Religion in America

The one time the government asked

In March 1957 the Census Bureau added a question to its monthly Current Population Survey that it has never repeated: what is your religion? Interviewers put it to roughly 35,000 households. The answers came back about two thirds Protestant, roughly a quarter Roman Catholic, a little over three percent Jewish, and under three percent who said they had no religion at all. The Bureau published the tables in 1958 as Series P-20, Number 79, and then the project died. Protests from religious groups worried about government intrusion, and from others worried about how such data might be used, killed any plan to repeat it. Congress later wrote the principle into law: the Census Bureau may not require anyone to answer a question about religious belief or membership.

That single fact shapes everything you will read about American religion, including everything in this course. There is no authoritative count. Every number you have ever seen about how many Americans are Catholic, or evangelical, or Muslim, or none of the above, comes from one of two very different instruments, and those instruments disagree with each other in ways that are not random.

Key idea: The United States has no religion census. American religious statistics are estimates produced by survey researchers and by religious bodies counting themselves, and knowing which kind of number you are holding is the first skill this course teaches.

Two instruments, two blind spots

The first instrument is the self-identification survey. A researcher telephones or emails a probability sample of adults and asks a question like: what is your present religion, if any? Whatever the person says is the datum. Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study is the largest of these, with more than 35,000 respondents in 2007, again in 2014, and roughly 37,000 in the 2023 to 2024 round published in February 2025. The General Social Survey has asked a religion question since 1972, which is what lets anyone speak about trends over half a century.

The second instrument is the congregational count. Here the unit is not the person but the local church, synagogue, temple or mosque, and the number comes from the religious body itself. The US Religion Census, run by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies and published through the Association of Religion Data Archives, has done this roughly every ten years since 1952, asking denominations for congregations and adherents county by county.

Each instrument fails in a characteristic direction, and the failures are worth memorizing.

Instrument	What it captures well	Where it goes wrong
Self-identification survey	Identity, including people who claim a tradition but never attend; change over time; the unaffiliated	People report what they wish were true, especially about attendance; small groups vanish into sampling error; question wording moves the answer
Congregational count	Geography, down to the county; institutional strength; traditions with formal membership	Traditions without membership rolls have to be estimated; some bodies never report; rolls keep the dead and the departed; nobody counts the unchurched

Here is the sharpest illustration of the first failure. In 1993 the sociologists C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler and Mark Chaves did something nobody had bothered to do: instead of asking people whether they had gone to church last Sunday, they went and counted. They tallied actual attendance in Protestant churches in one Ohio county and in Catholic parishes in eighteen dioceses, and compared the count with what national polls reported for the same populations. Poll respondents claimed attendance at roughly double the rate the head counts supported. The finding started an argument that has run for thirty years, and later work using time diaries, which ask people to walk through yesterday hour by hour rather than to describe their habits, has generally supported it.

Why this matters: Attendance is the single least reliable religion statistic in America, because it measures identity as much as behavior. Saying you go to church is a way of saying what kind of person you are.

The question itself is a variable

Ask an American two different questions about the same thing and you will get two different countries. Consider the word evangelical. Pew has generally identified evangelicals by denomination, sorting the specific church a respondent names into a Protestant family. Gallup has often used a self-description question: do you consider yourself a born-again or evangelical Christian? The Southern Baptist Convention knows how many names are on its rolls. These three procedures produce three different populations, overlapping but far from identical, and a person can easily belong to one and not the others. When a news story reports that evangelicals did something, your first question should be: measured how?

The same trap sits under the word none. The unaffiliated are defined by a survey answer, not by a belief. When Pew found the religiously unaffiliated at 16 percent of American adults in 2007, 23 percent in 2014, and 29 percent in the 2023 to 2024 study, it was tracking people who declined to name a religion when asked. That is not the same as atheism. Most of those people, when asked follow-up questions, say they believe in God or in some higher power, and a substantial share pray. The category is real and its growth is real, but the label invites a conclusion the data do not support.

Small groups are where sampling error bites hardest. A national sample of 35,000 adults will contain a few hundred Jews, a couple of hundred Muslims, and perhaps a hundred Hindus. That is enough for a share of the population and nothing like enough for detail, which is why Pew has run dedicated studies of Jewish Americans in 2013 and 2020, Muslim Americans in 2007, 2011 and 2017, and Asian Americans in 2012. When you see a claim about a small tradition drawn from a general survey, check whether the sample could possibly support it.

When a church counts itself

Denominational numbers have the opposite problem: they are institutional, and institutions have reasons. A denomination that reports baptized members counts a different thing from one that reports weekly attenders, which counts a different thing again from one that reports everyone in a household connected to the parish. Catholic dioceses have historically estimated their populations partly from parish registers and partly from local knowledge. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reports membership from its own records and keeps names on the rolls unless a member formally resigns, which is one reason national surveys consistently find a smaller share of Americans calling themselves Latter-day Saints than the church's totals imply. Neither number is a lie. They answer different questions.

Some communities are hard to count for structural reasons. Islam has no central membership registry in the United States, so estimates rest on mosque surveys, immigration and ancestry data, and modeling; Pew's 2017 estimate of about 3.45 million Muslims of all ages is a projection built from several sources, not a headcount. Historically Black Protestant denominations were undercounted for decades in congregational censuses because many congregations were independent or did not report. Native American traditions frequently have no membership at all in the sense a survey means, since the practice belongs to a community and a place rather than to an organization you join.

The point: Every religious statistic is the output of a procedure. Before you use one, ask who was asked, in what words, who did the counting, and who the method structurally cannot see.

Reading a real disagreement

Work a case. In February 2025 Pew published the third Religious Landscape Study and reported that the Christian share of American adults, which had fallen from 78 percent in 2007 to 71 percent in 2014, stood at 62 percent, but that the decline had slowed and might have leveled off since about 2019. Coverage split immediately. Some outlets ran the leveling off. Others ran the long fall. Both were in the report.

What would settle it? Not another headline. You would want to know whether the apparent plateau survives another survey wave, whether it appears in the General Social Survey as well as in Pew's, and whether it holds within age cohorts or is an artifact of the oldest and most religious Americans dying while the least religious young adults age into the sample. Pew's own modeling work, published in 2022, projected several futures precisely because the answer depends on assumptions about whether young adults keep switching out of religion at the rates their predecessors did. A responsible reader of religion statistics holds a trend loosely and asks what would change it.

What this course does with numbers

You will meet a lot of numbers in the next fourteen lessons, and they will all be dated and attributed, because an undated religion statistic is close to useless. You will also meet claims that no number can settle. Whether the Second Great Awakening was a genuine surge in devotion or a change in how devotion was recorded is partly a measurement question and partly not. Whether the founders intended a secular republic is not a measurement question at all.

One more habit before we start. This course describes traditions as their adherents would recognize them, and it presents scholarship as scholarship. Those are two different registers, and both are honest. When a historian argues that a revival was organized by publicity rather than sent by God, that is a claim about publicity, and it does not answer the theological question, which is not the historian's to answer. You will be asked repeatedly to hold the description and the analysis side by side without collapsing either into the other.

Common misconceptions

• The census tracks American religion. It asked once, in a 1957 sample survey, and has not asked since; federal law now bars requiring an answer about religious belief or membership.
• The nones are atheists. Most religiously unaffiliated Americans say they believe in God or a higher power; atheists and agnostics are a minority within the category.
• Church attendance figures measure attendance. They measure what people say about attendance, and head counts have repeatedly found the real rate far lower than the reported one.
• Denominational membership numbers and survey numbers should match. They count different things, one from institutional rolls and one from personal identity, and the gap is information rather than error.
• A national survey can describe any group. Groups under about two percent of the population appear in samples too small to support detail, which is why dedicated studies exist.

What to carry forward

• There is no American religion census; the 1957 Current Population Survey question was a one-off, and Congress later barred compulsory religion questions.
• Self-identification surveys capture identity and miss behavior; congregational counts capture institutions and miss the unchurched and the unregistered.
• Reported church attendance runs roughly double what head counts and time diaries find.
• Category labels such as evangelical and none are artifacts of question wording, and different instruments produce different populations under the same word.
• The Christian share of American adults fell from 78 percent in 2007 to 62 percent in 2023 to 2024, with recent evidence that the decline has slowed.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center. (2025, February 26). Decline of Christianity in the U.S. has slowed, may have leveled off. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
2. Pew Research Center. (2015, May 12). America's changing religious landscape. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
3. Association of Religion Data Archives. (n.d.). U.S. religion census: Congregational membership. ARDA. thearda.com.
4. Pew Research Center. (2022, September 13). Modeling the future of religion in America. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
5. Hadaway, C. K., Marler, P. L., and Chaves, M. (1993). What the polls don't show: A closer look at U.S. church attendance. American Sociological Review, 58(6), 741-752.
6. U.S. Bureau of the Census. (1958). Religion reported by the civilian population of the United States: March 1957. Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 79.

A sick man on the Allegheny

On 15 June 1799, in a Seneca village on the Allegheny River in northwestern Pennsylvania, a man named Sganyadaiyoh, known in English as Handsome Lake, collapsed and appeared to die. He was about sixty-four, a half-brother of the war leader Cornplanter, and by his own later account he had spent years drinking heavily in a community that had lost most of its land, most of its population, and nearly all of its political independence within a single generation. When he revived, he said three messengers in ceremonial dress had come to him with instructions.

Over the following years the messages accumulated into a body of teaching the Seneca call the Gaiwiio, the Good Message. It condemned alcohol, witchcraft accusation and the sale of land. It told people to keep the old ceremonial calendar of the longhouse, the Midwinter rites and the thanksgiving addresses, while adopting farming practices that would let families survive on reservations. It reorganized family duty in ways that fit the new economy without abandoning the clan system. After Handsome Lake's death in 1815 his followers fixed the teaching in a recited form, and the Code of Handsome Lake is still preached in Iroquois longhouses in New York, Ontario and Quebec today.

Start here rather than with a mission or a massacre, because it establishes the thing most surveys of American religion get wrong. Native religious life did not merely receive history. It made things. The anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace studied Handsome Lake closely and drew from him a general concept, the revitalization movement: a deliberate effort by members of a society under extreme stress to construct a more satisfying culture, usually around a prophet and a vision. Wallace's category has since been applied to movements worldwide, and it began in a Seneca village.

The core of it: Native American traditions are living religions with their own internal development, prophets, reformers and arguments, not a static background that history happened to.

The category problem

Before going further, a definitional difficulty that will not go away. Most Indigenous languages of North America have no word that separates religion from the rest of life, in the way that English separates religion from economics, law and medicine. What an outsider labels a religious ceremony may be, from the inside, simultaneously a legal proceeding, a medical treatment, a history lesson and a form of land management. When Diné people conduct a Blessingway, the chant restores hozho, a state usually translated as beauty, order and harmony, and the restoration is understood to be as real and as practical as setting a bone.

Three features recur widely, with the warning that generalizing across more than 570 federally recognized tribal nations, plus many more communities without federal recognition, is always risky.

• Place, not text. Ceremonies are tied to specific mountains, rivers, springs and burial grounds. A Christian congregation can relocate and remain itself; a ceremony whose meaning depends on a particular place cannot. This is why sacred-site cases are not disputes about scenery.
• Community, not membership. Participation follows from being a member of a clan, a society or a village rather than from a decision to join. There is often nothing for a survey to count.
• Restricted knowledge. Much ceremonial knowledge belongs to particular societies, families or initiates, and is not meant for outsiders or for print. That restriction is a religious rule, not a public relations preference.

That last point sets a real limit on this lesson. Some of what you might want to know is not yours to know, and the appropriate scholarly response is to say so rather than to hunt for a source that leaked it.

Contact, and the first revolt

Spanish missionaries reached the Rio Grande pueblos in the sixteenth century, and by the 1600s Franciscans in New Mexico were suppressing katsina ceremonies, seizing masks and prayer sticks, and flogging religious leaders. In 1675 the governor arrested forty-seven Pueblo religious leaders for sorcery and hanged three. One of those released, a Tewa man from Ohkay Owingeh known as Popé, organized what followed.

On 10 August 1680 the pueblos rose together in a coordinated revolt, coordinated by runners carrying knotted cords that counted down the days. Roughly four hundred Spanish colonists and twenty-one of thirty-three Franciscans were killed, and the survivors fled south to El Paso. The Spanish did not return in force for twelve years. It remains the most successful Indigenous uprising against a European colonial power in North America, and its immediate cause was religious suppression.

In New England the pattern was different. The Puritan missionary John Eliot translated the Bible into Massachusett, printing the New Testament in 1661 and the whole Bible in 1663, the first Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere. He gathered converts into fourteen "praying towns," beginning with Natick in 1651, where residents were expected to cut their hair, adopt English dress and submit to English-style courts. During King Philip's War in 1675 and 1676 the colonists interned many praying-town residents on Deer Island in Boston Harbor through the winter, where large numbers died. Conversion had not bought protection.

Worth holding on to: Missions were never only about belief. They came bundled with dress, language, family structure, land tenure and law, which is why resistance to them was rarely about theology alone.

The federal suppression, in law

The nineteenth-century United States did not merely tolerate missions; it hired them. Under the peace policy of the Grant administration in the 1870s, Christian denominations were assigned reservations to run, with agents nominated by mission boards. Then came outright prohibition. In 1883 the Secretary of the Interior, Henry Teller, directed agents to stamp out what he called heathenish dances and practices, and the resulting Rules for Courts of Indian Offenses made participation in the Sun Dance, and the practice of medicine men, punishable offenses on reservations. Rations could be withheld from families whose members participated.

Boarding schools carried the same policy to children. Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania in 1879 under Richard Henry Pratt, whose stated aim was to kill the Indian and save the man. Children were removed from home, forbidden their languages, given English names, and instructed in Christianity. By 1900 there were dozens of such schools, many run by churches under federal contract.

Against that background, the Ghost Dance looks less mysterious. In January 1889 a Northern Paiute man named Wovoka, also called Jack Wilson, fell ill during a solar eclipse and reported a vision: if people danced a particular round dance, lived peaceably, worked honestly and avoided alcohol, the dead would return and the earth would be renewed. Delegations traveled to Nevada to learn it, and versions spread across the Plains. Among the Lakota the teaching acquired new elements, including painted shirts some believed could turn bullets. Federal agents read the dance as an uprising in preparation. On 29 December 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the Seventh Cavalry killed some 250 to 300 Lakota, most of them noncombatants, while disarming Big Foot's band. The dance had counseled peace.

Peyote, and a church that had to become one

Meanwhile another movement was spreading north from Mexico and Texas. Ceremonial use of peyote, a small spineless cactus containing mescaline, moved among Plains peoples in the late nineteenth century, carried by figures such as the Comanche leader Quanah Parker. An all-night meeting, in a tipi or a fixed building, involves prayer, singing with a water drum and gourd rattle, a fire tended in a specific form, and the sacramental eating of peyote. Two main ritual forms developed, usually called the Half Moon and the Cross Fire way, the latter incorporating the Bible explicitly.

In 1918, facing repeated attempts by Congress and by state legislatures to outlaw the practice, practitioners in Oklahoma incorporated as the Native American Church. The legal form was a defensive adaptation: American law protected churches, so the tradition took the shape the law could see. Membership today is generally estimated in the hundreds of thousands across dozens of tribal nations.

The legal fight was long. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, declaring it federal policy to protect Native religious practice, but the statute created no enforceable right, and courts said so. In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988) the Supreme Court allowed the Forest Service to build a road through high country central to Yurok, Karuk and Tolowa religious practice, reasoning that the government was not coercing anyone's belief. Two years later, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court held that Oregon could deny unemployment benefits to two drug rehabilitation counselors, one of them a member of the Native American Church, fired for ingesting peyote at a ceremony. Justice Scalia's majority opinion announced a general rule: a neutral law of general applicability does not violate free exercise even when it burdens religion severely.

The reaction was immediate and broad. Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993, and in 1994 amended the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to protect the ceremonial use of peyote by members of federally recognized tribes explicitly. It took a statute, because the Constitution as the Court read it did not do the job.

Remember: The most consequential free exercise decision in modern American law arose from a peyote ceremony, and the rule it announced now governs claims brought by every religious community in the country.

Now

Native religious life today is plural in every direction. Many people practice traditional ceremonies; many are Christians, in denominations ranging from Catholic parishes on the Navajo Nation to independent Pentecostal congregations; many are members of the Native American Church; and a great many combine these in ways that would look contradictory only to someone who assumed religions come in sealed boxes. The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act gave tribes a legal mechanism to reclaim ancestral remains and sacred objects from museums, and repatriation has since reshaped the practice of American archaeology and museum curation. Sacred-site conflicts continue, from the 2016 opposition at Standing Rock to disputes over Oak Flat in Arizona and the Bears Ears region in Utah.

One closing caution about study. Ceremonies such as the sweat lodge and the vision quest have been widely borrowed by non-Native spiritual entrepreneurs, sometimes for money, occasionally with fatal results. Many Native religious leaders regard this as theft of something that is not transferable, because the ceremony belongs to a people and a place. Understanding a tradition and being entitled to perform it are different things, and this course only offers the first.

Common misconceptions

• Native American religion is one thing. Hundreds of distinct traditions exist, with different languages, ceremonies, cosmologies and rules; a Diné Blessingway and an Iroquois Midwinter ceremony are not variants of each other.
• These traditions died out. They are practiced now, in longhouses, kivas, hogans, tipi meetings and gymnasiums, alongside Christianity and often within the same families.
• The Ghost Dance was a war ritual. Wovoka's teaching prescribed peace, honest work and sobriety; the reading of it as an uprising was the agents' interpretation and it preceded the killing at Wounded Knee.
• Peyote use in the Native American Church is recreational drug use. It is a sacramental practice within a structured all-night ceremony, and federal law since 1994 protects it explicitly for members of federally recognized tribes.
• Anyone may learn and perform these ceremonies. Much ceremonial knowledge is restricted by rule to particular societies, initiates or communities, and unauthorized performance is widely regarded as theft rather than homage.

