns. Although most Catholic women found their vocations in marriage and motherhood, with the Virgin Mary as divine model, Catholic sisters were the publicly visible manifestation of Catholic women’s religious authority in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The millions of arriving Catholics compounded the need for churches, hospitals, and schools. Already called to minister to the sick and wounded during times of disease and war, by the late nineteenth century, Catholic sisters were administering and staffing large hospitals. When U.S. Catholic bishops decreed in 1884 that every parish should build its own school, religious women were deployed to help make this a reality. From the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1960s, Catholic women seeking meaningful work had vastly more opportunities within the Church than outside it.⁴⁴

Reform Judaism, influenced by earlier German Jewish immigrants, introduced innovations beyond non-kosher eating to include mixed gender seating and women’s participation in new synagogue choirs. This did not extend to synagogue leadership. At the same time, as Reform leaders de-emphasized the Jewish dietary laws and the home-centered Shabbat, they eroded the importance of Jewish domestic space over which women had traditionally presided. Jewish women found a new avenue for religious activities in the temple sisterhoods that surged in popularity in the 1890s. Sisterhoods attached women more closely to their local temples as they provided a space for comfortable American Reform women to aid needier Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Nationally, the women of the sisterhoods founded the National Council of Jewish Women, an outgrowth of the Jewish Women’s Congress held during the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions. The NCJW, composed primarily of upper- and middle-class Reform women, sought to further social reform and education in Judaism and Jewish culture.⁴⁵

In this same period, Black Baptist women, who had their religious authority circumscribed within the local church, pushed to expand it in associations. As African Americans developed their churches after emancipation, the role of the community in church decision-making declined, as authority concentrated in the person of the male minister. The deaconesses, who sometimes participated in matters of local church discipline, had limited authority to affect the outcomes. Yet even as Black women’s authority within the local church diminished, they shouldered the fundraising that enabled to development of these institutions as well as launched several new institutions to be run by and for women. By 1900, women delegates from local churches, district associations, and state conventions had formed the Woman’s Convention, an auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention that had been formed in 1893 to bring together sectional Baptist bodies, representing more than one million of their sisters.⁴⁶

Beyond serving as a training ground for exercising future political and religious power, women’s associations enabled women to do real work in education, charity, healthcare, and the institution building that marked the era. In doing so, they exposed a tension of American religious life that would become more discussed in later periods: the same churches and denominations that formally excluded women from ordained leadership were functionally dependent on female labor to sustain themselves. Women built the schools, staffed the hospitals, raised the funds, and organized the congregations. The gap between formal authority and practical indispensability would prove difficult to maintain, and the organizational confidence women developed in this period would become the basis for more direct challenges to religious and political exclusion in the decades ahead.

VII. World’s Parliament of Religion

The year 1893 featured a dramatic staging of the religious trends we have been discussing. It took place in Chicago, at the World’s Parliament of Religions. Coinciding with the Chicago World’s Fair the same year, this gathering of religious leaders included some of the leading representatives of Christianity and Judaism. But the representation extended well beyond these two traditions, and their many branches. Leaders of Eastern religions, growing in presence in some parts of the United States, were also featured. Swami Vivekananda, an Indian monk and philosopher, introduced Americans to the Vedas, the foundational scriptures of Hinduism, Krishna, and Vedantic philosophy. Anagarika Dhamapala, a Buddhist writer with connections to the American creators of Theosophy, promoted Buddhism’s “middle path” between hedonism and aestheticism. Both Vedanta societies and the Young Men’s Buddhist Association were founded in the U.S. in their wake.⁴⁷

Apart from representing a broad diversity of religions and thus shifting the focus away from Christianity for American attendees, the gathering’s ethos was defined by its diversity. The ecumenical movement increasingly attracted the attention of white Protestant denominational leaders who aimed to unify their institutions around a broader, modern interpretation of the gospel and Christian mission. At that time, this sense of potential inspired ideas even greater than merely uniting Northern and Southern Methodists or Baptists and Congregationalists. It encompassed evangelizing the world with this form of Protestant belief. This call aligned with Dwight Moody’s call for sectional and interdenominational cooperation for missions, primarily through revivals and gospel preaching. The spirit of mission persisted as both revivalist and ecumenical Protestants relied heavily on American money, values, and geopolitical influence, extending their reach further and reaching larger numbers across every continent.

The World’s Parliament of Religions was also the beginning of organized interfaith dialogue. The need or desire to speak across faith lines was relatively new in the nineteenth century. Its origins in 1893 were in part due to the religious convictions of the parliament’s organizer, the Swedenborgian layman Charles Carroll Bonney. Swedenborgianism, the mystical theological tradition founded on the visions of the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, held that divine truth was not the exclusive property of any single tradition. This conviction made Bonney genuinely interested in non-Christian religions at a moment when most of his contemporaries were focused on converting the world. It is telling that someone on the fringes of American Protestantism, rather than at its center, imagined the Parliament into existence.⁴⁸

Yet the Parliament also illustrated the limits of the openness it celebrated. The voices most prominent on its platform were those with the cultural fluency and institutional backing to travel to Chicago and perform their traditions for a largely white Protestant audience. Vivekananda’s commanding English and Dharmapala’s Western education enabled them to use a Protestant-friendly comparative religious vocabulary. The traditions that had no such representatives — like the Peyote practitioners of the Plains, the Chinese Buddhists of San Francisco’s Chinatowns, the Black Baptist women who had been building institutions across the South — were largely absent. The Parliament’s cosmopolitanism, in other words, had a class and racial ceiling that mirrored the broader contradictions of the era.

VIII. Conclusion

The tensions in American religion all became painfully clear in 1893. In this same year, American businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian queen, Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed, and the World’s Parliament of Religions gathered in Chicago. American religious life stood at a threshold. The imperial projects of continental, overseas, and civilizational expansion had shaped religion for decades, but they were now about to accelerate dramatically. The Spanish-American War loomed in the offing. Religious Americans had been wrestling with their understandings of race, nation, gender, tradition, and the boundaries of the sacred itself. Their beliefs on these issues would soon be tested on a genuinely global stage. The Parliament, for all its limits, had at least made one thing undeniable: the religious world was larger than American Protestantism had imagined. The coming century would demand a reckoning with that fact.

IX. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Daniel G. Hummel, with content contributions by Ralph Craig, Lisa Jane de Gara, Daniel G. Hummel, Chanhee Heo, Jenny Wiley Legath, Minami Nishioka, Kristine Gunnell, Lisa Barnett, and Ben Wright.

Recommended Reading

• Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
• Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Harvard University Press, 1992).
• Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024).
• Janine Giordano Drake, The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement (Oxford University Press, 2024).
• Timothy Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
• Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
• Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Harvard University Press, 1994).
• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998).
• Gale L. Kenny, Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024).
• James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press, 1988).
• Jenny Wiley Legath, Sanctified Sisters: A History of Protestant Deaconesses (NYU Press, 2019).
• Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (Harper Perennial, 2010).
• Joseph L. Locke, Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022).
• Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
• Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Ivan R. Dee, 1990).
• David Mislin, Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Cornell University Press, 2015).
• Frank A. Ninkovich, Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865–1890 (Harvard University Press, 2009).
• Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
• Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1970).
• Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press, 2005).
• Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 2012).
• Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 72, no. 1 (1985): 45–62.
• Judith Weisenfeld, Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (New York University Press, 2025).

Notes

1. Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (Doubleday, 1970). ↩︎
2. Walter F. LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Cornell University Press, 1998). ↩︎
3. Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” November 19, 1863. ↩︎
4. Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). ↩︎
5. Quoted in Obbie Tyler Todd, The Beechers: America’s Most Influential Family (Louisiana State University Press, 2024), 215, 213. ↩︎
6. Quoted in Blum, Reforging the White Republic, 141. ↩︎
7. Dwight Lyman Moody, The New Sermons of Dwight Lyman Moody (Goodspeed, 1880), 14. ↩︎
8. Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880-1910,” Journal of American History 72, no. 1 (1985): 45–62. ↩︎
9. James C. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). ↩︎
10. Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans, 2023). ↩︎
11. Jonathan D. Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews (Nextbook, 2016); Gary Phillip Zola, We Called Him Rabbi Abraham (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). ↩︎
12. Lance A. Sussman, “The Myth of the Trefa Banquet: American Culinary Culture and the Radicalization of Food Policy in American Reform Judaism” American Jewish Archives Journal 57, no 1 (2005): 29–52. ↩︎
13. Emma Lazurus, “The New Colossus,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/the-new-colossus/. ↩︎
14. Patrick W. Carey, Catholics in America: A History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). ↩︎
15. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (University of Georgia Press, 2009). ↩︎
16. James Adams Lester, A History of the Georgia Baptist Convention, 1822-1972 (Executive Committee, Baptist Convention of the State of Georgia, 1972). ↩︎
17. John M. Giggie, After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2007). ↩︎
18. Quoted in Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, Second Edition (Eerdmans, 2019), 317. ↩︎
19. Ann Braude, Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008), 73. ↩︎
20. Anne Butler, Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). ↩︎
21. Kristine Gunnell, Daughters of Charity:  Women, Religious Mission, and Hospital Care in Los Angeles, 1856-1927 (De Paul University Vincentian Studies Institute, 2013). ↩︎
22. Thomas C. Maroukis, The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010); Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). ↩︎
23. Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, Second Edition (Shambhala Publications, 1992). ↩︎
24. Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero, eds., Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 1999), 74–75. ↩︎
25. Peter Kearly Kim, “It’s ‘Ah Sin’ to be Yellow in America: Theatrics of Racial Humor in Protesting Injustice,” in Studies of American Humor, New Series 3, No. 18 (2008), 26. ↩︎
26. “Address of Rev. S. V. Blakeslee,” in Chinese Immigration: Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect. Report to the California State Senate of Its Special Committee on Chinese Immigration (1878), 243. ↩︎
27. Wong Chin Foo, “Why Am I a Heathen?” The North American Review 145, no. 369 (1887): 169-179. ↩︎
28. Yan Phou Lee, “Why I Am Not a Heathen. A Rejoinder to Wong Chin Foo,” The North American Review 145, no. 370 (1887): 306-312. ↩︎
29. Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard, 2022). ↩︎
30. Scott A. Mitchell, Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 38. ↩︎
31. Thomas Calobrisi, “The History of Buddhism in the United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, eds. Ann Gleig and Scott A. Mitchell (Oxford University Press, 2024), 40. ↩︎
32. See Jesse J. Lee, “Pure Land Buddhism in America,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, eds. Ann Gleig and Scott A. Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 129–43.  ↩︎
33. See Mitchell, Buddhism in America, 52. See also Scott A. Mitchell, The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2023), 36–39. ↩︎
34. Quoted in Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Knopf, 2012), 194. ↩︎
35. Ulysses S. Grant, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon, vol. 23 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 35. ↩︎
36. A. Hamish Ion, American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan, 1859-73 (UBC Press, 2009); 143-146. ↩︎
37. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith. See also, Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024). ↩︎
38. Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2004). ↩︎
39. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy. ↩︎
40. Dana L. Robert, Occupy Until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World (Eerdmans, 2003). ↩︎
41. Arthur T. Pierson, Evangelistic Work in Principle and Practice (Baker & Taylor, 1887), 219. ↩︎
42. Christopher H. Evans, Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard (Oxford University Press, 2022). ↩︎
43. Gale L. Kenny, Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024). ↩︎
44. Jenny Wiley Legath, Sanctified Sisters: A History of Protestant Deaconesses (NYU Press, 2019). ↩︎
45. Mary McCune, The Whole Wide World, Without Limits: International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893-1930 (Wayne State University Press, 2005); Laura Yares, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth Century America (NYU Press, 2023). ↩︎
46. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Righteous Discontent the Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Harvard University Press, 1994). ↩︎
47. Thomas Albert Howard, The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (Yale University Press, 2021). ↩︎
48. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, Second Edition (University of California Press, 2012). ↩︎

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I. Introduction

On March 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address. Deep into the war, with its casualties well known and deeply felt, Lincoln’s “Sermon on the Mount” as it came to be called, was a brief 703 words. In this speech Lincoln acknowledged the length of the war, the intractability of the core issue of slavery and that both sides could not win the war. Lincoln captured the essence of the stalemate when he said, “Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.”

One can almost feel his weariness. Like most Americans, Lincoln did not think that the war would be long when it began—some folks pulled up chairs to watch the first battle—and they did not think that slavery—the cause of the war—would end because of it. Both Southerners and Northerners believed that their causes were holy. Said Lincoln, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered ~ that of neither has been answered fully.” 

This intractable war between states formerly united tapped into foundational thoughts about power, society, justice, and freedom. All of these thoughts were grounded in a national civil religion and belief in God’s concern for and involvement in their lives—God’s providence. Thus, the Civil War ruptured the religious fabric of the country. It also exposed the foundational connection between religion, race, and inequities that stretched across the breadth of the nation from North to South, and East to West, capturing Americans from all religious faiths and none.

When the 89-year-old nation descended into civil war, religious institutions and ideas both served as model and mode for separation and for reunification. The Civil War stymied the growth of churches, reinscribed and redrew racial boundaries, and reconfigured religious cultures. After the war, the Reconstruction of the nation also transformed the nation. More than reunifying the states, Reconstruction remade the nature of governance, launched a new birth of imperial expansion, and expanded religious innovation. The period transformed the roles and rights of women, African Americans, Jews, Catholics, social reformers, labor activists, and saw the birth of a new national mythology grounded in both American Protestantism and historical fantasy.

But before the nation could experience a new birth, it had to face near-death, and American religion hastened the nation’s march toward its own grave.

II. Sanctifying Secession

Religion was not central cause of the Civil War. Slavery was. The nation’s debate over slavery escalated until a catastrophic, fratricidal war broke out that severed the Republic, killed roughly 700,000 American combatants, and dramatically altered the country’s political landscape.

Although religious conflict was not the primary cause of the Civil War, Americans’ religious beliefs, practices and institutions nonetheless quickly became entangled with the conflict in profound, powerful, and devastating ways. Given the way that religiosity had surged across the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, this could hardly have been otherwise. And when the nation burst into flames, religious communities, institutions, and ideals shared in the destruction.

The Civil War was a war among Americans, but it was also a war among believers. Abraham Lincoln famously observed in his Second Inaugural Address (1865), that Northerners and Southerners shared the same religious traditions. But as the ferocity of the war made clear, this shared religious culture did not abate sectional hostility. To the contrary, rather than mediating conflict, the religious dynamics in both North and South increasingly became coupled with irreconcilable sectional interests. This turned a civil conflict over slavery into a holy war between two Christian polities under God in which, as Lincoln put it, “each invokes His aid against the other.” Despite the existence of “counterpoint groups” who dissented from this weaponization of Christianity, and despite the circumspection of Lincoln himself, most Americans wholeheartedly adopted the fusion of religion with sectional politics.^1⁠

On both sides of the conflict, the central matter of slavery increasingly became an article of faith and a marker of orthodoxy for white Christians. Black Christians, North and South, labored tirelessly to eradicate both slavery and racism. White Northerners came to define human bondage as a grievous spiritual sin and increasingly made slaveholding a test of Christian fellowship. Far fewer bemoaned the racism in their communities, however. White Southerners found slavery clearly sanctioned in the Bible and saw it aligning with Christian benevolence and evangelism. In the decades before the war, these religious tensions over slavery passed the breaking point; the nation’s largest churches—Methodist and Baptist—all fractured into northern and southern bodies, a phenomenon that both anticipated and paved the way for political rupture. During the war itself, the same debates played out in intimate ways within individual congregations in the border regions, where the factions squabbled over church property and harassed ministers who engaged (or failed to engage) in political commentary.^⁠2

The stakes of these conflicts were supremely high. As James Henley Thornwell, the South’s leading theologian, explained, the parties to the War “are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders.” Rather, the struggle was between cosmic opposites, between “Christianity and Atheism.” At stake was the very “progress of humanity.”^3⁠ Existential dualism like this infused the war with a profound metaphysical intensity.

After Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in the election of 1860, southern states, including South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, held secession conventions to decide whether to remain in the Union. They feared Lincoln and claimed that he would abolish slavery. South Carolina held the first secession convention in December 1860 touching off a series of similar actions by other states: first, Mississippi, then Florida, Alabama and Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and finally North Carolina. Political arguments about federal power and citizenship blended with religious claims about God’s providence and the righteousness of secession.

Confederate leaders framed their destruction of the United States as a holy obligation.  In February 1861, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, invoked the legacy of God’s Providence and American Saints in his first inaugural address, saying “Reverently let us invoke the God of our fathers to guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which, by his blessing, they were able to vindicate, establish and transmit to their posterity, and with a continuance of His favor, ever gratefully acknowledged, we may hopefully look forward to success, to peace, and to prosperity.”⁴ According to Davis, this new Confederate nation would inherit the blessings of the United States as they embarked on creating a nation grounded in slavery and white supremacy. Davis and his fellow Confederates did not doubt that God bestowed his blessing on their new nation, and this ensured their eventual success in battle.

The same religious themes in Davis’s rhetoric appeared in secession conventions across the South as well as in the establishment of the Confederate States of America. The ties between religion and secession went beyond perfunctory prayers at conventions to encompass a new fashioning of Confederate religiosity both by Confederate leaders and Confederate Christians.

On March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, Alexander Stephens, the eventual vice president of the Confederacy, said what most Southerners were thinking in the spring of 1861: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”⁵ As Stephens made clear, racism enacted through slavery was the foundation of the Confederacy. Stephens believed that God ordained slavery as the only true godly social order. And the Confederacy was chosen to preserve this institution of godly government. Later, Stephens spoke of providence and the great plan of the Creator, believing, much like most Americans, North and South, that God was on their side.⁶

The churches of the South mirrored and in many ways preceded the separatist stances of Southern state governments. The secession question echoed through many institutions, including the major Christian denominations. For example, on March 23, 1861, the Episcopal bishops Stephen Elliott and Leonidas Polk called the Episcopal clergy and bishops of the South to a convention because: “political changes, forced upon us by a stern necessity, have occurred, which have placed our Dioceses in a position, requiring consultation as to our future Ecclesiastical relations.”⁷ Elliott and Polk instigated a split of the southern dioceses from their northern counterparts. In so doing they emphasized that the denominational split was a political one and not theological.⁸ Secession necessitated a discussion of the national affiliations of religious institutions and questions remained as to whether they would align with the proslavery views of the Confederate nation.

III. Making Meaning of War

After secession, both the Union and the Confederacy infused religion into all aspects of the war—from their military, to their government, their hospitals, their music, and their grieving rituals.⁹ They did so to prove their devotion to their cause, their moral authority in fighting this war, and as a way to justify the war’s terror and destruction. As much as the Confederacy believed God was with them, so did the Union. The story of religion and the Civil War is the study of a nation grappling with their religious and national identity in the face of that great and terrible upheaval.

Religion gave the Civil War a multitude of contradictory meanings, for this was a world in which all things had ultimate meaning under God’s direction.  The challenge of course, was how God could be on both sides—the North and South—given their disparate goals. Americans on all sides of the conflict believed that they could interpret the “providence” of God—the outworkings of the divine plan and will in the world—with what seems like stunning confidence. They plotted signal events of the war alongside the sacred history of the Bible and its prophecies.

