18th Century Church
The Great Awakening
- The Great Awakening refers to a northeastern Protestant revival movement that took place in the 1730s and 1740s.
- The movement began with Jonathan Edwards, a Massachusetts preacher who sought to return to the Pilgrims' strict Calvinist roots.
- British preacher George Whitefield and other itinerant preachers continued the movement, traveling across the colonies and preaching in a dramatic and emotional style.
- By the 1770s, the Baptists were growing rapidly both in the north and in the South.
- The supporters of the Awakening—Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists—became the largest American Protestant denominations by the first decades of the 19th century.
- Opponents of the Awakening—Anglicans, Quakers, and Congregationalists—were left behind.
The American Revolution
- The Revolution split some denominations, notably the Church of England, whose ministers were bound by oath to support the king, and the Quakers, who were traditionally pacifists.
- Religious practice suffered in certain places because of the absence of ministers and the destruction of churches, but in other areas, religion flourished.
- The American Revolution inflicted deeper wounds on the Church of England in America than on any other denomination because the King of England was the head of the church.
- Loyalty to the church and to its head could be construed as treason to the American cause.
- Another result of this was that the first constitution of an independent Anglican Church in the country bent over backwards to distance itself from Rome by calling itself the Protestant Episcopal Church.
Massachusetts: church and state debate
- After independence, American states wrote constitutions establishing their government.
- From 1778 to 1780, the politicians of Massachusetts were absorbed in drafting a charter of government that the voters would accept.
- One of the most contentious issues was whether the state would support the church financially.
- Advocating such a policy were the ministers of the Congregational Church, which had received public financial support during the colonial period.
- The Baptists had grown strong since the Great Awakening, adhered to their conviction that churches should receive no support from the state.
- The Constitutional Convention chose to support the church and Article Three authorized a general religious tax to be directed to the church of a taxpayers' choice.
19th Century Church Drastically SpreADS & Changes
The 2nd Great Awakening
- The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant movement that began around 1790, and gained momentum by 1800.
- Membership rose rapidly among Baptist and Methodists whose preachers led the movement.
- Millions of new members enrolled in existing evangelical denominations and led to the formation of new denominations. Many converts believed that the Awakening brought in a new millennial age.
- The Second Great Awakening stimulated the establishment of many reform movements designed to remedy the evils of society before the anticipated Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
- While the First Great Awakening was centered on reviving the spirituality of established congregations, the Second focused on the unchurched and sought to instill in them a deep sense of personal salvation.
American Restoration Movement
- The Restoration Movement began on the American frontier during the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century.
- Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell sought to restore the whole Christian church, on the pattern set forth in the New Testament.
- They joined in fellowship in 1832 with a handshake. They were united in the belief that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, that churches celebrate the Lord's Supper on the first day of each week, and that baptism of adult believers by immersion, is a necessary condition for Salvation.
- The Restoration Movement has seen several divisions, resulting in multiple separate groups.
- Church of Christ religion came from this movement.
Latter Day Saints - Mormons
- Mormons follow teachings of Joseph Smith Jr.
- The Latter Day Saint movement traces their origins to the Burned-over district of western New York, where Joseph Smith, Jr., reported seeing God the Father and Jesus Christ, eventually leading him to doctrines that, he said, were lost after the apostles were killed.
- The Book of Mormon - he said was a translation of words found on a set of golden plates buried near his home by an indigenous American prophet.
- After publishing of the Book of Mormon in 1830, the church rapidly gained a following.
- Smith built the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, where he was assassinated.
- After Smith's death, the majority accepted Brigham Young as the church's leader.
- After continued difficulties and persecution in Illinois, Young left Nauvoo in 1846 and led his followers, the Mormons, to the Great Salt Lake Valley in what is today Utah.
- Mormons do not hold to the teachings of the Orthodox Christian view of Jesus Christ's Deity, which in turn would remove them from "the Church".
Jehovah's Witnesses
- In July 1879 Charles Taze Russell began publishing the magazine Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, with particular attention to his belief that the world was in "the last days".
- In 1881, Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society was formed in Pennsylvania. In 1884 Russell became president of the Society when it was legally incorporated.
- Russell's group split into several rival organizations after his death in 1916.
- One of those groups retained control of Russell's magazine, Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, and his legal corporation, the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society of Pennsylvania and adopted the name Jehovah's witnesses in 1931.