Where this leaves us

• Handsome Lake's visions of 1799 produced the Code still recited in Iroquois longhouses, and gave anthropology the concept of a revitalization movement.
• These traditions are tied to particular places and communities rather than to texts and memberships, which is why the ordinary instruments of religious statistics cannot see them.
• The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the deadliest colonial defeat of its kind in North America, was triggered by the suppression of katsina ceremonies.
• Federal policy moved from funding missions to banning ceremonies outright in 1883, and to removing children to boarding schools from 1879 onward.
• Modern American religious liberty law was reshaped by Native claims: AIRFA in 1978, Lyng in 1988, Smith in 1990, RFRA in 1993 and the peyote amendments in 1994.

Sources

1. Legal Information Institute. (n.d.). Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu.
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Handsome Lake. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ghost Dance. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. National Museum of the American Indian. (n.d.). Native Knowledge 360 degrees. Smithsonian Institution. americanindian.si.edu.
5. Wallace, A. F. C. (1970). The death and rebirth of the Seneca. Alfred A. Knopf.
6. Martin, J. W. (2001). The land looks after us: A history of Native American religion. Oxford University Press.

An execution on Boston Common

On 1 June 1660 the Massachusetts authorities hanged Mary Dyer on Boston Common. She was a Quaker, she had been banished on pain of death, and she had come back anyway. Three other Quakers were hanged in Boston in the same three-year span under the same statute. Dyer had walked to the gallows once before, in October 1659, and been reprieved with the rope around her neck on condition that she leave the colony; she returned the following May specifically to challenge the law that condemned her.

Hold that scene against the sentence most Americans learned in school: that the colonies were founded as a refuge from religious persecution. The Massachusetts Puritans had themselves fled the coercive apparatus of the Church of England. Within thirty years they were operating one. Understanding why is not a matter of catching them in hypocrisy. It is a matter of noticing that they wanted something different from what we now mean by religious freedom.

The point: Most colonies were founded to build a right religious order, not to permit many. Toleration, where it appeared, was usually a practical concession by people who did not think of it as an ideal.

What the Puritans were actually building

The Massachusetts Bay Company's fleet arrived in 1630 under John Winthrop, carrying some seven hundred settlers, and the colony grew to perhaps twenty thousand by 1640. These were not separatists in the manner of the small Plymouth group of 1620. They believed the Church of England could be purified and intended to demonstrate how, in a commonwealth where church and civil government would work in visible agreement.

Two features made that commonwealth distinctive. First, the churches were congregational: each local church governed itself, called its own minister, and admitted its own members, with no bishops above it. Second, admission was hard. From the late 1630s a candidate was expected to give a public relation, an account of the work of grace in their own soul, judged by the existing members. Baptism and the vote in church affairs followed from that. In 1631 the General Court restricted the status of freeman, and thus the civil vote, to church members.

So when Puritan writers defended liberty of conscience, they meant the liberty of a rightly ordered church to follow God's word without interference from bishops or kings. They did not mean an individual's right to be wrong in public. Nathaniel Ward's satirical tract of 1647, written from Ipswich in Massachusetts, put the position with brutal clarity: he wrote that all religions which contradicted the truth were welcome to keep away from the colony.

The system also generated its own problems. As the founding generation aged, many adult children could not produce a convincing conversion relation, which meant their own children could not be baptized. In 1662 a ministerial synod adopted what critics called the Half-Way Covenant, letting baptized but unconverted adults present their children for baptism while withholding the Lord's Supper. The compromise kept the churches full and satisfied almost nobody.

The dissenters, one at a time

Massachusetts produced its critics from inside. Roger Williams, a young minister who arrived in 1631, argued three things the colony could not accept: that the civil magistrate had no authority over the first table of the Ten Commandments, that is, over religious duties; that the colony's land title from the king was worthless because the land belonged to Native nations; and that a pure church must separate from the corrupt Church of England entirely. The General Court banished him in October 1635. He left in the winter, was sheltered by Narragansetts, and founded Providence in 1636. His 1644 book The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution argued that forced worship stinks in God's nostrils, and made the case for what he called soul liberty on explicitly religious grounds: coercion produces hypocrites, not saints. Rhode Island's royal charter of 1663 guaranteed that no person should be molested for differences of opinion in matters of religion.

Anne Hutchinson held meetings in her Boston home to discuss sermons and concluded that most of the colony's ministers were preaching a covenant of works rather than of grace. Tried before the General Court in November 1637, she defended herself ably on scripture until she claimed direct revelation, which settled the matter against her. She was banished and went to Rhode Island.

The Quakers were different again, because they kept coming back. The Society of Friends taught that the inner light of Christ was available to anyone directly, which dissolved the authority of ministers, of the trained clergy and of the sacraments at once. Massachusetts passed escalating laws from 1656: fines for shipmasters who landed Quakers, whipping, ear-cropping, tongue-boring, and finally, in 1658, death for returning after banishment. That is the law under which Dyer died.

Not everyone accepted the logic. On 27 December 1657, thirty residents of Flushing in New Netherland signed a remonstrance against Director-General Peter Stuyvesant's order banning Quakers. Most of the signers were not Quakers. They argued that their town charter promised liberty of conscience, and that the law of love extended to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, meaning Muslims. Stuyvesant arrested the leaders. The document survives as one of the earliest American arguments for toleration written by people who had nothing personal to gain from it.

Maryland, and the limits of a famous law

Maryland was chartered in 1632 to Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, a Catholic operating in a kingdom where Catholics could not worship publicly. Settlement began in 1634. The Calverts needed Protestant settlers to make the colony viable and needed Catholics to be safe in it, so they instructed Catholics to worship privately and give no offense.

In 1649 the assembly passed the Act Concerning Religion, often called the Maryland Toleration Act. Read what it actually says. It protected the free exercise of any person professing to believe in Jesus Christ, which covered Catholics and the various Protestants, and it punished sectarian name-calling with fines. It also prescribed death and forfeiture of property for anyone who denied the Trinity or the divinity of Christ. It was a peace treaty among Christians, not a charter of universal liberty, and it was written by a minority seeking protection.

It did not last. Puritans who had been welcomed into the colony gained control and repealed the act in 1654, briefly outlawing Catholic worship. After the Protestant revolution of 1689 Maryland established the Church of England in 1692, funded it with a tobacco tax, and by 1704 had banned public Catholic worship and Catholic schools. Maryland's Catholics spent most of the eighteenth century worshipping in private chapels on their own estates.

Why this matters: The Maryland act shows toleration arriving as a minority's survival strategy rather than as a principle, which is exactly why it was repealed as soon as the minority lost power.

The colonies compared

Colony	Established church	Dissenters
Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire	Congregational, supported by town taxes	Baptists and Quakers taxed for the town church; Quakers executed in Boston 1659 to 1661
Virginia, and later the Carolinas and Georgia	Church of England, funded by parish tithes	Dissenting preachers required licenses; dozens of Baptist preachers jailed in the 1760s and 1770s for preaching without one
Maryland	None until 1692, then Church of England	Catholics tolerated 1649 to 1654 and again briefly, then excluded from public worship and office after 1704
Rhode Island	None	Liberty of conscience chartered in 1663; Jews, Quakers and Baptists settled freely
Pennsylvania and Delaware	None	Penn's Frame of Government of 1682 protected all who acknowledged one God; office limited to Christians
New York	Church of England in four southern counties after 1693	Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, Jews and Quakers present; enforcement patchy

Two groups fit nowhere on that table. In September 1654 twenty-three Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil landed at New Amsterdam; Stuyvesant asked permission to expel them and the Dutch West India Company, which had Jewish investors, told him to let them stay. Their congregation, Shearith Israel, is the oldest Jewish congregation in what became the United States. And enslaved Africans, some of them Muslims, arrived into a legal regime designed to keep religion from disturbing property: a Virginia statute of 1667 declared explicitly that baptism did not alter a person's condition of bondage, removing the last legal argument against converting the enslaved.

Common misconceptions

• The colonies were founded on religious freedom. Nine of the thirteen had an established church at the Revolution, supported by taxes and backed by penalties.
• The Puritans wanted toleration. They wanted liberty for a right church, and they said so plainly; Nathaniel Ward invited contrary religions to keep their distance.
• The Maryland Toleration Act granted general religious liberty. It protected trinitarian Christians and prescribed death for denying the Trinity, and it was repealed five years later.
• Roger Williams argued for separation on secular grounds. His case was theological: state coercion corrupts the church and produces hypocrisy rather than faith.
• Persecution was a New England peculiarity. Virginia jailed Baptist preachers into the 1770s, and Maryland barred Catholic public worship for most of the eighteenth century.

Putting it together

• Massachusetts built a congregational establishment with restricted church membership and a civil vote tied to it, and hanged four Quakers between 1659 and 1661.
• Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished for challenging that order; Rhode Island became the exception, chartering liberty of conscience in 1663.
• The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657 shows non-Quakers arguing for toleration on principle, and being arrested for it.
• Maryland's 1649 act protected trinitarian Christians only, and collapsed with the political fortunes of the Catholic minority that wrote it.
• At the Revolution nine colonies had establishments, and the practical question was not whether to have religion in public life but which church the taxes would support.

Sources

1. Library of Congress. (n.d.). Religion and the founding of the American republic. Library of Congress. loc.gov.
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Maryland Toleration Act. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Flushing Remonstrance. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Mary Dyer. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Ahlstrom, S. E. (1972). A religious history of the American people. Yale University Press.
6. Butler, J. (1990). Awash in a sea of faith: Christianizing the American people. Harvard University Press.

A bill to pay the ministers

In the autumn of 1784 the Virginia General Assembly took up a bill with an unglamorous title: a Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion. Its sponsor was Patrick Henry, the most popular politician in the state. The proposal was moderate by the standards of the day and looked to many like an improvement. Rather than fund the Episcopal church alone, as colonial Virginia had funded the Church of England, it would levy a general assessment and let each taxpayer designate which Christian denomination received his share. Money left undesignated would go to schools. Nobody would be compelled to support a church he disliked.

James Madison thought it was the most dangerous bill in the state, and he beat it. How he did so is the single best case study in this course of how disestablishment actually happened in America, because the victory was not won by philosophers.

Key idea: Disestablishment was achieved by an alliance between Enlightenment rationalists who distrusted state religion and evangelical dissenters who distrusted state religion for entirely different reasons. Neither group could have won alone.

The argument, and the petitions

Madison's contribution was the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, written in 1785 and circulated without his name on it. Its fifteen numbered paragraphs make a compressed and still formidable case. Religion is a duty owed to the Creator, and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force. Whoever can establish Christianity to the exclusion of other religions may establish one sect to the exclusion of others, and the same authority that can levy three pence for religion can levy any amount. Establishment has not helped religion historically; it has produced pride and indolence in the clergy and superstition and persecution in the laity.

What defeated the bill, though, was not primarily Madison's prose. It was volume. Petitions poured into the assembly from across Virginia, and the largest of them came from Baptists and Presbyterians, whose preachers had been jailed under the old establishment within living memory. Their argument was not the philosopher's. It was that state support corrupts the gospel, that a church which takes the magistrate's money will preach the magistrate's message, and that Christ's kingdom needs no tax collector. One evangelical petition circulated in multiple copies and collected several times the signatures Madison's Memorial did.

The assessment bill died without a vote. Madison then brought forward a measure Thomas Jefferson had drafted back in 1777 and never got passed, and on 16 January 1786 Virginia enacted the Statute for Religious Freedom. It declares that no one shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, and that no one shall suffer on account of religious opinion. Jefferson counted it, along with the Declaration and the founding of his university, as one of the three achievements he wanted on his tombstone. His authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the presidency did not make the list.

What the Constitution actually said

The federal Constitution drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 mentions religion exactly once, in Article VI: no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. That clause was more radical than it now sounds. Every European state and most American states had religious tests; Virginia's own convention had debated whether a Jew or a Catholic might be president, and the answer the Constitution gave was that nobody could ask.

The absence of anything else about religion alarmed people on both sides. Baptists in New England and Virginia feared that a national government with no explicit limit might create a national church. Others simply wanted a bill of rights. When the first Congress drafted amendments in 1789, the religion language went through several versions before settling into sixteen words: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The states ratified on 15 December 1791.

Now read that clause literally, because the literal reading is the historical one. Congress shall make no law. The First Amendment bound the federal government and nobody else. It did not disestablish a single state church, and it was not understood to. Connecticut kept its Congregational establishment until 1818. New Hampshire ended its in 1819. Massachusetts, where this course began with a hanging on Boston Common, was the last, and it did not disestablish until 1833, forty-two years after the First Amendment was ratified. Several states kept religious tests for state office far longer; Maryland required a declaration of belief in God from officeholders until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1961.

Bottom line: In 1791 the United States had a federal government forbidden to establish religion and several state governments that had established it. That was not a contradiction anyone needed to resolve; it was the design.

Two documents people quote badly

On 1 January 1802 Jefferson replied to a letter from the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, a minority in a state with a Congregational establishment, who had congratulated him on his election. His reply says that the American people, by adopting the religion clauses, built a wall of separation between church and state. The phrase is Jefferson's, written eleven years after ratification, in a private letter, by a man who had not been at the Constitutional Convention. It has since been quoted in Supreme Court opinions as though it were part of the amendment. It is evidence of what one influential founder thought the clause meant, which is worth a great deal and is not the same as authority.

The Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli is quoted just as loosely in the other direction. Its English text, ratified unanimously by the Senate in June 1797 and signed by President John Adams, includes a passage stating that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. That is real, and the unanimity is striking. The complication, which honest use of the document requires, is that the surviving Arabic version of the treaty does not contain that article, and scholars still debate how the discrepancy arose. Use it as evidence that the Senate of 1797 was willing to say such a thing to a foreign power, which is what it straightforwardly shows.

What disestablishment did to religion

Here is the outcome that surprises people. Removing state support did not shrink American religion. The sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, working from membership records, estimated that the share of Americans formally adhering to a church rose from roughly 17 percent in 1776 to about 34 percent by 1850 and past 60 percent in the twentieth century. Their explanation is economic: an established church is a monopoly with no incentive to compete, while a free market in religion rewards denominations that recruit energetically, plant congregations cheaply and preach in the language of ordinary people. The Methodists and Baptists, who did all three, went from marginal to dominant within two generations.

The estimates are contested. Critics argue that the 1776 baseline understates participation because colonial churches had high attendance and low formal membership by design, and that the supply-side model imports assumptions from economics that do not fit religious behavior everywhere. Take the direction of the finding as well established and the precise numbers as an argument still running.

The mechanism, though, is visible in the next lesson's material. A country with no established church and a moving frontier is a country where religious authority has to be earned in front of an audience that can walk away, and that shapes what American preaching sounds like to this day.

Incorporation, and why the modern arguments are modern

One more step, and it comes much later. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, forbids states to deprive any person of liberty without due process of law. Beginning in the twentieth century the Supreme Court held that this clause applies most of the Bill of Rights against the states, a doctrine called incorporation. Free exercise was incorporated in Cantwell v. Connecticut in 1940, when the Court reversed the convictions of Jehovah's Witnesses for soliciting without a certificate. The Establishment Clause was incorporated in Everson v. Board of Education in 1947.

This is why the fights Americans have about school prayer, town council invocations, courthouse monuments and religious exemptions all date from the mid-twentieth century onward. Before incorporation, a state could put prayer in its schools and no federal question arose. The constitutional argument you have grown up hearing is younger than commercial television.

Common misconceptions

• The First Amendment ended established churches in America. It bound Congress only; Massachusetts kept its establishment until 1833.
• Separation of church and state is a phrase in the Constitution. It comes from Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, not from the text.
• Disestablishment was the work of skeptics. The decisive petitions in Virginia came from Baptists and Presbyterians arguing that state money corrupts the gospel.
• Removing state support weakened American religion. Formal adherence rose sharply through the nineteenth century, and the denominations that grew fastest were those with no establishment to lose.
• Today's church-state cases descend directly from 1791. They became possible only after the religion clauses were applied to the states in 1940 and 1947.

The short version

• Patrick Henry's 1784 assessment bill would have funded Christian teachers by tax with taxpayer designation; Madison and a coalition of evangelicals defeated it.
• Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom passed on 16 January 1786 and became the model for the federal settlement.
• The Constitution's only religious provision is the Article VI ban on religious tests; the religion clauses of the First Amendment were ratified on 15 December 1791 and bound Congress alone.
• State establishments persisted until 1833, and state religious tests longer still.
• Incorporation through the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1940 for free exercise and 1947 for establishment, created the modern body of church-state litigation.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). The Bill of Rights: A transcription. National Archives and Records Administration. archives.gov.
2. Legal Information Institute. (n.d.). First Amendment. Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Library of Congress. (n.d.). Religion and the state governments. Religion and the founding of the American republic. loc.gov.
5. Finke, R., and Stark, R. (1992). The churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and losers in our religious economy. Rutgers University Press.
6. Curry, T. J. (1986). The first freedoms: Church and state in America to the passage of the First Amendment. Oxford University Press.