As war often does, the cataclysm of the Civil War evoked visions of the end of times and stirred the apocalyptic imagination.^⁠10 For instance, Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” cast the Union army as God’s cleansing force in the Book of Revelation, treading the grapes of divine wrath. In the South, no one embodied providential confidence more than the pious General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, erstwhile Presbyterian deacon and Sunday School superintendent. Jackson’s death in May 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville—he was shot accidentally by his own men—seriously troubled the providentialist confidence of Southerners, and after the war was lost and their narrative was shattered, Jackson’s accidental death became essential to southerners’ providentialist reinterpretation of the war and its outcome. This reinterpretation was called the “Lost Cause.”¹¹

The traumas of the war, emerging from a free flow of prophecy and scripture, eventually did substantial damage to Americans’ providential confidence, as it did to their confidence in the Bible as an arbiter in all things. Consequently, the Civil War can be read as precipitating not only a mass slaughter but also a “theological crisis” for American Christianity.¹²

While true that Americans of the Civil War era read the same bible and ostensibly prayed to the same god, the ways that they read and used the bible to interpret the war and justify their actions differed. The Bible was full of wars and fighting so they came to understand war as a place where they could encounter God and understand God’s plan. This accorded with their providential view that God would intervene. Their faith was troubled when they did not win faced the horror of mass death. While both Northerners and Southerners used the same Bible, in a literal interpretive and material way–sometimes as actual shields during the war as reports of Bibles stashed in breast pockets suggest–they derived different insights and guidance. They even highlighted and turned to different scriptures in their sermons and public writings; Northerners to Romans 13 regarding submission to authorities and Southerners to Psalms 46:11 which proclaimed that “The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.”¹³

Americans of other faith traditions struggled to negotiate both the sectional schism and the Protestant hegemony that suffused both sections. Many Catholics and Jews, for instance, had complicated allegiances, as the dominant Protestant culture viewed them with skepticism and questioned their dedication to the American nation. Their relationship with the Civil War was even further complicated by the fact that family members on the Catholic and Jewish homefront were more likely to support the Democratic Party and oppose wartime measures such as emancipation and the draft. However, some members of these groups saw their service in the Civil War as proof of their allegiance to the United States and attempted to use it as a badge of their successful assimilation.¹⁴

IV. Religion in the Armies

As the Civil War began, volunteers poured in from across the country, bringing their diverse religious backgrounds with them. While adherents of each tradition had distinct ways of approaching the war, most soldiers were united by a common evangelical Christian culture that emphasized individual salvation, a personal God, and the role of divine providence in history. But other faith traditions played important roles in the conflict as well.

Christian soldiers first thought about saving their own souls. In civilian life, many young men reasoned that they had a long life to reconcile themselves with their Creator, but the Civil War put them face-to-face with death in a way they had not experienced before. On the battlefield, a stray bullet or artillery shell could soon bring their existence to a close. The brutality of battle led many men to strengthen their Christian faith, which softened the finality of death through the belief in a serene afterlife.

The men of the Civil War generation did not reduce Heaven and Hell to metaphorical illusions; these were real places with genuine rewards and agonizing punishments. Daniel Abernathy, a Confederate private, recognized that his life could be taken at any moment and took solace in the Christian afterlife, writing to his family, “I think we would all better try and prepare for death … I will try to serve God the best I can and try to be prepared for death and eternity for that is all the comfort I see.”¹⁵

Likewise, Northern and Southern soldiers envisioned God as a deity who personally cared for them, and that belief gave the universe a sense of order and fairness. In this worldview, God had a plan for each individual soldier, so the man who fell in battle had not died in vain but had played an instrumental role within a mysterious divine plan. In addition, many soldiers believed that a just God looked after their friends and family after they passed. Before leaving for war, a New York soldier wrote that his son had asked him an uncomfortable question: what would happen if his father never returned? In a letter to his wife, the soldier replied, “I know now how to answer little Henry’s question. Tell him the Savior will be his pa, if I don’t come back.” In this sense, a personal, caring God provided order even amid the chaos of battle. Not all Civil War soldiers grew more devout, but the experience of war brought many to ask uncomfortable questions about their mortality and the fate of their souls.¹⁶

Civil War soldiers also expressed their religious faith through a broader providential lens, which held that God used events on Earth to punish or reward certain nations. Many Protestant ministers viewed America and its unfolding history through a biblical perspective. Just as the Old Testament prophets and nations had been chosen for a specific duty, America had its own divine purpose. However, a providential view of history did not mean that events were foreordained, as God could grant or withdraw His blessing based on the individual behavior of His believers.¹⁷

As a result, the Civil War became a matter of intense providential speculation. Why had the Lord wrought this gruesome war? Northern and Southern Protestant ministers delivered sermons aimed at convincing soldiers that God favored their respective sides and would ensure victory. These addresses bolstered morale in both armies, especially in the Confederate Army’s latter years, as Southern divines espoused the belief that, while God had momentarily punished the Confederacy through military defeats, He would eventually turn the war against the North.

Many ministers also used this providential worldview to argue that military defeats stemmed not from bad strategy but from God’s punishment. As a result, ministers pressed soldiers with sermons about their various sins. Many ministers questioned whether God would bestow His blessing on an army that engaged in cursing, gambling, and drinking. The men in uniform thus became targets for ministers’ sermons on the benefits of godly behavior for their cause.

Civil War soldiers did not always accept the ministers’ confident proclamations. Many soldiers adopted what historian Peter Carmichael terms “providential pragmatism,” neither adhering to the ministers’ moralism nor subscribing to overly simplistic narratives about divine providence, as the events on the battlefield proved incoherent and inconsistent. To be sure, this pragmatism rarely led soldiers to become nonbelievers, but it did lead them to place faith in their individual judgment and to resist the urge to interpret every event as a revelation of God’s will.

While most Civil War soldiers came of age in the antebellum era’s dominant evangelical Christian culture, some sat squarely outside that fold and thus had an uncertain relationship to the war..These tensions were not just abstract problems. The divisions of the war cut apart families of all faiths. Julius Ochs of Chattanooga, Tennessee joined the Union Army, while his wife Bertha supported the Confederacy and was even arrested for smuggling medical supplies to wounded Confederate soldiers.¹⁸

Religious diversity spread beyond the nation’s larger faiths. The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System database includes at least 292 combatants with names associated with Islam. The most famous Muslim soldier was the formerly enslaved Muhammad ibn Said, who enlisted in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry and fought in several battles before starting schools for Black children during Reconstruction.¹⁹

Despite their different backgrounds, Civil War soldiers faced many of the same hardships. For Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Muslims, the Civil War left an indelible mark, both physically and psychologically, on those who fought in it. During their service and beyond, these men turned to religion to understand the bloodshed and give their service meaning.

V. Homefront

Religion permeated nearly every element of life during the Civil War, both on the battlefield and the homefront. Countless Americans turned to heaven to try to reckon with the national cataclysm. Churches, synagogues, clergy, devotional literature, and religious rituals all helped Americans make meaning of world saturated in suffering, sacrifice, and confusion. Whether maintaining morale, organizing opposition, or simply offering comfort, religious institutions went to war as well, and this war exposed and often deepened divisions within American society.

Religious institutions also became central to wartime aid efforts. Through prayer circles, fundraising campaigns and other charity work, religious organizations supported the work of soldiers at war. They also worked to meet the spiritual needs of Americans struggling with separation from family and an increasing parade of death.

Spiritualism became one way that Americans reckoned with mass death. Spiritualism had spread quickly after its 1840s origins, but the loss of so many lives encouraged many to seek contact with lost ones through seances, trances, mediums, and spirit writings. Even Mary Todd Lincoln reportedly participated in seances in the White House after her son’s death in 1862.²⁰

Religious institutions created particular opportunities for women who distributed food, medical supplies, clothing, and Christian readings through the United States Christian Commission and the United States Sanitary Commission in the North and various church-based aid societies in the South.

Both sides repeatedly called for days of prayer and fasting, and pious partisans did their part to heed the call.²¹ Sometimes these calls for religious observance were paired with revivals that swept through both army camps and home front communities. Ubiquitous funeral sermons prompted considerations of eternity, and religious traditions helped a nation in near perpetual mourning.

The war also caused an always simmering American antisemitism to boil over. In December 1862, Union Major General Ulysses S. Grant issued the most notorious act of government issued antisemitism in all of American history. General Orders No. 11 expelled all Jewish people from the area under his control which included parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. President Lincoln rescinded the order earning him reverential esteem among America’s Jewish communities who came to nickname him Rabbi Abraham. Still, Lincoln’s intervention did not occur until well after many Jewish families frantically abandoned their homes and property.²²

The war deepened tensions within American religious life. Denominations that had already split before the war remained divided along sectional lines, and Catholics, Jews, and other religious minorities navigated complicated loyalties amid widespread suspicion and nativism. By the war’s end, religion had provided Americans with language for sacrifice, redemption, judgment, and hope, while also revealing the profound moral and theological fractures at the heart of the nation.

VI. African American Wartime Religion

For African Americans of faith in the North and South, the outbreak of the American Civil War came as the fulfillment of long-awaited and prophesied judgment of God. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, religious Black abolitionists and anti-slavey advocates met the moment with action. They understood the national strife as the fulfillment of the prophecies of David Walker and countless others declaring alongside abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, “God be praised! That it is here at last!” and continuously found ways to support the war effort.²³ Douglass enunciated the war objectives held by countless free Black people through scripture, stating that he must “stand up for the downtrodden, to open my mouth for the dumb, to remember those in bonds as bound with them.”²⁴ And while Douglass’ fame and renown led him to the White House to negotiate directly with President Abraham Lincoln, many other Black religious leaders and lay people contributed to the war effort.

Reverend Henry McNeal Turner of Israel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Washington D.C. used his pulpit to deliver “ardent sermons advocating the use of black soldiers,” and when Black men were allowed to enlist (after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863), Reverend Turner transformed his “churchyard [into] the first volunteers signed up for the local regiment, soon to become the 1st USCT.” Once Black troops began training, Turner visited the regiment frequently, “preaching and encouraging the men to prove their manhood and protect their rights.”²⁵ Desiring to serve Black troops more directly, Turner and other Black ministers advocated being permitted to serve as chaplains in the Union army, a role that would be the highest-ranking public office held by Black men. However, although Union officials permitted Black chaplains, they had to be elected by white officers, resulting in only 14 Black ministers receiving this appointment.

Despite this restriction, Black ministers and laypeople, men and women alike found alternative ways to take part in the long-anticipated move of God. Many churches and organizations raised funds, gathered clothing and supplies to send to the formerly enslaved, and hundreds of others served as missionaries. For the ecumenical American Missionary Association (AMA) alone, 437 free Black men and women served as missionaries to the freedpeople, driven by religious conviction and racial kinship. Sara G. Stanley, a free Black Presbyterian born in North Carolina and Oberlin-educated, applied to become a missionary to the freedpeople in 1863. In her application, she declared, “ I have felt a strong conviction of duty, an irresistible desire to engage in teaching the freed people; to aid to the extent of what ability God has given me, in bringing these poor outcasts from the pale of humanity, into the family of man.”²⁶

Stanley was far from alone in seeing teaching and missionary work with the freedpeople as a religious duty. Edmonia Highgate, a young Black AMA missionary, was one of two women to address the attendees of the 1864 Colored Convention, encouraging the men to “trust in God and press on, and not abate one jot or tittle until the glorious day of jubilee shall come.”²⁷ The prophesies that had dominated antebellum Black Northern theological and social discourse transformed into consistent calls to action, to see the deliverance of the enslaved brought to pass.

Enslaved people’s religious cosmology also understood the Civil War as a long-prayed-for deliverance and responded with actions of their own. As historian Abena Boakyewa-Ansah argues, to the enslaved the “opening of churches, provisions for Black ministers, the availability of the Gospel, and the accessibility of the Bible… were as much a part of freedom as education, home-building, and paid work.”²⁸ Thus, enslaved people used the free soil brought by the Union to transform what historian Albert Raboteau called the “Invisible Institution” into a visible one.²⁹

After the outbreak of the war, enslaved people who could not run away to Union lines continued to fervently pray. Formerly enslaved woman Chana Littlejohn recalled fellow enslaved people gathering in her cabin “to pray for the Yankees to come.” She recalled a woman so fervent in prayer that she ran into the yard crying out “blue bellies come on, blue bellies come on!”³⁰ After Union occupation brought freedom, these hidden forms of worship and prayer burst into the visible landscape, with formerly enslaved people celebrating their freedom in the streets. For example, in New Bern, North Carolina, Union troops reported the parades of freedpeople crying out that “the providence of God in the fruition of a long deferred hope” through Union victory, seeing “victorious banners” of the Union as “a sign of their approaching millennium.”³¹

Black Christians North and South, free and enslaved, responded to the war consistently with action. For many, the Civil War was the Day of Jubilee that demanded their active participation, leading thousands of free Blacks to serve Union efforts to support the newly freedpeople, and the formerly enslaved to claim religious congregation and expression as a central part of their freedom.

VII. Reconstruction

After the Civil War, the theaters of Reconstruction expanded beyond the North-South axis to include the West and pushed the timeline beyond the presumed reunification in 1877 because what was really taking place was not just governmental reconstruction but also a reconstruction of ideas of citizenship and belonging that was recalcitrantly oriented toward white supremacy so that by the late-nineteenth century, policies around land and segregation reinforced white power and the adjudication of rights on the basis of race and class. This was reinforced by the increasing religious diversity of American society and the ways that religion became a proxy for difference where people were referred to as heathen if they did not practice Christian traditions.³²

Northerners, Southerners and freedpeople alike, interpreted the war’s outcome from their own vantage point as something God had done, but ultimately, the use of providential explanations decreased. When the Confederate armies surrendered, white Southern Christians were devastated and found themselves at a loss to make sense of how God could have allowed them to lose.³³ Bereft of the cornerstone institution of slavery, white Southerners scrambled to maintain superiority over freed people. This included an effort to maintain control over both bodies, land, and citizenship.³⁴

Enslaved people believed they had finally been redeemed. Northern Black Christians shared this sense of redemption. Northern white Christians except for anti-war Democrats, felt a sense of redemption, that God had taken them through a terrible trial but then blessed them with victory. Regarding providentialism many Americans became less confident in believing they knew what God was doing through their life circumstances and took a posture more attuned to Lincoln’s. Even in the North, their confidence in providentialism waned due to the high cost of victory.³⁵

Americans immediately organized to enact their vision of a postwar America through religious institutions. During the war Protestant white Northerners grew more comfortable with fighting against slavery and this sentiment carried over into postwar aid. Protestant denominations lined up to send missionaries, teachers, doctors, and clergy to the South with the hopes of remaking the region and training formerly enslaved people to take their places in that remade society. Northern Protestants wanted to build on the redemption of victory. Some white clergy in the North called on the U.S. government to punish former rebels and to more deeply reconstruct the South.³⁶ These calls would soon wane, however.

Christianity had long played a vital role in the lives of northern Black Christians and the war’s end led churches to push for Black civil rights, voting rights, and economic assistance for freedmen. In the South, Black churches grew by leaps and bounds. Before the war, enslaved were often forced to attend church alongside their enslavers where they heard sermons about how their Blackness was cursed by God. However, after the war, formerly enslaved Christians used their newly won agency to embrace Christianity for themselves and Black Southern churches quadrupled in a matter of decades.³⁷

White Southerners used Christianity to transform Confederate defeat into the historical myth of the Lost Cause. Churches created stained glass windows depicting Confederate soldiers as saints. Lizzie Rutherford, a woman from Georgia, called Jefferson Davis’s birthday, now rechristened as Confederate Memorial Day, “the Sabbath of the South.”³⁸ Organizations like the United Confederate Veterans, and especially women’s organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and various Ladies Memorial Associations throughout the South institutionalized a religious narrative of Confederate righteousness.³⁹ These traditions endured long after the war. In 1900 a Presbyterian clergymen prayed at a soldiers’ reunion that all in attendance “may meet in that Heavenly Home where Lee, Jackson, and all the Heroes who have gone before are waiting.”⁴⁰

Some white southerners did more than just pray to honor the Confederacy. They engaged in campaigns of terrorism to restore its vision of a society rooted in white supremacy. In 1866, the Ku Klux Klan formed in Tennessee. Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest joined immediately and became the first Grand Wizard. Forrest and other Klan leaders framed their terrorism as a religious duty to protect Christian civilization from Black political participation. The Klan’s 1868 Organization and Principles of the Ku Klux Klan included a creed that began by asserting “We, the Order of the KKK, reverentially acknowledge the majesty and supremacy of the Divine Being, and recognize the goodness and providence of the same.”⁴¹

VIII. Black Reconstruction

African Americans understood the end of the war through Christian eschatology, which means understandings of the end of the world. References to biblical events and namesakes like “jubilee” and “Zion” and “New Jerusalem” accompanied the quest for freedom. By applying Christian understandings of the end of times to their situation, African Americans displayed the impact of widespread conversion to Christianity. Moreover, African American interpretations of Biblical events bled into the broader American Protestantism in the nineteenth century.⁴²

African Americans not only interpreted their freedom through religious concepts, but also they gained more control over their religious organizations and worship practices. Many built associations of already extant independent churches and secured leadership for themselves. Some churches were formed out of white churches and with white church assistance. For instance, with the help of the Trinity Methodist—a white church—African Americans organized St. James Colored Methodist Episcopal in Tallahassee, Florida.⁴³ The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was one of two independent Black denominations formed in the South after emancipation. The Zion Union Apostolic church formed in North Carolina out of a union of Baptist and Episcopal church members and was entirely independent.⁴⁴ The CME Church negotiated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South to retain properties that otherwise would have had to be surrendered.⁴⁵

Picking a pastor and a denomination were among freedpeople’s first acts of freedom. Congregations elected new trustees and deacons and voted to affiliate with new denominations. They navigated changing laws and authorities to keep hold of their buildings. For example, enslaved members of Immanuel Church in Portsmouth, Virginia, had paid two-thirds of the cost of their building, but under Virginia law, the property had to be held by white trustees. When Immanuel voted to leave the southern Methodists and affiliate with the AME, the former white pastor claimed to still have jurisdiction, and church members appealed to the U.S. military and the Freedman’s Bureau to keep the building.⁴⁶

Northern missionaries helped facilitate the quick creation of independent Black congregations. “This has been a year of revivals in Georgia,” Henry McNeal Turner told his denomination’s newspaper in late 1866. Turner arrived in Georgia with the First Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops, as the Union Army’s first Black chaplain. He stayed as the lead missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Turner witnessed the greatest growth of Black churches in American history.⁴⁷ James Walker Hood, a Black missionary from Connecticut, planted churches right behind Union lines in North Carolina, often having to flee towns as the army lost territory, only to resume church planting when the Union recaptured the town.⁴⁸

Freed people, many of whom had been prevented from worshipping independently or openly, now thronged to religious services. One white Presbyterian in Charlotte, North Carolina, bemoaned that “when the war was ended in 1865, the Freedmen nearly all ceased to attend services in the churches in which they were brought up, but gathered in large crowds to open air meetings conducted by men of their own race.”⁴⁹ The exodus out of southern white churches was quick. In Tennessee, Black membership in southern Methodist churches plummeted from 12,267 to only 17 by the end of Reconstruction.⁵⁰ Northern denominations, Black and biracial, expanded all across the South. The Southern Black congregations that had worshipped independently before the Civil War now took on greater importance.

