Faith in America: A Complete History of Christianity in the United States

Christianity has been part of American life since 1565, more than half a century before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock, when Spanish Catholics founded St. Augustine, Florida. From those first missions to the present day, the Christian faith has shaped the nation's founding documents, its schools and hospitals, its reform movements, its music, and its sense of purpose. This is the full story of Christianity in the United States, told from its colonial beginnings through the Great Awakenings, the founding era, the rise of Pentecostalism, and the faith of the civil rights movement, down to a country where about six in ten adults still call themselves Christian.

At a Glance

• The oldest Christian presence in what is now the United States dates to 1565, when Spanish Catholics founded St. Augustine, Florida, 55 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620.
• Colonial America was religiously plural from the start: Puritan New England, Catholic Maryland (1634), Quaker Pennsylvania, Anglican Virginia, and Rhode Island, founded on religious liberty in 1636.
• The First Great Awakening (1730s and 1740s) and the Second Great Awakening (roughly 1790 to 1840) reshaped American Christianity and fed reform movements including abolition.
• The Declaration of Independence appeals to a "Creator" and "Nature's God," and the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, protected religious liberty without establishing a national church.
• The Azusa Street Revival of 1906 in Los Angeles launched modern Pentecostalism, now one of the fastest-growing forms of Christianity worldwide.
• Congress added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and made "In God We Trust" the national motto in 1956.
• As of the Pew Research Center's 2023 to 2024 Religious Landscape Study, about 62 percent of American adults identify as Christian, down from 78 percent in 2007 but showing signs of leveling off.

Before the Mayflower: Spanish Catholic Beginnings

The American Christian story is older than the one most textbooks tell. On September 8, 1565, the Spanish admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded St. Augustine on the coast of Florida, the first permanent European settlement in what became the United States. It came 42 years before Jamestown and 55 years before Plymouth. Spanish Franciscan friars soon spread a network of Catholic missions across Florida, the Southwest, and eventually California, baptizing and teaching Native peoples long before any English Bible was printed on this continent.

That means the deep roots of American Christianity are not only Protestant and not only English. They are Catholic, Spanish, and Southern as well. Any honest history has to begin with the missions, not the Mayflower. The story of the many streams of American Christianity is explored further across our Christian denominations library, including the Roman Catholic tradition that arrived first.

The Colonial Patchwork of Faith

When English settlers did arrive in the 1600s, they did not bring a single church. They brought many. The Pilgrims and Puritans who shaped New England were Calvinist Protestants seeking to build a purified church. Aboard the ship Arbella in 1630, the Puritan leader John Winthrop framed the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city upon a hill," a covenant community watched by the world, an image that would echo through American speech for four centuries.

Elsewhere the colonies looked entirely different. Maryland was founded in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics, and its 1649 Toleration Act was an early, if limited, law protecting Christian worship. Rhode Island was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams on the then radical principle that the state should not coerce conscience. Pennsylvania welcomed Quakers, Mennonites, and German pietists. Virginia and the southern colonies were largely Anglican. From the beginning, American Christianity was a patchwork, and that plurality would later make religious liberty not just an ideal but a practical necessity. You can trace how these local congregations built towns and civic life in our look at the steeple on Main Street.

The First Printed Word: Faith and Literacy

Faith drove the printed word in early America. The Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640, was the first book printed in British North America. It was a fresh translation of the Psalms into metrical verse for congregational singing, produced by New England ministers including Richard Mather and John Eliot. The impulse to read Scripture for oneself pushed the colonies toward widespread literacy and, eventually, toward schools and colleges. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all began as institutions to train Christian ministers. The King James Bible in particular soaked so deeply into daily speech that its cadences still shape American English, a story told in our piece on the Bible-shaped roots of American English.

The Great Awakenings

Two waves of revival did more than any single event to define American Christianity. The First Great Awakening, in the 1730s and 1740s, was a surge of evangelical preaching led by figures like Jonathan Edwards in Massachusetts and the English itinerant George Whitefield, who drew enormous crowds up and down the colonies. It stressed personal conversion, heartfelt experience, and a direct relationship between the believer and God. Historians often note that it also knit the scattered colonies into a people who shared a common language of the heart, something that mattered a generation later when they debated independence.

The Second Great Awakening, from roughly 1790 to 1840, was even more consequential for the shape of the church. Frontier camp meetings and tireless circuit riders drove explosive growth in Baptist and Methodist congregations, which became, and largely remain, the backbone of American Protestantism. You can read the distinct stories of the Baptist and Methodist movements in our denominations library. The revivals also lit the fire under reform: the abolitionist movement, temperance, and early campaigns for public education all drew energy from awakened Christian conviction. Much of the hymn tradition born in this era is traced in how music shaped American Christian culture and in the hymns that shaped American history.