Enfield, 8 July 1741

A visiting minister preached at Enfield, Connecticut, on a Wednesday in July 1741, from a text in Deuteronomy about the foot sliding in due time. His name was Jonathan Edwards, he was pastor at Northampton in Massachusetts, and he read the sermon from a manuscript in a level voice, which was his habit. The sermon builds one image with terrible patience: the listener is suspended over a pit by a thread that a divine hand is choosing, for now, not to cut.

He did not finish. Another minister present, Stephen Williams, recorded in his diary that the congregation broke into moaning and crying out so loudly that Edwards had to stop and ask for quiet. People were carried outside. The text became the most anthologized sermon in American history, which has had the unfortunate effect of making the entire revival look like an exercise in terror. It was not, and Edwards himself spent much of his career arguing about what the emotion in that meetinghouse actually proved.

So what?: The revivals of the 1730s and 1740s made religious experience, publicly narrated and emotionally visible, the test of genuine faith for a large part of American Protestantism. That standard has never gone away.

Before Enfield: Northampton, 1734

Edwards was not an itinerant sensationalist. He was a formidable philosophical theologian who read Locke and Newton and worked out a Calvinism in which the will is genuinely free while remaining wholly determined by what the affections love. In the winter of 1734 and 1735 his Northampton congregation experienced an intense wave of conversions, beginning after the sudden deaths of two young people. Edwards wrote it up carefully, counting cases, describing the sequence of anxiety, despair and relief, and published it in 1737 as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. It appeared in London and went through printings across the English-speaking Protestant world.

That publication matters as much as the revival. Edwards had produced a template: here is what a genuine work of God looks like, here are its stages, here is how you would recognize one in your own town. Ministers elsewhere read it and started looking.

Whitefield, and religion as a public event

The figure who turned scattered local awakenings into something that felt continental was an Anglican priest in his mid-twenties. George Whitefield first came to Georgia in 1738 and returned in 1739 for a tour that ran from Georgia to New England and back over fifteen months. He preached outdoors, in fields and town commons, sometimes several times a day, in a trained actor's voice.

Benjamin Franklin, a religious skeptic who became Whitefield's printer and friend, tested that voice in Philadelphia. Standing on Market Street while Whitefield preached from the courthouse steps, Franklin walked backward until he could no longer hear distinctly, computed the area of the semicircle, allowed two square feet per person, and concluded that more than thirty thousand could have heard him. Franklin reports the experiment in his Autobiography, and adds drily that he had come intending not to donate and emptied his pockets before the sermon ended.

Franklin also printed Whitefield's journals and sermons, and here the analysis gets interesting. Whitefield advertised. Newspapers announced his arrival weeks ahead. Accounts of crowds in one town were printed in the next town's paper, so that the audience arrived already knowing they were part of something large. The historian Frank Lambert has argued that Whitefield essentially invented modern religious publicity, using the same commercial print networks that sold patent medicines.

In short: The Awakening travelled on printing presses and shipping routes. That is not a debunking of it. It is an account of how any religious movement in a commercial society reaches people.

The fight the revival caused

Revival split churches, and the split had a real principle in it. On 8 March 1740 the Presbyterian minister Gilbert Tennent preached at Nottingham, Pennsylvania, on the danger of an unconverted ministry. His claim was that a minister who has not himself experienced conversion cannot lead others to it, and that congregations stuck with such a man are entitled to go hear someone else. To a settled clergy holding parish appointments for life, this was an attack on the entire structure of the church.

The parties that formed are usually called New Lights, who supported the revivals, and Old Lights, who opposed them. Charles Chauncy of Boston made the Old Light case in 1743: the outcries, faintings and convulsions proved nothing about grace, since human passions can be worked up by any skilled speaker; itinerants who invade another minister's parish destroy order; and enthusiasm, meaning the claim of direct divine impulse, is the oldest route to religious chaos. Some of the evidence favored him. James Davenport, an itinerant whose behavior grew increasingly extreme, led followers in New London in 1743 to burn books by respected divines, and later apologized in print.

Edwards's own answer, in Religious Affections in 1746, refused both extremes. Emotion is not proof of grace, he agreed, and neither is its absence. What distinguishes genuine religion is a settled change in what the person loves, visible over time in practice. It remains one of the sharpest pieces of religious psychology written in America.

The institutional consequences were permanent. Presbyterians split into Old Side and New Side from 1741 to 1758. Congregational churches lost members to Separate congregations, many of which became Baptist. Connecticut passed a law in 1742 penalizing itinerant preaching in another minister's parish. And the New Light party founded colleges to train ministers on its own terms, giving rise to the College of New Jersey in 1746, later Princeton, along with Brown in 1764, Rutgers in 1766 and Dartmouth in 1769.

Who else was in the crowd

Two groups matter here beyond the ministers. Whitefield preached to enslaved audiences and urged masters to permit instruction, and the revivals mark the beginning of large-scale Christianization among enslaved Africans in the colonies, which Lesson 7 takes up in detail. The same Whitefield lobbied successfully for the legalization of slavery in Georgia, which had banned it, and owned enslaved people who worked at his Bethesda orphanage. Both facts are his.

Women found new room to speak, within limits. Sarah Osborn of Newport, Rhode Island, a schoolteacher, ran religious meetings in her house in the 1760s that grew to include several hundred people a week, most of them Black, both enslaved and free. Her correspondence records both the meetings and the criticism she received for holding them.

Did it happen?

Now the dispute, and it is a genuine one. In 1982 the historian Jon Butler published an article arguing that the Great Awakening is an interpretative fiction: the revivals were regional and episodic rather than continental, occurred over decades rather than in one wave, and were assembled into a single national event by later writers, above all by Joseph Tracy, whose 1842 book gave the phrase its currency. Frank Lambert's Inventing the "Great Awakening" in 1999 sharpened the point differently, showing how the revivalists themselves constructed the sense of a single movement through print.

Thomas Kidd's 2007 history takes the other side. Contemporary participants across widely separated colonies used the same vocabulary, corresponded with each other, read the same narratives and understood themselves to be part of one work; church admission records show real surges; and the institutional wreckage of the schisms is not an artifact of later writing.

What would settle it? Partly the numbers, which are patchy: church admissions rose sharply in some New England towns in the early 1740s and not in others, and the southern revivals came later. Partly the definition. If a Great Awakening means a synchronized national religious upheaval, Butler is closer to right. If it means a transatlantic network of revivals sharing personnel, methods, vocabulary and print, which reshaped denominations permanently, Kidd is. The disagreement is about what counts as an event, and that is a fair thing for historians to disagree about.

Common misconceptions

• Edwards was a ranting hellfire preacher. He read his sermons in a quiet voice and wrote the era's most careful analysis of why emotional display proves nothing on its own.
• The revivals were anti-intellectual. The New Light party founded four colleges, and its leading theologian engaged Locke and Newton directly.
• Everyone welcomed the revivals. Old Lights fought them hard, Connecticut criminalized itinerancy in 1742, and the Presbyterians split for seventeen years.
• Whitefield was a straightforward friend of enslaved people. He preached to them and pressed for their instruction while lobbying to legalize slavery in Georgia and owning enslaved people himself.
• The Great Awakening is a settled fact of the calendar. Historians disagree about whether the phrase names an event or a retrospective assembly of separate regional revivals.

Looking back

• Edwards's Northampton revival of 1734 and 1735, published in 1737, gave ministers a template for recognizing a work of God.
• Whitefield's tour of 1739 and 1740 used outdoor preaching and commercial print to make revival a public event across colonies.
• Tennent's 1740 sermon against an unconverted ministry licensed congregations to abandon their settled pastors, and the New Light and Old Light parties formed around that principle.
• The revivals split Presbyterians and Congregationalists, fed the Baptists, and produced four colleges.
• Butler and Lambert argue the Great Awakening was constructed after the fact or by publicity; Kidd argues participants across the colonies experienced it as one work, and the institutional damage was real.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Great Awakening. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). George Whitefield. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Library of Congress. (n.d.). Religion in eighteenth-century America. Religion and the founding of the American republic. loc.gov.
5. Butler, J. (1982). Enthusiasm described and decried: The Great Awakening as interpretative fiction. Journal of American History, 69(2), 305-325.
6. Kidd, T. S. (2007). The Great Awakening: The roots of evangelical Christianity in colonial America. Yale University Press.

Twenty thousand people in a Kentucky field

In August 1801, at a meetinghouse called Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, a Presbyterian minister named Barton W. Stone hosted a sacramental meeting. These were ordinary events in the Scots-Irish Presbyterian calendar: several days of preaching and self-examination leading to communion. This one was not ordinary. Contemporary estimates put the crowd between ten and twenty thousand, at a time when Lexington, the largest town in Kentucky, held fewer than two thousand people. Wagons filled the surrounding woods. Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist preachers all preached, sometimes simultaneously from different stumps, and the denominational boundaries dissolved for a week.

The physical phenomena became famous: people fell as if dead and lay for hours, others were seized by involuntary jerking of the head and limbs, some laughed uncontrollably or barked. Observers who approved called these the exercises and read them as the Spirit breaking a hard heart. Observers who disapproved called them contagious hysteria. Both watched the same thing happen.

What matters here: Cane Ridge is the visible start of a fifty-year reorganization of American Protestantism around the camp meeting, the itinerant preacher and the assumption that revival can be produced rather than awaited.

The camp meeting as a technology

Think about the logistics for a moment, because they explain the form. A settler family in Kentucky in 1800 lived hours from any neighbor, had no settled minister within a day's ride, and could not spare a workday. A camp meeting solved that by concentrating a year of religion into four or five days when the crop was in. Families camped on the ground. Preaching ran from dawn to midnight in shifts. Children were baptized, couples were married, disputes were settled, goods were traded, and courtship happened at the edges, to the considerable anxiety of the organizers.

The Methodists understood the form better than anyone and standardized it: a cleared rectangle, tents in ordered rows, a preaching stand at one end, a fenced area near the front for those under conviction. By the 1820s the camp meeting was a Methodist institution with published rules.

That institutional skill shows in the numbers. In 1776 the Methodists were a tiny movement in America with a few dozen preachers. By 1850 they were the largest Protestant body in the country. Their organizational secret was the circuit rider: a young unmarried preacher, often without formal education, assigned a circuit of two dozen or more preaching points which he rode continuously, forming small class meetings that ran themselves between visits. Francis Asbury, who directed the American Methodists from 1784 until his death in 1816, rode an estimated 270,000 miles doing exactly this. Baptists expanded on a parallel model, licensing farmer-preachers who supported themselves and planted congregations wherever there were enough neighbors to constitute one.

Compare that with a Congregational or Episcopal church, which required a college-trained minister, a salary and a building before it could exist at all. On a moving frontier, the cheap model wins. The historian Nathan Hatch called what followed the democratization of American Christianity: authority passed from the educated clergy to preachers whose credential was their audience.

Finney and the new measures

The revival's second phase had an urban and northeastern character, and its central figure was a lawyer. Charles Grandison Finney was practicing in Adams, New York, when he underwent a dramatic conversion in 1821, gave up the law and began preaching. He brought courtroom habits with him. He addressed audiences directly as a jury, he named individuals in prayer, and he expected a verdict.

His methods, which opponents called the new measures, included:

• Protracted meetings, running nightly for days or weeks rather than a single Sunday.
• The anxious bench, a front seat where those under conviction sat publicly, so that the decision was visible and social.
• Praying for named individuals in public meetings, sometimes for people present.
• Allowing women to pray aloud in mixed assemblies, which drew heavy criticism and was one of the strands leading toward women's public speech in reform movements.

Underneath the methods was a theological argument that split American Calvinism. Finney's Lectures on Revivals of Religion in 1835 states it flatly: a revival is not a miracle, and it is not dependent on a miracle in any sense. It is the result of the right use of the appropriate means, as a crop is the result of farming. If that is true, then any congregation that fails to have a revival has only itself to blame, and the older Calvinist posture of waiting on a sovereign God becomes negligence.

Finney's great Rochester campaign in the winter of 1830 and 1831 made the point in practice. He preached nightly for six months in a boomtown transformed by the Erie Canal, and the effects rippled through the region's businesses, temperance societies and reform organizations. Western New York was revived so often that Finney himself described it as burned over, and the phrase stuck as the name for the district.

Remember: The shift from awaiting revival to producing it is the single most consequential theological change of the period, and it is why American evangelicalism has always been comfortable with technique.

Conversion into reform

If a person could be converted by the right means, so could a society. Most revivalists of this generation were postmillennialists: they expected the thousand-year reign of righteousness described in Revelation to arrive through the gradual improvement of the world, with Christ returning at the end of it rather than before. That belief turns social reform into religious work with a deadline.

The organizational output was extraordinary for a country of this size. The American Bible Society was founded in 1816, the American Tract Society in 1825, the American Temperance Society in 1826. Theodore Dwight Weld, a Finney convert, became a central organizer of the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 with the funding of the merchants Arthur and Lewis Tappan. Oberlin College, where Finney taught and later served as president, admitted Black students and women alongside white men in the 1830s, decades ahead of nearly every other college. When women who had learned to speak and organize in antislavery work called a convention on their own rights, they met on 19 and 20 July 1848 in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, in the heart of the burned-over district.

The reform impulse also ran in directions modern readers find less congenial. The same networks produced sabbatarian campaigns to stop Sunday mail delivery, anti-Catholic organizing, and asylum and prison reform in which piety and social control were thoroughly mixed.

The break the revival could not survive

Revivalism reorganized American Protestantism and then American Protestantism broke along the line the revival could not cross. Slavery was defended and attacked in the same evangelical vocabulary, from the same Bible, by people using the same conversion language.

Body	Split	Immediate trigger
Presbyterians	Old School and New School, 1837, then along sectional lines by 1861	Doctrine and revival methods first, slavery decisively later
Methodists	Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1844 to 1845	A bishop, James O. Andrew, who had become a slaveholder by marriage, and whether he could serve
Baptists	Southern Baptist Convention, Augusta, Georgia, May 1845	The mission board's refusal to appoint a slaveholder as a missionary

These were the largest popular institutions in the country, and they divided fifteen years before the states did. The Southern Baptist Convention formally apologized for its founding in a resolution passed in 1995, on its hundred and fiftieth anniversary.

Common misconceptions

• Camp meetings were mainly emotional excess. They were a rational solution to distance, labor scarcity and the absence of settled clergy, and the Methodists ran them on published rules.
• Revivalism was rural and anti-urban. Finney's most influential campaign was in Rochester, a canal boomtown, and his converts staffed urban reform societies.
• Revival and social reform were opposites. Postmillennial revivalists founded the antislavery, temperance and Bible societies, and the women's rights convention met in a Methodist chapel.
• Finney was a traditional Calvinist. He argued that revival is the result of the right use of means rather than of a special divine act, which was the point his critics attacked.
• The churches split when the country did. The Methodists and Baptists divided in 1844 and 1845, fifteen years before secession.

Pulling it together

• Cane Ridge in August 1801 gathered perhaps ten to twenty thousand people and set the template for the camp meeting.
• Circuit riders and farmer-preachers let Methodists and Baptists expand across a frontier where a college-trained settled ministry could not follow.
• Finney's new measures made conversion a public, produced, expected outcome, and his 1835 Lectures denied that revival requires a miracle.
• Postmillennial expectation turned conversion into reform: Bible, tract, temperance and antislavery societies, Oberlin, and Seneca Falls in 1848.
• The same revival vocabulary served both sides of the slavery argument, and the Methodists and Baptists split in 1844 and 1845.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Cane Ridge Revival. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Second Great Awakening. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Charles Grandison Finney. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Burned-over district. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Hatch, N. O. (1989). The democratization of American Christianity. Yale University Press.
6. Finney, C. G. (1835). Lectures on revivals of religion. Leavitt, Lord and Co.

Walking out of St. George's

Richard Allen was born enslaved in Philadelphia in 1760, sold with his family to a Delaware farmer, converted under Methodist preaching as a teenager, and bought his own freedom around 1780 by hauling wood and making bricks. By the late 1780s he was back in Philadelphia, preaching at five in the morning at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church, where his sermons drew a growing Black congregation.

Then the trustees moved the Black worshippers to the gallery. In Allen's account, he and Absalom Jones knelt to pray in the wrong section and a trustee seized Jones by the arm to pull him up off his knees mid-prayer. The Black members walked out in a body and did not come back. Allen's own memoir dates this to 1787; historians working from the church's building records place it in 1792 or 1793, since the gallery in question was not yet built in 1787. The discrepancy is worth noticing, because it is a small example of how a founding story gets fixed in memory.

What followed was institutional. The Free African Society, a mutual aid body Allen and Jones organized in April 1787, gave way to two churches: Jones led the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, and Allen opened Bethel in 1794 in a converted blacksmith shop. After twenty years of litigation with the Methodist hierarchy over who controlled Bethel, Allen convened delegates from several cities in Philadelphia in April 1816, formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent denomination, and was consecrated its first bishop. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion church organized in New York on similar grounds in 1821.

The point: The independent Black denominations were founded over the control of a building and a body, not over doctrine. Their theology was Methodist. What they would not accept was worshipping under someone else's authority in someone else's gallery.

The religion the enslaved made

Most Black Christians in 1800 were not in Philadelphia. They were enslaved in the South, and what they practiced has to be reconstructed from testimony, from the WPA interviews with formerly enslaved people collected in the 1930s, from songs and from the complaints of those who tried to control it.

Slaveholders had reasons to want the enslaved Christianized and reasons to fear it. The reassuring version was preached openly: a white minister, or a Black preacher under supervision, expounding the household codes about servants obeying masters. Formerly enslaved people remembered those sermons with contempt, and remembered walking out of them in their heads.