Turner noted that almost half of those Black worshippers who joined his church in 1866 and 1867 were new to the faith. What attracted so many to Black Christianity during Reconstruction? Perhaps it was the opportunity to worship without white oversight. Perhaps, it was because many believed that God had answered their prayers for freedom. As activist and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois said, Black Americans discerned the hand of God at work in emancipation. The outcome of the war convinced many that God was on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor.⁵¹

Churches became the center of freed people’s organizing in politics, education, and charity work. Richmond’s First African Baptist Church, with seating for almost 4000, was the only space in the city large enough to host political mass meetings.⁵² North Carolina’s First Colored Convention met in Raleigh’s Loyal AME Church. Those mass meetings laid out Black priorities: equal citizenship and education.⁵³ Many Black ministers were active in the Republican Party; Turner and Hood served as elected state officials. To establish schools, many Black churches worked closely with northern white denominations and missionary associations that sent an impressive number of teachers, missionaries, clothes, books, and money. They started printing presses, colleges and universities, and mutual aid societies.

African American women played a vital role in organizing churches. African American women served in churches and mutual aid societies that formed the backbone in African American communities.  While formal leadership eventually became associated with maleness, women led worship services and churches in the immediate post-emancipation period and garnered influential roles in churches and associations through their financial giving/support and literacy.⁵⁴ Black women’s sociality also formed foundations for the institutionalized religion.⁵⁵ Despite racism and sexism, African American women emerged as teachers and missionaries in black churches and organizations designed to uplift their communities during and after the Civil War.⁵⁶ Women like Lydia Smith of St. James C.M.E. were some of the first teachers in African American communities as schools often operated inside of black churches.⁵⁷

The postemancipation period also saw the transformation in African American religious culture.  Field hollers and spirituals gave way to hymns and the emergence of public performance troupes like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The songs of African American religion, also known as Spirituals, formed the soundtrack to their survival despite the harsh circumstances that accompanied slavery, the Civil War, and racial terrorism. These songs became a melodic resistance to slavery, provided hope and confidence after emancipation, and eventually became the foundation of modern American genres such as the Blues and Gospel.⁵⁸

Black religious change included more than the rapid expansion of Black Protestant churches, however. African cosmologies continued to inform a range of practices, particularly in places like New Orleans where healing rituals, rootwork, conjuring, or divination blurred the boundaries between Christianity and traditional African religious practice. All of these traditions offered sources of protection, comfort, and resistance in an age of chaotic violence.^59[18]

Reconstruction also brought changes to Black Catholicism. The Sisters of the Holy Family, a Black women’s religious order was formed in 1842 New Orleans but blossomed considerably during Reconstruction. The order opened St. Mary’s Academy in 1867 ast he first secondary school for Black girls in New Orleans.  In Baltimore, the Society of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart formed in 1875 for the purpose of evangelizing Black Americans. Despite an overwhelmingly white leadership, the Josephites nonetheless offered important sources of community, and eventually authority, for Black American Catholics.

The Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist groups targeted Black churches during Reconstruction because they were so important to Black organizing. Even when Black worshippers won legal title to their buildings, arsonists frequently burned them down. One witness in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, testified before Congress that in the runup to the 1870 elections, almost “every colored church and school-house in the county was burned up.”⁶⁰ One night in 1870, Klansmen severely assaulted Elias Hill, a disabled Black Baptist preacher in South Carolina, demanding that he “quit preaching” and renounce the Republican Party.⁶¹

The violence against Black people’s freedom and independence enraged Henry McNeal Turner, who had been elected to the Georgia state legislature in 1868, only to be evicted along with other Black legislators by a vote of the assembly. He said: It is extraordinary that . . . in a land where ringing chimes call child and sire to the church of God, a land where Bibles are read and Gospel truths are spoken, and where courts of justice are presumed to exist; it is extraordinary that, with all these advantages on your side, you can make war upon the poor defenseless black man. You know we have no money, no railroads, no telegraphs, no advantages of any sort, and yet all manner of injustice is placed upon us.”⁶²

IX. Indigenous Religion in Reconstruction

Reconstruction was not just a reunification of the North and South.  The process of reunification—the underlying ideas and ideals about citizenship and belonging gained greater purchase and were put to new use in the west as the removal of Native Americans continued and as religious groups and like the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Chinese immigrants challenged the assumptions of citizenship and belonging.

In 1864, Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson emulated Sherman’s “March to the Sea” in the Western theater. Commanding 300 troops guided by allied Indian scouts, Carson launched a surprise attack against the Kiowa people in the Texas Panhandle, burning a main village before being forced to retreat in the face of a severe Kiowa counterattack.

Oral histories of this battle testify to the sacred power of the Kiowa forces. At one point in the fight, “Sétèmqíà (Bear That Runs Over Them), … put on his feathered warbonnet, with a magpie attached to its base, before racing into the battle. Fighting at close range, American bullets tore the feathers off the headdress, but the magpie’s body stayed in place. Onlookers said that as Sétèmqíà continued to fight ‘the wings of that magpie [were] flapping like it was alive or something.’” Commenting on this record, historian Jennifer Graber notes how “Kiowas affirmed not only their warriors’ willingness to defend their free life on the land, but the sacred power that enlivened their struggle.”⁶³ As this quote suggests, sacred power and freedom were intimately connected to the land.

During the Civil War and early Reconstruction, the U.S. greatly increased its westward expansion. A significant relationship between the government/state and religion helped effect westward expansion and removal of Native Americans as part of the process of reconstructing the nation along lines of racial inequality. Between 1861 and 1871, 58 treaties and 7 unratified agreements between the federal government and Indigenous nations were made, most of them concerning the purchasing of Indigenous land.⁶⁴ In some treaties, the annuity payments for the land were overseen by an explicitly Christian “board of visitors,” or the treaty stipulated that the payment would only happen once missionaries had set up schools and churches, thus essentially requiring Christian presence in order for Native Americans to receive the economic sustenance they had been promised. What these treaties show is the intimate connection between religion, education, land, and imperialism. As Kiowa leader Séttháidé argued in the treaty negotiations, “I don’t want any of these medicine homes [churches] built in this country. I want the papooses brought up just exactly as I am.” This negotiation failed. By 1867, the Kiowas were being governed by Quakers on their new reservation, surrounded by Christian “medicine homes” and schools.⁶⁵ The 1867 treaty with the Kiowa established “a school building or mission house.”⁶⁶

In the late nineteenth century, therefore, Indigenous peoples called upon sacred power and rituals to resist and weather American imperialism. Indigenous religions incorporated, resisted, shaped, and were shaped by Christianity, especially various forms of Protestantism. They were neither eradicated nor fully resistant as common myths suggest. Some nations, like the Kiowa, resisted the forcible missionization of their lands and people. Others, like the Ojibwe in present-day Minnesota, incorporated elements of Christian worship into their practices. By the time of the Civil War, missionaries even remarked that hymn singing had “become indigenous.”⁶⁷

Even when Indigenous people did convert, it was almost never a wholesale move. One Methodist Cherokee, Enola, a Cherokee Sergeant fighting for the Union, practiced conjure during the war.⁶⁸ In this instance, Methodist prayer and Indigenous conjure were both ways for Enola to access spiritual power and certainty in a chaotic time. Indigenous practices were also dynamic and not static as commonly depicted. In fact, the Civil War and Westward Expansion greatly shaped sacred beliefs and rituals. During the war, Cherokee fighting for the Confederacy revitalized War Dance rituals.⁶⁹ The Kiowa fighting on the plains adopted the Sun Dance in 1865.⁷⁰

The Ghost Dance movement encapsulates these three themes of westward expansion, dynamic religious life, and adaptability. A “forward-looking, pragmatic religion,” the Ghost Dance originated in 1869 and quickly sparked Indian nationalism that would come to undergird 20^th century pan-Indian politics.⁷¹ Predicting an imminent Apocalypse, The Ghost Dance practitioners believed in a coming Messiah – but disagreed over whether this Messiah was Jesus, demonstrating both the influence of evangelical Christianity and the retention of Indigenous practices and rituals.⁷²

As the land grab set into overdrive by the 1862 Homestead Act continued throughout the 19^th century, Native Americans living on reservations found access to their “old ways” continually restricted. The Ghost Dance’s vision of restored land and a renewed creation resonated deeply. Finally, in 1887 the infamous Dawes Act forced Indians to sell large portions of their reservation land, violating most of the previous treaties. All of this settler colonial violence and disruption drove Native Americans first to the Sun Dance and then to the Ghost Dance.⁷³ While the Wounded Knee Massacre drove the Ghost Dance underground, it did not wipe it out; the Ghost Dance continued after the Ghost Dance War, proving a flexible and resilient religion for Native Americans entering the twentieth century.⁷⁴

X. Conclusion

If religion couldn’t keep the Union together, how could it have been used to put it back together? 

During Reconstruction 1865-1876, southern whites developed a different version of redemption. They mythologized the war which they saw as a Lost Cause because they refused to accept that their cause was illegal and military defeat sealed the deal. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan used violence to thwart every effort to extend citizenship to Black southerners. The redemption of the South from Black equality and a return to white superiority was woven together with a racist theology where God sanctified white supremacy in all areas of life.

Reconstruction policies included amendments to the Constitution that provided Black Americans with citizenship and male suffrage (14^th and 15^th Amendments). In the west, Christians also advocated policies of inclusion that embraced the Chinese and Native American people but this inclusion rested on presumptions of complete assimilation by the Chinese and Native Americans into the white Protestant culture of their proponents, but this was not to be.⁷⁵ Northern Christians tired of the struggles with reconstructing the South and focused on a more expedient reunion. Many white Christians moved away from an optimistic millennialism that supported improving the world to a pessimistic millennialism. The push for unity placed Black civil rights on the shelf as the South entrenched the segregationist policies of Jim Crow. When Reconstruction ended, Southern whites believed they redeemed their communities for unjust Black rule.  Black Christians realized that redemption in its fullest measure was a dream deferred as they looked for another Moses.⁷⁶

Reconstruction finally fell after the Compromise of 1877 which just allowed the reimposition of race-based and white supremacist political and cultural ideology under the religious guise of Redemption. White southerners attacked Black ministers, claiming that they were sexual predators. Those that resisted were publicly lynched.⁷⁷ Ida B. Wells chronicled these outrages with courageous journalism. Mississippi Legislators initiated a plan of racial terror under the guise of religious authority and offered prayers in the legislature after passing the Grandfather Clause which eroded the political rights of Black Southerners. Many white Northerners embraced these white supremacist ideas and practices.⁷⁸ By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had reconstructed along the lines of white supremacist power, and religion remained a resource for reinforcement and resistance.

XI. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Nicole Myers Turner and Ben Wright, with content contributions from Devin Burns, Mark Draper, Ethan Goodnight, Matthew Harper, Brianna Harrison, Ryan Tobler, Nicole Myers Turner, and Ben Wright

Recommended Reading

1. Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
2. James P. Byrd, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
3. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
4. Emily Suzanne Clark, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
5. Robert Darden, Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement (2014).
6. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
7. Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 68–69.
8. Tiffany M. Hale, Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Indigenous Resistance After the U.S. Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026).
9. Luke Harlow, Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
10. Matthew Harper, The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (2016).
11. April Holm, A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017).
12. Elizabeth L. Jemison, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
13. William B. Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
14. Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014).
15. Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022).
16. Adam D. Mendelsohn, Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2022).
17. Randall Miller, Harry Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
18. Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
19. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
20. Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (Berkeley: Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West by University of California Press, 2012).
21. Shari Rabin, The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton, 2025).
22. George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (North Carolina, 2010).
23. Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
24. Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
25. Nicole Myers Turner, Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
26. Benjamin J. Wetzel, American Crusade: Christianity, Warfare, and National Identity, 1860–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).
27. Steve Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).
28. Ben Wright and Zachary W. Dresser, Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

Notes

1. Benjamin J. Wetzel, American Crusade: Christianity, Warfare, and National Identity, 1860-1920 (Cornell University Press, 2022). ↩︎
2. See April Holm, A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era (Louisiana State University Press, 2017); Lucas P. Volkman, Houses Divided: Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of Union in Missouri (Oxford University Press, 2018); and Bridget Ford, Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland (University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Luke Harlow, Religion, Race and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). ↩︎
3. James Henley Thornwell, “The Christine Doctrine of Slavery,” in Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, v. 6: Ecclesiastical (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1873), 405-406.  See James Oscar Farmer, Jr. The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Mercer University Press, 1986). ↩︎
4. Jefferson Davis, “First Inaugural Address, February 18^th, 1861” from The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 7, pp. 45-51. Transcribed from the Congressional Journal, Volume 1, pp. 64-66. ↩︎
5. Garrett Davis, and Alexander H. Stephens, The War Not For Emancipation: Speech by Hon. Garrett Davis, of Kentucky, and African Slavery, The Corner-Stone of the Southern Confederacy: Speech by Hon. Alex. H. Stephens, of Georgia (E.D. Baker, 1861), 70. ↩︎
6. Stephens, The Corner-Stone of the Southern Confederacy, 71-5. ↩︎
7. Letter from Leonidas Polk and Stephen Elliott to Southern Bishops. March 23rd, 1861. MS90, Polk Family Papers. Box 10, Polk Letters January 1861-February 1862. William R Laurie University Archives and Special Collections, the University of the South. ↩︎
8. Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880, (Cambridge University Press, 2014). ↩︎
9. See David B. Cheesebrough, ed., “God Ordained This War”: Sermons on the Sectional Crisis, 1830-1865, (University of South Carolina Press, 1991); Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War, (University of Kansas Press, 1998); Harry Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation, (Yale University Press, 2007); Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, (University of North Carolina Press, 2006); James P. Byrd, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and The Civil War, (Oxford University Press, 2021); and Randall Miller, Harry Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1998). For the particularities of religious life amongst soldiers and civilians, see: Steve Woodworth, While God is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers, (University of Kansas Press, 2001); Gardiner H. Shattuck, A Shield and Hiding Place: The Religious Life of the Civil War Armies, (Mercer University Press, 1987); Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Kent Dollar, Soldiers of the Cross: Confederate Soldier-Christians and the Impact of War on Their Faith, (Mercer University Press, 2005). ↩︎
10. Ben Wright and Zachary W. Dresser, eds. Apocalypse and the Millenium in the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). ↩︎
11. Daniel Stowell, “Stonewall Jackson and the Providence of God,” in Religion and the American Civil War, eds. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (Oxford University Press, 1998), 187-207; Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. ↩︎
12. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. ↩︎
13. James P. Byrd, A Holy Baptism, 1-15. ↩︎
14. See Adam D. Mendelsohn, Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army (NYU Press, 2022); William B. Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (Fordham University Press, 2015). ↩︎
15. Daniel Abernathy to Moses and Polly Abernathy, March 22, 1864, Private Voices Online Archive, https://altchive.org/node/8664. ↩︎
16. Edward P. Smith, Incidents of the United States Christian Commission (J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1871), 325, quoted in George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 181. ↩︎
17. For more on providentialism, see George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples; Steven E. Woodworth, While God is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (University Press of Kansas, 2001). ↩︎
18. Eli N. Evans, “The War between Jewish Brothers in America,” in Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, eds. Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam D. Mendelsohn (NYU Press, 2010), 30. ↩︎
19. Nicholas Said, The Autobiography of Nicholas Said; a Native of Bornou, Eastern Soudan, Central Africa (1873). ↩︎
20. Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 2012). ↩︎
21. For just one of many, many examples see “SOUTHERN NEWS.; The Fast Day Retaliation. RETALIATION” New York Times (March 18, 1864), 8. ↩︎
22. Stephen V. Ash, “Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant’s General Order No. 11,” in Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, eds. Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam D. Mendelsohn (NYU Press, 2010). ↩︎
23. Frederick Douglass, “The Fall of Fort Sumter,” Douglass Monthly, May, 1861, in Philip Foner, ed, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, (Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 444.  ↩︎
24. Douglass Monthly, March, 1862, in Foner, Frederick Douglass, 442. ↩︎
25. Edwin S. Redkey, “Black Chaplains in the Union Army,” Civil War History 33, no. 4, (1987): 334. ↩︎
26. Sara G. Stanley, “Letter to the American Missionary Association,” in A Community of Voices on Education and the African American Experience: A Record of Struggles and Triumphs, eds. Hazel Arnett Ervin and Lois Jamison Sheer (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 72. ↩︎
27. The Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, held in the City of Syracuse, N.Y, October 4,5,6, and 7, with the Bill of Wrongs and Rights, and the Address to the American People, (J.S. Rock and G. L. Ruffin, 1864), 15. ↩︎
28. Abena Boakyewa-Ansah, “Crafted By Their Own Hands: The African American Religious Experience in Union-Occupied North Carolina, 1862-1865,” The North Carolina Historical Review 94, no. 3 (2017): 299-300. ↩︎
29. Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, (Oxford University Press, 2004). ↩︎
30. “Chana Littlejohn,” in North Carolina Narratives, parts 1 and 2, vol. 11 of Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States (N.p., 1941), 54-59 (quotation, 56), in Raboteau, Slave Religion, 319. ↩︎
31. W.P. Derby, Bearing Arms in the Twenty-Seventh Massachusetts Regiment During the Civil War, 1861-1865, (Wright and Potter Printing Co. 1883),94-95, in Raboteau, Slave Religion, 320. ↩︎
32. Louis S. Warren, God’s Red Son : The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (Basic Books, 2017); Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022). ↩︎
33. Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877 (Oxford University Press, 2001). ↩︎
34. Elizabeth L. Jemison, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008). ↩︎
35. Edward J. Blum, “To Doubt this would be to doubt God,” in Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era, eds. Zachary Dresser and Ben Wright (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 217–54.  Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War (Viking, 2006); Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. ↩︎
36. Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898, (Louisiana State University Press, 2015). ↩︎
37. Paul Harvey, Christianity and Race in the American South: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 75–112. ↩︎
38. Charles Reagan Wilson, “The Religion of the Lost Cause: Ritual and Organization of the Southern Civil Religion, 1865-1920,” Journal of Southern History 46, no. 2 (1980), 227. ↩︎
39. Caroline Janney, Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). ↩︎
40. United Confederate Veterans, Minutes of the Tenth Annual Meeting and Reunion, 1900 (New Orleans, 1902), 70. ↩︎
41. Organization and Principles of the Ku Klux Klan (1868). ↩︎
42. See Matthew Harper The End of Days; Steven Dundas, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Religion and the Politics of Race in the Civil War Era and Beyond (Potomac Books, 2022). ↩︎
43. John G. Riley, “History of St. James C.M.E. Church,” Historical Structure Form: Florida Master Site File. ↩︎
44. Worth E. Norman, Jr., James Solomon Russell: Former Slave, Pioneering Educator and Episcopal Evangelist (McFarland & Company, 2012). ↩︎
45. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Staying in Place: southern Methodists, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and postwar battles for control of church property,” Journal of the Civil War Era 13, no. 3 (2023). ↩︎
46. Nicole Myers Turner, Soul Liberty, 11–13, 29–31. ↩︎
47. Christian Recorder, November 24, 1866; Jay Riley Case, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920, Illustrated edition (Oxford University Press, 2012), 159–82. ↩︎
48. James Walker Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, or the Centennial of African Methodism (AME Zion Book Concern, 1895), 185–88, 289–300. ↩︎
49. Mrs. Nannie R. Alexander, “Personal Reminiscences of the Founding of Seventh Street Presbyterian Church and Biddle University by Mrs. Nannie R. Alexander Who Assisted Her Husband, the Late Rev. S. C. Alexander, D. D., Founder of Both Church and School” (Personal Letter, Handwritten, Willerstown, PA, December 1910). ↩︎
50. Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877 (Oxford University Press, 1998), 80–81. ↩︎
51. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, reprint (Free Press, 1998 [1935]), 123. ↩︎
52. Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 110. ↩︎
53. Matthew Harper, The End of Days, 35–41. ↩︎
54. Nicole Myers Turner, Soul Liberty; Martha S. Jones, All Bound up Together: The Woman Question in African American public culture, 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). ↩︎
55. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). ↩︎
56. See Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (Knopf, 2010). ↩︎
57. Riley, “History of St. James C.M.E. Church.” ↩︎
58. See Robert Darden, Nothing but Love in God’s Water. ↩︎
59. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (University of California Press, 2014) and Emily Suzanne Clark, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). ↩︎
60. U.S. Congress Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, vol. 9 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 1025; Shawn Alexander, Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings: A Brief History with Documents (Macmillan Higher Education, 2016), 13–14. ↩︎
61. U.S. Congress Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 1406-1410; Alexander, Reconstruction Violence, 87–92. ↩︎
62. Henry McNeal Turner, “Speech on the Eligibility of Colored Members to Seats in the Georgia Legislature,” September 3, 1868, The #HMTProject Digital Archival Project. ↩︎
63. Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018), 68–69. ↩︎
64. 1868 was the final treaty. In 1871, the Indian Appropriation Act ended the practice of formal treaty making, as the United States asserted its imperial authority over the continent. ↩︎
65. Graber, The Gods of Indian Country, 74. ↩︎
66. Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. II. (Treaties). (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), 978, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31210003349790?urlappend=%3Bseq=9. ↩︎
67. Michael David McNally, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion, Religion in America Series (Oxford University Press, 2000), 80. ↩︎
68. John D. Loftin, People of Kituwah: The Old Ways of the Eastern Cherokees (University of California Press, 2024), 173. ↩︎
69. Loftin, People of Kituwah, 174. ↩︎
70. Graber, The Gods of Indian Country, 72. ↩︎
71. Louis S. Warren, God’s Red Son, 7–9. See also Tiffany M. Hale, Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Indigenous Resistance After the U.S. Civil War (Yale University Press, 2026). ↩︎
72. Warren, God’s Red Son 11–12, 106. ↩︎
73. Warren, God’s Red Son, 152–60. ↩︎
74. Warren, God’s Red Son, 377–78. ↩︎
75. Joshua Paddison, American Heathens. ↩︎
76. Blum, Reforging the White Republic, 174–209; Mark A Noll, “Reconstructing Religion,” Journal of the Civil War Era (March 12, 2017), https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies/reconstructing-religion/. ↩︎
77. Jemison, Christian Citizens. ↩︎
78. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Blum, Reforging the White Republic. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