- Substantial organizational and doctrinal changes occurred between 1917 and the 1950's.
- Jehovah's Witnesses do not hold to the teachings of the Orthodox Christian view of Jesus Christ's Deity, which in turn would remove them from "the Church".
SEPARATION of Church and State
- In October 1801, members of the Danbury Baptists Associations wrote a letter to the new president-elect Thomas Jefferson. Baptists, being a minority in Connecticut, were still required to pay fees to support the Congregationalist majority.
- The Baptists sought Jefferson as an ally in making all religious expression a fundamental human right and not a matter of the government.
- In his January 1, 1802 reply to the Danbury Baptist Association Jefferson summed up the First Amendment's original intent, and used for the first time anywhere a now-familiar phrase in today's political and judicial circles:
- The amendment established a "wall of separation between church and state." Largely unknown in its day, this phrase has since become a major Constitutional issue. The first time the U.S. Supreme Court cited that phrase from Jefferson was in 1878, 76 years later.
African American Churches
- The Christianity of the black population was grounded in evangelicalism.
- The Second Great Awakening has been called the "central and defining event in the development of Afro-Christianity."
- During these revivals Baptists and Methodists converted large numbers of black people.
- They formed new denominations.
- In 1787, Richard Allen and his colleagues in Philadelphia broke away from the Methodist Church and in 1815 founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which, along with independent black Baptist congregations, flourished as the century progressed.
Abolition of Slavery
- The first American movement to abolish slavery: 1688 when Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania wrote a two-page condemnation of the practice, sent it to the governing bodies of their Quaker church, the Society of Friends.
- The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage: The first American abolition society, formed in 1775, in Philadelphia, primarily Quakers.
- After the American Revolutionary War, Quaker and Moravian advocates persuaded slaveholders in the Upper South to free their slaves.
- In 1833 the Anti-Slavery Society was formed.
- Abolition had a strong religious base including Quakers, and people converted by the Second Great Awakening, led by Charles Finney in the North, 1830s
- African-American activists and their writings were tremendously influential to some sympathetic white people, most prominently the first white activist to reach prominence, William Lloyd Garrison, who was its most effective propagandist.
- Garrison's efforts to recruit eloquent spokesmen led to the discovery of ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who became a prominent activist in his own right.
Russian Orthodoxy
- The headquarters of this North American Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church was moved from Alaska to California around the mid-19th century.
- It was moved again in the last part of the same century, to New York. This transfer coincided with a great movement of Uniates to the Orthodox Church in the eastern United States.
- This move increased the numbers of Orthodox Christians in America.
- The Uniates were received into Orthodoxy into the existing North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church.
- At the same time large numbers of Greeks and other Orthodox Christians were also immigrating to America. All Orthodox Christians in North America were united under the omophorion of the Patriarch of Moscow, through the Russian Church's North American diocese.
Liberal Christianity
- The "secularization of society" is attributed to the time of the Enlightenment.
- In the United States, religious observance is much higher than in Europe, and the United States' culture leans conservative in comparison to other western nations, in part due to the Christian element.
- New attitudes became evident, and the practice of questioning the nearly universally accepted Christian orthodoxy began to come to the forefront.
- In the post–World War I era, Liberalism was the faster-growing sector of the American church.
- In the post–World War II era, the trend began to swing back towards the conservative camp in America's seminaries and church structures.
Fundamentalism
- Christian fundamentalism began as a movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to reject influences of secular humanism and source criticism in modern Christianity.
- In reaction to liberal Protestant groups that denied doctrines considered fundamental to these conservative groups, they sought to establish principles necessary to maintaining a Christian identity, the "fundamentals."
- Especially targeting critical approaches to the interpretation of the Bible, the fundamentalists grew in various denominations as independent movements of resistance to the drift away from historic Christianity.
- Evangelical has become the main identifier of the movement's moderate and earliest ideas.
Roman Catholicism
- By 1850 Roman Catholics had become the country's largest single denomination.
- Between 1860 and 1890 Roman Catholics in the United States tripled through immigration; by the end of the decade it would reach seven million.
- These Catholics came from Ireland, Southern Germany, Italy, Poland and Eastern Europe.
- This influx would eventually bring increased political power for the Roman Catholic Church and a greater cultural presence, led at the same time to a growing fear of the Catholic "menace."