The other version happened at night. Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion, published in 1978 and still the standard work, named it the invisible institution: unsupervised worship in brush arbors and clearings, sometimes with an iron pot turned upside down at the center of the circle, which participants said caught the sound and kept it from carrying to the big house. The preaching there was not about obedience. It was about Exodus, a people brought out of bondage, and about Daniel in the lions' den, and about a judgment coming.

One artifact makes the conflict unusually visible. In 1807 a volume was printed in London for use with enslaved people in the British West Indies, containing selected parts of the Bible. Exodus is almost entirely absent. Passages about servants and masters are kept. Somebody went through the scriptures deciding which parts enslaved people should be allowed to hear, which tells you both what the enslaved were finding in the text and how well the finders understood it.

The practices carried African inheritances into Christian forms: the ring shout, a counterclockwise shuffling circle with hand clapping and call-and-response singing, documented in the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands; the spirituals, which W. E. B. Du Bois called the sorrow songs in 1903 and read as the finest thing America had produced. Whether particular spirituals encoded escape instructions is disputed by historians and often overstated in popular accounts. What is not disputed is that they carried double meaning: a river to cross that was both the Jordan and the Ohio.

Religion also armed rebellion. The Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston in 1822 was organized partly through the African Church there, which the authorities demolished afterward. Nat Turner, who led the rising in Southampton County, Virginia, on 21 and 22 August 1831, was a preacher who acted on visions. In the reprisals and legislation that followed, southern states tightened laws against Black preaching, against gathering without white supervision, and against teaching enslaved people to read.

Emancipation, and a mass exodus of members

What happened after 1865 was one of the fastest religious realignments in American history, and it was a choice made by hundreds of thousands of people almost simultaneously. Black members left the white-controlled churches where they had sat in galleries. In many southern Methodist and Baptist congregations, the Black membership was simply gone within a few years.

Where they went was into institutions of their own. AME and AME Zion missionaries moved south immediately behind the Union armies, and the AME counted several hundred thousand members by the 1880s. The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, organized in 1870. Black Baptists, who had always had the advantage of congregational independence, built associations and then a national body: the National Baptist Convention, formed in 1895, became the largest Black organization of any kind in the United States.

These churches did work that no other institution would do for the people in them. They ran schools and colleges, held the burial societies and insurance funds, housed the banks, trained the public speakers, and elected the only Black officials most communities had. A generation of political leadership came out of pulpits because the pulpit was the one platform white authorities could not easily take away.

Why this matters: When the civil rights movement mobilized through churches in the 1950s, it was not improvising. It was using the only mass institution Black Americans owned outright, built for that purpose across ninety years.

The migration and the music

Between 1916 and 1970 roughly six million Black Americans left the South. The established northern congregations, often middle class and formal, did not always suit the arrivals, and thousands of storefront churches opened in converted shops across Chicago, Detroit and New York, many of them Pentecostal or Holiness. The Church of God in Christ, founded by Charles Harrison Mason and reorganized after he attended the Azusa Street revival in 1907, grew into the largest Black Pentecostal denomination in the country.

The music changed with the geography. Thomas A. Dorsey, a Chicago blues pianist who had worked with Ma Rainey, began writing sacred songs in blues idiom in the 1930s and met fierce resistance from pastors who considered the form the devil's. He kept at it, published relentlessly, and gospel music became the dominant sound of Black Protestant worship within twenty years.

The movement, and the argument inside it

On the evening of 5 December 1955, five thousand people packed Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and spilled into the streets to decide whether to continue the bus boycott begun that morning. They elected a twenty-six-year-old newcomer, Martin Luther King Jr., to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, in part because he was too new in town to have enemies. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in Atlanta in January 1957, was built explicitly on churches, with ministers as its officers.

The church supplied more than buildings. It supplied the mass meeting form, with its singing, testimony and collection; the freedom songs, which were largely spirituals and gospel numbers with changed words; a trained cadre of public speakers; funds that did not depend on white employers; and a theological vocabulary of suffering and deliverance that made sense of what was being asked of people. Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who became one of the movement's most effective organizers, testified and led songs in the same voice.

The church was also divided. Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention and leader of the largest Black denomination in the country, opposed direct action and civil disobedience, holding that legal challenge and economic self-help were the responsible route. That disagreement was severe enough to split the convention: King and his allies left to form the Progressive National Baptist Convention in 1961. Many local pastors declined to open their buildings to organizers, fearing arson and losing their mortgages, and some had good reason: the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on 15 September 1963 killed four girls. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written that April, is addressed not to segregationists but to eight moderate white clergymen who had urged him to wait.

Today Black Protestant churches remain a distinct and substantial part of American religion. Pew's 2021 study found Black Americans more religious than Americans overall on standard measures, with about two thirds Protestant, while roughly a fifth were religiously unaffiliated and that share ran markedly higher among adults under thirty. Both halves of that finding are the story.

Common misconceptions

• Enslaved people simply accepted the Christianity preached at them. They took the parts that spoke to their condition, above all Exodus, and worshipped unsupervised where they could.
• The Black church is one denomination. It names a family including AME, AME Zion, CME, several Baptist conventions, the Church of God in Christ and thousands of independent congregations.
• Independent Black churches split over doctrine. Allen's Methodism was orthodox Methodism; the break was over control, dignity and who could kneel where.
• Every Black minister supported the civil rights movement. The largest Black denomination's president opposed direct action, and the dispute split the National Baptist Convention in 1961.
• Spirituals were mainly coded escape maps. Historians dispute the specific claims; what is well established is their double meaning and their function in sustaining a community.

What you now know

• Richard Allen and Absalom Jones led a walkout from St. George's in Philadelphia and built independent institutions, culminating in the AME denomination in 1816.
• The invisible institution named by Albert Raboteau was unsupervised worship centered on Exodus and deliverance, held against the obedience sermons preached openly.
• After emancipation, Black members left white-controlled churches en masse; the AME expanded across the South and the National Baptist Convention formed in 1895.
• The Great Migration produced storefront and Pentecostal congregations and, through Thomas A. Dorsey, gospel music.
• The movement ran on church infrastructure and church vocabulary, and the churches disagreed sharply about direct action, splitting the National Baptist Convention in 1961.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center. (2021, February 16). Faith among Black Americans. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Richard Allen (bishop). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). African Methodist Episcopal Church. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Raboteau, A. J. (1978). Slave religion: The invisible institution in the antebellum South. Oxford University Press.
6. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of Black folk. A. C. McClurg and Co.

Newport, August 1790

George Washington spent two days in Newport, Rhode Island, in August 1790, and the warden of the local Hebrew congregation, Moses Seixas, read him an address. Seixas wrote that the new government gave to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. Washington's reply, sent shortly afterward, quoted that phrase back and endorsed it, adding that the United States does not merely tolerate its minorities as an act of indulgence, since all possess alike liberty of conscience.

Notice who wrote the famous words first. The most quoted sentence about religious liberty in early American history was composed by a Jewish congregational officer in a state that had chartered liberty of conscience in 1663, and endorsed by a president who understood what he was being handed. The congregation's building, dedicated in 1763 and now called Touro Synagogue, still stands and is the oldest surviving synagogue in the country.

Key idea: American Judaism was shaped less by persecution than by an unfamiliar problem: what happens to a tradition built for a community with legal authority over its members when that authority disappears and everything becomes voluntary.

Three waves, three Judaisms

Jewish migration to America came in distinguishable waves, and the differences between them explain most of the internal map of American Judaism today.

Wave	Period and origin	What it produced
Colonial	1654 onward, Sephardi families via Amsterdam, Recife and London	A handful of congregations in port cities: New York, Newport, Charleston, Savannah, Philadelphia; perhaps two to three thousand people by 1790
Central European	Roughly 1820 to 1880, mostly German-speaking lands	Growth to around a quarter of a million; peddling and retail; the Reform movement and its institutions
Eastern European	1881 to 1924, from the Russian empire, Galicia and Romania	Roughly two million arrivals; the Lower East Side; Yiddish culture, the labor movement, and the modern American Orthodox and Conservative bodies

The second wave arrived into a country with no established Jewish authority structure at all: no chief rabbinate, no communal tax, no power to compel. In central Europe a Jewish community was a legally recognized corporation that could regulate its members. In Cincinnati it was a voluntary association that people could leave. Everything that follows is an attempt to answer that.

Reform, and the argument it started

Isaac Mayer Wise arrived from Bohemia in 1846 and settled in Cincinnati in 1854. He was an organizer above all, and he built the institutions American Reform Judaism still uses: a prayer book intended for national use, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873, and Hebrew Union College in 1875, the first lasting rabbinical seminary in the country.

Reform's argument was that Judaism is a developing religion whose essence is ethical monotheism, and that laws given for one historical situation may be set aside in another. In practice that meant services in English and German with an organ, mixed seating, shortened liturgy, and the abandonment of dietary law and of prayers for a return to Zion and a rebuilt Temple. The 1885 Pittsburgh Platform stated the position bluntly: Jews are a religious community and no longer a nation, and the Mosaic legislation regarding diet, purity and dress is foreign to modern mental and spiritual habits.

Two years before the Platform, the argument had already burst into the open at a banquet. At the dinner celebrating Hebrew Union College's first ordination in 1883, the caterer served shellfish. Several guests walked out. The trefa banquet, as it became known, was probably a caterer's blunder rather than a statement, but it clarified for traditionalists that they needed institutions of their own.

They built them. The Jewish Theological Seminary opened in New York in 1886, and after Solomon Schechter came from Cambridge to lead it in 1902 it became the center of what is now Conservative Judaism: committed to halakhah, Jewish law, as binding, and equally committed to historical scholarship showing that the law has always developed. For much of the twentieth century it was the largest American Jewish movement, occupying the middle ground.

Two million people in thirty years

The wave that changed everything began in 1881, when pogroms and legal restrictions in the Russian empire pushed emigration to a scale nobody had planned for. About two million Jews reached the United States before Congress closed the door with the quota acts of 1921 and 1924.

They arrived poor, crowded into the Lower East Side of Manhattan and comparable districts in a dozen cities, and worked in the garment trade. The world they built was not primarily synagogal. It was the Yiddish daily press, above all the Forverts founded in 1897; the landsmanshaftn, mutual aid societies organized by home town; the Yiddish theatre; and the labor unions. On 25 March 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, and the funeral processions and the union organizing that followed are part of American Jewish religious history as much as any synagogue is, because for many of the people involved the movement carried the moral weight that religion had carried at home.

The established German-descended Jewish community reacted to the newcomers with a mixture of generosity, embarrassment and alarm, funding settlement houses and vocational programs partly to speed assimilation. Class and cultural condescension between the two groups took two generations to fade.

In short: The eastern European wave brought secular Jewish culture, socialism and Yiddish as well as Orthodoxy, and any account of American Judaism that only counts synagogue members misses most of it.

The other movements

American Orthodoxy was often written off in the early twentieth century as an immigrant remnant that would not survive. It did the opposite. Yeshiva College, chartered in 1928, produced English-speaking rabbis with secular degrees. After 1945, Hasidic communities that had lost most of their members in Europe rebuilt in Brooklyn, notably Satmar in Williamsburg and Chabad-Lubavitch at its headquarters in Crown Heights, and they grew rapidly through high birth rates and intensive schooling. Modern Orthodoxy, which combines strict observance with full participation in secular society and higher education, developed alongside them.

Reconstructionism came from a Conservative rabbi who thought both his movement and Reform had the wrong theory. Mordecai Kaplan argued in Judaism as a Civilization in 1934 that Judaism is an evolving religious civilization, a total culture with a language, art, folkways and land, not merely a set of doctrines; and he reinterpreted God in naturalistic terms as the power that makes for salvation. His practical innovations spread far beyond his movement. In 1922 he called his daughter Judith to the Torah in what is generally counted as the first American bat mitzvah.

Women's ordination followed the same pattern of movement-by-movement change: Sally Priesand was ordained by Hebrew Union College in 1972, and the Jewish Theological Seminary ordained its first woman rabbi in 1985 after a bitter internal fight.

Belonging without believing

American antisemitism was rarely violent by European standards, and it was persistent. Leo Frank was lynched in Georgia in 1915 after a trial that convicted him on evidence that has not held up. Henry Ford's newspaper serialized antisemitic material through the 1920s. Elite universities imposed quotas on Jewish admissions from the 1920s, and resorts, clubs and neighborhoods excluded Jews by covenant well into the 1960s. Against that background the postwar suburban decades looked like arrival: synagogue building boomed, and Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew in 1955 argued that Judaism had become one of three equally American ways of being religious.

Now the numbers, from Pew's 2020 study of Jewish Americans. It estimated about 7.5 million Jews of all ages in the United States, roughly 2.4 percent of adults identifying as Jewish. Within that, a substantial and growing share describe themselves as Jewish but not by religion: they identify as Jewish ethnically, culturally or by family while answering the religion question with none. Of those who name a branch, roughly 37 percent said Reform, 17 percent Conservative and 9 percent Orthodox, with a large group naming no branch at all. The age pattern is the striking part. Younger American Jews are more likely than their elders both to be Orthodox and to be Jews of no religion. The middle is thinning at both ends at once.

The category itself is what makes American Judaism hard for survey instruments. A person can be counted as having no religion and still light candles, fast on Yom Kippur, and raise children as Jews. That is not a contradiction inside a tradition that has always been a people as well as a faith, and it is one more case of the measurement problem from Lesson 1.

Common misconceptions

• American Jews came mainly to escape the Holocaust. The great migration was from 1881 to 1924 and ended when Congress imposed quotas; refugee admission in the 1930s and 1940s was comparatively small and heavily restricted.
• Reform Judaism is Judaism made lazy. It rests on a theological argument that revelation is progressive and ethics is the core, stated explicitly in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform.
• Orthodoxy was a dying remnant. It is now the fastest growing segment of American Judaism, with the youngest age profile.
• Jews of no religion are lapsed or lost to the community. Many maintain practices and raise Jewish children; the category reflects a survey question about religion, not the boundaries of a people.
• The denominations were imported from Europe. Reform began in Germany but Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism are American creations, and American Orthodoxy took a distinct form.

The takeaway

• The phrase about giving bigotry no sanction was written by Moses Seixas of Newport in 1790 and endorsed by Washington in reply.
• Three migration waves, colonial Sephardi, central European, and eastern European, built three different Jewish Americas.
• Isaac Mayer Wise built the Reform institutions; the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform stated the movement's position; the Jewish Theological Seminary and Solomon Schechter anchored Conservative Judaism.
• The 1881 to 1924 wave brought Yiddish culture, the labor movement and Orthodoxy, and much of its religious energy went into institutions that were not synagogues.
• Pew's 2020 study found about 7.5 million Jews of all ages, with younger American Jews more likely both to be Orthodox and to be Jews of no religion.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center. (2021, May 11). Jewish Americans in 2020. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Touro Synagogue. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Pittsburgh Platform. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Reconstructionist Judaism. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Harvard University. (n.d.). Judaism. The Pluralism Project. pluralism.org.
6. Sarna, J. D. (2004). American Judaism: A history. Yale University Press.

A convent burns above Boston

On the night of 11 August 1834 a crowd climbed Mount Benedict in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and burned the Ursuline convent school that stood on it. The nuns got their pupils out, and most of those pupils were Protestant girls whose Boston and Cambridge families had sent them there because the teaching was good. A rumour had gone around that a woman was being held inside against her will. The night before, the Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher had preached against Catholic influence in three Boston churches. Of the men later brought to trial, all but one were acquitted, and the one convicted was pardoned after a petition that the Catholic bishop of Boston signed. The Massachusetts legislature never paid the order for the property.

In 1834 there were perhaps three hundred thousand Catholics in a country of about fifteen million. Within a generation Catholicism would be the largest single church in the United States, and it has never since been anything else. Both halves of that sentence matter. The story is not only arrival and growth; it is a long argument, conducted by Protestants and Catholics both, about whether a person who owed obedience to a bishop in Rome could be a citizen of a republic.

Key idea: Nearly every internal fight in American Catholicism between 1820 and 1960, over pew rents, school books, parish deeds, national languages and papal letters, was an argument about authority: who decides, the congregation, the bishop, the nation, or Rome.

From thirty-five thousand to the largest church in the country

At the first federal census in 1790 there were roughly thirty-five thousand Catholics in a population approaching four million, most of them in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and they had no bishop. John Carroll, a Maryland-born ex-Jesuit whose cousin Charles had signed the Declaration of Independence, was made superior of the American mission in 1784 and then, in 1789, the first bishop of Baltimore, elected by the American clergy themselves in an arrangement Rome permitted once and never again.

What changed the arithmetic was migration, in three overlapping surges.

Period	Who came	What it changed
1820s to 1850s	Irish, in enormous numbers after the famine of 1845 to 1852; Germans into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys	Catholicism becomes the largest single denomination; Irish clergy come to dominate the American hierarchy
1880s to 1924	Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, French Canadians into New England mill towns, Mexicans into the Southwest	The national parish, immigrant devotional life, and a church of perhaps twelve million by 1900
After 1965	Mexican, Central American, Caribbean, Filipino and Vietnamese Catholics	Spanish-language parishes; a Latino share of American Catholics approaching a third by the 2010s

Growth on that scale outran the institution. Priests were scarce, parishes enormous, and the church built at a pace that shaped American cities: churches, schools, orphanages, hospitals, colleges, cemeteries and burial societies, largely financed by domestic servants and labourers in small weekly amounts. By 1908 the Vatican stopped treating the United States as mission territory. In 1789 the country had one diocese. A century later it had dozens.