Jonathan Edwards claimed that the millennium would commence in America, and by 1835, Rev. Lyman Beecher agreed. Born on the eve of the Revolution, Beecher’s enthusiasm for evangelism and moral reform led him to help found the Domestic Missionary Society in 1820 and the American Temperance Society in 1826. As Unitarianism eroded the reformed tradition in the Northeast, Beecher went west in 1832 to serve as the first president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. From this seat, Beecher argued that America, “blessed with such experimental knowledge of free institutions, with such facilities and resources of communication,” was “destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world” through its Christianization.¹

In “A Plea for the West,” Beecher argued that America’s unique religious and civil liberties provided the opening for the work, but that the work itself was in the West. “[A] young empire of mind, and power, and wealth,” the Western territories of the growing nation offered opportunities for revenue, population growth, and political power. Beecher called for an investment of Protestant money and personnel in churches and schools to ensure that “moral culture” was part of this colonial rush. The fate of the nation and the world was at stake. As he put it, “the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West.”²

For American Protestants like Beecher, it seemed like the dawn of a Christian empire was at hand. Beecher sensed the very real tensions inherent in a country founded as a republic on paper and an empire in practice, one in which all men were created equal under God but weren’t treated so under the law. This great diversity of religious belief and practice would test the national experiment by highlighting the contradictions built into its system of government,

Religious rhetoric seemed to support both the nation’s rapacious growth and the arguments of those who would curb it. It would provide a framework for challenging slavery and a framework for enlarging it. It would underpin efforts to reimagine fundamental institutions like the family and resist the entrenchment of market capitalism, and to enforce family norms and that same market capitalism. While the Civil War is often framed as a conflict between state and federal power, those were merely the units used to express a far more fundamental conflict that took place throughout the American empire: who, exactly, had been created equal—and was that equality to be found in this world, or only in the next?

II. Continuing Reform

The Second Great Awakening had swelled the ranks of many white Protestant churches in the United States, especially in the Northeast, and after the first quarter of a century, they seemed poised to expand further, fulfilling Beecher’s charge. The circuit riders and revival preachers who had lit fires in upstate New York looked to bring their tactics to the ever-advancing frontier. In fact, they believed it was imperative to do so. Even as they praised the growing wealth of the nation, many worried about the damage that unrestrained capitalism might do to the moral fabric of the nation. Protestant Christianity and family life were seen as bulwarks against that unraveling, and the frontier seemed to be a clear danger zone, populated disproportionately by single men animated by the pursuit of money, not the desire to create families and communities. Conversely, religious leaders also worried about the similar populations of single men and women who moved to the growing cities and industrial towns of the eastern seaboard, impelled there by the same forces that drove others westward.

The spirit of voluntarism and evangelism united many Protestants. Yet many agreements to work across denominational divides foundered in the 1830s. The 1801 Plan of Union that had bound Presbyterians and Congregationalists was dissolved in 1837 by the more theologically conservative wing of the Presbyterian Church, a dissolution which also resulted in the division of the Presbyterian Church itself, as “New Lights” persisted in the ecumenical collaboration and revivalism that their “Old Light” colleagues rejected.

Many claimed for their own denomination the mantle of the “primitive,” rooted in the practices of the early Church, or split away from their existing churches to restore it. Unitarianism, a primitive movement away from Congregationalism that included rejecting the Trinity, had solidified its place as one of the chief faiths of Massachusetts elites, even capturing the established churches that still received public funding. Methodists and Baptists developed primitive wings in the 1830s, both of which rejected ecumenical association. Others wanted to eliminate the denominational divisions that were dividing Christians and “restore” one church. To the west, two religious movements led by Barton Stone and the father-son pair of Thomas and Alexander Campbell joined forces in 1831 to do this. Stone and Alexander Campbell insisted that theirs was a movement without denomination, calling themselves “Christians” or “Disciples of Christ,” even as they hashed out key points of doctrinal agreement like adult baptism.³

Whether ecumenical or firmly denominational, the white Protestants who worked for the salvation of all continued to maintain strict racial boundaries in their earthly churches. In areas with free Black populations, primarily in the northern states, independent Black churches like the African Methodist Episcopal church saw significant growth in this period. Allen’s successor Morris Brown, worked to build a broader North American organization, welcoming Canadian churches full of formerly enslaved Black Americans.⁴

Shared across all of these churches was an optimism about the possibilities of individual salvation and, for some denominations, perhaps even perfection. The natural extension of this faith in the individual was the belief that society itself could be perfected through the collective workings of individual Americans. In 1836, Charles Grandison Finney distilled the optimism of the age into a call to his followers to go out into the world and do good: “Because you have all the powers of moral agency; and the thing required is, not to alter these powers, but to employ them in the service of your Maker. God has created these powers, and you can and do use them.”⁵ Lyman Beecher believed that he already knew what institutions were necessary for the maintenance of a moral society: the family, the school, the church, the marketplace, and the mission. Moral reform efforts were therefore best directed towards persuading or coercing individuals to operate within the boundaries of those institutions, which would in turn curb destructive impulses to intemperance and infidelity.

III. New Faiths

Ensuring the ability of all to read and understand the Bible had been a pillar of American Protestantism since the colonial period, but the boundaries of religious innovation had always been policed, socially and even legally. In this moment, however, it was as if the boundlessness of the American religious imagination had not only empowered individuals to receive grace through their own efforts, but also to re-imagine the nature of religious belief. This transformation unfolded through both individual revelation and individual reason, often at the same time.

The Unitarian belief that Christ’s divinity consisted in his perfection of the religious faculties that all human beings possessed laid the groundwork for the emergence of Transcendentalism’s rejection of all religious authority outside of the individual, whose soul contained all that was necessary for knowledge and understanding of the divine. Rather than chaos, Transcendentalists believed that this approach could—with the proper support—lead all humans to an understanding of the divine, whatever its nature. Despite its articulation and modern reputation as a quintessentially American set of beliefs, Transcendentalism’s roots lay in the writings of European philosophers and theologians, as well as ancient Sanskrit texts like the Bhagavad Gita, a product of the rich transatlantic print culture of the 19th century.⁶

The egalitarian impulses of the Second Great Awakening led to thousands of Americans affiliating with the Methodists and Free Will Baptists, who had rejected Calvinist views that salvation was only available to the elect. Other Americans were drawn to even more egalitarian religions like the Universalists, who believed that individual reason was sufficient for accessing the divine and that salvation was guaranteed to all, negating the need for individual conversion.

William Miller and his followers represented the fluidity of religious affiliation that was common in this period. Born into a Baptist family, Miller later became a Deist and struggled to reconcile these two faith traditions through intense Bible study. He claimed to have discovered the date and time of the Second Coming encoded as prophecy in the book of Daniel: October 22, 1844.⁷ Tens of thousands of Americans, mostly from evangelical Protestant traditions, came to believe in Miller’s prophecy. When Jesus did not return in 1844, a moment tactfully referred to as “The Great Disappointment,” most followers joined other churches, including smaller marginal groups like the Shakers, or became unbelievers. Others confidently attempted to wrangle the predicted date and the prophecy into something new, spawning a family of Adventist churches. One group believed Miller’s date had marked something important—the beginning of a period of judgment for humankind preceding the Second Coming—and established the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, keeping Saturday as the Sabbath. Miller’s prophecy and the adaptations of his believers illustrate the religious confidence and creativity of the period.

While Miller saw no need for moral reform efforts, others who did questioned whether the fundamental institutions of human society were up to the task of creating a holy society. Anxieties over economic status and gender relations drove many to question the norms of American society. For some, these questions led them to affiliate with existing groups like the Shakers, whose communities grew significantly in this period. For others, their explorations led to new religiously inspired communities that experimented with ways of holding property, sharing responsibilities, and even constituting romantic and sexual relationships.

The Burned-Over District of Upstate and Western New York produced new experiments in living, including the utopian Oneida Community. Founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848, its residents practiced “complex marriage” (sexually open marriages) and communalism. Transcendentalists, inspired by the writings of the French intellectual Charles Fourier, established short-lived communities like Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands and George and Sophia Ripley’s Brook Farm, both of which struggled to balance the challenging labor needed for material self-reliance against the desire for time spent on intellectual and spiritual growth. Brook Farm’s participants provide further examples of the spiritual mobility of this age. Isaac Hecker began as a Methodist, engaged in a period of searching at Brook Farm, and became a Catholic, while his friend-turned-frenemy Orestes A Brownson began life as a Presbyterian, became a Universalist, then went through a period of unbelief, and then embraced Transcendentalism, before finally becoming a Catholic.⁸

Raised in the Burned-Over District, Joseph Smith Jr. spent his young adulthood in a part of the country that would not have looked askance at most of Brownson’s religious wanderings. Smith was born to a Methodist mother whose conversion had come as the result of a vision in a dream. His father hailed from a family of Universalists and skeptics. Finding themselves in poverty as a result of bad harvests, medical bills, and getting swindled by a business acquaintance, Joseph and Lucy moved their family to Palmyra, New York, just east of Rochester. As a young man, Smith attended revivals and read the Bible but found himself spiritually unsatisfied. He gained a reputation for his visions and for using special stones that could lead to buried treasure.

Miller and Noyes reread the Bible to find new prophecies and new ways of imagining society, but Smith’s visions led him to a new scripture entirely. In 1823, a vision of an angel told him he was to be “the conduit for God’s voice,” and directed him to gold plates buried nearby that would, when translated, tell the history of those who had lived in North America in the distant past. Smith revealed these visions to his family; with their support, he translated the gold plates in secret with the use of seer stones over several years and published the Book of Mormon in 1830.

This deeply American religious text positioned Indigenous Americans as descendants of a family of dissenting Israelites. After his resurrection, Jesus ministered to these Native Americans. This, plus the unearthing of the plates from American soil itself, “sacralized and Christianized the ground upon which the young United States was built.” The text is dominated by named men, good and evil, and a distrust of democracy in favor of kingly and prophetic leadership, despite centering personal liberty and agency as key to salvation.⁹

Smith and his followers chose to establish a new church in 1830 and used all the tools of the First Amendment to build and defend it. Following further revelations that helped determine the organizational structure of this new denomination, Smith ordained other men as “elders,” giving them the authority to baptize. Over the next few years, Smith would issue hundreds more revelations, and a growing group of followers accepted these as scripture, even those that spoke to and expanded on Biblical stories. When his second elder questioned the church’s baptismal requirement, which was not found in the Book of Mormon, Smith received a revelation that commanded obedience to his revelation. Unsurprisingly, this bold new church ruffled the feathers of locals, and church members would soon embark on the first of several moves over the next fifteen years, transplanting themselves to Kirtland, Ohio in early 1831.

Only a few months later, in June 1831, Smith received a revelation declaring Missouri to be “the land of promise & the place for the City of Zion.” Thereafter, his followers began steadily relocating from Ohio to Missouri, even as converts from America and England swelled Kirtland’s population. Even after attempting to create Mormon-only counties in the state, relations between Latter Day Saints and their neighbors increasingly deteriorated. After a conflict that saw two Mormons and one state militiaman die, Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an executive order in 1838: “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State, if necessary, for the public good.” Falling back across the river to Illinois, a new revelation inspired them to buy land along a bend in the Mississippi River. In 1840, these settlers received a charter for their newest Zion, a city called Nauvoo in Illinois. They built a temple—and built up a militia, using it and the legal rights of their city to protect Smith from extradition back to Missouri.¹⁰

One local newspaper editor was concerned that the Mormons had “[stepped] beyond the proper sphere of a religious denomination, and become a political body.”¹¹ The editor was not wrong to see political ambitions. In addition to ensuring that followers voted as a bloc in local elections, Smith announced a bid for the presidency in 1844, while also presiding over a private group establishing a political kingdom of God in which priesthood leadership served as a living constitution.¹²

The downfall of Nauvoo would come from within the church’s membership itself. In June 1844, a group of Mormon dissenters published the only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor, which confirmed revelations that Smith had endeavored to keep secret for two years: that marriages sealed by the power of Mormon priesthood were vital, and that those marriages were to be polygamous, central to an “eternal patriarchal structure” that would populate the earth. Before Smith’s first wife Emma threatened him with divorce in 1843, he had married over thirty additional wives without her knowledge.¹³ The Nauvoo city council ordered the destruction of the Expositor‘s press, and the dissenters fled. But the damage was done. In the aftermath, Smith was charged with treason and imprisoned with several others in Carthage, Illinois. Two weeks later, men stormed the jailhouse and assassinated Smith alongside his brother Hyrum.

Over the next six months, “new citizens” moved in to stake a claim in Nauvoo; its city charter was revoked by January 1845, and the men charged with Smith’s murders were eventually acquitted. Feeling pressured and vulnerable, the majority of Latter Day Saints, now under the direction of Brigham Young, decided to abandon their newly finished temple. In early 1846, they headed West in waves towards a new home in the Salt Lake Valley, which appealed to them because it was outside of American jurisdiction. In this flight from their own oppression and towards a new Zion, they manifested their religious destiny by colonizing land already inhabited by others. Within a year, however, this area became part of the United States at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. Church leaders immediately petitioned for statehood for the Utah Territory as the State of Deseret but were rebuffed for decades, in part because of their refusal to eliminate plural marriage.¹⁴

In this period of excitement, Americans believed they could reinterpret or discover new scripture and change our understanding of human history, economic relationships, the family, and salvation itself. Some even believed that humans could communicate with the dead. Many Americans were happy to dabble in folk religions and the occult alongside their existing affiliations, freely consulting mesmerists and clairvoyants and seers even as they went to services and revivals. They may even have seen Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” who began a new religious movement in the mid-1840s that came to be called Spiritualism. He attracted a significant following for his heterodox teachings about death, which he argued was pleasant, and the afterlife, which, like Universalists, he believed was open to all. But it was his ability to commune with ghosts and other psychic feats that drew people to him. This “Harmonial Circle” engaged in the typical patterns of missionary work: commissioning itinerant missionaries, publishing books and newspaper articles, and holding well-attended lectures.

Unsurprisingly, the occurrence that brought Spiritualism into mainstream consciousness occurred in the Burned-Over District that had been home to Smith’s early revelations and Miller’s great disappointment. In 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox, 11 and 14 respectively, heard an eerie rapping within their walls, one that seemed to come from an immaterial mind that responded to queries. “Mr. Splitfoot,” as they named the spirit, revealed himself to be a peddler buried in the basement of their home.¹⁵ Soon the whole town was involved, and though a body was never found beneath the house, the girls became national celebrities and relocated to New York City, where Davis had also located his ministry. Spirit circles soon developed, as well as new societies organized around the movement, which found supporters in William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, Horace Greeley, the newspaper editor, and Queen Victoria.

In an 1841 sermon, Unitarian William Ellery Channing traced the shape of Transcendentalism: “Thought frees the old bounds to which men used to confine themselves. . . . Men forget the limits of their powers. They question the infinite, the unsearchable, with an audacious self-reliance….”¹⁶ His assessment reflects much of this intellectual and spiritual moment, one in which Americans not only felt they could question with audacious self-reliance, but answer those questions with the same audacity.

