Christianity

n.

1. The Christian religion, founded on the life and teachings of Jesus.
2. Christians as a group; Christendom.
3. The state or fact of being a Christian.
4. pl., -ties. A particular form or sect of the Christian religion: the Christianities of antiquity.

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Major world religion which arose out of Judaism. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth (first cent. CE) fulfilled the prophetic predictions of the Hebrew Bible as the Christ, a Greek term which translates the Hebrew Mashi'ah (literally, the anointed; figuratively, savior, Messiah). As portrayed in the New Testament, Jesus was the son of Mary, a Jewish virgin whose miraculous conception of Jesus was caused by the Holy Spirit. Jesus attracted a number of Jewish followers (apostles) with his preaching, which called for repentance in anticipation of the long-awaited "Kingdom of Heaven." He criticized the two major Jewish religio-socio-economic parties, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, but seems to have shared many ideas with both groups, especially the Pharisees, and observed the commandments ordained in the Hebrew Scriptures. His "messianic" activity, which was seen as a political threat both to the Roman government in Erets Israel and to the Jewish authorities, led to his crucifixion. Jesus' disappointed disciples were able to reinterpret his messianic calling, giving it spiritual rather than political content, thereby keeping Jesus' movement alive---initially as a Jewish sect---until it developed fully into Christianity.

All the first Christians were Jewish followers of Jesus who believed that he had risen from the dead and would imminently return. Under the influence of Paul of Tarsus (a Jew who was originally an opponent of Christianity), the new religion expanded to include Gentiles who considered themselves free of the obligation to observe the commandments. Scholars are divided as to when the final break between the two religions occurred, but it was probably some time in the second century as Gentile Christianity became the dominant part of the religion. Eventually, the Jewish-Christians became a small minority among Christians, despised by Jews for being Christians and by Christians for being Jews. They survived for a few centuries.

Early Christians were persecuted by the Romans, but, in the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official Roman religion. From that time on, Jews who lived under Christian governments were subjected to persecution, discrimination, attempts at conversion, expulsions, and massacres. Many Christians believed that the continued existence of the Jews as a separate, legitimate religious entity called into question the truth of Christianity as the successor religion to biblical Israel. They also accused the entire Jewish people with the crime of "deicide," i.e., killing God, (i.e., Jesus) because of the New Testament account of Jewish complicity in the crucifixion. Therefore, while Christians generally recognized the right of Jews to observe their own religion in the hope that they would eventually convert to Christianity, attempts were made to guarantee that a secondary status for Jews was maintained, as if their depressed condition were evidence of Divine displeasure. Christian anti-Semitic theory and practice have been major factors in Jewish history. Anti-Jewish stereotypes, even identifying Jews with the devil, became deeply ingrained in the Christians consciousness.

While there are many forms of both Judaism and Christianity, the differences between classical Judaism and classical Christianity may be summarized as follows:

(1) Judaism conceives of God's unity as absolute, with no internal distinction; Christianity maintains a Divine Trinity of three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all of whom are God, even though the Father generated the Son, and the Father and Son together (according to Western Christianity) caused the procession of the Spirit.

(2) For Judaism, God is incorporeal and can never be visible in human form; while agreeing that God is incorporeal, Christianity sees in Jesus the incarnation (embodiment) of the second Person of the Trinity, the Son.

(3) Although Judaism contains certain concepts of original sin, the preponderance of Jewish opinion holds that individuals can achieve salvation through their own effort; Christianity holds that the sinful nature of humanity, caused by the original sin of Adam, prevents salvation without the intermediacy of the sacrifice of the Divine-human Messiah.

(4) The Jewish concept of the Messiah is generally a political one: when he comes in the future, he will be a human descendant of David who restores the monarchy, rebuilds the Temple, and gathers in the Jewish exiles from the Diaspora; for Christians, while Jesus the Messiah was fully human, the son of Mary and descendant of David, he was also fully God, and his task was humanity's redemption from the original sin of Adam.

(5) Judaism maintains that the covenant between God and the People of Israel embodied in the Hebrew Scriptures is eternally valid and not to be superseded; observance of the commandments, as understood through talmudic legislation, is necessary for the personal salvation of the Jews. Christianity believes in a second covenant, between God and all humanity, recorded in the New Testament (as contrasted to the Hebrew "Old Testament") and pronounced by the mission of the Divine-human person of Jesus; salvation (available to all humanity) depends on belief in Jesus as the Christ/Messiah, not on observance of the commandments.

(6) Since Christians see themselves as the recipients of the new covenant, they believe that they are the true spiritual descendants of Abraham and deserve the name Israel; Jews maintain that they remain the "true Israel," being both the physical and spiritual heirs of Abraham.

