The History of Christianity in America

Christianity did not arrive in America on the Mayflower, though that is often where the story gets told. By the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, Catholic missionaries had been working in what is now Florida and New Mexico for decades. Spanish Franciscans established missions across the Southwest beginning in the late 1500s. Christianity in America is older, wider, and more complicated than any single origin story can hold.

The Colonial Period

The Pilgrims and Puritans who shaped New England were Calvinist Protestants fleeing religious pressures in England. Their vision was theocratic in its ambitions. John Winthrop's famous "city upon a hill" sermon, delivered aboard the Arabella in 1630, framed the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a covenant people with a divine mission. This language, and this self-understanding, would echo through American rhetoric for the next four centuries.

The colonial period was religiously diverse in ways that surprise modern readers. Maryland was founded as a Catholic refuge. Rhode Island, famously, was founded by Roger Williams on the principle of religious liberty. Pennsylvania welcomed Quakers, Mennonites, and others. The southern colonies were largely Anglican. From the beginning, American Christianity was plural.

The Great Awakenings

The First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s was a wave of evangelical revivals that swept through the colonies, led by figures like Jonathan Edwards and the English preacher George Whitefield. It emphasized personal conversion, emotional experience, and the direct relationship between the believer and God. It also, historians often note, helped create a sense of shared colonial identity that would prove useful a few decades later.

The Second Great Awakening, beginning around 1800, was even more consequential. It drove massive growth in Baptist and Methodist churches, spread Christianity across the frontier, and launched reform movements including abolitionism. The revivalist tradition that would shape American evangelical culture for the next two centuries was born in this period.

Christianity and the Founding

The relationship between Christianity and the American founding is genuinely complex and has been the subject of enormous historical debate. The founders were not a monolith. Some were devout Christians. Others, like Jefferson and Franklin, held beliefs that were more Deist than orthodox. The Constitution does not mention God or Christianity. The Declaration of Independence references a "Creator" and "Nature's God" without specifying a Christian deity.

What is clear is that the moral and philosophical vocabulary of the founding was deeply shaped by a broadly Protestant culture. Natural rights, the dignity of persons, the accountability of rulers -- these ideas had Christian roots even when their expression was more philosophical than theological. The phrase "all men are created equal" does not appear in the Bible, but it grows from soil that Christianity helped cultivate.

The 19th Century

The 19th century was the period in which Christianity became deeply embedded in American public life. Sunday schools spread literacy. Churches built hospitals and universities. The abolitionist movement, which ended slavery, drew heavily on Christian conviction. So, it must be said, did some of the defenses of slavery -- a reminder that Christianity, like all institutions, can be used to argue for almost anything.

The waves of Catholic immigration from Ireland, Germany, and later Italy and Eastern Europe created a new layer of American Christianity that was in tension with the Protestant establishment. Anti-Catholic sentiment was real and often ugly. Over time, a broadly ecumenical American Catholicism emerged as a major force in the country's religious life.

The 20th Century and Today

The 20th century saw the rise of Pentecostalism, which began at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906 and is now one of the fastest-growing forms of Christianity globally. It also saw the mid-century "civil religion" period in which phrases like "one nation under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance (1954) and "In God We Trust" became the official national motto (1956).

The civil rights movement was, in its leadership and its language, explicitly Christian. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister. The moral argument for racial equality was made in the cadences of scripture and the Black church tradition.

Today, roughly 65 percent of Americans identify as Christian, down from higher figures in earlier decades but still an overwhelming majority. American Christianity spans an enormous range of traditions, politics, and practice. What it shares is a history as long as the country itself and a presence in American life that no honest account of the nation can ignore.