IV. Conquest and Missions

When Lyman Beecher spoke in 1836 of “the West,” the United States claimed sovereignty over the territories known as the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest, most of which lay east of the Mississippi River. But “the West” was already much larger in the American imagination, and through imperial wars, would quickly grow to span the continent. This push for territorial acquisition was not without controversy, especially after the Missouri Compromise, but the argument published in John O’Sullivan’s 1845 newspaper was widely shared by white Americans: that it was their “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” This belief in the territorial destiny of white America supposedly contained within it the belief in a sacred duty to convert the continent’s “heathens,” caring little for Native peoples’ own religious traditions that had served them for thousands of years. With money from the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the federal government’s Civilization Fund, and private fundraising campaigns on the Eastern Seaboard, missionaries fanned out across these new territories.¹⁷

Missionary work west of the Mississippi had been underway since the earliest days of Spanish and French colonialism. U.S. missionary efforts in this period were rarely any Native group’s first “encounter” with Christianity. The responses to U.S. missionization and the territorial expansion that accompanied it were varied. The hundreds of Native communities in nineteenth-century North America interpreted the spirit world differently. The sheer diversity of Native America defies generalizations about Native reactions to the white American missionary impulse. Some Native people experimented with Protestant, Catholic, or Mormon ideas about religion according to communal and individual needs. Scholars have recently suggested that these experiences are best characterized as an ad hoc “affiliation” with, not a wholesale “conversion” to, Christian theology. Native people could be simultaneously Christian adherents and ongoing practitioners of established rituals in their communities.¹⁸

Native people east of the Mississippi followed a similar experimental approach, but their experiences at the very moment of Beecher’s plea demonstrate the clear limits to any affiliation. In the first decades of the 19th century, some among the Five Nations had permitted the Moravians, Presbyterians, and other Protestants to build churches in their towns, instruct their children in the English language, and teach them about concepts like monogamy, sin, and private property—including chattel slavery. Some became missionaries in their own right, mediating between God’s Word and Indigenous thought. In the face of attempts to remove them from their land, Cherokee women wrote extensively about their community’s Christian “progress” and appealed to white Americans through a shared love of Christ. Peggy Ann Scott’s 1817 letter to a federal official made it explicit: “Oh Sir, I implore you, for the sake of the dear crucified Savior, who shed his blood for the red, as well as white people.”¹⁹ But while Indigenous Christians might have shared in the same salvation, white Americans still felt divinely called to seize Native lands and destroy Native communities. Christianity could not save Native people from the hell of Removal and cultural genocide.

For white American missionaries who had worked among these groups for years, the efforts to remove them from their lands were a betrayal. ABCFM leaders like Jeremiah Evarts as well as public intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson condemned Removal, but white Christian women were most active in the protest, drawing on writings of and implicitly mirroring the tactics of Cherokee women like Peggy Ann Scott. Lydia Sigourney, a poet and teacher in Hartford, Connecticut, collaborated with friend and fellow educator Catharine Beecher, Lyman Beecher’s eldest daughter, to launch a national petition drive opposed to Removal in 1829. Beecher argued that the Cherokee should be “protected and sustained in their rights [to become] a free and Christian people” by noting that this small “cherished relic of antiquity” posed no danger to white American power. Beecher argued Christian women must raise their voices to care for a “helpless race.”²⁰

In the 1840s, the pace and scale of both displacement and missionary activity intensified.  Federal forces continued to acquire and distribute Native land to white Americans. Numerous Protestant denominations raced to provide religious instruction, ranging from the Methodists and Baptists to the Quakers and Presbyterians and eventually the Mormons. In many of these new American territories, Catholic missionaries to Native groups had been present for centuries, as had Mexicans of Spanish descent who were born Catholics. The accession of Mexican territories added a multitude of Catholics to the American populace who were also seen as an important object of Christianization by Protestant missionaries. By the 1870s, there were more than seventy missions in or near Native communities between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean, working to effect the spiritual and cultural transformation of Indigenous peoples.

V. Immigrants and Nativists

American Protestants could feel bullish about their missionary work in part because they seemed to have plenty of personnel. The revivals of the Second Great Awakening had led to a deeper churching of the American public, especially among the Methodists, who by 1850 represented the largest single denomination in the country. Looking west, they saw a frontier populated by non-Protestant Indigenous people and a rush of land-hungry—and later gold-hungry—men who needed religious care. But religious diversity was increasing in the East as well, and Beecher’s use of the word “plea” in his title indicates his belief in an existential danger: “This danger from an uneducated mind is augmenting daily by the rapid influx of foreign emigrants, unacquainted with our institutions, unaccustomed to self-government, inaccessible to education, and easily accessible to prepossession, and inveterate credulity . . .”²¹

Beecher was alarmed as immigrants from Europe increasingly made the United States their home. These new arrivals were impelled to move because of political and economic conditions in their home countries and the opportunities presented by newly seized land in the United States. The 1850 census, which was the first to ask people their national origin, revealed that nearly 10% of the free US population had been born in another country. Most of these immigrants were of national origins already represented in the American populace: English, Irish, Anglo- and French-Canadian, and German. To that end, increased immigration introduced greater religious diversity largely by making existing ethnic minorities a greater proportion of the population and, in turn, making their religious practices more visible in daily life. But these immigrants brought their own local religious practices and perspectives, unsettling local congregations from the inside even as American Protestants expressed anxieties about their presence.

By 1850, Catholics rivaled Baptists and Methodists as a major denomination in the United States. But the Vatican still understood the United States as a young Catholic nation without the money or personnel to sustain its own spiritual or material operations.²² Since the British colonial period, American Catholics could only receive the sacraments through itinerant priests, and the rush of immigration at midcentury only exacerbated this issue. “National” churches became increasingly common, worrying both American Protestants and the Vatican. Isaac Hecker, an American-born convert to Catholicism who had been part of the Brook Farm set, became a priest in the Redemptorist order. At first, Hecker helped supply many German-born priests to minister to Catholics in America, but he later came to believe that it was important for American Catholics, whether immigrant or native-born, to have American priests. To accomplish this, he sought and received papal approval to establish the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, better known as the Paulist Fathers, in 1857. Many of the first members of the order were American converts like Hecker, and their ministry displayed many of the characteristics of the American Protestant culture they had come from, especially the use of tracts, books, and newspapers in extending their work.²³

In a similar vein, American Jews had long created and supported Jewish institutions themselves. This work only increased as new immigrants settled in the interior. Even when they established congregations, access to Jewish resources, like religious books, kosher food, and even Jewish marriage partners, was very limited; it was nearly impossible to strictly observe Jewish law in most places.²⁴ Ordained rabbis of varying traditions began to arrive in the United States at mid-century, but most congregations continued to be led by hazanim as they had been for decades or even centuries.²⁵ Efforts at “modernization” and reform in some congregations, like Charleston’s historic Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, led to personal arguments and bureaucratic maneuvers like those seen in Protestant denominations, but with one important difference. For those opposed, the potential addition of a musical organ represented the creep of Christianity into their worship, as the organist would be breaking the Sabbath.²⁶ In the United States, Sunday closing laws made it challenging for most Jews to observe a Saturday Sabbath and still make a living. Jews contested these laws in the public sphere, and very occasionally in court, but all but the wealthiest and most pious worked on the Sabbath.²⁷

Political disestablishment was finally completed in 1833 when Massachusetts eliminated state funding of select churches. All non-Protestants could now vote, hold office, and swear oaths. But American Protestants reacted negatively to the increasing visibility—and potential political power—of non-Protestants. Both Jews and Seventh Day Adventists were rebuffed when they sued to overturn laws mandating the closure of businesses on Sundays, with Protestant leaders using the language of American democracy to argue that religious minorities should accede to the will of the majority.

In addition, there were efforts to promulgate a specific kind of Protestant culture through civic institutions like schools. Despite their framing as “non-sectarian,” public common schools run by private boards were vehicles for transmitting Protestant culture through the use of the Authorized Version Bible, as well as the singing of Protestant hymns, and the use of textbooks that portrayed the Catholic Church as evil.²⁸ Religious minorities found ways to resist, and even evade, these efforts. In Philadelphia, Rebecca Gratz founded the first Jewish Sunday school in 1838, intended to counter Christian missionary efforts and strengthen Jewish knowledge and commitments among children.²⁹

In New York City, Archbishop John Hughes argued that the school system was using taxpayer funds to proselytize to children, and that in setting up parochial schools to avoid this, Catholics were being doubly taxed. His counterargument, that the city also provide funds for parochial schools, was unpersuasive, but his maneuvering helped lead to the passage of the Maclay Act in New York State, which placed public schools directly under the control of city officials and prohibited religious instruction in those schools. This provision angered many Protestants. Despite these changes, attendance at parochial schools grew across the country.³⁰

The school controversy in New York took place amidst growing antagonism towards American Catholics, and historians have long struggled to untangle the religious, ethnic, and economic aspects of this antagonism. American anti-Catholicism certainly grew in the 19th century in response to increased European immigration, incorporating nativist responses to the perceived threat that “unskilled” immigrant labor posed to wages.³¹ But it also remained rooted in ideas that had been fundamental to American self-understanding since the days of British colonialism.

In the mind of most Protestants, Catholicism represented oppression, tyranny, and subservience, everything that Anglo-American culture was not. In the United States, a key part of this ideology was the idea that Catholics were not allowed the privacy of mind to make free choices but instead were told what and how to think by their priests, and by extension the Pope, who held both spiritual and temporal power in the 19th century.³² As New England writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick noted in her 1835 novel The Linwoods, “The political institutions of a people may be inferred from their religion. Absolutism, as a mirror, reflects the Roman Catholic faith.”³³ This fear was also at the core of Lyman Beecher’s plea; despite his optimistic framing, much of the piece explores the ways that un-Americanized Catholics will be the conduit through which European powers will take control of the United States.

Anti-Catholicism expressed itself at mid-century in ways that reflected the gendered nature of culture and political power in the United States. Despite the criticism of Catholicism’s supposed lack of privacy, American Protestants were obsessed with one particular Catholic private space: the convent. Some claimed that Catholic priests routinely sexually abused women in convents and murdered illegitimate children to cover their crimes. Readers across the country lapped up “convent tales” like Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836), full of the scandalous behavior that was supposedly taking place in these private religious spaces.

Elite American Protestants sent their daughters to convent schools to benefit from the European-educated women who taught there but simultaneously rejected the idea that any woman could have rationally chosen to enter religious life. They viewed such women as disordered and in need of rescue, a reminder that the concept of a right to private choice in America has always been gendered.³⁴ For the most part, though, nativist activism attempted to restrict Catholic participation in the electoral system. America could be fascinated by women who devoted their lives to the Church, even seeing them as victims in need of rescue. But they feared the power of Catholic men at the ballot box. Parallels to anti-Mormon sentiment are quite clear. In both cases, these religions were seen as politically dangerous, and possibly subversive, and Protestant critics focused their conspiracy theorizing on what they viewed as secret perversions of the family: polygamous marriage and the convent. 

Anti-Catholic activism took many forms in the 19th century, including violence organized by private citizens and organizations. A crowd incensed by accusations of abuse and murder in Catholic institutions burned down the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in August of 1834, and broader nativist riots rooted in political and civic concerns enveloped cities like Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New Orleans deep into the 1850s.³⁵ Writing soon after the burning of the Ursuline convent, Beecher made clear that he did not support violence against Catholics and their property, but one can see a clear line between his fears of political subversion and what developed by mid-century: an explicitly nativist party.³⁶

Candidates in the American Party, more commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party, exploited the power vacuum created by dysfunction in the major parties. Know Nothing candidates briefly swept into power in towns and cities across the country, promising to bar immigrants from jobs, public office, and even citizenship. The party’s power declined just as swiftly, unable to agree on a national platform outside of anti-Catholicism, but questions about the “dual loyalty” of American Catholics would persist well past the 1861 unification of Italy that eliminated the pope’s official control over earthly territory.

Despite the official separation of church and state, the reaction to Jewish and especially Catholic immigration in the antebellum period highlights how the country was legally and culturally Protestant and the lengths that some American Protestants would go to keep it that way. And yet, inspired by the spirit of reform that animated antebellum society, many outside mainstream Protestantism believed that their faiths were fully compatible with the political ideas of their nation, and they actively continued to participate in American civic and cultural life.

VI. Resistance and Rebellion

The question over the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture paralleled a series of other questions in the 19th century that occupied the minds of white American men. Could women be full participants in society? Could nonwhite people? Could immigrants? What would happen if they were? Even as Catholicism was held up as a faith that denied freedom of conscience and individual agency, these questions remind us that the United States also denied those and further freedoms to most of its residents during this period. Central to this was the tension between individual civil liberties and the majoritarian desire for power and money.

Nineteenth-century white Protestant thought contained a major contradiction. Protestants believed that all human beings had souls and were spiritually equal. But they also believed that human society was naturally hierarchical and therefore unequal. The rising push to reform the world opened the door for some to examine or even attempt to resolve this tension.

Like Catholicism, slavery had long served as a metaphor for white Americans conceptualizing what was different about their new nation. But as with Catholicism, slavery wasn’t simply metaphorical. As the economic and political system of the nation, slavery impacted the lives of every American, from those held in enslavement to free white people in states that had abolished slavery in the 18th century. In 1836, when the mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts turned out on strike, they sang:

Oh! Isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I –

Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?

Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave

For I am so fond of liberty,

That I cannot be a slave.³⁷

This song was itself a reworking of the song “I won’t be a nun.” These Protestant New England girls had little danger of being forced into a convent, but their employment in the mills was predicated on other people being slaves—those who produced the cotton they worked with—and their demand for higher wages came with the understanding that those producing the raw materials would never get the same.

As slavery intensified and spread across newly colonized territories, supporters and opponents drew on the authority of the Bible, and the fact that people across political, social, and racialized spectrums could develop a range of stances on the morality and legality of slavery from biblical texts demonstrates its interpretative flexibility. There was not a simple truth about “what the Bible says about slavery.” Rather, what the Bible said about slavery emerged from complex negotiation between the biblical texts and their readers.³⁸

Proslavery white supremacists sought to demonstrate that slavery in the Atlantic World—especially the racialized enslavement and exploitation of Africans and their descendants—was part of a long historical and biblical reality. To prove this point, writers like Josiah Priest and clergy like Holland McTyeire made the case that no passage in the Old or New Testaments abolished or explicitly condemned slave-owning.³⁹ Instead, they found evidence that slavery was deemed acceptable by ancient Israelites and Christians. Perhaps the most robustly used biblical passage to justify slavery was the so-called “curse of Ham” (Genesis 9:20–27), a passage in which one of Noah’s sons, Ham, sees him naked; consequently, Ham’s son Canaan is cursed and labeled as a servant of Noah’s other sons. Over the centuries and through Jewish, Christian, and Islamic interpretation, this passage eventually became racialized, and proslavery writers portrayed Africans as descendants of Ham and Canaan in order to justify their “continued” enslavement from the Bible to modernity.⁴⁰

The “curse of Ham” even led some to the view that Black and white humans had different origins, mirroring contemporary theories circulating throughout the Euro-American scientific community. Polygenism promoted a reading of Genesis that was deeply tempting to white supremacists looking for further justification for enslavement. But many religious Americans, especially clergy, recoiled at the idea, even as they were committed white supremacists. They believed that only some of the freedoms available to white men should belong to white women, and even fewer should be available to Black Americans or Indigenous people. However, to deny the humanity of any of these groups would be to question Scriptural truth, and that was unacceptable.⁴¹

By contrast, Black and white abolitionists read biblical texts to justify their understanding of Christian theology as liberatory, turning to the academic study of language to suggest that the Bible meant “servant” and not “slave.”⁴² They also sought to demonstrate that Christian morals required human equality and unity. They quoted biblical texts like Galatians 3:28 (“there is no longer slave or free…”) and Acts 17:26 (“from one blood he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth…”). Accordingly, they reasoned that Christians ought to view chattel slavery as unbiblical and demand the emancipation of enslaved people.

Black Americans, unsurprisingly, provided some of the most Bible-based arguments for abolitionism. David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World repeatedly chastised white clergy for acting contrary to the Bibles they held in their hands, for failing to understand that humans cannot be lord over one another, and for falsely believing that Africans are cursed by God. Inspired by Walker’s example, Maria Stewart became the first American woman to speak in front of a “promiscuous” audience, including white and Black listeners. She appealed to her audience in the same way that revival preachers did: “I possess nothing but moral capability—no teachings but the teachings of the Holy spirit.” Baltimore’s Frances Ellen Watkins, a young free Black woman, repeatedly targeted what she saw as the denial of Biblical truth: “A ‘reverend’ man, whose light should be/The guide of age and youth,/Brings to the shrine of Slavery/The sacrifice of truth!” This condemnation of white Christian hypocrisy was often paired with the founding phrases of the American republic that drew authority from God. Having thrown off the yoke of British oppression because of their God-given rights, white Americans were asked a provocative question by Walker: “Was your sufferings under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?”⁴³

In this, Walker gestured towards the greatest fear of every individual enslaver: slave revolt. During this period, this fear hardened into paranoia, and then into policy, but that belief in human unity meant that it was never simple. In the wake of rising abolitionist sentiment, including Walker’s appeal, North Carolina again took up a proposed ban on slave literacy, one that had repeatedly failed because enslavers believed they had a duty to ensure the people they enslaved were Christian, which required being able to read the Bible. When the ban eventually passed in 1830, it permitted the enslaved only “the use of figures,” asserting that “affording them facilities of intelligence and communication” would only make them unhappy and damage the health of the community.⁴⁴ We see in this the contortions into which white supremacists twisted themselves to argue that enslavement was a natural and Bible-ordained system rooted in the inherent intellectual inferiority of those of African descent who still, nevertheless, needed to be prevented from reading and writing.

The following year, Nat Turner, a Black man and sometimes Baptist preacher in Virginia, led a rebellion that lasted four days and resulted in the deaths of over 50 white men, women, and children. The backlash then killed over 100 Black Virginians. What we know of Turner and his motivations comes from a narrative transcribed and then published by the white attorney Thomas Gray while Turner was in jail. Turner argued that he was a devout Christian and had experienced apocalyptic visions over the previous decade, giving him a reputation as a prophet among local enslaved people. The revolt was put down, and Turner was hanged, but the event seemed to confirm the fears of those who pushed for literacy bans. Turner was a Christian, a Baptist. As Joseph Smith was experiencing visions in New York, Turner was experiencing different visions in Virginia. In a way, Turner worked towards the millennium by attempting to remake the world around him. Like Smith, he claimed the mantle of a prophet. And what good could a literacy ban do in the face of that kind of belief?

VII. Schisms

External changes added pressure to American slavery discourse in the 1830s. In 1833, the United Kingdom passed a gradual emancipation bill. In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI’s encyclical In supremo apostolatus condemned the slave trade. Despite increasing immigration to the Northeast, the majority of American Catholics lived in the South in 1839, especially in Maryland and Louisiana.⁴⁵ Just like Protestants sought religious sanction for white supremacy and slavery in the Bible, Southern Catholics, including bishops, advanced a hair-splitting reading of Gregory’s encyclical that condemned the trade but not necessarily the ownership of people. In practice, Southern Catholics ceased neither, and the 1838 sale of 272 enslaved men, women, and children by the Maryland Jesuit community resulted in condemnation from other Jesuits and the Vatican.⁴⁶

Immigration patterns meant that far fewer American Jews lived in the South than the North, but those that did enslaved Black Americans at a similar rate to their white Christian neighbors. Jewish law did not forbid the practice, and participating in the system was one way of aligning with the dominant group.⁴⁷ In almost every faith and denomination in the United States, one could find devout believers opposed to slavery, committed to slavery, and at every point in between. The only possible exception might be Islam, where most American adherents were enslaved. Nonetheless, this is also a reminder that religious belief is always, but one aspect of a person’s ethical and moral calculus, and that belief and practice often do not align. 

Many white Americans defended slavery more strenuously, and even more silently received its benefits. But an increasing number of white Americans spoke and wrote on slavery and abolition, many moved by faith and conscience. As with temperance, Cherokee Removal, and missionary work itself, they banded together in organizations to advance these goals, forming the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. They aimed to abolish slavery on the state and national level, though they condemned slave revolts.⁴⁸ Founded and controlled by white men, the organization platformed Black men like Frederick Douglass with great frequency, celebrating their speech, but never allowing them to rise into leadership. Black and white women in the organization were allowed to do neither.