Historically, Jews have been the objects of Christian missionaries, who attempted to demonstrate that the Christian approach to the issues outlined above is the correct one. Converted Jews who knew Jewish literature and tradition often stood in the forefront of the conversion campaigns. Jews, for their part, maintained that Christianity was a false religion, contradicted by the simple words of the Bible and by human reason. Both Jews and Christians wrote polemical works; Jewish anti-Christian compositions included detailed refutations of Christian doctrines and were intended to provide answers to the Christian attack on Judaism. While these works rarely represent the most sophisticated theological thinking of either side, they do indicate the state of popular religion as understood by both advocates and opponents of the two religions (see Apologetics and Polemics).

While the Christian mission to the Jews was usually low-key, it frequently took on violent forms, and forced conversions were not an uncommon feature of Jewish-Christian relations. An additional distinctive earmark of the Jewish-Christian conflict in the Middle Ages was the Disputation, a public debate held between representatives of the two religions (most notably in Paris, 1240; Barcelona, 1263; and Tortosa, 1413-14). These were usually stage-managed affairs with the anti-Jewish results known in advance. Often the local Christian rulers used such occasions for their internal political purposes. In the modern period, Jews and Christians have often met on more equal terms engaging in dialogue rather than in disputation (see Interfaith Relations).

Despite the history of antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, there were often cultural exchanges and mutual influences between the religions. Early Christianity adopted many distinctive Jewish beliefs and practices, such as prayers and baptism, while, at the same time, it was heavily affected by Greek paganism. Medieval Jews were instrumental in the transfer of Greek learning in its Arabic form to Christian Europe. The works of Maimonides were used by a number of Christian thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas. Christianity, for its part, influenced Judaism, both in the area of popular religious practices and in theology, mainly, but not only, in regard to Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). The influence of Christianity on Judaism has been especially pronounced in the modern period in Western countries as Jews began to evaluate Christianity more positively and were more willing to borrow consciously from it.

Judaism has traditionally had an ambivalent attitude towards Christians and Christianity. Since Christianity claimed to be the true Israel and heir to the biblical tradition, Jews naturally regarded it as an illegitimate usurper. The Christian beliefs in trinity and incarnation, as well as the cultic use of images, were often seen as proof that Christianity is another form of Idolatry. In addition, living under Christian persecution caused many Jews to have an extremely negative view of the majority religion. On the other hand, many Jews were able to distinguish favorably between Christian trinitarian monotheism and idolatrous polytheism. Some (notably Judah Halevi and Maimonides) have even seen positive aspects to the spread of Christianity (and Islam), believing that it would help prepare the world for the eventual advent of the true Messiah. Still others, e.g., Franz Rosenzweig, taught that Christianity is the proper way for Gentiles to worship God.

In recent years, many Christians have come to realize that Christian beliefs have often nurtured Anti-Semitism, and were among the factors leading to the Holocaust. The Catholic Church has issued proclamations condemning anti-Semitism and declaring that contemporary Jews are not to be considered guilty of deicide. Catholics and liberal Protestants now rarely seek to convert Jews and have revised anti-Judaism in the prayers and catechisms, but evangelical Protestants continue their missionary activity, and such groups as "Jews for Jesus" are an integral part of their campaign (see Cults). In general, the evangelical groups have been very supportive of the State of Israel because of their messianic beliefs and eschatological timetable, while Catholics and liberal Protestants have been much less approving. The Eastern Orthodox churches have not changed their teachings concerning the Jews and Judaism and retain traditional prejudices.

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One billion, seven hundred eighty-three million, six hundred sixty thousand people-about one out of every three in the world today-claim Christianity as their religion. This makes Christianity by far the world's largest religion. But those people have such vastly different opinions as to its theological content that a single definition of Christianity is just about impossible.

There are, however, some common beliefs, although even these are subject to differing interpretations:

1. -Jesus of Nazareth, by his death on the cross, provided redemption for humans who were separated from God because of sin. Some Christians view this literally as a historic act, part of God's new covenant with humankind. Others see the cross as a permanent symbol of the victory of good over evil. But the architecture of all Christian churches features, usually on prominent display, a cross. In Roman Catholic tradition it is a crucifix, the body of Jesus nailed to the cross, signifying Jesus' death. In Protestant tradition the cross is empty, emphasizing his resurrection.

2. Jesus, either literally or figuratively, was resurrected from the dead.

3. Baptism is the initiation into the religion.

4. -A Communion meal (Eucharist, Lord's Supper, Communion, or Last Supper) involving bread and wine is a central liturgical element of worship.

5. -There is one life to live on Earth, followed by an everlasting afterlife (usually in heaven or hell).

6. -The Bible, consisting of both Old and New Testaments, although interpreted in different ways, is the standard by which Christians live.