Christianity and the American Founding

The relationship between Christianity and the founding is genuinely complex, and it has been argued over ever since. The founders were not a single mind. Some were devout, orthodox believers. Others, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, held views closer to deism than to any creed. The Constitution itself does not mention God or Christianity, and its only reference to religion is a protective one: no religious test may be required for public office.

Yet the moral vocabulary of the founding was steeped in a broadly Protestant culture. The Declaration of Independence appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," to a "Creator" who endows people with unalienable rights, to "the Supreme Judge of the world," and to "divine Providence." The claim that rights come from God, not from government, sits at the heart of the American idea. The Confederation Congress echoed the same instinct in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which declared, "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

When the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, forbidding Congress to establish a national church or to prohibit the free exercise of religion, it was written to protect faith, not to remove it from public life. The founders had watched European states persecute rival churches, so they kept the government from picking one. For a fuller treatment, see our study of what America's founders actually believed and our profile of the Christian founding fathers.

The Nineteenth Century: Revival, Reform, and Rupture

The 1800s were the century in which Christianity became deeply embedded in American public life. Churches built hospitals, orphanages, colleges, and Sunday schools that spread literacy. The Bible was the most widely read book in the country. And Christian conviction stood on both sides of the era's greatest moral crisis. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and the preachers of the Underground Railroad grounded the case against slavery in Scripture. So, painfully, did some defenders of slavery, a sobering reminder that the Bible can be pressed into the service of almost any cause when readers want it to be.

The Civil War tore through American churches as it tore through the nation, splitting major denominations along regional lines, some of which would not reunite for a century. Out of that suffering came a deepened national habit of appealing to Providence, most memorably in Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, which read the war itself as a moral reckoning under God.

A Wider Church: Catholic and Immigrant America

The 19th and early 20th centuries brought waves of Catholic immigration from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Eastern Europe, along with Orthodox Christians from Greece, Russia, and the Middle East. This transformed the American religious landscape and provoked real, often ugly, anti-Catholic prejudice. Over time, an energetic American Catholicism became one of the largest and most influential expressions of the faith in the country, building an enormous network of parishes, schools, and charities. The distinct witness of the Eastern Orthodox churches added yet another ancient stream to the American mix. To see how this diversity plays out in the holidays Americans keep, read our history of Christian holidays in America.

The Twentieth Century: Pentecostal Fire and Civil Religion

Two developments defined 20th century American Christianity. The first was the birth of modern Pentecostalism. The Azusa Street Revival began in 1906 in a humble building on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, led by the African American preacher William J. Seymour. Marked by fervent worship, healing, speaking in tongues, and a striking interracial fellowship, it seeded a movement that now counts hundreds of millions of believers around the world. Denominations such as the Assemblies of God trace their roots to it. Learn more in our overview of the Pentecostal tradition.

The second was the rise of what scholars call American civil religion, the public, non-sectarian language of faith woven into national life. Congress added the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance on Flag Day in 1954, and in 1956 it made "In God We Trust" the official national motto and put it on the nation's paper currency. Both stories are told in full in our histories of the Pledge of Allegiance and of the national motto, and gathered at our faith and America hub.

Faith and the Civil Rights Movement

No 20th century movement showed the public power of American Christianity more clearly than the struggle for civil rights. Its leadership and its language were explicitly Christian. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister, and the movement's marches, mass meetings, and moral arguments rose out of the Black church tradition, made in the cadences of Scripture and the old spirituals. King's appeal to a higher law, and to the God-given dignity of every person, drew directly on the same conviction the founders had voiced: that rights come from the Creator. His story sits among the famous Christian Americans who shaped this country.

Christianity in America Today

American Christianity today spans an immense range of traditions, from high liturgical worship to storefront Pentecostal churches, from historic Black congregations to sprawling non-denominational megachurches. According to the Pew Research Center's 2023 to 2024 Religious Landscape Study, about 62 percent of American adults identify as Christian. That is down from 78 percent in 2007, but the long decline appears to have slowed and may be leveling off. Protestants remain the largest group at roughly 40 percent of adults, with Catholics near 19 percent. Christianity is no longer the unquestioned default it once was, yet it remains, by a wide margin, the faith of most Americans.

Why This History Still Matters

The history of Christianity in America is not a straight line of triumph, nor a simple story of decline. It is a long, tangled inheritance of missions and revivals, of principle and hypocrisy, of churches that fought slavery and churches that excused it, of a faith that helped birth both the nation's noblest ideals and its capacity for self-correction. To know that history is to understand the country itself more honestly. The threads of faith and national life have been braided together since 1565, and no clear account of America can leave them out. To keep exploring, visit our faith and America hub or browse the wider blog.