The school question

The sharpest conflict was over children. Nineteenth-century American public schools were not secular; they were mildly Protestant, and their standard classroom text was the King James Bible, read without comment. In 1842 Bishop Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia asked that Catholic pupils be allowed to use the Douay version instead and be excused from Protestant devotions. A rumour spread that Catholics wanted the Bible out of the schools altogether.

In May 1844 fighting broke out in the Kensington district of Philadelphia; in July it resumed in Southwark. Two Catholic churches and a seminary were burned, homes were destroyed, and about a dozen people died. Nativist politics went national with the American Party, whose members answered questions about it by saying they knew nothing, and which briefly elected governors and dozens of congressmen in the mid 1850s.

American bishops drew a conclusion and acted on it. Meeting as the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, they directed that every parish build a parochial school within two years and that Catholic parents send their children to it. The same council commissioned the catechism, published in 1885 and known ever after as the Baltimore Catechism, that generations of American Catholics learned by question and answer. The parallel political move failed: an 1875 attempt to amend the federal Constitution to bar public aid to sectarian schools, pushed by Representative James Blaine, died in the Senate, but versions of it entered dozens of state constitutions and were still being litigated in the twenty-first century, as you will see in the last lesson of this course.

The upshot: The American Catholic school system, at its peak educating millions of children, was built as a defensive institution by a minority that had concluded the public school belonged to somebody else.

Whose parish is it?

Inside the church the fights were about property and language. Under American law a congregation could incorporate and hold its own title, and in the early republic many Catholic congregations did exactly that, electing lay trustees who owned the building and sometimes claimed the right to hire and fire the priest. Bishops regarded this as Protestantism creeping in through the deed box, and spent decades pulling titles into diocesan hands. The most consequential failure came in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where a dispute over control of parish property led Polish parishioners and their priest Francis Hodur to break away in 1897 and form what became the Polish National Catholic Church, which still exists.

Language produced the national parish: a congregation defined not by neighbourhood but by nationality, with its priest, its language, its feast days and its own school, so that a single city block could hold an Irish, a German, an Italian and a Polish parish. In 1891 a memorial associated with the German lay leader Peter Paul Cahensly asked Rome to organise American bishops by nationality. Rome declined, and the American hierarchy, largely Irish, read the request as a threat to its authority.

That fight bled into a theological one. A group of bishops around Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul argued that the church should embrace American conditions: public engagement, temperance, the separation of church and state as a workable arrangement rather than a regrettable one. Conservatives, in America and in France, called the position Americanism. In 1899 Leo XIII addressed a letter, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, to Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore condemning a set of opinions under that name. American bishops replied, in effect, that nobody here held them. The letter chilled theological experiment in the American church for half a century.

Smith, Kennedy, and the price of admission

Two presidential campaigns bracket the change. In 1928 Al Smith, governor of New York, became the first Catholic nominated by a major party. He lost heavily, including five states of the previously solid Democratic South, in a campaign saturated with the claim that a Catholic president would take orders from the Vatican. In 1960 John F. Kennedy faced the same claim and answered it in a single set-piece. On 12 September 1960 he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association that he believed in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, that he would make decisions in accordance with what his conscience told him to be the national interest, and that if the office ever required him to violate his conscience he would resign it.

The speech worked, and it is worth noticing what it cost. Kennedy purchased Catholic eligibility for the presidency by promising that his religion would make no difference to his governing, an offer no candidate courting religious voters in the twenty-first century would make. American Catholicism between Smith and Kennedy also produced two loud and opposite public voices: Dorothy Day, who with Peter Maurin sold the first issue of The Catholic Worker in Union Square on 1 May 1933 for a penny and built a movement of houses of hospitality and radical pacifism, and Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio audience in the 1930s ran into the millions and whose broadcasts turned toward antisemitism before his archbishop and the networks shut him down.

The council, and the church that came out of it

John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in October 1962; it closed in December 1965, after four sessions and roughly 2,500 bishops. For American parishioners the visible change was liturgical. Sacrosanctum Concilium, approved in 1963, permitted worship in the vernacular and the reordering of the Mass, and within a few years the priest had turned to face the congregation and the Latin was gone from most American parishes.

The document with the deepest American fingerprints was Dignitatis Humanae, the 1965 declaration on religious liberty, which held that the human person has a right to immunity from coercion in religious matters. Its principal architect was John Courtney Murray, an American Jesuit who had been ordered to stop publishing on church and state in the 1950s and was then brought to Rome as an adviser. Murray's argument, made at length in We Hold These Truths in 1960, was that the American arrangement was not a compromise with error but a sound way of ordering a religiously plural society. The council adopted the substance.

Then came the reversal of expectations. In 1968 Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, reaffirming the prohibition on artificial contraception against the recommendation of the majority of his own advisory commission. Surveys ever since have found American Catholic practice diverging sharply from that teaching, and many historians treat the encyclical as the moment when large numbers of American Catholics learned to keep their faith while setting aside a specific instruction of the magisterium. The numbers of priests and of women religious, which had risen through the 1950s, fell steeply from the late 1960s, and parishes and schools began closing and merging in the old immigrant cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

Why this matters: Vatican II gave American Catholics a vernacular liturgy and a doctrine of religious liberty that matched their political inheritance, and it arrived at the same moment as a crisis of obedience that the council itself had not caused.

Counting a church that people leave

Now the measurement problem from Lesson 1, applied. Pew's 2014 Religious Landscape Study found 20.8 percent of American adults identifying as Catholic. The same study found that about 13 percent of all American adults were former Catholics, a group larger than any Protestant denomination, and that for every convert to Catholicism several people left. Yet the Catholic share of the population fell only slowly, because immigration kept replacing the departures. Roughly a third of American Catholics in that study were Hispanic, and the younger the age group, the larger that share.

The other number that changed the church is grim and specific. In January 2002 the Boston Globe began publishing an investigation showing that the Archdiocese of Boston had moved priests accused of sexually abusing children from parish to parish. In June 2002 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in Dallas. The bishops then commissioned an outside study from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, published in 2004, which counted 4,392 priests accused of abusing minors between 1950 and 2002 and 10,667 individuals who had made allegations. Diocesan bankruptcies, state investigations, and a Pennsylvania grand jury report in 2018 followed. Sociologists disagree about how much of the decline in Catholic affiliation the crisis caused as against the broader disaffiliation you will meet in Lesson 14, but no account of American Catholicism after 2002 can leave it out.

Common misconceptions

• American Catholics were always a working-class immigrant group. The colonial community was small, English-speaking and in Maryland often wealthy and slaveholding; the immigrant working-class church is a nineteenth-century development.
• Nativism was fringe. The American Party elected governors and dozens of congressmen in the 1850s, and anti-Catholic argument was made from respectable pulpits and in mainstream newspapers.
• Parochial schools were built to keep religion in education. They were built because public schools already had religion in them, of a Protestant kind, and Catholic requests for accommodation had failed.
• Vatican II caused the collapse in vocations. The timing is close, but the same decades saw comparable declines in other institutional commitments, and historians dispute the causal claim rather than assume it.
• Latino Catholics are new arrivals. Catholic communities in New Mexico, Texas and California predate their incorporation into the United States, and some parishes there are older than the republic.

What to remember

• Roughly 35,000 Catholics in 1790 with no bishop; John Carroll of Baltimore from 1789; the largest single church in the country by the 1850s and about twelve million people by 1900.
• The 1834 Charlestown convent burning and the 1844 Philadelphia riots mark the violent edge of a mainstream anti-Catholic politics that peaked with the American Party.
• The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 ordered a school in every parish and commissioned the Baltimore Catechism.
• Trusteeism, the national parish, the Cahensly memorial of 1891 and Leo XIII's 1899 letter on Americanism were all arguments about who holds authority.
• Al Smith lost in 1928; Kennedy answered the same charge in Houston on 12 September 1960 by promising his religion would not govern his governing.
• Vatican II, 1962 to 1965, brought the vernacular Mass and, through John Courtney Murray, a declaration on religious liberty; Humanae Vitae in 1968 opened a lasting gap between teaching and practice.
• Pew in 2014: 20.8 percent of adults Catholic, about 13 percent of adults former Catholics, roughly a third of Catholics Hispanic. The John Jay study of 2004 counted 4,392 accused priests between 1950 and 2002.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center. (2015, May 12). America's changing religious landscape. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Roman Catholicism. Britannica. britannica.com.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Catholic Church in the United States. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Philadelphia nativist riots. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Second Vatican Council. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
6. John Jay College of Criminal Justice. (2004). The nature and scope of the problem of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and deacons in the United States, 1950-2002. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
7. Dolan, J. P. (1985). The American Catholic experience: A history from colonial times to the present. Doubleday.

Five thousand copies out of a Palmyra print shop

In March 1830 a jobbing printer in Palmyra, New York, named Egbert B. Grandin finished a run of five thousand copies of a 588-page book. He had wanted his money up front, and a local farmer, Martin Harris, had mortgaged his farm for three thousand dollars to guarantee it. The book was the Book of Mormon, which its translator, a twenty-four-year-old named Joseph Smith, said he had rendered from golden plates by the gift and power of God. Two weeks after the printing, on 6 April 1830, Smith and a small group organised a church.

Within the next seventy-five years, Americans founded, on American soil, at least four more religious movements that now count members in the millions, three of them well outside the United States. That is not a normal thing for a country to do. Most societies produce new religions rarely and then suppress them. This one produced them in a rush, in a corridor running from western New York to Los Angeles, and mostly let them live.

Worth holding on to: New religions did not appear in America because Americans were unusually credulous. They appeared because disestablishment removed the machinery for stopping them, and because a competitive religious market rewarded anyone with a claim worth hearing.

What made the ground fertile

Four conditions, none of them sufficient on its own, kept recurring.

• No establishment to prosecute you. By the 1830s no state had an established church, and heresy had ceased to be an offence anywhere. A founder faced ridicule, mobs and occasionally militia, but not a court authorised to convict him of false doctrine.
• Cheap print and a literate public. The steam press and the postal system meant that a farmer with a manuscript could reach a national readership. Every movement in this lesson is a publishing operation as much as a congregation.
• Restorationism. The revivals of Lesson 6 left a widespread conviction that the churches had drifted from the primitive Christianity of the New Testament and that someone would restore it. That is an invitation, and several people accepted it.
• Millennial arithmetic and the body. Prophetic chronology, especially the numbers in Daniel and Revelation, was ordinary Protestant reading material. So was the question of why God had stopped healing the sick, which every movement here answers in some way.

Historians differ about the weight of each. What none of them will let you say is that upheaval simply produced religion: plenty of equally disrupted places produced nothing of the kind.

Five movements at a glance

Movement	Founding	The claim that set it apart	Where it stands
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints	Joseph Smith; Book of Mormon printed 1830, church organised 6 April 1830	A restored priesthood and continuing revelation through a living prophet, with additional scripture	The church reports about 17 million members worldwide; Pew's 2014 survey found 1.6 percent of US adults identifying as Mormon
Seventh-day Adventists	Out of the Millerite expectation of 1843 to 1844; organised 1863 at Battle Creek, Michigan	Saturday sabbath, a heavenly judgment begun in 1844, and the prophetic ministry of Ellen G. White	Reports more than 20 million members worldwide, the great majority outside the United States
Christian Science	Mary Baker Eddy; Science and Health published 1875, church chartered 1879	Sickness and matter as errors of mortal mind, corrected by understanding divine Mind	Publishes no membership figures at all, by a rule in its own church manual
Jehovah's Witnesses	Charles Taze Russell; Zion's Watch Tower from 1879; the present name adopted in 1931	God's kingdom as a literal government, with loyalty to it overriding national claims	Reports roughly 8.5 million active publishers worldwide; the lowest retention rate Pew has measured for any US tradition
Pentecostalism	Topeka, Kansas, 1901; the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles from April 1906	Baptism in the Holy Spirit, evidenced by speaking in tongues, and divine healing now	Pew's 2011 study of global Christianity put pentecostals and charismatics together at roughly a quarter of the world's Christians

The Latter-day Saints: revelation, exodus, and the federal government

Latter-day Saint teaching holds that the church Christ founded fell into apostasy and was restored through Joseph Smith, who received visions beginning in 1820, translated an ancient American record, and was given priesthood authority by heavenly messengers. Revelation did not stop with him: the church is led by a president understood as a prophet, seer and revelator, and the canon can be added to.

The first fifteen years were a running conflict over land, politics and neighbours' fear of a bloc that voted together. The Saints were driven from Kirtland, Ohio, and then from Missouri, where Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an order on 27 October 1838 declaring that they must be treated as enemies and exterminated or driven from the state. They built Nauvoo on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, which by the early 1840s was among the largest cities in the state. On 27 June 1844 a mob stormed the jail at Carthage and killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum.

The succession split the movement. The largest body followed Brigham Young, who led the first companies into the Salt Lake Valley on 24 July 1847. A smaller body eventually gathered around Smith's son as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1860, which took the name Community of Christ in 2001 and has developed in a markedly different direction, ordaining women from 1984.

Plural marriage, practised privately from the 1840s and announced publicly in 1852, then set the church against the United States for forty years. Congress criminalised bigamy in the territories in 1862; the Supreme Court upheld a conviction in Reynolds v. United States in 1879, in a decision whose reasoning you will take apart in the final lesson; the Edmunds Act of 1882 disfranchised polygamists; and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the church as a corporation and moved to seize its property. In 1890 church president Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto advising members to contract no marriage forbidden by law. Utah became a state in 1896. Fundamentalist groups that continued the practice separated from the church, which excommunicates members who enter plural marriages. A second boundary moved in June 1978, when Official Declaration 2 extended priesthood ordination and temple ordinances to Black members, ending a restriction that had stood since the nineteenth century.

What a movement does when the date passes

William Miller was a Baptist farmer and War of 1812 veteran in Low Hampton, New York, who read the prophetic numbers in Daniel and concluded that Christ would return between March 1843 and March 1844. He said so cautiously, and others said it loudly. When the period passed, a follower named Samuel Snow refined the calculation to 22 October 1844. Tens of thousands waited. Nothing happened, and the day is still called the Great Disappointment.

Most Millerites simply went home. A minority did something more interesting: they concluded that the date had been right and the event misunderstood, that what began on 22 October 1844 was a work of judgment in the heavenly sanctuary rather than a return to earth. Around that reinterpretation, and around Ellen G. White, whose visions the movement accepted as prophetic, and around the seventh-day sabbath borrowed from Seventh Day Baptists, a church took shape and formally organised in 1863 at Battle Creek, Michigan.

Adventism then did something no one would have predicted from a failed prophecy: it built a health empire. Belief that the body is a temple produced dietary reform, and the Western Health Reform Institute of 1866 became the Battle Creek Sanitarium under John Harvey Kellogg, whose brother turned one of its breakfast experiments into a cereal company. Adventist hospitals and Loma Linda University followed, and because Adventists as a population are largely non-smoking and often vegetarian, epidemiologists have studied them for decades as a research cohort in the Adventist Health Studies. Charles Taze Russell, whose Bible Student movement became Jehovah's Witnesses, was reading in the same post-Millerite world.

The core of it: Failed prophecy does not reliably destroy a movement. What it destroys is the loose crowd; the committed minority reinterprets, organises, and often builds something more durable than what existed before.

Healing, mind, and a church that will not count itself

Mary Baker Eddy spent much of her early life ill, and much of it trying cures: homeopathy, hydropathy, and the mental healing of Phineas Quimby of Portland, Maine. In February 1866 she fell on ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, was badly hurt, and recovered while reading an account of a healing in Matthew. She dated her discovery to that recovery. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures appeared in 1875; the Church of Christ, Scientist was chartered in Boston in 1879; the Mother Church building went up in 1894.

The teaching, stated as Christian Scientists state it, is that God is Mind and wholly good, that matter and sickness have no ultimate reality, and that healing follows from understanding this rather than from medicine. The church trains practitioners who pray with the sick professionally. It is also, structurally, one of the most tightly designed organisations in American religion: Eddy's Manual of The Mother Church fixed the governance permanently, provided for readers instead of preachers, and forbids the publication of membership numbers, which is why this is the one American denomination whose size genuinely cannot be reported. Its newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, founded in 1908, became a serious and widely respected daily.

The Witnesses, and the constitutional law they made

Charles Taze Russell began publishing Zion's Watch Tower in 1879 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Under Joseph Franklin Rutherford, who took over after Russell's death, the movement adopted the name Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931 and took the shape it still has: door-to-door preaching by every member, a kingdom hall rather than a church, and a refusal of the things Witnesses regard as owed to God alone. They do not salute flags, serve in armies, or accept blood transfusions.

That refusal put them in court constantly, and the country got a body of First Amendment law out of it. In Minersville School District v. Gobitis in 1940 the Supreme Court upheld the expulsion of two Witness children who would not salute the flag, and a wave of violence against Witnesses followed across the country that year. Three years later, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, decided on Flag Day 1943, the Court reversed itself: Justice Robert Jackson wrote for the majority that government may not compel a citizen to declare a belief, and that the whole point of a bill of rights is to place some questions beyond the reach of majorities. The Witnesses argued dozens of cases in that era, including Cantwell v. Connecticut in 1940, which you met in Lesson 4 as the case that applied free exercise to the states.

Pew's 2014 study found the Witnesses to be one of the most racially diverse traditions in the country and, at the same time, the one with the lowest retention: only about a third of American adults raised as Witnesses still identified as such. A movement can grow steadily through conversion while losing most of its own children.

Azusa Street, and the American religion that went global

On 1 January 1901, at a small Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, run by the holiness preacher Charles Fox Parham, a student named Agnes Ozman began speaking in a language she did not know. Parham taught that this was the biblical sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit. In 1905 he opened a school in Houston, where a Black holiness preacher named William J. Seymour, the son of formerly enslaved parents, was permitted to listen from the hallway because Texas segregation law and Parham's own practice kept him out of the room.