Activists Angelina and Sarah Grimké hailed from a family of enslavers in South Carolina and rose to prominence in the 1830s speaking and writing directly to Southern women. Opposed by male abolitionists, they also received criticism from female abolitionists. In a series of public essays exchanged with Catharine Beecher, Angelina Grimké articulated not only the Christian and republican roots of abolitionism, but also her own right to speak on the issue as a woman. She posited that if men and women were both endowed with the same “moral nature,” the same ability to recognize good and evil in the world, then they had the same obligation to act on that moral nature: “My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do.”⁴⁹ In this, she echoed Maria Stewart, who claimed she had “nothing but moral capability,” which was all she needed.⁵⁰ Beecher, who had authored a petition in the fight against Cherokee Removal and advocated for women’s education, still argued that women were to use moral suasion alone, starting with the men in their lives. Beecher equated women’s public activism, especially public speaking, with ambition. If she were to step outside of “her place as dependent and defenceless,” she would lose “the sacred protection of religion” and her right to chivalrous treatment.⁵¹

The American Anti-Slavery Society would eventually split over the issue of women’s rights, but the networks formed through their activism brought together women of different religious backgrounds to advocate for their own rights. Many of these abolitionists would have been familiar with prominent feminist Fanny Wright, a Scottish writer and activist who had advocated for women’s property rights and sexual freedom in the United States. But Wright also opposed organized religion, making her an unacceptable model of feminism for many women. American religious women had been advocating for and creating educational opportunities for white and Black women for decades, while others advocated ordaining women within their denominations. Clarissa Danforth had been ordained by the Free Will Baptists in 1815, and Joseph Smith had received a revelation ordaining his first wife Emma in 1830. Still, the pulpit was largely closed to women, just as the stage was closed to women abolitionists.

A handful of women who had cut their teeth in the anti-slavery movement later organized the 1848 women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. Those in attendance issued a “Declaration of Sentiments,” modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Just as abolitionists had used the entangled political and religious views of that document to highlight the hypocrisy of slaveholding, so did the women of this convention, proclaiming: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” Where the original declaration laid out the charges against George III, this charged American men with a variety of crimes, including withholding the franchise and denying women property rights, but also barring them from participation in the ministry, denying them access to their children in divorce, establishing a different code of morals for men and women, and “[claiming] the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.”⁵² As with white Americans, who had no motivation to dilute their political and economic power by liberating and enfranchising Black Americans, men in America were generally uninterested in diluting their power by enfranchising women.

Just as with controversies over revivalism and cross-denominational missionary work, the question of slavery and abolition would split white Protestant denominations. For the Presbyterians, those in support of ending slavery and willing to engage in public activism aligned with the New School in the 1837 split, but the Old School would split over the issue of slavery in 1861 when the country itself did. In 1844, the Methodist Church split apart over slavery, followed by the Baptists the following year. While the final straw for these splits was often a fight about tactics, or who was appointed to missionary endeavors, the root of all of it was the unsquareable circle of holding other human beings as property.

The 1850s were bookended by two religiously motivated antislavery acts, both in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and its political fallout. Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown were born only a few miles apart in northwestern Connecticut, and they represent two important impulses in anti-slavery activism that would carry the nation into—and through—the Civil War.

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, published serially in 1851, depicted slavery as an abomination that degraded human relationships, especially families, which were fundamental to the human experience. Her older sister had counseled the Grimkés and others like them that the appropriate direction for their efforts was to persuade their husbands and sons in private, not to speak to the masses. Stowe chose to persuade as well, but spoke to other mothers through her novel, asking: “if it were your Harry, mother . . . that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, to-morrow morning . . . how fast could you walk?” For decades, moral reformers had made the argument that mothers were the guardians of the nation’s morality, and  Angelina Grimké had argued that women had the same moral nature as men and the same obligation to speak up in the face of cruelty. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s appeal to mothers combined those arguments into her own “plea,” one that attempted to reckon with the rot at the core of her father’s “young empire of mind, and power, and wealth.”⁵³

Even the most fervent of abolitionists had to admit, though, that moral suasion had not stopped the gains of “the slave power” in the United States. John Brown knew it. He had been an active organizer in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio before moving his family to Kansas to enter the bloody conflict over whether that territory should enter the Union as a free or slave state. His 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, often portrayed as the isolated act of a fanatic, was in fact a long-planned, carefully plotted, and well-financed effort born out of Christian fervor for slave liberation inspired by Toussaint Louverture and Nat Turner. Brown’s funding came from prominent New England abolitionists and religious leaders like Theodore Parker and Samuel Gridley Howe, but funding and counsel came from a network of Black abolitionists he came to know and respect, including Harriet Tubman and Mary Ellen Pleasant.⁵⁴

When he was tried in the wake of the raid and sentenced to death, his speech to the court was reprinted in newspapers around the country. In an argument that echoed Stowe’s plea to mothers, Brown pointed out that if he had committed violence to defend the wealthy white men in attendance or their family members, he would have been celebrated, but instead he had committed violence to defend enslaved people. The Bible he had sworn on told him to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them” (Hebrews 13:3), and he had “endeavored to act up to that instruction.”⁵⁵

Brown’s death became martyrdom—and struck fear into the hearts of enslavers—not because he was willing to do what others would not, but because he was willing to follow in the path of Black liberators who had gone before, to risk his life for the liberation of the enslaved. His actions were an expression of his faith, and the radicalism of that faith was that all men were created equal, in this world and the next. Brown had resolved the tension at the heart of the American republic to his own satisfaction. What, if anything, the rest of America would do to enact Lyman Beecher’s imagined “moral and political emancipation of the world” remained to be seen.⁵⁶

VIII. Conclusion

By 1860, American religion had proved to be far more than a matter of private conscience. American religion was wielded as a social and political force. Gender relations, economic inequality, imperial conquest, migration, nativism, and the very nature of national identity all drew on religious rhetoric. And American religion was in turn shaped by these forces. Experiments with new religious movements unleashed both spiritual creativity and violent backlash. New waves of migration challenged Protestant authority and exposed the limits of Americans’ commitment to religious liberty. Over the nineteenth century, revivals spawned both reform and rebellion. The same religious energies that inspired hope for social progress also intensified social tensions. The splintering of the nation’s largest Protestant denominations unleashed a new form of sectionalism. Pulpits, North and South, pushed the nation closer to the cataclysm and ultimate redemptive potential of civil war.

IX. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Erin Bartram, with content contributions by Chance E. Bonar, Erin Bartram, Stephen Howard Browne, William E. Burns, M Dougherty, Caroline Greer, Alexandria Griffin, Tyler E. Kibbey, Mélena Laudig, William Perez, Shari Rabin, Steven Peach, Obbie Tyler Todd, Ian Wilson, and Ben Wright.

Recommended Reading

1. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
2. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024).
3. Brandi Denison, Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
4. Maura Jane Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5–17.
5. Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
6. Jennifer Graber, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (Oxford University Press, 2011).
7. Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
8. Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. S. Deborah Kang (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
9. Chester Gillis, Roman Catholicism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
10. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
11. Jennifer Graber, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
12. Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
13. Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
14. Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
15. Leon A. Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1976).
16. Adam Jortner, No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
17. Gale L. Kenny, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834–1866 (University of Georgia Press, 2024)
18. Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014)
19. Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022)
20. Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism (New York: Liveright, 2024).
21. Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (New York: Liveright, 2020).
22. Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2017).
23. Ben Wright, Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020).

Notes

1. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Truman & Smith, 1835), 16-7. ↩︎
2. Beecher, A Plea for the West, 11. ↩︎
3. Philip Barlow and Stephen J. Stein, “Religious and Geographical Expansion, 1790–1865,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in America (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 121-5. ↩︎
4. Dennis C. Dickerson, “The Freedom Church, 1831–1861,” in The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History, 56–107 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). ↩︎
5. Charles Grandison Finney, Sermons on Various Subjects (1834), 13. ↩︎
6. Daniel Walker Howe, Making of the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 1997), 197-208. ↩︎
7. William Miller, Evidence from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ, About the Year 1843: Exhibited in a Course of Lectures (1836). ↩︎
8. Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (Hill & Wang, 2007), 150-180; Charles Crowe, George Ripley, transcendentalist and utopian socialist (University of Georgia Press, 1967); Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter With Catholicism (University of California Press, 1994), 302-7; Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 128-131, 134-153; David. J. O’Brien, Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic (Paulist Press, 1992), 34-38. ↩︎
9. Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism (Liveright, 2024), 17-31. ↩︎
10. Adam Jortner. No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America (John Hopkins University Press, 2021), 97; John P Greene, Facts Relative to the Expulsion of the Mormons from the State of Missouri, under the “Exterminating Order” By John P. Greene, An Authorized Representative of the Mormons, (R. P. Brooks, 1839), 26. ↩︎
11. Warsaw Signal, (Illinois, May 19, 1841), Vol. 2, No. 2. ↩︎
12. Park, American Zion, 81; Times and Seasons, 15 July 1842, The Joseph Smith Papers, 855, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/times-and-seasons-15-july-1842/9#facts. ↩︎
13. Park, American Zion, 76-81. ↩︎
14. Benjamin Park. Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020), 274. ↩︎
15. These events were documented and published by E. E. Lewis shortly after the events were described in a small pamphlet that was signed by a few dozen witnesses. See: E. E. Lewis, A Report of the Mysterious Noises, Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox (E. E. Lewis, 1848). ↩︎
16. Quoted in David Cameron Miller, “Kindred Spirits: Martin Johnson Heade, Painter; Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Poet; and the Identification with ‘Desert’ Places” in American Quarterly 32, No. 2 (1980): 67-185. ↩︎
17. Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press, 2018); Amanda Hendrix-Komoto Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). ↩︎
18. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Harvard University Press, 2006), 8-10; Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2012); Brandi Denison, Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879-2009 (University of Nebraska Press, 2017); and Graber, Gods of Indian Country. ↩︎
19. Tiya Miles, “‘Circular Reasoning: Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns,” American Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2009): 221-243. ↩︎
20. Catharine Beecher, “CIRCULAR: Addressed to Benevolent Ladies of the United States (Boston, 1829). See also Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (W. W. Norton, 1973). ↩︎
21. Beecher, A Plea for the West, 49. ↩︎
22. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007), 198–200. ↩︎
23. Erin Bartram, “American Catholics and ‘The Use and Abuse of Reading,’ 1865–1873,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 29, no. 1 (2019): 37-40. ↩︎
24. Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (New York University Press, 2017); Leon Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820-1870 (Brandeis University Press, 1976). ↩︎
25. Zev Eleff, Who Rules the Synagogue?: Religious Authority and the Formation of American Judaism (Oxford University Press, 2016). ↩︎
26. Shari Rabin, “Judges and Jews: Congregational Conflict and the Protestant Secular in 19th-Century America,” Religion 48 no. 4 (2018): 659-677; Allan Tarshish, “The Charleston Organ Case,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1965): 411-449. ↩︎
27. Jonathan D. Sarna and David G. Dalin, eds. Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience (Notre Dame University Press, 1997). ↩︎
28. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 127. ↩︎
29. Laura Yares, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (New York University Press, 2023); Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Harvard University Press, 2000). ↩︎
30. Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America (University of California, 2012), 152-3, 163. ↩︎
31. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford University Press, 1992); David J. Endres, “Know-Nothings, Nationhood, and the Nuncio: Reassessing the Visit of Archbishop Bedini” U.S. Catholic Historian 21 (Fall 2003): 1-16; Katie Oxx, The Nativist Movement in America: Religious Conflict in the 19^th Century (Routledge, 2013). ↩︎
32. Maura Jane Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford University Press, 2012), 5-17. Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2011), 7, 29-30. See also Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Greenwood Press, 1995); Peter D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Identity from the Risorgimento to Fascism (University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Jason K. Duncan, Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685-1821 (Fordham University Press, 2005). ↩︎
33. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, The Linwoods; or, “Sixty years since” in America, Vol. 1 (Edward Churton, 1835), 91. ↩︎
34. Erin Bartram, “Jane Minot Sedgwick II and the World of American Catholic Converts, 1820-1890,” (PhD Diss., University of Connecticut, 2015), 74-77, 148-151; Tracy Fessenden, “The Convent, the Brothel, and the Protestant Woman’s Sphere,” Signs 25, no. 2 (2000):451-478; Marie Anne Pagliarini, “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 9, no. 1 (1999): 97-128. ↩︎
35. A Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia (B. Perry, 1844). ↩︎
36. Beecher, A Plea for the West, 62. ↩︎
37. Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and spindle : or, life among the early mill girls ; with a sketch of “The Lowell Offering” and some of its contributors (1898), 83-86. ↩︎
38. For helpful overviews, see Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2006); J. Albert Harrill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture 10, no.2 (2000): 149–86. ↩︎
39. Josiah Priest, Bible Defence of Slavery, and Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro Race, 5^th ed. (W. S. Brown, 1852); Holland N. McTyeire, Duties of Masters to Servants: Three Premium Essays (Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1851). ↩︎
40. See David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton University Press, 2005). ↩︎
41. G. Blair Nelson, “Infidel science! Polygenism in the mid-nineteenth-century American weekly religious press,” (PhD Diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2014) 1-5. ↩︎
42. Albert Barnes, An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Perkins & Purves, 1846); George B. Cheever, The Guilt of Slavery and the Crime of Slaveholding: Demonstrated from the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures (Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1860]). ↩︎
43. David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (Hill and Wang, 1965 [1830]). ↩︎
44. Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 180. ↩︎
45. Chester Gillis, Roman Catholicism in America (Columbia University Press, 2020), 66-68. ↩︎
46. Thomas Murphy’s Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838 (Routledge, 2001) is a thorough account of slavery on Jesuit plantations. For an overview of attempts to confront Jesuits’ history of slavery, see Kelly L. Schmidt, “A National Legacy of Enslavement: An Overview of the Work of the Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 8 (2021), 81-107.  For primary sources specifically related to the 1838 sale, see the Georgetown Slavery Archive (https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/). On the lives and communities of people enslaved by the Jesuits, see Kelly L. Schmidt, “Enslaved Faith Communities in the Jesuits’ Missouri Mission,” U.S. Catholic Historian 37 no. 2 (2019): 49-81; and associated digital visualization project, “Jesuits’ Enslaved Communities in Missouri” (https://kumu.io/KLS/jesuits-enslaved-communities). ↩︎
47. Mark I. Greenberg, “Becoming Southern: The Jews of Savannah, Georgia, 1830-70,” American Jewish History 86, no. 1 (1998): 60-61. ↩︎
48. The American Anti-Slavery Society, The Constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society: with the declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention at Philadelphia, 1833, and the address to the public issued by the Executive Committee of the Society in Settember [sic] 1836 (New York, 1838) ↩︎
49. Angelina E. Grimke, Letters to Catherine Beecher (Boston, 1838), 115. ↩︎
50. Maria W. Stewart, “Lecture Delivered At The Franklin Hall, Boston, September 21, 1832” in Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (Washington, 1879), 55-59. ↩︎
51. Catharine E. Beecher, Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism (Philadelphia, 1837), 101-102. ↩︎
52. Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, July 19th and 20th, 1848. Proceedings and Declaration of Sentiments (Rochester, 1848). ↩︎
53. Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston, 1852), 80; Beecher, A Plea for the West, 16-7. ↩︎
54. Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 112-119. ↩︎
55. Address of John Brown to the Virginia Court, when about to receive the sentence of death, for his heroic attempt at Harper’s Ferry to give deliverance to the captives, and to let the oppressed go free (Boston, 1859). ↩︎
56. Beecher, A Plea for the West, 16-7. ↩︎

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I. Introduction

In 1808, the Reverend Absalom Jones celebrated the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade at St. Thomas African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. God appeared on “behalf of oppressed and distressed nations, as the deliverer of the innocent.”¹ Jones offered thanksgiving for a legal end of the transatlantic trade and called for the abolition of domestic slavery. He advocated that African Americans receive educational and missionary training so that they might further extend liberation and Christian faith. He prayed that “this highly favoured country may continue to afford a safe and peaceful retreat from the calamities of war and slavery.”²

Jones’ prayer was not answered, despite his community’s consistent actions to advance liberation. Over the next two decades, the young U.S. republic grew in power but not in peace. Violence and slavery extended across an increasingly connected and geographically expanding landscape. Jones spoke, however, to vital developments in American religion, including the dramatic growth of American churches and institutions linked to social causes. The fact that Jones’ sermon was printed and distributed “by the congregation” also signaled a revolutionary increase in print accessibility, providing new communication tools to religious and civic leaders, their communities, and individual readers.

The young republic swelled with nationalistic fervor but also saw streams of religious revival, organizing, and social agitation outside white Protestants’ designs for a benevolent empire. New waves of immigrants brought Catholic perspectives and practices. Nativist Protestants met them with violence. Some Indigenous communities saw the rise of prophets promoting unity and resistance while others embraced Protestant Christianity. Black Christians continued to oppose slavery and racism, sometimes seeking international alternatives in Haiti or Liberia, but the majority resisted expatriation and fought to make their home in the United States. Hawaiians and others encountered a newly ambitious American expansionism. Women played pivotal roles in all of these endeavors. New organizations and periodicals flooded the cultural and religious landscape with novel theologies, textual and anthropological interpretations, and social experiments.

II. Indigenous Revival and Resistance

In the same year as Absalom Jones’ celebration of the liberatory potential of American governance, Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee spiritual leader, offered no praise for the United States. He instead founded an Indigenous community that professed its own sovereignty, unity, and rejection of American practices. He and his followers established a community on the Wabash River called Prophet’s Town, just below the mouth of the Tippecanoe River, on Miami lands that the United States claimed as the Indiana Territory.

Tenskwatawa was born in 1775 and raised between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes amidst cycles of violence, migration, and settler deception. Many of his Shawnee ancestors and relatives migrated back and forth from their Ohio Valley homelands to live among various Native groups. Europeans established trading relationships, and some Indigenous people gained wealth and status through moments of exchange. But disease, dislocation, and violence led various prophets to reject European influences as early as the 1730s and instead to call for their communities to return to traditional customs.³ Decades of violence and encroachment resulted in seven major compromise treaties between a range of chiefs and the U.S. government between 1804 and 1807 that stripped land from Indigenous people, leading many to seek spiritual renewal and new modes of resistance.

At the end of 1804, in a time of despair and opportunity, Tenskwatawa saw a vision that he believed restored access to sacred power. Raised by his sister and failing to measure up to his older brother, Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa was considered a drunk and a braggart and nicknamed Lalawethika, meaning “the Rattle” or “Noisemaker.” But in his vision, the Master of Life showed him the consequences for sinful tribesmen and the promise of a land overflowing with game, fish, and crops if they corrected course. Renouncing alcohol and his transgressions, he adopted the name Tenskwatawa, “the Open Door” and committed to lead his people into paradise.⁴

Drawing thousands of Native American pilgrims to join him, Tenskwatawa railed against American culture, most especially alcohol but also foreign food, dress, farm implements, hunting with guns, and keeping livestock and dogs. He instructed his followers to revitalize traditional technologies, foodways, and material culture. He had a complicated relationship to traditional rites as he favored some rituals and rejected wealth. But his decision to forbid medicine bags, other ceremonial dances, and many shamans, strained his support.