- As the 19th century waned, Protestant Americans realized that Roman Catholics were not trying to seize control of the government. Nonetheless, fears continued into the 20th century that there was too much "Catholic influence" on the government.
Anti-Catholicism
- Anti-Catholicism in the United States reached a peak in the 19th century when the Protestants became alarmed by the influx of Catholic immigrants. Some Protestants claimed that the Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation.
- The "nativist" movement in the 1840s, was a frenzy of anti-Catholicism that led to mob violence, the burning of property, and the killing of Catholics.
- The nativist movement found expression politically called the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s.
- The Catholic parochial school system developed in the early-to-mid-19th century in response to anti-Catholic bias in American public schools.
Labor Union Movement
- The Catholic Church exercised a prominent role in shaping America's labor movement.
- Nativism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-unionism coalesced in Republican politics, and Catholics gravitated toward unions and the Democratic Party.
- The Knights of Labor was the earliest & largest labor organization in the U.S., and in the 1880's half of it's members were Catholic.
- In Rerum novarum (1891), Leo spoke out against the abuses that workers faced and demanded that workers be granted rights and safety regulations.
- Rerum novarum provided new impetus for Catholics to become active in the labor movement.
- American Catholics exerted influence across organized labor. Catholic union members and leaders played important roles in steering American unions away from socialism.
Youth Programs
- While children and youth in the colonial era were treated as small adults, in the nineteenth century, one after another the denominations large and small began special program for their young people.
- Urban Protestant churchmen set up the YMCA.
- Methodists looked on their youth as potential political activists, to engage in social justice movements such as prohibition.
- Black Protestants youth had a major role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and the 1960's.
- White evangelicals in the twentieth century set up Bible clubs for teenagers, and experimented with the use of music to attract young people.
- The Catholics set up a network of parochial schools, and more than half of their young members were attending elementary schools run by local parishes.
The 20th Century Church Continues to Spread
Social Gospel
- The Social Gospel flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s by calling for the application of Christian ethics to social problems like economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, bad hygiene, child labor, inadequate labor unions, poor schools, and the danger of war.
- The Social Gospellers sought to operationalize the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:10): "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
- They typically were post-millennialist; they believed the Second Coming could not happen until humankind rid itself of social evils by human effort.
- Some scholars argue that the horrors caused by World War I left many disillusioned with the Social Gospel's ideals and of a glorious future for mankind.
- Many of the Social Gospel's ideas reappeared in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Scopes Monkey Trial
- The Scopes Monkey Trial was a major publicity event in 1925 that saw a modernist challenge to Fundamentalist beliefs about the Bible.
- A criminal case that used Tennessee's Butler Act, which made it unlawful (public school), "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."
- The case was a critical turning point in the United States' creation-evolution controversy.
- After the passage of the Butler Act, the American Civil Liberties Union financed a test case, where a teacher named John Scopes intentionally violated the Act.
- The highly publicized trial pitted two of the pre-eminent lawyers of the time against one another; Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan headed up the prosecution and famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow spoke for Scopes.
Evangelicalism
- In the U.S., and elsewhere, there has been a marked rise in the evangelical Protestant denominations, and a decline in the mainstream liberal churches.
- The 1950's saw a boom in the Evangelical Church
- The post–World War II prosperity experienced in the U.S. also had its effects on the church. Church buildings erected in large numbers, and the church's activities grew with this expansive physical growth.
- In the southern U.S., the Evangelicals, represented by leaders such as Billy Graham, have had a notable surge of the preachers of fundamentalism.
- Although there exists a diversity in the Evangelical community worldwide, the ties that bind all Evangelicals are still apparent: a "high view" of Scripture, belief in the Deity of Christ, the Trinity, salvation by grace through faith, and the bodily resurrection of Christ, to mention a few.
Pentecostalism
- Pentecostalism arose in 20th-century Christianity.
- The Pentecostal movement had its roots in the Pietism and the Holiness movement.
- The Azusa Street Revival was led by William J. Seymour, and began on April 14, 1906 at the African Methodist Episcopal Church until roughly 1915.
- The revival was characterized by ecstatic spiritual experiences accompanied by speaking in tongues, and dramatic worship services.
- It was the primary catalyst for the rise of Pentecostalism, and as spread by those who experienced what they believed to be miraculous moves of God there.