Seymour went to Los Angeles in February 1906. Locked out of the church that had invited him, he preached in a house on Bonnie Brae Street, and in April the meetings broke out into something the neighbours noticed. They moved into a former African Methodist Episcopal building at 312 Azusa Street, a plain wooden structure that had been serving as a stable and warehouse, and ran almost continuously for three years. Services had no fixed order, no announced preacher and no separated seating, and Black, white, Latino and Asian worshippers prayed together at a time when almost nothing else in Los Angeles was integrated. Newspapers wrote about it with contempt. Frank Bartleman, who was there, later wrote that the colour line was washed away in the blood.

It did not stay washed away. Parham came to Los Angeles, disapproved of what he found, and broke with Seymour. The Assemblies of God, organised at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1914, became the largest white Pentecostal body, while the Church of God in Christ under Charles Harrison Mason, whom you met in Lesson 7, became the largest Black one. In 1916 a further split divided Pentecostals over the nature of the Godhead and the correct baptismal formula, producing the Oneness bodies. In 1994, at a meeting in Memphis, the white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America dissolved itself and reconstituted as a racially inclusive organisation, an act participants called a reconciliation.

From the 1960s the Pentecostal experience spread into churches that were not Pentecostal at all: the charismatic movement in Episcopal, Lutheran and Catholic parishes, with Catholic charismatic renewal usually dated to a student retreat at Duquesne University in 1967.

Bottom line: A revival held in a converted stable on a side street in Los Angeles, led by the son of enslaved parents, reshaped Christianity in Latin America, Africa and Asia more thoroughly than any American missionary board did.

Common misconceptions

• These groups are all versions of the same thing. They disagree about the most basic questions, including whether there is new scripture, whether Christ has already acted invisibly, and whether matter exists.
• The Great Disappointment ended Millerism. It ended the crowd. The reinterpreting minority produced the Seventh-day Adventist Church and influenced the movement that became Jehovah's Witnesses.
• Latter-day Saints abandoned plural marriage because they changed their minds. The 1890 Manifesto came after federal legislation had disfranchised polygamists and dissolved the church as a corporation.
• Pentecostalism began among white Southerners. Its founding revival was led by a Black preacher in Los Angeles and was interracial from the start; segregation was reimposed afterward.

Summing up

• The Book of Mormon was printed at Palmyra in 1830; the church was organised on 6 April 1830; Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage on 27 June 1844; Brigham Young reached the Salt Lake Valley on 24 July 1847.
• Federal legislation from 1862 to 1887 and the Supreme Court in 1879 forced the polygamy question; the 1890 Manifesto preceded statehood in 1896, and Official Declaration 2 opened the priesthood to Black members in 1978.
• The Great Disappointment of 22 October 1844 produced, through reinterpretation, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, organised in 1863 and now overwhelmingly non-American.
• Mary Baker Eddy published Science and Health in 1875 and chartered her church in 1879; its manual forbids publishing membership figures.
• Jehovah's Witnesses lost Gobitis in 1940 and won Barnette in 1943, and their litigation built much of modern First Amendment doctrine.
• Azusa Street, from April 1906 under William J. Seymour, launched Pentecostalism, now a quarter of world Christianity when charismatics are included.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center. (2015, May 12). America's changing religious landscape. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Great Disappointment. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Mary Baker Eddy. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Pentecostalism. Britannica. britannica.com.
6. Pew Research Center. (2011, December). Global Christianity: A report on the size and distribution of the world's Christian population. Pew Research Center.
7. Bushman, R. L. (2005). Joseph Smith: Rough stone rolling. Alfred A. Knopf.

A sermon mailed to every minister in the country

On 21 May 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist occupying the pulpit of First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue in New York, preached a sermon he called Shall the Fundamentalists Win? He argued that a party in the churches was trying to make a short list of doctrines into a test of Christian standing, and that if it succeeded, educated young people would simply leave. A publicist working for the Rockefeller family had the sermon reprinted under a milder title and mailed to Protestant ministers across the country, a distribution running to well over a hundred thousand copies. The reply from the Presbyterian side, by Clarence Macartney of Philadelphia, asked instead whether unbelief would win.

What followed was not a debate between religion and science. It was an argument inside Protestantism, between people who had read the same books and drawn opposite conclusions about what a church could give up and still be a church.

So what?: The fundamentalist-modernist controversy set the categories American religion still uses. Evangelical, mainline, liberal and fundamentalist are all words that got their present meaning in this fight.

What the modernists had read

Three bodies of scholarship reached American seminaries in the second half of the nineteenth century, mostly through Americans who had studied in German universities.

The first was higher criticism: the study of the biblical texts as historical documents with authors, sources and dates. Its most famous product was the argument that the Pentateuch was compiled from several strands written centuries after Moses. The second was evolutionary biology, after Darwin published in 1859, together with a geology that made the earth immensely old. The third was the social gospel, which read the prophets and the sermon on the mount as a programme for industrial society; Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist who had pastored beside Hell's Kitchen, put the case in Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907.

Modernists concluded that Christianity is a living thing that has always restated itself, and that a faith which stakes everything on the literal accuracy of ancient texts is handing its own children an unnecessary reason to disbelieve. Their argument was evangelistic in intent: save the religion by translating it.

What the fundamentalists had read

Their answer had a serious academic address of its own, Princeton Theological Seminary. Charles Hodge, who published a three-volume systematic theology in the early 1870s, asked in a short book in 1874 what Darwinism was and answered that, as a system excluding design, it was atheism. In 1881 A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield published an article on inspiration arguing that the biblical books, as originally written, contained no error of any kind. That claim, worked out with real philological care, is the ancestor of the word inerrancy.

Alongside it ran a different stream: dispensational premillennialism, brought from Britain by John Nelson Darby, spread through summer Bible conferences, and made portable in 1909 by the Scofield Reference Bible, which printed the interpretation in the notes beside the text. It taught that history is divided into eras, that the present one ends in judgment, and that the church should expect decline rather than progress. It made the social gospel look not merely wrong but naive.

Between 1910 and 1915 two California oil men, Lyman and Milton Stewart, paid for twelve volumes of essays called The Fundamentals, sent free to ministers, missionaries and theological students on a scale reaching into the millions of copies. In 1920 the Baptist editor Curtis Lee Laws coined the word fundamentalist for those willing to do battle for the fundamentals.

Their argument, stated at its strongest, is not obscurantism. It is this: Christianity makes factual claims about events, and a religion that keeps the vocabulary while abandoning the claims has not saved anything worth saving. If Christ did not rise, the church is a benevolent society with unusually old furniture.

The denominations split

The Presbyterians fought hardest because their polity gave them the machinery. The General Assembly had adopted a list of essential doctrines in 1910 and reasserted it in 1923: the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the reality of the miracles. In reply, roughly 1,300 ministers signed the Auburn Affirmation, arguing that these were theories about doctrines and could not be made tests of ordination.

The most formidable conservative was J. Gresham Machen, a New Testament scholar at Princeton, whose Christianity and Liberalism in 1923 made an argument liberals found insulting and logicians found clean: liberalism is not a variant of Christianity but a different religion, and honest people should stop pretending otherwise and separate. Machen lost the institutional fight. He left Princeton in 1929 to found Westminster Theological Seminary, was suspended from the ministry in 1936, and organised the church that became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Fosdick lost too, in his way. Told in 1924 that he could keep the Presbyterian pulpit only by becoming a Presbyterian, he resigned. John D. Rockefeller Jr. built him a new church on Riverside Drive, opened in 1930, and Fosdick preached in it and on national radio for two decades.

Dayton, Tennessee, July 1925

In March 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act, making it unlawful for a state-funded teacher to teach that man descended from a lower order of animals. The American Civil Liberties Union advertised for a teacher willing to test it. Businessmen in Dayton, a town of about eighteen hundred people, saw an opportunity to put the place on the map and recruited John T. Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old coach who had substituted in a biology class.

The trial ran for eight days in July. William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential candidate, appeared for the prosecution; Clarence Darrow, the country's best-known defence lawyer, for Scopes. When the judge excluded expert testimony on evolution, Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible, and questioned him outdoors, on the courthouse lawn, about the age of the earth and the length of the days in Genesis. Bryan conceded that the days might not have been twenty-four hours. H. L. Mencken sent dispatches to Baltimore portraying the town as a rural asylum.

Two things about the trial are usually left out. Scopes was convicted and fined one hundred dollars, and in 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court threw out the fine on a technicality while upholding the statute, which killed the appeal the ACLU wanted; the Butler Act stayed law until 1967. And Bryan's objection was not only to evolution. The textbook Scopes taught from, George William Hunter's A Civic Biology of 1914, presented human races in a hierarchy and recommended that families it called parasitic be prevented from reproducing. Bryan, a lifelong campaigner against the strong grinding the weak, had read the eugenics in the book and said so. Bryan died in Dayton five days after the trial ended.

Remember: Dayton was not a straightforward contest between knowledge and ignorance. The prosecution's champion was attacking a textbook that did in fact teach eugenics, and the defence's victory was journalistic rather than legal.

Retreat, or reconstruction?

The story most Americans absorbed is that fundamentalism was humiliated at Dayton and disappeared into the backcountry until it re-emerged in the 1970s. Historians stopped believing that some time ago. George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture in 1980 traced the movement's intellectual seriousness, and Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again in 1997 documented what happened in the supposedly missing decades: not retreat but construction.

Between 1925 and 1945 conservative Protestants built a parallel infrastructure. Bible institutes trained pastors and missionaries outside the university system. Radio, which the mainline denominations had partly ceded, became a conservative medium; Charles Fuller's programme was carried on hundreds of stations. Publishing houses, summer camps, youth movements and mission boards multiplied. None of it required a single seminary board to change its mind.

Then a group inside that world decided the separatism was a mistake. The National Association of Evangelicals formed in 1942. Fuller Theological Seminary opened in 1947, the same year Carl F. H. Henry published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, accusing his own side of abandoning social responsibility. Billy Graham's Los Angeles campaign in 1949 made him a national figure, and in 1956 he helped found Christianity Today as a magazine for this new evangelicalism.

The break came in 1957, when Graham accepted the sponsorship of a council of New York churches that included liberals for his Madison Square Garden crusade. Separatist fundamentalists, Bob Jones Sr. among them, denounced him for cooperating with unbelief. That quarrel is the reason the two words now mean different things in American usage: an evangelical will work with people he thinks are wrong, and a fundamentalist regards that willingness as the error itself.

Where the argument went next

The legal fight over evolution outlived everyone involved. In Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968 the Supreme Court struck down anti-evolution statutes as establishments of religion. States then required balanced treatment for creation science, and in Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987 the Court struck that down too. A reformulation called intelligent design was tested in a federal district court in Pennsylvania in 2005, in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, where the judge held it to be creationism relabelled and not science.

The demographic outcome is stranger than either side predicted. The modernists won the seminaries, the denominational bureaucracies and the prestige, and then their churches shrank. Mainline Protestant membership peaked in the mid-1960s and fell for decades afterward, a decline Dean Kelley provoked argument about in 1972 by titling a book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. Pew's 2014 study found evangelical Protestants at 25.4 percent of American adults and mainline Protestants at 14.7 percent. Since then evangelical numbers have flattened too, and the growth has gone to the unaffiliated, which is Lesson 14.

Common misconceptions

• It was religion against science. Both sides were religious, and both had academic centres; Princeton's inerrancy argument was made by trained philologists.
• Fundamentalists were rural and uneducated. The movement's institutional strength in the 1920s was urban, in northern cities and their seminaries, and its leading theologian held a chair at Princeton.
• Scopes won. He was convicted and fined; the reversal in 1927 was on a technicality and left the statute standing until 1967.
• Fundamentalism vanished after 1925. It built institutes, radio networks and publishing houses through the 1930s, which is what made the postwar evangelical surge possible.
• Evangelical and fundamentalist mean the same thing. The words parted in the 1950s over whether to cooperate with churches one considers mistaken.

The short version

• Fosdick preached Shall the Fundamentalists Win? in May 1922; the reprint went to Protestant ministers nationwide, and Macartney answered it.
• Modernism rested on higher criticism, evolutionary science and the social gospel; fundamentalism rested on Princeton inerrancy, dispensational premillennialism, and The Fundamentals of 1910 to 1915.
• The Presbyterian fight produced the Auburn Affirmation of 1923, Machen's Christianity and Liberalism, Westminster Seminary in 1929 and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.
• Scopes was tried in July 1925, convicted, fined one hundred dollars, and freed on a technicality in 1927; Bryan objected to the eugenics in the textbook as well as to evolution, and died five days after the trial.
• The 1925 to 1945 decades were institution-building, not retreat, which is why the NAE in 1942, Fuller in 1947, Graham from 1949 and Christianity Today in 1956 had something to build on.
• Graham's 1957 New York crusade split evangelicals from separatist fundamentalists, and the two labels have meant different things since.

Sources

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Scopes Trial. Britannica. britannica.com.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Fundamentalism. Britannica. britannica.com.
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Fundamentals. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Harry Emerson Fosdick. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Pew Research Center. (2015, May 12). America's changing religious landscape. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
6. Marsden, G. M. (1980). Fundamentalism and American culture: The shaping of twentieth-century evangelicalism, 1870-1925. Oxford University Press.
7. Carpenter, J. A. (1997). Revive us again: The reawakening of American fundamentalism. Oxford University Press.

Fifteen pages in Arabic, written in North Carolina

In 1831 a man in Bladen County, North Carolina, sat down and wrote fifteen pages in Arabic. His name was Omar ibn Said. He had been born around 1770 in Futa Toro, in what is now Senegal, had studied for something like twenty-five years with Muslim teachers, and had been captured, sold and shipped to Charleston in 1807. He escaped, was jailed in Fayetteville after being found praying, and covered the walls of the cell in Arabic script, which is how the local gentry noticed that the man they had bought was a scholar. His autobiography opens with the sixty-seventh chapter of the Quran. The manuscript is now in the Library of Congress, and it is the only known autobiography written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States.

Said is recorded in his lifetime as a convert to Christianity, and historians read that record carefully rather than simply: the same document that reports his baptism contains long passages of Quranic Arabic, and a man in his position had reasons to give the answer his owners wanted. What is not in doubt is the first fact. Muslims were in America before the United States existed.

What matters here: Islam in America has two beginnings. The first, among enslaved West Africans, produced individuals and documents but no surviving community. The second, from the 1880s, produced the communities that exist now. Both are the history of American Islam, and neither one explains the other.

Enslaved Muslims, and a broken transmission

Historians estimate that a substantial minority of the Africans brought to North America came from Muslim regions of West Africa, from Senegambia to the Niger valley. Sylviane Diouf and Michael Gomez have assembled the traces: Arabic manuscripts, names, dietary refusals, prayer observed by neighbours and recorded in plantation letters. Bilali Muhammad, held on Sapelo Island in Georgia, left a thirteen-page Arabic manuscript on Islamic law. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, enslaved in Maryland in 1731, was eventually redeemed and returned to Africa. Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori, a prince of Futa Jallon, spent forty years enslaved in Mississippi before being freed in 1828.

None of it carried forward as an institution. Families were separated at sale, the slave trade from Africa was banned in 1808, Arabic literacy died with the generation that brought it, and Christian mission on the plantations was pressed hard. What survived is a memory that later movements would find useful, and a set of documents that make the claim of a Muslim American past specific rather than sentimental.

Two streams

	Immigrant stream	African American stream
Begins	1880s, from Ottoman Syria and Lebanon; renewed after 1965	1913 onward, in northern cities during the Great Migration
Early institutions	Village-style mosques in the Midwest: Ross, North Dakota, 1929; Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1934	Moorish Science Temple, 1913; the Nation of Islam from 1930; Ahmadi missions from 1920
What it was answering	How to keep a religion while assimilating into a Christian country	What religion could say to people whose ancestors' religion had been taken from them
Where it stands now	Sunni and Shia congregations organised as American nonprofits, with elected boards that hire the imam	Mostly Sunni after 1975, alongside a reconstituted Nation of Islam

Peddlers, autoworkers, and the first mosques

Migration from the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Mount Lebanon in the 1880s and 1890s was mostly Christian, but a Muslim minority came with it: peddlers who worked the rural Midwest, then factory hands drawn by Henry Ford's five-dollar day to Highland Park and Dearborn, Michigan. Small farming communities of Syrian and Lebanese Muslims settled in North Dakota. They built where they landed. A mosque went up at Ross, North Dakota, in 1929, and in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1934; the Cedar Rapids building, now called the Mother Mosque of America, is the oldest surviving purpose-built mosque in the country. Albanians, Bosnians, Yemenis and Tatars added congregations of their own. The national origins quota act of 1924 then closed the door for forty years, which is why this stream stayed small.

Islam remade in Black America

In 1913 a man who took the name Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple in Newark, teaching that African Americans were of Moorish origin and that Islam was their proper religion. In 1920 an Ahmadi missionary from India, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, arrived and found his most receptive audience among African Americans, converting hundreds in Chicago and Detroit; the Ahmadiyya movement is a distinct tradition whose claims about its founder most other Muslims reject, and for two decades it was the main channel by which Sunni-style practice and Quranic Arabic reached Black America.