Tenskwatawa insisted that followers end intertribal violence and embrace a pan-Indian racial category utterly distinct from Europeans and Africans. While intertribal unity was a sensible military response to white American encroachments, many rejected Tenskwatawa’s teachings. Many were averse to his rejection of a traditional understandings of specific ethnic cultures among indigenous people, his denunciation of tribal leaders who compromised with American officials or missionaries, and eventually the witch hunt he launched among his followers.⁵ He also struggled to convince others to follow his calls to abandon children and other relatives with European ancestry, embrace monogamy, and destroy European tools that had enabled prosperous agricultural economies.⁶

Thousands flocked to Tenskwatawa’s villages, first in Ohio and after 1808 in the Indiana Territory. Meanwhile his brother, Tecumseh, traveled across the continent to build a proposed intertribal confederacy. After Tecumseh died at the Battle of Thames in October 1813 and the confederacy fell apart, Tenskwatawa spent a decade exiled in Canada. No longer claiming religious leadership, he sought to exert influence through his connections with British officials. Beginning in the mid-1820s, Tenskwatawa helped facilitate the American removal of Shawnees to Kansas, where he died unceremoniously in 1836.

Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh sought to promote Indigenous cultural autonomy and political independence. The United States responded with aggressive invasion. Despite never achieving support from the majority of Shawnees or uniting indigenous people across the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, the brothers greatly alarmed American officials.⁷

By 1817, the American government moved Ohio’s major tribes, including the Ottawa, Shawnee, Seneca, and Wyandot, to reserves near the towns of their principal chiefs.⁸ These three largest tribes in Ohio – the Shawnee, Seneca, and Wyandot – responded in different ways to Christian missionaries. The Shawnee at Wapakoneta welcomed Quakers, who taught farming and industrial techniques. The Shawnee allowed the Quakers to establish a trade school, but they did not permit the Quakers to preach or establish a mission. While retaining their own religious traditions, their religious practice underwent a profound change as the tribe grew closer to the Good Grandmother, a more loving figure in their cosmology than the distant Great Spirit.⁹

The Seneca refused Christian missionaries from their reserve along the Lower Sandusky River, where they cultivated successful farms. Following the Gaiwiio, or “Good Word,” of Handsome Lake, a respected prophet among their fellow Haudenosaunee, they were willing to adopt the technology they associated with white people but refused their religion. Their prophet forbade them from drinking alcohol, practicing witchcraft, and divorcing, but the Seneca ignored his encouragements to simplify ancient rituals that he argued would frighten white people. They continued many older traditions, including the White Dog Sacrifice of mid-winter, where two spotless white dogs, one male and one female, were killed as an offering to the Great Spirit.¹⁰

Many of the Wyandot embraced the faith of missionaries. Those who converted to Christianity when the French claimed the Ohio Country became practicing Catholics and most of the tribe traveled to Detroit every Easter to attend mass. But at least half of the tribe converted to Methodism after John Stewart, a free man of African descent, arrived at the tribe’s Grand Reserve on the Upper Sandusky River in 1817. Stewart, originally from Virginia, was a dynamic preacher who won converts through his stirring words and his beautiful singing voice. Stewart was aided by a free Black interpreter, Jonathan Pointer, who was fluent in the nation’s language. The Wyandot appreciated the strict morality he taught, including the demand for faithfulness in marriage, total abstinence from alcohol, and an end to seeking revenge.¹¹ The preacher faced questions from white authorities around his free status and opposition from young Wyondot leaders such as Mononcue and Two Logs, who initially considered it improper to entertain a Black preacher on assumptions of racial inferiority.¹²

Stewart contracted tuberculosis and another Methodist minister, James Finley, arrived at the Grand Reserve by 1822. Finley established a mission school, which taught Wyandot children religion as well as practical skills like reading, writing, arithmetic, carpentry, and animal husbandry. Finley built the Methodist Mission Church, a replica of which stands to this day, with funds provided by the U.S. government. Young Wyandot chiefs, like Mononcue and Between the Logs, became Christian ministers themselves. In 1822, Presbyterian missionaries opened a mission and school for the Ottawa in the Maumee River Valley. Dozens of Ottawa, Wyandot, Shawnee, and Munsee children, along with the children of local settlers, attended the school. While few converted to the Presbyterian faith, the Ottawa appreciated the efforts of the missionaries to translate the New Testament into their own language – and to protect them from local whiskey traders.¹³ Many credited their newfound faith with preventing the dissolution of their tribe, especially during their removal to the Kansas Territory in 1843. One of their first acts, after founding the town of Kansas City, Kansas, was to establish a Methodist church.¹⁴

Many Native American communities suffered from predatory compromise treaties with the U.S. government, such as the 1805 Treaty of Tellico that took Cherokee lands. By the early nineteenth century, private land ownership, European migration, and the enslavement of Africans in plantation agriculture resulted in economic stratification that privileged an emergent group of Cherokee elites. Some claimed status in connection to Protestant Christian missionaries. Muscogee leaders welcomed Moravian schools for the teaching of language and industrial skills but not religion, while a number of Cherokee embraced the Christian faith and saw the 1801-founded Moravian Spring Place Mission School in Northwest Georgia as vital to cultivating an educated class of leaders who could resist the encroachment on their lands and culture.

In 1817, the thirteen-year-old Cherokee student Gallegina Watie was invited to attend the Foreign Missionary School (FMS) in Cornwall, Connecticut. Born in the Cherokee nation, Watie was the oldest son of nine children of a prominent family and was educated at Spring Place Mission. On his way to Connecticut, Watie was introduced to Elias Boudinot, a New Jersey lawyer and former president of the Continental Congress, whose name the thirteen-year-old took in tribute. His namesake was a devout Presbyterian, supporter of women’s political inclusion, critic of slavery, and opponent of new proslavery western states. In 1816, he had also been a founder and first president of the American Bible Society (ABS) and published a book using speculative arguments built on Bible texts to argue that Native Americans were the “ten lost tribes” of Israel. He asserted that American mistreatment of Native Americans would subject the nation to the judgment of God, suggesting “Europeans” were “the original cause of their sufferings… in possession of their lands… enriched by their labors… a large proportion of their numbers perished in our wars and by our means.”¹⁵

The elder Boudinot’s work to advance religious societies and publications and his conjecture-stuffed warnings of God’s judgment against the early U.S. republic reveal a profound contradiction that the school the Cherokee student named after him sought to resolve. Efforts to “civilize” the “heathen” brought together the young nation’s political ideologies of exceptionalism and white supremacy. And even so, Boudinot and his Native American and global cohort of classmates possessed consequential agency over where they studied, whom they married, and what they advocated for their communities.

The school had been founded just a year prior by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the culmination of a movement among evangelically minded institutions to train Indigenous students as missionaries. This effort took off after Yale President and Congregationalist Minister Timothy Dwight met and sought educational opportunities for “Henry” Ōpūkahaʻia, a Hawaiian-born young man who arrived in New Haven in 1809. Six of the twelve students in the FMS’s inaugural class were Hawaiian, and Boudinot joined the next year as the enrollment doubled to twenty-four and included seven Indigenous North American pupils including Abanaki, Choctaw, and Cherokee students. The school came to include Chinese, Greek, Indian, Bengali, Javanese, Tahitian, and New Zealander students as well.¹⁶ The goal of the school was to send these young men back to their homelands to preach conversion to Christianity. Ōpūkahaʻia’s desired to do so, but he died of typhus in Connecticut in 1818, the year Boudinot arrived. The FMS’s very existence was shaped by the era’s evangelical thrust. New organizations and greater access to print linked religious efforts with the political ideologies and technological innovations that drove American imperialism.

Boudinot’s cousin John Ridge, whose father Major Ridge was a chief and leader of the Cherokee in the Red Stick War, followed him to Connecticut to study. While at FMS, Ridge fell in love with Sarah Northrup, a young white woman whose father was the school steward. Similarly, after Boudinot relocated back to Cherokee lands, he continued to romantically correspond with Harriet Gold, the daughter of a FMS founder and prominent white family in Cornwall. Both courtships caused public outrage and mob violence.

Ridge and Northrup fled to the Cherokee nation in 1824, and protests over Boudinot and Gold’s nuptials in 1826 eventually caused the school to close. Ridge and Boudinot became prominent advocates among the Cherokee, with Boudinot founding the Cherokee Phoenix in 1828 and serving as its editor until 1832. Their extended family, which had also enslaved African Americans, managed several plantations, but came to see the abandonment of their lands as essential for their survival after the election of Jackson in 1828 and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Georgia’s confiscation of Cherokee lands and the Ridge family’s break with the majority of Cherokee eventually led to the Ridge family signing the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 and moving to present-day Missouri. The 1838 mass removal to Oklahoma, known as the Trail of Tears, brought Ridge’s rival John Ross into power. The new leaders called for the execution of the leaders of the Ridge-Boudinot family. Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Boudinot were stabbed to death by Ross supporters in 1839.

III. Reform

Organizations like the ABCFM and the ABS, founded in 1810 and 1816, were central to the Protestant efforts to save the world. Historians of the twentieth century recognized this era’s loose network of Protestant societies as the rise of the Benevolent Empire, which aimed to address social issues through voluntary efforts rooted in Christian principles.¹⁷ Evangelical Protestants founded their social reform institutions upon the belief that spreading Christianity would improve the United States and the world. Very few Protestants of the era interpreted the Bible’s apocalyptic literature as an invitation to political inactivity, awaiting a literal thousand-year period of Divine rule on the earth. More often, Protestants believed that active Christian reform efforts were integral to enacting God’s will.

The first American organization designed to extend Christian conversion around the globe was the 1810-founded ABCFM. Congregationalist seminarians in Massachusetts founded the society with the support of professors and prominent clergy backers to collect funds and commission missionaries to serve abroad and among Native Americans. Another society with shared aims, the United Foreign Mission Society (UFMS) was founded in New York in 1817 by the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches, which, by 1826, merged with the ABCFM. These missionary efforts were not merely linked to ideologies of continental expansion and republicanism, but also to an international imperial imagination that sought to extend American influence around the globe.¹⁸

Founded in 1816 and led by New Jersey statesman Boudinot, the American Bible Society (ABS) sought to spread the message of Christianity by translating, producing, and distributing the Bible. Before the United States mandated universal education in the mid-nineteenth century, the American Sunday School Union (ASSU) was founded in 1824 to establish Sunday schools and provide educational resources to rural and frontier areas without schools. However, efforts were not merely limited to explicitly religious concerns. Other organizations also aided people experiencing poverty, labored for the moral improvement of sailors, reformed prisons, lobbied to improve bankruptcy or labor laws, built orphanages, created schools for deaf students, suppressed gambling or dueling, promoted temperance (abstinence from alcoholic drink), fought for the abolition of slavery, and many other issues as well. This era saw the establishment of many more organizations that addressed these social concerns and others. These national societies built an extensive media infrastructure to help control the morality of the American public.¹⁹

The rapid development of these organizations tapped into a spirit of voluntarism fostered by republicanism and religious disestablishment. In contrast to European state-backed churches bolstered by tax revenues, the era witnessed a rising tide of national pride in institutions supported by numerous volunteers and multiple churches from a variety of denominations. These efforts were buoyed by the swelling conversionist themes and revivalist energies in nineteenth century American religious culture. Lyman Beecher, one of the most important preachers to support these Protestant sensibilities and organizations, decried what he feared was alarming moral decline, and he encouraged people of faith to put their energy toward institutions of social reform.²⁰ American Protestants saw benevolent societies as both an answer to the dangers of a rapidly changing America and a way to positively embrace aspects of geographic expansion, economic and technological advances, and social change toward a redemptive and reforming vision and lasting influence.

In 1818, at the same time that the Cherokee Nation-born Boudinot started his studies at FMS in Connecticut, a Connecticut-born young Charles Grandison Finney left teaching to study law under Squire Wright in western New York. Very quickly, though, Finney became consumed by frequent scriptural references in his law books. Finney found himself engaging more deeply with the Bible and spiritual questions. He also became increasingly involved with the local Presbyterian Church and came to serve as the choir director.²¹ In 1821, while praying alone in the woods—not unlike other future preachers and prophets—Finney felt convicted of his sin, assured of God’s forgiveness, and called to preach. He dramatically relayed his urgent sense of religious vocation to a client of the law office later that day: “Deacon Barney, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours.”²² Rather than seeking what he felt were cost-prohibitive formal theological education in the nation’s expanding array of seminaries and divinity schools, he was tutored by his own pastor and granted a license to preach by his local Presbytery in 1823.

Finney disagreed with his mentor over the meanings of original sin and predestination, theological interpretations important to strict Calvinist Presbyterianism in that era. And indeed, Finney would eventually break with traditional Reformed thought. He honed his skills as a preacher and pastor while serving with the Female Missionary Society in Utica and gaining a reputation as a revivalist preacher in rural Jefferson County, blending the emotional intensity of Baptist and Methodist traditions while still appealing to Presbyterians more wary of emotional revivalism.²³ Finney deviated from traditional liturgies and catechism in favor of “new measures” for evangelism such as long meetings, extemporaneous prayer, and emotionally charged appeals. One of his innovations was the use of the “anxious seat,” a designated chair or bench at the front of the congregation where individuals publicly demonstrated their conviction of sin and their desire to repent and seek salvation.

Despite his growing fame, Finney faced criticism for both his theology and his revival practices. Lyman Beecher rebuked his emphasis on free will. Hailed as the “father of modern revivalism,” he was criticized for emotionally charged appeals and “new measures” that critics derided as encouraging superficial and transient conversions. Some detractors likened his methods to theatrical performances, “mesmerism,” and Roman Catholicism. Finney also faced opposition for empowering women in his revivals by allowing them to organize and speak in public meetings. These controversies culminated in the New Lebanon Convention of 1827, where Presbyterians formally debated and scrutinized Finney’s methods and theological innovations.²⁴

Finney’s most renowned revival took place in 1830–1831 in Rochester, New York, a rapidly growing city shaped by the Erie Canal. The population was a diverse mix of farmers, merchants, laborers, and artisans, all navigating the economic uncertainties and social upheavals brought on by industrialization and urbanization. Finney’s revival transcended denominational divisions, drawing over a thousand supposed converts. Many traveled more than 100 miles to hear his preaching, which spoke not only to individual spiritual needs but also to the collective moral concerns of Jacksonian society.²⁵

Finney went on to preach in major urban centers, including Philadelphia, Wilmington, Providence, Boston, and Manhattan’s infamous Five Points neighborhood, where he notably converted a theater into a church. The social concerns most common in his preaching were linked to the issues at the core of American Protestants’ organizational efforts. He preached against the vices of alcohol and tobacco, urging converts to commit to temperance, abolitionism, and women’s rights, embodying his belief in the integration of personal holiness and societal reform.²⁶ While ministering at the former Manhattan theater, that he converted into the Chatham Street Chapel, he denied holy communion to slaveholders, deeming them unrepentant sinners. Despite threats of mob violence, Finney offered the chapel in October 1833 for a meeting of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, a gesture that led to its destruction by arson. Yet Finney’s approach to spiritual renewal and social engagement prioritized revival preaching over political action, highlighting the tensions and limits of antebellum Protestants’ social reform.²⁷

Finney supported women’s religious organizing and speaking, and he relied on their support. Despite near constant opposition, American women created new opportunities to exert leadership beyond the domestic sphere in the early republic. Many found opportunities to preach within certain Protestant denominations, mostly Baptist and Methodist, in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, and abroad in Canada and Great Britain. Both Black and white women explored new possibilities of public speaking and religious leadership. For Black women, the ever-present threat of slavery and racial violence curtailed the possibilities for those enslaved, impoverished, or mistreated because of their race.

Female preachers occupied a tenuous position in the pulpits of the early American republic. Able to gather large crowds and recognized for their speaking ability, many female preachers wrote of their successes in converting people and working with the male clergy of certain denominations. Dozens published memoirs, such as Freewill Baptist Nancy Towle’s, a white woman from New Hampshire, and other spiritual and theological writings, such as those by the famous Harriet Livermore, a white woman who spoke before Congress. Despite their widespread efforts as religious leaders, female preachers faced significant opposition from multiple quarters: their friends and families, denominational leadership, and, sometimes, even the law.

Women’s access to preaching and itinerancy benefited from the momentum of the era’s emphasis on individual conversion and revival, and women of the early nineteenth century enjoyed several educational advantages that their colonial mothers had not. Not only did they achieve higher literacy rates and greater access to Bibles, tracts, and religious literature through the mechanisms of evangelical print networks, but they also came to occupy new roles in religious gatherings with the growth of revivals and Sunday Schools. Camp meetings, revivals, and local worship services were spaces where female preachers, instead of only college-educated male clergy, were able to exhort more freely than they had previously been allowed.²⁸ Their designator as lay preacher or itinerant, however, often meant they were not ordained or installed to serve as the stated pastors of local congregations.

Though hundreds of women preached and taught in the early part of the century, many of their appointments were unequal and impermanent. They also still faced opposition even in temporary roles and often had to advocate for their right to preach as they traveled to new locations, even when invited to preaching appointments. To defend their ministry vocations, female preachers often dedicated portions of their memoirs to explaining their calling to the ministry. When speaking or writing about their call to the ministry, many women preachers explained that they shied away from the call to preach for as long as they could, accepting it after years of contemplation, challenges to that calling, and encouragement from others that finally led them to the pulpit. Others, both female and male clergy, wrote newspaper articles or pamphlets arguing for the right of women to preach using Biblical figures as justification.

Both Black and white women sacrificed much to sustain their ministries, as they often had to travel long distances on foot or on horseback, board at the houses of church congregants or supporters, preach outside regardless of weather, and were often impoverished. Female preachers, however, viewed the cost of their bodily health as a worthy sacrifice to convert souls and bring people to the Lord. Black female preachers, such as Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw, faced a worse threat to their bodily safety: enslavement. Even though Lee and Elaw were born free, their ministries’ public visibility and presence in communities where slavery was still legal came with the risk of being sold into slavery. Yet, both women braved these dangers and traveled across vast preaching circuits in Virginia and Maryland where they faced increased danger. Southern society disapproved more strongly of women preaching and was more accepting of seizing Black people and condemning them to a life of enslavement.

IV. Families in Slavery and Freedom

The countless new organizations created by American Protestants struggled to respond to the existing dominant social institutions of the family and chattel slavery. Despite a broad range of early Americans who suggested that the Bible and the Christian faith inform society, they profoundly disagreed about what scripture and tradition meant for social ethics. Religious arguments amplified debates over the household, labor, and race.

The family operated as the foremost religious institution in antebellum America, a vehicle through which Americans actualized their ideas of citizenship, race, childhood, gender, and sexuality. Ministers explained that devotion to family life symbolized a greater commitment to the nation and to God. White Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell argued, “Religion never thoroughly penetrates life, till it becomes domestic. Like that patriotic fire which makes a nation invincible, it never burns with inextinguishable devotion till it burns at the hearth.”²⁹ Bushnell, like many white Americans, believed the religion of a nation was measured by the strength of the white Christian families who comprised it.