- Within Pentecostalism there are three orientations: Wesleyan-Holiness / Higher Life / Oneness
- Pentecostalism would later birth the Charismatic movement within established denominations.
- Pentecostalism claims more than 250 million adherents worldwide.
Roman Catholicism
- By the beginning of the 20th century, approximately one-sixth of the population of the United States was Roman Catholic.
- Modern Roman Catholic immigrants come to the United States from the Philippines, Poland, and Latin America, especially from Mexico.
- This multiculturalism and diversity has greatly impacted the flavor of Catholicism in the United States. For example, many dioceses serve in both the English language and the Spanish language.
Eastern Orthodoxy
- Emigration from Greece and the Near East has created a sizable Orthodox diaspora in the United States and elsewhere.
- Virtually all the Orthodox nationalities - Greek, Arab, Russian, Serbian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Bulgarian - are represented in the United States.
- The Orthodox church movements in the West are fragmented under what is called jurisdictionalism.
- This is where the groups are divided up by ethnicity as the unifying character to each movement.
- Ten years ago converts faced a daunting task having to learn the language and culture of the Orthodox group in order to properly convert to Orthodoxy.
- In recent times many of the churches now perform their services in modern English or Spanish or Portuguese (depending on the district).
Russian Orthodoxy
- In 1920 Patriarch Tikhon issued a decree that the North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church continue to exist in a de facto autonomous mode of self-governance.
- Between the World Wars the Metropolia coexisted and at times cooperated with a synod later known as Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).
- ROCOR, which moved its headquarters to North America after the Second World War, claimed but failed to establish jurisdiction over all parishes of Russian origin in North America.
- After World War II the Patriarchate of Moscow was unsuccessful to regain control over these groups.
- In the early 1960's the Metropolia became known as the Orthodox Church in America.
National Associations
- The Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908, the first major expression of a growing ecumenical movement among Christians in the United States.
- Today, the NCC is a joint venture of 35 Christian denominations in the United States with 100,000 local congregations and 45,000,000 adherents. .
- The NCC took a prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement, and fostered the publication of the widely used Revised Standard Version, followed by an updated New Revised Standard Version, the first translation to benefit from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
- Carl McIntire led in organizing the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) in 1941.
- A national conference for United Action Among Evangelicals was called to meet in April 1942.
- The organization was called the National Association of Evangelicals for United Action, soon shortened to the National Association of Evangelicals (NEA).
- There are currently 60 denominations with about 45,000 churches in the organization.
Oregon Compulsory Education Act
- After WWI, states concerned about the influence of immigrants looked to public schools to help.
- In 1922, the Masonic Grand Lodge of Oregon sponsored a bill to require all school-age children to attend public schools.
- The Democratic Governor Walter M. Pierce, endorsed by the Klan, the Compulsory Education Act was passed by a vote of 115,506 to 103,685.
- Its primary purpose was to shut down Catholic schools in Oregon.
- The constitutionality of the law was struck down by the Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) before it went into effect.
- The law caused Catholics to organize for the right to send their children to Catholic schools.
- In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the United States Supreme Court declared the Oregon's Compulsory Education Act unconstitutional in a ruling that has been called "the Magna Carta of the parochial school system."
Martin Luther King Jr. (1964)
- The Civil Rights Movement
- As the center of community life, Black churches held a leadership role in the Civil Rights Movement. Their history as a focal point for the Black community and as a link between the Black and White worlds made them natural for this purpose.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. was but one of many notable Black ministers involved in the movement.
- He helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957), serving as its first president.
- King received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through non-violent civil disobedience.
- Ralph David Abernathy, Bernard Lee, Fred Shuttlesworth, C.T. Vivian and Jesse Jackson are among the many minister-activists. They were especially important during the later years of the movement in the 1950's and 1960's.
The 21st Century Church in America
- 240 Million professing Christians in the United States.
- 65% of adults profess Christianity as their faith.
- 22.7% Catholic
- 48.5% Protestant
- Largest Protestant denominations: The Southern Baptist Convention / United Methodist Church / The Church of God in Christ
- 1 Million Eastern Orthodox Christians
- Today most Christian churches in the U.S. are either Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, or Catholic
- Hartford Institute estimates there are roughly 350,000 religious congregations in the United States.
- Just think of what kind of movement Christians could have in America for the Gospel if there was unity.