In 1930 a peddler in Detroit known as W. D. Fard began teaching in the same milieu, and after he disappeared in 1934 the movement passed to Elijah Muhammad, born Elijah Poole in Georgia, who led it for four decades from headquarters in Chicago. The teaching of the Nation of Islam, as the Nation itself states it, is that Black people are the original people of the earth, that Fard was the appearance of God in person, and that Elijah Muhammad was his messenger. Its programme was separation and self-reliance: businesses, farms, schools, a newspaper, strict dress, no alcohol, tobacco or pork, and a discipline that visibly rebuilt lives, which is why prisons became its most productive mission field. Sunni and Shia Muslims elsewhere did not regard these teachings as Islam, and the Nation was not asking them to.

Malcolm Little joined while imprisoned in Massachusetts and, as Malcolm X, became the Nation's national spokesman and its most formidable public voice. He broke with Elijah Muhammad in 1964, made the pilgrimage to Mecca that April, and wrote home that he had prayed alongside Muslims of every colour, which he described as a revision of what he had believed about race. He took the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, founded two new organisations, and was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on 21 February 1965.

The decisive turn came ten years later. Elijah Muhammad died in February 1975, and his son Warith Deen Mohammed took over and moved the whole community into Sunni Islam: he set aside the teaching about Fard's divinity, opened membership to all races, renamed the organisation more than once, and eventually dissolved its central structure so that its mosques became ordinary Sunni congregations. Most of the membership followed him. In 1977 and 1978 Louis Farrakhan re-established the Nation of Islam on Elijah Muhammad's original teachings, and it continues on that basis. Muhammad Ali, who had joined the Nation in 1964, followed Warith Deen Mohammed into Sunni Islam in 1975.

The upshot: The largest single movement of American converts to Sunni Islam happened in 1975, by decision of one leader, and it is the reason most Black American Muslims today are Sunni rather than members of the Nation.

After 1965: a mosque beside the office park

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended the national origins quotas and replaced them with preferences for skills and family reunification. Muslims came as graduate students and physicians and engineers from Pakistan, India, Egypt and Jordan, then as Iranians after 1979, then as refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The institutions followed the pattern of every other American religion: voluntary associations incorporated under state law. The Muslim Students Association was founded in 1963, the Islamic Society of North America in 1981, and mosques were built by boards of trustees who raise the money, own the building and hire the imam, an arrangement with no precedent in most of the countries the founders came from.

The growth is measurable because someone counted the buildings. The US Mosque Survey found 1,209 mosques in 2000, 2,106 in 2011, and 2,769 in 2020. Note what kind of number that is, in the vocabulary of Lesson 1: a congregational count, good at geography and institutional strength, silent about how many people are in the pews.

For people, Pew has had to model. Its 2017 estimate was about 3.45 million Muslims of all ages, a little over one percent of the population, built from survey data, immigration statistics and demographic projection rather than from a headcount. The composition surprises people who have not looked: in that study about 58 percent of Muslim American adults were foreign-born, and about one in five was Black, with roughly half of Black Muslim adults being converts. American Muslims are not a diaspora of one nationality. They are the most racially varied major religious group the surveys measure.

Since September 2001

The attacks of 11 September 2001 changed the terms of membership for every Muslim in the country. Reported hate crimes against Muslims jumped sharply in 2001 and again after later attacks abroad. Between 2002 and 2012 the New York Police Department ran a surveillance programme that mapped mosques, student groups and businesses; it was disclosed by reporters in 2011 and 2012 and later shut down. A proposal in 2010 to build an Islamic community centre two blocks from the World Trade Center site became a national controversy, though the same city contained mosques much older than the towers.

Pew's 2017 survey of Muslim Americans found that about half said it had become harder to be Muslim in the United States in recent years, and that 48 percent reported at least one specific incident of discrimination in the past twelve months. The same survey found 92 percent saying they were proud to be American. Both numbers are the survey's; holding them together is the point of taking the survey at all.

Common misconceptions

• Islam arrived in America with recent immigration. Enslaved Muslims were here in the eighteenth century and left documents; what did not survive was the institutional chain.
• American Muslims are mostly Arab. Arabs are a minority; the immigrant stream is heavily South Asian, and about a fifth of Muslim adults are Black Americans.
• The Nation of Islam is how Black Americans practise Islam. Most Black American Muslims are Sunni, largely because Warith Deen Mohammed moved the community into Sunni Islam after 1975.
• Mosques answer to clerical authorities abroad. Most American mosques are nonprofit corporations governed by elected boards that hire and can dismiss the imam.
• Muslim American population figures are counts. They are projections. Pew's 3.45 million for 2017 is modelled from several sources, because no instrument counts American Muslims directly.

Recap

• Omar ibn Said wrote his Arabic autobiography in 1831; it is held by the Library of Congress and is the only known example from an enslaved person in the United States.
• Muslim migration from Ottoman Syria and Lebanon in the 1880s produced early mosques at Ross, North Dakota, in 1929 and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1934, and was cut off by the 1924 quota act.
• The Moorish Science Temple began in 1913, Ahmadi missions from 1920, and the Nation of Islam in Detroit in 1930 under W. D. Fard and then Elijah Muhammad.
• Malcolm X broke with the Nation in 1964, made the hajj that April, and was assassinated on 21 February 1965.
• In 1975 Warith Deen Mohammed moved his father's community into Sunni Islam; Louis Farrakhan re-established the Nation on the older teachings in 1977 and 1978.
• Mosques counted: 1,209 in 2000, 2,106 in 2011, 2,769 in 2020. Pew's 2017 estimate of Muslims was about 3.45 million of all ages, roughly 58 percent foreign-born, about one in five Black.
• Pew in 2017: 48 percent reported a specific incident of discrimination in the previous year, and 92 percent said they were proud to be American.

Sources

1. Library of Congress. (n.d.). Omar Ibn Said Collection. Library of Congress. loc.gov.
2. Pew Research Center. (2017). U.S. Muslims concerned about their place in society, but continue to believe in the American dream. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Nation of Islam. Britannica. britannica.com.
4. Harvard University. (n.d.). Islam. The Pluralism Project. pluralism.org.
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Mother Mosque of America. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
6. Diouf, S. A. (1998). Servants of Allah: African Muslims enslaved in the Americas. New York University Press.
7. Bagby, I. (2021). The American mosque 2020: Growing and evolving. US Mosque Survey 2020, Report 1.

A Chicago hall, 11 September 1893

The World's Parliament of Religions opened in Chicago on 11 September 1893, in a hall attached to the Columbian Exposition, and among the delegates was a thirty-year-old Bengali monk who had arrived with no formal invitation and very little money. Swami Vivekananda began by addressing the audience as sisters and brothers of America, and the room stood and applauded for minutes before he could continue. Anagarika Dharmapala of Ceylon spoke for Buddhism at the same Parliament, and the Rinzai Zen abbot Soyen Shaku spoke through a young translator named D. T. Suzuki, who would spend much of his later life explaining Zen to Americans.

The Parliament is often told as the moment Asian religions arrived in America. Look at what happened next and the story reverses. Vivekananda founded the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894 and attracted a following of American seekers. Meanwhile Congress spent the following three decades making sure that the populations who actually practised these religions could not come.

The upshot: The religious map of the United States after 1965 is, more than anything else, a product of immigration statute. Change the law and you change the religions in the country, which is why a lesson on Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism in America has to begin in Congress.

The exclusion era, and the communities that survived it

Chinese labourers who came for the gold rush and the railroads built temples in California from the 1850s, and Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Japanese migration followed, and with it the first lasting Buddhist institution: the Buddhist Mission of North America, founded in San Francisco in 1899 by priests of the Jodo Shinshu tradition, which built temples up and down the coast.

Punjabi Sikhs began arriving around the turn of the century, working in lumber mills in Washington and then in the orchards and rice fields of California. They opened the first gurdwara in the United States at Stockton in 1912. Then the law closed. The Immigration Act of 1917 created an Asiatic Barred Zone excluding immigrants from most of Asia. In 1923, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court held that a Punjabi Sikh who had served in the United States Army was not a free white person within the meaning of the naturalisation statute, and citizenships already granted to South Asians were revoked. California's alien land laws then barred many of them from owning the farms they worked. The 1924 quota act finished the job.

The Japanese American Buddhist community paid the heaviest price. After Pearl Harbor, Buddhist priests were among the first people the FBI arrested, on the reasoning that a Buddhist priest was a leader of an unassimilated community. Roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent were removed to camps in 1942, and Buddhist services were held in the barracks. The organisation renamed itself the Buddhist Churches of America in 1944, using a Protestant word on purpose.

What the 1965 act did

Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act at the foot of the Statue of Liberty on 3 October 1965. It abolished the national origins quotas and replaced them with preferences, chiefly for family reunification and for occupational skills in short supply. Its sponsors said publicly that it would not change the ethnic composition of the country. It changed the ethnic composition of the country.

Because the skills preference did much of the early work, the first large cohorts of Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist immigrants after 1968 were unusually well educated: physicians, engineers, graduate students, scientists. That fact shaped everything that got built. Communities with professional incomes could buy land in suburbs, commission architects, import priests and finance temples in a single generation, which is why so many American temples sit on ordinary suburban roads near office parks and interstate exits.

Hindu America: two audiences, two histories

Hindu traditions had reached Americans long before Hindus did, and largely through teachers who came to teach non-Indians: Vivekananda's Vedanta Society from 1894, Paramahansa Yogananda, who arrived in 1920 and founded the Self-Realization Fellowship, the Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1960s, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, founded in New York in 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, whose devotees were mostly young Americans. These movements are part of the story, but they are not the same story as the temples.

Temple building began in earnest in 1977, when two purpose-built temples were consecrated: the Ganesha temple of the Hindu Temple Society of North America in Flushing, Queens, and the Sri Venkateswara Temple at Penn Hills outside Pittsburgh. Both were built to traditional specifications, with priests trained in India and consecration rites performed by specialists flown in for the purpose. American temples often do something that would be unusual in India: they house deities from several regional traditions under one roof, because a suburb has one Hindu community rather than twenty, and the congregation is Tamil and Gujarati and Bengali at once. Scholars call this a congregational adaptation, and it comes with a second one, a Sunday schedule, because that is when Americans are free.

Practice in most Hindu homes remains domestic: a shrine, daily puja, festivals such as Diwali and Navaratri, life-cycle rites. The temple is where the community becomes visible, which is also why building has continued at scale. The BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham in Robbinsville, New Jersey, inaugurated in 2023 after more than a decade of construction, is among the largest Hindu temples anywhere outside India.

Buddhist America, and the two Buddhisms argument

American Buddhism has a structural feature that scholars have argued about for thirty years: the people who arrived with Buddhism and the people who adopted it rarely share a room. Immigrant and heritage communities, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Lao and Sri Lankan, run temples that are also community centres, with services in the home language and a monastic clergy. Convert communities, overwhelmingly white and highly educated, run meditation centres organised around sitting practice and retreats.

Charles Prebish named the pattern the two Buddhisms; Jan Nattier proposed a sharper three-part scheme distinguishing Buddhism that was imported by seekers who went looking for it, exported by missionary movements, and carried as baggage by immigrants who had it already. The categories have been criticised for flattening Asian American converts and for treating white practitioners as the interesting case, which is a fair criticism and a useful one to hold while reading any book on American Buddhism.

Both sides built. Shunryu Suzuki's San Francisco Zen Center dates from 1962; Chogyam Trungpa founded the institution that became Naropa University in 1974; the Insight Meditation Society opened at Barre, Massachusetts, in 1975 to teach vipassana. Refugee arrivals after 1975 from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos built hundreds of temples, and Hsi Lai Temple, opened at Hacienda Heights, California, in 1988, is one of the largest Buddhist complexes in the Western hemisphere. Soka Gakkai International-USA, which grew from Japanese Nichiren Buddhism, is among the most racially diverse religious organisations in the country.

Then there is the export nobody planned. In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn began a programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center that became Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, deliberately stripped of Buddhist vocabulary so it could be prescribed in a hospital. Whether that counts as Buddhism, a secular therapy, or a borrowing that hollows out its source is an argument Buddhists themselves conduct in public.

In short: There is no single American Buddhism. There is a heritage Buddhism organised around temples and community, a convert Buddhism organised around meditation, and a secular meditation industry with millions of participants who would not call themselves Buddhist at all.

Sikh America

Sikhs describe their faith as the teaching of ten Gurus beginning with Guru Nanak in the fifteenth century, followed by the Guru Granth Sahib, the scripture installed as the eternal Guru, which sits at the centre of every gurdwara and is treated with the courtesies owed to a living teacher. Worship is congregational and open, and every gurdwara serves langar, a free vegetarian meal to anyone who comes, sitting on the floor together, a practice designed to refuse caste distinction. Initiated Sikhs keep five articles of faith, among them uncut hair, which for men usually means a turban.

That turban is why Sikh American history includes a specific kind of violence. Sikhs are not Muslims, and the men who attack them frequently think they are. Four days after the September 2001 attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was shot dead by a man who said he was retaliating against Arabs. On 5 August 2012 a gunman entered the gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and killed six worshippers preparing the langar meal; a seventh victim died years later of his injuries. Sikh organisations campaigned for years afterward until the FBI began recording anti-Sikh incidents as their own category in hate crime statistics from 2015.

The community's American roots are older than the violence. Dalip Singh Saund, who came from Punjab in 1920, earned a doctorate in mathematics, farmed in the Imperial Valley and was elected to Congress from California in 1956, the first Asian American and the first Sikh to serve there.

What the numbers can and cannot say

Pew's 2014 Religious Landscape Study put Hindus at about 0.7 percent of American adults and Buddhists at about 0.7 percent. Those are shares of a very large sample, and they are close to the limit of what such a sample can support: a few hundred respondents cannot tell you about regional variation, generational change or practice. That is why Pew ran a dedicated survey of Asian Americans in 2012, which found roughly half of Indian Americans identifying as Hindu, and why the best information about Sikhs comes not from national surveys at all but from community organisations, whose estimates cluster around half a million people. The general survey cannot see them.

Why this matters: Applying Lesson 1's caution here is not pedantry. Small religious populations are where a confident-sounding statistic is most likely to be an artefact of the instrument.

Common misconceptions

• Asian religions came to America in the 1960s. Chinese temples date from the 1850s, Japanese Buddhist institutions from 1899, the Stockton gurdwara from 1912. What 1965 changed was the size and legality of the flow.
• American Buddhism means meditation. For most Buddhists in America, temple practice is chanting, ritual, teaching and community, and daily meditation is a convert emphasis.
• Sikhism is a branch of Hinduism or of Islam. Sikhs describe it as a distinct revelation with its own scripture and Gurus, and treating it as a hybrid misstates what its adherents believe.
• Hindu temples in America reproduce Indian temples. Many deliberately house several regional traditions together and schedule around a Sunday, both adaptations to American conditions.
• Post-2001 attacks on Sikhs were cases of mistaken identity, and that is the whole story. Mistaken identity explains the attacker's stated motive; it does not explain why an American religious minority had to campaign for years to be counted in federal statistics.

Where this leaves us

• The 1893 Parliament of Religions introduced Vivekananda, Dharmapala and Soyen Shaku to an American audience, and exclusion laws then kept out the communities whose religions they represented.
• Chinese Exclusion in 1882, the Asiatic Barred Zone in 1917, Thind in 1923 and the 1924 quota act shaped American religious demography for four decades.
• The 1965 act, signed on 3 October, ended the quotas and favoured professional skills, which is why post-1968 Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist immigration was well educated and could build quickly.
• Purpose-built Hindu temples opened in Flushing and outside Pittsburgh in 1977; American temples commonly house several regional traditions and meet on Sundays.
• American Buddhism divides between heritage temples and convert meditation centres, a split named by Prebish and refined by Nattier, with a secular offshoot in Kabat-Zinn's 1979 stress reduction programme.
• The Stockton gurdwara opened in 1912, Dalip Singh Saund entered Congress in 1956, and after Oak Creek in 2012 the FBI began counting anti-Sikh hate crimes separately from 2015.
• Pew's 2014 figures of roughly 0.7 percent each for Hindus and Buddhists are near the resolution limit of a general survey; Sikh numbers come from community estimates of around half a million.

Sources

1. Harvard University. (n.d.). The Pluralism Project. Harvard University. pluralism.org.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Sikhism. Britannica. britannica.com.
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Buddhism. Britannica. britannica.com.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
6. Pew Research Center. (2012). Asian Americans: A mosaic of faiths. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
7. Eck, D. L. (2001). A new religious America: How a Christian country has become the world's most religiously diverse nation. HarperSanFrancisco.

A sermon against preachers in politics

In 1965 Jerry Falwell, pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, preached a sermon called Ministers and Marches. His argument was that clergy had no business in politics. Preachers were called to save souls, and the ministers marching in Selma were doing the wrong job; he said he would not use his pulpit for the civil rights movement or against communism.

Fourteen years later, in June 1979, Falwell sat in a room in Lynchburg with three Washington political operatives, Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips and Ed McAteer, along with Robert Billings, and came out of it as the head of a national political organisation. Weyrich supplied the name, taken from a phrase Falwell had used about the country's silent majority of moral people, and the Moral Majority was launched. Falwell later disavowed the 1965 sermon and had it withdrawn.

What matters here: The most politically consequential religious movement of the last half century was assembled in about four years, by people who had spent the previous decade insisting that religion and politics should stay apart. Something changed. What it was is genuinely disputed.

The dispute about 1979

Two accounts are defended by serious historians using much the same archive.