American Protestant views of the family reinforced the belief that monogamous, heteronormative marriage provided the only virtuous expression of sexuality and the essential foundation for a virtuous family. This view of marriage was not only normative in churches but also enshrined in American law and society, setting up subsequent debates over new religious movements’ that had different views on marriage and family structure. The Church of the Latter-Day Saints, first founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, claimed religious sanction for polygamous marriage, leading non-Mormons to deride the group as culturally backwards and unfit as citizens. When leader Brigham Young declared in 1852 that plural marriage was acceptable for members, a decades-long conflict ensued involving the U.S. government, legislators, everyday Americans, and the Church of Latter-Day Saints.³⁰ As the antebellum period progressed, other groups that failed to embrace normative understandings of the family faced criticism—for example, the Oneida Community, whose leader, John Humphrey Noyes drew the ire of commenters as he advocated for complex marriage, where all women were wives to all men, and all men were husbands to all women in the community.³¹ Such religious movements were derided for not participating in or failing to meet standard American Protestant rubrics for sexuality, marriage, and family.

Domestic manuals, child-rearing guides, novels, and sermons penned across the nineteenth century offered white women and men tools for building families that served God and, most importantly, produced morally upstanding, racially pure citizens. In these accounts, the future of the nation rested on the small shoulders of white children. Whereas eighteenth-century theologians focused on children needing the rod of Christian discipline to address original sin, nineteenth-century Christian theologians represented children as dependent, fragile, and in need of instruction.³²

Representations of the home in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century emphasized male religious leadership, while early nineteenth-century discourse firmly planted the mother as the tender guide of her children’s character development.³³ In The Mother’s Book (1831), for example, white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child argued that a mother’s actions directly shaped a child’s behavior. She argued that if a mother expressed “bad passions,” those negative qualities could easily slip into the child’s “soul,” just as “the imperceptible atmosphere he breathes enters into his lungs.”³⁴ This hyperfocus on the responsibility of the mother in building the moral capacity of her children reveals how discussions about the family in antebellum America gendered caretaking and placed the responsibility of religious education of children onto women.

These portraits of white nuclear families in prescriptive texts obscured the reality of antebellum family life—the expansion of American land and American wealth in the antebellum U.S. relied upon the separation of families of color. The process of Indigenous dispossession, carried out by both white governmental agents and Christian citizens, forcibly separated African Americans and Indigenous Peoples from their families in the name of Christian benevolence. The 1819 Civilization Act exemplified this approach, and missionary organizations had founded at least thirty-eight Christian schools for Indigenous children by 1825, who were separated from their families for long periods of time to attend schools that demanded that Indigenous children give up the religious, cultural, and political traditions of their upbringings.³⁵

The system of chattel slavery also subjected African American families to violence, whereby enslavers regularly sold enslaved people away from mothers, fathers, siblings, and extended kin for profit. Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was separated from his mother as an enslaved child, and he condemned family separation as the epitome of the “cruelty and barbarity of the slave system.” Douglass argued that enslavers also used the practice as “a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.”³⁶ The prevalence of familial separation within Black and Indigenous communities made clear that in the United States the right to family was designed exclusively for white American Christian citizens. Even so, these communities sustained old and developed new values and cultures around family and religion. Some enslaved people cultivated new forms of family. Others stole away to reunite. They defined the family on their own terms and out of their own experiences.³⁷

Enslaved African American communities retained and cultivated African diasporic religious and social traditions outside of the normative white Protestant theologies. Mainstream white American Protestant culture promoted views of marriage and the family that privileged male mastery and white dominance. Many enslaved people created their own, rival frameworks. Women in enslaved communities were often vital in preserving cultural knowledge, rituals, and connections to their ancestors, one another, the Divine, and the earth.³⁸ African traditions among enslaved women ranged from philosophical worldviews to practical medicinal technologies. This included Black women caregivers providing both spiritual support and abortifacient medicine to enslaved women who had been subject to sexual violence. These practices asserted human dignity, reproductive control, and community power that countered how the institution of slavery sought to dehumanize, exert bodily harm, and dispossess the enslaved of collective resources.³⁹ Many of the religious traditions of African-descended enslaved people paid simultaneous attention to spiritual or ancestral presence as well as physical and material conditions.

White enslavers in the early nineteenth century found justification in Christian theologies that assumed gendered and racialized structures of mastery and submission. Against these efforts that increasingly used the Bible and religious instruction for social control, many of the enslaved found affirmations of human dignity and resources for liberation in within Christianity. Many Bible stories of God’s deliverance resonated with the enslaved, such as the narrative of Exodus that tells of the ancient Hebrew people liberated by God from enslavement in Egypt. Scriptures that claimed God’s justice for the oppressed informed the faith of African American Christians.⁴⁰ African American theology and faith communities emerged in relationship to white Protestant churches and beyond them, developing what historian Albert Raboteau termed the “invisible institution.” These spaces and practices, especially among enslaved communities, included worship in homes or in the woods beyond the gaze of enslavers or white authorities. Some African Americans participated in the emphases on revival and affective religion common to Protestantism of the era, even as they developed or adapted culturally specific worship practices that included musical traditions, dance, raising of holy hands, shouting, and call-and-response preaching.⁴¹

Most Southern Black Christians worshipped in biracial congregations where enslavers and those enslaved worshipped alongside one another. This was true of Protestant and Catholic churches from the colonial era and well into the nineteenth century. Congregants both white and Black, celebrated their marriages at the same altar and baptisms at the same font or nearby body of water. But such shared spaces did not translate to civil equality. Eighteenth-century revivalism bolstered African American participation in new Baptist and Methodist connections. In the 1770s George Liele and his convert, David George, established all-Black Baptist churches in South Carolina and Georgia which remained even after the preachers fled to British colonies after the war.

Methodist leaders who denounced slavery and proclaimed spiritual equality also appealed to African American Christians such as Richard Allen, who had been born in Maryland and through his preaching convinced his enslaver to let him purchase his freedom. By 1788, Allen, fellow Free African Society founder Absalom Jones, and others literally walked out of Philadelphia’s largest Methodist Episcopal church, fed up with the racial inequalities they faced relegated to back pews or the balcony and expected to wait until all whites had been served before they could partake in the Lord’s Supper. When they and others sought to pray at the front rail they were commanded to leave by the white religious authorities. Allen reported being “dragged off of our knees” and “treated worse than heathens.”⁴² Such indignity led Jones to serve as founding pastor at St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. Allen organized an entirely Black-run Methodist church named Bethel. Allen and members worked tirelessly to purchase land and fend off legal attacks from white Methodists who attempted to claim rights of ownership or supervision. Similar efforts took place in Baltimore, and the emergent networks led to the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1815 and Allen’s elevation as the denomination’s Bishop.⁴³

In New York, James Varick and Christopher Rush, declined Allen’s desire for a unified denomination and created their own religious network called the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Peter Williams, Jr. became the prominent pastor of St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church in New York. Black Episcopalians were not members of their own denominations, per se, and faced white discrimination on an institutional level, even as they grew in number in several Northern cities. Presbyterian and Congregational churches also remained within white denominational structures, even as a number of Black churches in these denominations were founded in the 1820s and headed up by a well-connected cohort of educated Black Presbyterian ministers.

Reception to Black clergy was mixed in the early nineteenth century, with enslavers and Southern authorities becoming particularly opposed to Black ministers and autonomous Black religious gatherings. Their opposition accelerated after 1830, due in part to the successes of Black religious and civic organizing and the distribution of print materials that criticized slavery. Proslavery repression sought to limit Black religious organizing and racial injustices in integrated churches often proved restrictive and stifling. Still, African Americans continued to participate in religious institutions and create spaces for vibrant, Black-empowering faith across the varied contexts of the early US. Many found deep meaning, ritual significance, languages of liberation, and practices of community in churches.

Even though the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 was led by Black Christians and the work of tireless activists, enslavers in the Upper South also benefited from higher prices selling their human chattel to the cotton fields of the Deep South. This prompted more dislocation and family separations as well as the threat of kidnapping and enslavement. Slavery’s slow decline in the Northern states coincided with efforts to expand and strengthen proslavery power in the South.

The new national bodies created by the Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists by the end of the War of 1812 all evaded moral clarity about slavery. When white Christians spoke up in favor of abolition, they were usually removed from positions of leadership. The very same Protestant bodies also harbored deep anti-Catholic sentiments, and American Catholics struggled to establish their own practices and institutions in the face of frequent persecution. Very few Catholics were willing to add an additional opportunity for confrontation by embracing abolitionist activity.

As white Christian churches offered no structural response to slavery, a number of American religious leaders pushed ideas of emigration and colonization. Paul Cuffee, a Black Quaker, worried that the United States might never offer freedom and dignity to Black people and organized an 1814 emigration plan relocating thirty-eight Black Americans to Sierra Leone, a British colony in West Africa that was founded in part by formerly enslaved people in the Americas who escaped to freedom during the American Revolution. Following the logic of an imperialist missionary impulse that undergirded the ABCFM and other mission organizations, religious leaders in the North and South founded the American Colonization Society (ACS). They hoped that their efforts would bring salvation to Africa, encourage manumissions, and eliminate free Black communities in the U.S. Many enslaved people were given colonization as their only path out of enslavement. Thousands emigrated, and eventually they founded Liberia as the first African republic. Nevertheless, the majority of Black Americans suspected African colonization was a racist scheme to rip them from the land they now called home in an attempted reversal of the transatlantic slave trade.⁴⁴

Churches provided key sites of Black Americans resistance to the ACS. In contrast, Black community organizers and church leaders supported Black-led emigration efforts that helped thousands of African Americans relocate to the Black republic of Haiti in the 1820s. In Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Black church networks held public forums that inspired more abolitionist action. By 1827, African American clergy were at the forefront of founding Freedom’s Journal, the first African American edited newspaper and its successor publication, The Rights of All. Black Presbyterian Reverend Samuel Eli Cornish served as the principal editor of both and general agent. Religious notions of African American “chosenness” informed the paper’s rejection of colonization and efforts to link free African American communities in projects of Black empowerment.⁴⁵

Agents of these papers included prominent Black pastors and community leaders. One of the paper’s agents, David Walker, had been born in North Carolina, but worked in Boston and connected to the organizing efforts of Black Methodists and Prince Hall Freemasons. Walker offered his own antislavery jeremiad, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829. Attacking colonization, Walker justified slave insurrection as a means of God’s justice and called the Christianity of white Americans into question. Walker sent and smuggled copies of his work to cities of the South, including to a Black minister in Savannah and as far as New Orleans, stoking the outrage of white authorities and efforts in Southern states to further restrict Black education and religious services.⁴⁶

Black-authored publications such as those edited by Rev. Cornish and written by Walker demanded that the nation reckon with slavery and racism. These efforts were supported by local religious and educational leaders like Black Baltimoreans Jacob Greener and William Watkins, who encouraged the white activist William Lloyd Garrison toward a more aggressive abolitionism. In 1831, Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator condemned colonization and echoed Walker’s call that violent insurrection would enact God’s vengeance.

Hundreds of individual black congregations were formally organized by the time of the Civil War. While only the Methodist and northern Baptist remained fully independent of white oversight as separate denominations, all provided important structure to local Black communities, and helped organize Black advocacy against slavery and racism on a national level. Indeed, Black churches voiced strong opposition to slavery at a time when white-run churches, paralyzed by their affiliation with slaveholders, often remained indecisive or hostile to reform efforts.⁴⁷

V. Conclusion

The early nineteenth century brought new optimism and new anxieties. Americans fretted over the sins of their society and sought to conquer them by creating religious networks and social reform organizations. The Second Great Awakening advanced northwards from camp meetings to the revivals in Upstate New York. This phase of revivalism provided more energy to the cause of social reform. Assaults on Indigenous communities continued and slavery expanded, dividing religious communities in dangerous ways. Novel methods of communication knit the nation together while also exposing its great divisions. Black Christians developed innovative methods to continue pressing for abolition, while white denominational bodies pushed to silence these critiques. Women took on increased importance as the incubators of religion in the family, while many also pushed for greater autonomy outside of it. Still, many Americans, especially white Americans, remained confident that God was guiding the fate of their nation.

VI. Reference Material

This chapter has been edited by Nathan Jérémie-Brink, with content contributions from Gary James Bergera, Kyle Bulthuis, Nathan Chang, Paul Finkelman, Caroline Greer, Daniel Gullotta, Mélena Laudig, Dylan Nelson, Lori Person-Baynard, Mary Stockwell, and Ben Wright

Recommended Reading

1. Catherine Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
2. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2015).
3. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024).
4. John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
5. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
6. Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024).
7. Sonia Hazard, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford University Press, 2025).
8. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
9. Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (Penn State University Press, 1996).
10. Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (Hill and Wang, 1978).
11. Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014).
12. Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022).
13. Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York University Press, 2008).
14. Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (New York University Press, 2014).
15. Mary Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Tribes (Westholme, 2015).
16. Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
17. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
18. Ben Wright, Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (Louisiana State University Press, 2020).

Notes

1. Absalom Jones, A Thanksgiving Sermon, Preached January 1, 1808, in St. Thomas’s, or the African Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, On Account of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, On that Day by the Congress of the United States (Fry and Kammerer, 1808), reprinted in Early Negro Writing, 1760-1837, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley (Black Classic Press, 1995), 337, 341. These are quotations from Acts 10:34, Acts 17:26, and Psalm 68:31. ↩︎
2. Jones, A Thanksgiving Sermon, 341-342. ↩︎
3. For more detailed descriptions of Shawnee trajectories in the eighteenth century, see R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. (Random House, 2024), 271-307; Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). For the broader nativist response, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). ↩︎
4. Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, 33-34; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 124-130. ↩︎
5. Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, 34-41, 136-139; DuVal, Native Nations; Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, 42-47 and Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 136-139. ↩︎
6. DuVal, Native Nations, 320-322. On the centrality of women’s agricultural labor to Native economies in the Ohio Valley: Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). ↩︎
7. The end of this paragraph draws on Edmunds’ concluding assessment on pgs. 187-190. See also Mary Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Tribes (Westholme, 2015), 9-12. ↩︎
8. “The Treaty at the Foot of the Rapids, September 29, 1817,” Charles J. Kappler, editor, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), 145–155. ↩︎
9. Henry Harvey was the son of the Quaker missionaries who lived among the Shawnee at Wapakoneta. He described their work in his History of the Shawnee Indians, from the Year 1681 to 1854, Inclusive (Ephraim Morgan & Sons, 1855); for changes in the Shawnee religion, see James Howard’s Shawnee: The Ceremonialism of a Native American Tribe and Its Background (Ohio University Press, 1981). ↩︎
10. Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 7–8, 297–298; Elizabeth Tooker, The Iroquois Ceremonial of Midwinter (Syracuse University Press, 1970), 118–123. ↩︎
11. For the first biography of Stewart, see Joseph Mitchell’s The Missionary Pioneer, or a Brief Memoir of the Life, Labors, and Death of John Stewart (Man of Colour), Founder, under God, of the Mission Among the Wyandotts at Upper Sandusky (Printed by John C. Totten, 1827). ↩︎
12. Mitchell, The Missionary Pioneer, 68. ↩︎
13. Important sources on the Presbyterian mission at Ebenezer include “Reverend Isaac Van Tassel, Ebenezer Mission, Maumee, Ohio to the Presbyterian Synod of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1831,” Missionary Herald at Home and Abroad, Volume 27: 387–388 and Charles Sumner Van Tassel’s Story of the Maumee Valley, Toledo, and the Sandusky Region, Volume I (S.J. Clarke, 1929). ↩︎
14. Reverend Finley chronicled his time among the Wyandot in the following works: Autobiography of Rev. James B. Finley; or, Pioneer Life in the West, ed. W. P. Strickland, D.D. (Jennings and Graham, 1853); History of the Wyandott Mission, at Upper Sandusky, Ohio Under the Direction of the Methodist Episcopal Church (J. F. Wright and L. Swormstedt, 1840); and Life Among the Indians, ed. D. W. Clark (Cranston & Curts, 1854). ↩︎
15. Elias Boudinot, A star in the West: or, A humble attempt to discover the long lost ten tribes of Israel, preparatory to their return to their beloved city, Jerusalem (D. Fenton, S. Hutchinson and J. Dunham, 1816), 300. ↩︎
16. John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). ↩︎
17. The first historian to coin the term “Benevolent Empire” was Gilbert H. Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse 1830-1844 (1933; reprinted, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964). ↩︎
18. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2015), 5. ↩︎
19. Sonia Hazard, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford University Press, 2025), 3. ↩︎
20. Lyman Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc., of Lyman Beecher, D.D., ed. Charles Beecher (Harper & Brothers, 1865), 262. ↩︎
21. On the legacy of Finney, see William G. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham, (Wipf and Stock, 2004); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1991), 211-212. ↩︎
22. Garth M. Rosell and Richard A. G. Dupuis, eds., The Original Memoirs of Charles G. Finney (Zondervan, 2002), 20. For academic biographies, see Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Charles Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1996), and Keith J. Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse University Press, 1987). ↩︎
23. Marianne Perciaccante, Calling Down Fire: Charles Grandison Finney and Revivalism in Jefferson County, New York, 1800-1840 (State University of New York Press, 2003), 37-74. ↩︎
24. James D. Bratt, “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 1 (2004): 65–106; Hambrick-Stowe, Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism, 66-75. ↩︎
25. Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (Hill and Wang, 1978). ↩︎
26. Hambrick-Stowe, Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism, 145-150; Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1994), 64-75. ↩︎
27. James H. Moorhead, “Social Reform and the Divided Conscience of Antebellum Protestantism,” Church History 48, no. 4 (1979): 416-430. ↩︎
28. Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, especially chapters one and two. ↩︎
29. Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture, reprint (Charles Scribner & Co., No. 654 Broadway, 1871), 63. Colleen McDannell notes that the chapters of Christian Nurture were first penned between 1847 and 1861. See McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Indiana University Press, 1986), 159n40. ↩︎
30. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). This exclusion reached a tumult following the antebellum period with the Supreme Court case Reynolds v. United States (1878) and the passage of the Edmunds Act in 1887, which worked to criminalize polygamy. See also W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). ↩︎
31. Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (University of Illinois, 1984). ↩︎
32. For discussions of these ideological shifts, see Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective, edited by N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes (University of Illinois Press, 1985), particularly the introduction to Part II: “Perfectible Children in an Imperfect World: Perspectives from Nineteenth Century America.” See also McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America and Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩︎
33. Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, Religion, Life, and the Life Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America (University of Michigan Press, 1992), 134. ↩︎
34. Lydia Maria Child, The Mother’s Book (Published by Carter and Hendee, 1831), 9. ↩︎
35. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, second edition (University Press of Kansas, 2020), 8-9. ↩︎
36. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), Documenting the American South, University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 37-38. ↩︎
37. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). For more on African American practices of family and marriage see Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2019) and Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).  ↩︎
38. Renee K Harrison, Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America, (Basingstoke, Hampshire 2009), 30, 155. ↩︎
39. See Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk, chapters 2 and 3. ↩︎
40. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Exodus: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth Century Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2000); Cornel West, “The Prophetic Tradition in Afro-America,” in African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003). ↩︎
41. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South, updated edition (Oxford University Press, 2004). ↩︎
42. Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen… (Martin & Boden, 1833), 14. ↩︎
43. Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York University Press, 2008). ↩︎
44. Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (New York University Press, 2014. ↩︎
45. Benjamin Fagan, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (University of Georgia Press, 2016). ↩︎
46. Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (Penn State University Press, 1996). ↩︎
47. Ben Wright, Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (Louisiana State University Press, 2020). ↩︎