The first account puts tax law and segregated schools at the centre. After the Civil Rights Act, hundreds of private Christian academies opened across the South, many of them enrolling white children who had left newly integrated public schools. In 1971 a federal district court held in Green v. Connally that a school which discriminated by race could not hold federal tax exemption. The Internal Revenue Service acted, and in 1976 revoked the exemption of Bob Jones University, which barred interracial dating, retroactive to 1970. In 1978 the IRS proposed rules requiring private schools founded around the time of desegregation orders to demonstrate they were not discriminating. The mail that arrived in Washington was measured in hundreds of thousands of letters. Randall Balmer, who interviewed Weyrich and has published his recollections, reports him saying flatly that abortion was not the catalyst, and that what finally moved evangelicals was the threat to their schools. The Supreme Court settled the tax question in 1983 in Bob Jones University v. United States, upholding the revocation.

The second account says the movement had many older roots and that abortion was one of them. Daniel K. Williams traces evangelical political organisation back through the school prayer decisions of 1962 and 1963, which convinced many Protestants that the federal courts were hostile to religion. Phyllis Schlafly's campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment ran from 1972 and mobilised religious women who had never done politics before. Anita Bryant's 1977 campaign against a Dade County gay rights ordinance did the same. On abortion, evangelicals were slower than Catholics, partly because the issue looked Catholic; the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution in 1971 permitting abortion in a range of circumstances. What moved them was a deliberate campaign of persuasion, above all the 1979 film series by Francis Schaeffer and the surgeon C. Everett Koop, shown in churches across the country. By the time the SBC's conservative faction won the presidency of the convention in 1979 with Adrian Rogers, the argument inside the denomination was already running.

What would settle this? Evidence about what actually moved money, mailing lists and votes between 1976 and 1980, and both sides have some. The accounts are also less opposed than they look: the school tax fight can be what organised the leadership while abortion is what recruited the rank and file. Notice which move each account makes, because it is a general lesson in reading history: one explains a movement by the interests of its organisers, the other by the convictions of its members.

The machinery, and the switch

The infrastructure was borrowed from secular conservatism. Richard Viguerie's direct mail operation could reach millions of households with a targeted letter. Church directories became voter files. In August 1980 Ronald Reagan appeared before a gathering of thousands of evangelical leaders in Dallas and told them that he knew they could not endorse him, but that he endorsed them.

The switch it produced is visible in four years of election returns. In 1976 Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist who taught Sunday school and spoke openly about being born again, carried a large share of white evangelical voters. In 1980 he lost them to a divorced former actor who rarely attended church. Whatever the religious right was, it was not a movement organised around the personal piety of candidates.

The organisations kept changing names and leaders. The Moral Majority dissolved in 1989. Pat Robertson, who had run for the Republican nomination in 1988, founded the Christian Coalition that year with Ralph Reed, which distributed tens of millions of voter guides through churches in the 1990s. James Dobson's Focus on the Family, begun in 1977 as a radio programme about parenting, became one of the largest religious broadcasters in the country and spawned a Washington policy arm in 1983.

What the votes actually look like

Two rules organise most of what surveys find. First, tradition matters, but race cuts across it: white and Black Protestants often hold similar theological views and vote in opposite directions, for reasons that Lesson 7 of this course explains. Second, since the 1990s frequency of attendance has predicted party, within almost every tradition, better than belief does.

Group	Recent presidential voting	Note
White evangelical Protestants	Roughly four in five for the Republican nominee in 2004 and again in 2016	The most reliable bloc in either coalition
Black Protestants	Roughly nine in ten Democratic	Theologically conservative and politically Democratic at the same time
White Catholics	Competitive, leaning Republican in recent cycles	The Catholic vote as a single bloc no longer exists
Hispanic Catholics	Majority Democratic, with a Republican share that has moved between cycles	Now roughly a third of American Catholics
Jewish voters	Consistently Democratic by wide margins	Orthodox voters are a clear exception
Religiously unaffiliated	Strongly Democratic	The fastest-growing group in the electorate

These are survey and exit poll figures, which carry all the cautions from Lesson 1. Exit polls in particular are quick instruments with real error, and the evangelical category depends on how the question was asked.

The other half of the story

While the religious right was being built, something else was happening to the same population. The General Social Survey found the religiously unaffiliated at about five percent of American adults in 1972, and still under ten percent through the 1980s. Then the line bends. Pew put the unaffiliated at 16 percent in 2007, 23 percent in 2014, and 29 percent in the Religious Landscape Study conducted in 2023 and 2024 and published in February 2025, which found Christians at 62 percent and reported that the decline had appeared to level off over the previous few years.

Be careful with the category, as Lesson 1 warned. Atheists and agnostics are a minority within it. Most of the unaffiliated select nothing in particular, and large numbers of them report believing in God or a higher power and some of them pray regularly. The growth is in the answer people give when asked to name a religion.

Four explanations, and how to tell them apart

• Political backlash. Michael Hout and Claude Fischer argued in the American Sociological Review in 2002 that the rise began among political moderates and liberals who had never been very observant, and who started declining to name a religion once being religious came to imply a partisan identity they rejected. The timing fits: the increase begins in the 1990s, after the religious right became a fixture of national politics.
• Generational replacement. Robert Putnam and David Campbell argued in American Grace in 2010 that this is mostly a cohort story. Each generation since the 1960s starts adult life less affiliated than the one before, and cohorts do not converge much as they age. If that is right, the aggregate can keep rising for decades without any individual changing their mind.
• Delayed family formation. Affiliation historically rose when people married and had children, because congregations are where American families go. Marriage and childbearing now happen later and less often.
• General institutional decline. Membership fell across the whole range of American voluntary associations over the same period. On this account religion is not being singled out; it is one more institution people stopped joining.

These are not mutually exclusive, and the way to distinguish them is panel data: follow the same people over years and see who changes. Panel evidence tends to support a mix, with cohort replacement doing much of the aggregate work and political disaffection doing more among people who once identified loosely with a tradition. Two further accelerants get argued about with less settled evidence: the Catholic abuse revelations from 2002, and the politics of the elections after 2015.

The point: The most confident sentence you can write is a conditional one. If the backlash account is right, the nones are a political artefact that politics could partly reverse; if the cohort account is right, the trend is demographic and will run for decades whatever the parties do.

Common misconceptions

• The religious right was a direct response to Roe v. Wade in 1973. The organisations came six years later, and the historian who interviewed the founders reports them naming other triggers; the honest answer is that this is disputed.
• Evangelicals have always voted Republican. Carter carried much of the white evangelical vote in 1976 and lost it in 1980.
• The nones are atheists. Atheists and agnostics are a minority of the group; most say nothing in particular and many report belief in God or a higher power.
• Religion determines how Americans vote. Race and attendance frequency both cut across tradition, and Black Protestants and white evangelicals share much theology and almost no partisanship.
• Rising nones means America is becoming secular like Europe. Belief and prayer have fallen much more slowly than affiliation, and the United States remains far more religious on every measure than western Europe.

Putting it together

• Falwell preached against clergy in politics in 1965 and founded the Moral Majority in June 1979 with Weyrich, Phillips, McAteer and Billings.
• One account of the movement's origin centres on Green v. Connally in 1971, the 1976 revocation of Bob Jones University's exemption and the 1978 IRS proposals; the other traces school prayer in 1962 and 1963, the ERA fight from 1972, and evangelical mobilisation on abortion after 1973.
• Carter carried much of the white evangelical vote in 1976; Reagan took it in 1980 and it has been the Republican coalition's most reliable bloc since.
• Black Protestants vote Democratic by roughly nine to one, which is why race, not theology, is the better predictor here.
• The unaffiliated: about 5 percent in the GSS in 1972, 16 percent in Pew in 2007, 23 percent in 2014, 29 percent in the 2023 to 2024 study published in February 2025, which found Christians at 62 percent and the decline levelling off.
• The four explanations are backlash, cohort replacement, delayed family formation and general institutional decline, and panel data is what distinguishes them.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center. (2015, May 12). America's changing religious landscape. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
2. Pew Research Center. (2025, February). Religious Landscape Study. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org.
3. Association of Religion Data Archives. (n.d.). Survey data on American religion and politics. ARDA. thearda.com.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Moral Majority. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Bob Jones University v. United States. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
6. Hout, M., & Fischer, C. S. (2002). Why more Americans have no religious preference: Politics and generations. American Sociological Review, 67(2), 165-190.
7. Williams, D. K. (2010). God's own party: The making of the Christian right. Oxford University Press.
8. Putnam, R. D., & Campbell, D. E. (2010). American grace: How religion divides and unites us. Simon and Schuster.

A mill worker in Spartanburg

In 1959 a textile mill in Spartanburg, South Carolina, moved to a six-day week. Adell Sherbert, a spooler who had worked there for thirty-five years, was a Seventh-day Adventist and would not work on Saturday. She was fired, could not find work in the local mills on those terms, and applied for unemployment compensation. South Carolina refused it, on the ground that she had declined suitable work without good cause. In 1963 the Supreme Court held that the state had to pay.

The reasoning in Sherbert v. Verner is the reason the case matters. The Court said that forcing a person to choose between following her religion and receiving a public benefit is a burden on free exercise, and that a state may impose such a burden only to serve a compelling interest, by the means least restrictive of religion. That is a demanding test, and for twenty-seven years it was the law.

Remember: Almost every argument you will hear about religion and American law is really an argument about one of three questions: which clause applies, how hard the government has to justify itself, and whose history counts.

Sixteen words, and the tension inside them

The First Amendment opens by saying that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Two clauses, sixteen words, and a permanent tension: an accommodation generous enough to satisfy free exercise can look like an establishment, and a separation strict enough to satisfy establishment can look like hostility to exercise.

Two structural points from Lesson 4 carry the whole modern story. First, the amendment originally bound only Congress; the states were free, and Massachusetts kept a tax-supported church until 1833. Free exercise was applied to the states in Cantwell v. Connecticut in 1940 and establishment in Everson v. Board of Education in 1947. Second, the earliest free exercise case had already drawn the line the Court would keep returning to: in Reynolds v. United States in 1879, upholding the conviction of a Latter-day Saint for bigamy in Utah Territory, the Court distinguished belief, which is absolutely protected, from action, which is not.

How the free exercise test was built, and taken apart

After Sherbert the high point was Wisconsin v. Yoder in 1972, where the Court exempted Old Order Amish families from compulsory schooling past the eighth grade, reasoning that two more years of high school would undermine a self-sufficient religious community that had sustained itself for centuries.

The test looked strong and performed weakly. Through the 1980s claimants kept losing: an Orthodox Jewish Air Force psychologist could not wear a yarmulke on duty in 1986; Muslim prisoners could not compel a schedule change for Friday prayers in 1987; and in 1988, in Lyng, the Forest Service was allowed to build a road through high country central to Yurok, Karuk and Tolowa practice, a case you met in Lesson 2.

Then, in Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, the Court changed the rule. Two drug rehabilitation counsellors in Oregon, one a member of the Native American Church, had been fired for ingesting peyote in a ceremony and denied unemployment benefits. Justice Scalia wrote that a neutral law of general applicability does not violate free exercise merely because it burdens a religious practice, and that carving out exemptions is a job for legislatures rather than courts. The alternative, he argued, would make every citizen a law unto himself.

The reaction was extraordinary. A coalition running from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Southern Baptists and the Latter-day Saints pushed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act through Congress in 1993 with almost no dissent, and President Clinton signed it. RFRA does by statute what Sherbert had done by constitutional interpretation: it forbids the federal government to substantially burden religious exercise unless it uses the least restrictive means of serving a compelling interest. In City of Boerne v. Flores in 1997 the Court held that Congress could not impose that standard on the states, so RFRA now binds the federal government; Congress passed a narrower statute for prisons and land use in 2000, and more than twenty states enacted RFRAs of their own.

Two other lines survived Smith and now do most of the work. A law that is not neutral or not generally applicable still faces strict scrutiny, which is how the Court unanimously struck down Hialeah's ordinances against animal sacrifice in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah in 1993: the city had banned the Santeria practice while leaving comparable secular killings alone. And RFRA gave claimants a statutory route, used successfully in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby in 2014, where closely held corporations objecting to contraceptive coverage won under the statute rather than under the Constitution.

The core of it: Since 1990 the first question in a free exercise case is not how important the religious practice is. It is whether the government treated religion worse than a comparable secular activity, and whether a statute rather than the Constitution supplies the standard.

The establishment side of the line

Everson in 1947 upheld New Jersey's reimbursement of bus fares for children attending parochial schools, while writing the separationist language that the losing side would quote for decades. Then came the school cases: in Engel v. Vitale in 1962 the Court struck down a prayer composed by the New York Board of Regents for daily classroom recitation, and in Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963 it struck down devotional Bible reading and the Lord's Prayer as school exercises. Neither decision touched private prayer by students, and both were, and remain, among the most misunderstood rulings in American law.

In Lemon v. Kurtzman in 1971 the Court assembled a three-part test: a law needed a secular purpose, a primary effect that neither advanced nor inhibited religion, and no excessive entanglement between government and religion. Judges applied it for half a century while complaining about it. Justice O'Connor reframed it as a question about whether government action endorsed religion, sending a message to nonadherents that they were outsiders.

Meanwhile a second approach grew up beside it. In Marsh v. Chambers in 1983 the Court upheld a paid legislative chaplain by pointing to unbroken practice since the First Congress, and in Town of Greece v. Galloway in 2014 it upheld prayer before town board meetings on similar grounds. In 2019 it let a large cross stand on public land in Bladensburg, Maryland, partly because it had been there since 1925 as a war memorial.

In 2022 the two approaches collided and one won. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District concerned a high school football coach who prayed at midfield after games. The Court ruled for the coach and, in doing so, said plainly that Lemon and the endorsement test had been abandoned, and that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by reference to historical practices and understandings. The dissent disputed the majority's account of the facts, arguing the prayers were not the quiet private moments the opinion described. Whatever you make of it, the doctrinal consequence is clear: the operative question in establishment cases is now historical.

Following the money

The third line runs through school funding, and it has moved further than either of the others. Its background is the wave of state constitutional provisions from the 1870s barring public aid to sectarian schools, which you met in Lesson 9 as the Blaine amendments, written when sectarian meant Catholic.

Case	Year	Holding
Locke v. Davey	2004	A state could decline to fund a scholarship for a degree in devotional theology; there is play in the joints between the clauses
Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer	2017	Missouri could not exclude a church preschool from a neutral playground resurfacing grant because it was a church
Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue	2020	A state that funds private school scholarships may not disqualify religious schools on the basis of their religious status
Carson v. Makin	2022	Maine could not exclude schools that would use tuition assistance for religious instruction either; use, like status, is not a permitted ground

Read the table downward and you can see a rule invert inside eighteen years. The older question was how much aid to religious institutions the Establishment Clause permits. The current question is how much exclusion of religious institutions the Free Exercise Clause allows, and the answer has been shrinking.

How to read the next case

When the next dispute reaches the news, work through it in this order.

1. Which clause is the claimant using? Free exercise cases are about burdens on practice. Establishment cases are about government sponsorship. Some cases involve both, and many recent ones are also free speech cases.
2. Is the law neutral and generally applicable? If yes, Smith controls and the claimant will probably lose on the Constitution alone. If the government exempted comparable secular conduct, the claimant will probably win.
3. Is a statute in play? RFRA for federal action, RLUIPA for prisons and land use, a state RFRA where one exists. These often decide the case without any constitutional ruling at all.
4. What is the comparator? Modern free exercise litigation is largely an argument about which secular activity the religious one should be compared with.
5. Which history is being invoked, and by whom? Since 2022 both sides argue from founding-era practice, which means the fight over what actually happened in 1791 is now a fight about what the law is.

Common misconceptions

• The Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools. It barred state-sponsored prayer as a school exercise in 1962 and 1963. A student praying privately, or a religious club meeting on the same terms as other clubs, was never prohibited.
• Employment Division v. Smith was overturned. It has not been. Congress answered it by statute, several justices have called for reconsidering it, and the Court has instead narrowed it by policing neutrality and general applicability.
• RFRA protects you against your state. Only if your state passed one. City of Boerne in 1997 held that the federal statute cannot be applied to the states.
• Tax exemption for churches is constitutionally required. The Court upheld it in 1970 as permissible, not as compelled, and Congress and the states could in principle change it.
• The religion clauses protect only believers. They protect the nonreligious as well: the Establishment Clause is the clause a nonbeliever uses, and the Court has treated deeply held nonreligious convictions as protected in some statutory contexts.

What to carry forward

• Reynolds in 1879 separated protected belief from regulable action; Cantwell in 1940 and Everson in 1947 applied the two clauses to the states.
• Sherbert in 1963 and Yoder in 1972 built a compelling interest test for free exercise; claimants nonetheless lost repeatedly through the 1980s.
• Employment Division v. Smith in 1990 held that neutral, generally applicable laws need no religious exemption; RFRA in 1993 restored the older standard by statute, and City of Boerne in 1997 confined RFRA to the federal government.
• Lukumi in 1993 preserved strict scrutiny for laws that are not neutral or not generally applicable, which is where most modern free exercise litigation now lives.
• On establishment, Engel in 1962 and Schempp in 1963 ended state-sponsored school prayer; Lemon in 1971 supplied the test; Kennedy v. Bremerton in 2022 discarded it for history and tradition.
• The funding line ran from Locke in 2004 through Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza and Carson, inverting the question from what aid is permitted to what exclusion is allowed.

Sources

1. Legal Information Institute. (n.d.). First Amendment. Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu.
2. Supreme Court of the United States. (n.d.). Opinions of the Court. supremecourt.gov. supremecourt.gov.
3. Oyez. (n.d.). Supreme Court case summaries and oral argument audio. Oyez. oyez.org.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Employment Division v. Smith. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Lemon v. Kurtzman. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
6. Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, Public Law 103-141, 107 Stat. 1488 (16 November 1993).
7. Witte, J., & Nichols, J. A. (2016). Religion and the American constitutional experiment (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.