7. There is only one universal Church.

It is this final point that confuses people unfamiliar with Christian history. There is a vast difference between the stately liturgy of an Orthodox High Mass, with vested clergy chanting hymns in Latin or Greek, enveloped with the smell of incense wafting heavenward, and that of the shouting, singing, foot-stomping southern revival tent-meeting. One might be forgiven for seeing no similarity between a quiet Quaker meeting, where there is no worship leader and long periods of time pass when nothing seems to be happening, and a Pentecostal song service featuring many people raising their hands toward heaven and praying aloud in unintelligible tongues. A large, mainstream church in suburban Illinois might be attended by seven or eight hundred worshipers wearing dresses or suits, dutifully following an order of service designed and printed using the latest desktop computer technology. Meanwhile, an Appalachian one-room log sanctuary might house a dozen ardent believers whose church service reaches its high point when the faithful drape poisonous rattlesnakes around their necks.

These examples illustrate the breadth of Christianity. Participants in one tradition often deny the orthodoxy of other traditions, but they all share the above-listed common beliefs based on the same Bible.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand all this is to contrast the two extremes of Christianity, while remembering that in between these two positions are many gradations embracing shades of meanings and differences.

Ever since the famous Scopes Trial held in the spring of 1925, these two contrasting interpretations have been labeled fundamentalist (conservative, religious right) and modernist (liberal, religious left). John Scopes was a science teacher in Tennessee, accused of breaking a new state law forbidding the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow, who faced the flamboyant prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, defended him. Scopes lost and was fined one hundred dollars. But the trial polarized Americans, many of whom thought Bryan and his fundamentalist witnesses looked old-fashioned and foolish. As far as public education was concerned, the liberals lost the battle but eventually won the war. The fundamentalist/modernist controversy, however, is still with us.

At issue is biblical interpretation. Is the Bible to be read literally or metaphorically? This is a central issue that polarizes Christianity.

Fundamentalists have developed an entire tradition of preaching, teaching, and singing around a historical, literal interpretation. The "old-time religion" of conservative Christianity is the fastest-growing religion in the world today, with television stations featuring The 700 Club and The PTL Club and with numerous preachers showcased on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network). The popular Bill Gaither "Homecoming" Gospel music concert series, held in big-venue halls and stadiums, attracts thousands of people to each show. Conservatives have organized politically into groups such as the Christian Coalition, with enough clout to field presidential candidates such as Pat Robertson. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's "Left Behind" novels top the fiction charts.

Conservative Christians belong to every denomination. They may be called evangelicals, charismatics, pentecostals, or fundamentalists. But there are traditional, or conservative, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Catholics as well as Baptists and Seventh-day Adventists. The hymns may be different, and worship traditions vary, but generally, within the framework of their tradition, conservatives read the Bible as they would a historical textbook.

The message at the heart of conservative Christianity is that human beings are born sinners. (One illustration sometimes offered, though questioned by skeptics, is that babies have to be taught how to share and be good, while selfishness and bad behavior come naturally.) The original sin of Adam, parent of the human race, has been passed on to his offspring and renders all humans unworthy of God's grace and an afterlife with him in heaven. In order for humans to enter heaven and spend eternity with God, the problem of atonement or reconciliation with God has to be addressed.

This reconciliation was achieved when Jesus of Nazareth accepted humankind's collective punishment-death and separation from God-in their place. Through this substitutionary atonement, as it is called, Jesus earned God's grace for humankind, who had been unable to earn it for themselves.

The following story is frequently told to illustrate the conservative Christian concept of substitutionary atonement:

A driver is arrested for speeding. He is brought before a judge who is wearing a black robe, the symbol of authority. The judge is sitting behind a great, elevated bench and looks down at the accused. All the trappings of the room point to the fact that this judge is in control and holds the power of life and death.

"How do you plead?" asks the judge.

The accused knows he is guilty. He was speeding and breaking the laws of the land. There is no sense denying the fact. And this isn't the first time. He's done it before.

"Guilty, your honor."

The judge pronounces his sentence. "I fine you one hundred dollars."

"I'm guilty," says the accused, "but I don't have enough money. I deserve the penalty, but I cannot pay."

"Then you must go to jail," says the judge.

The accused is made ready to be led off to jail, but before he can be escorted from the courtroom the judge halts proceedings.

"Wait!" he says. Removing his robe, the symbol of authority, he comes out from behind the imposing bench. Now he looks just like everyone else. Standing next to the accused the judge reaches into his pocket and produces a one-hundred-dollar bill. Paying the fine for the guilty party, he says, "Do you accept this payment?"

"Yes," says the relieved speeder. "I'm guilty, but I accept your payment of my fine. In the eyes of justice, the very judge who was forced to sentence me has paid my penalty. He put aside his robe of honor to do it, coming down here to stand right beside me like a brother, but my sin is now and forever atoned for."

And then the final mystery is explained to the courtroom. The judge was both father and brother to the accused-father when judgment was pronounced and brother when payment was made. And yet, somehow, father and brother are one and the same.

This story illustrates the essence of conservative Christian theology. The transaction it represents occurred at a real place and time in history, centering on Jesus of Nazareth and the cross at Calvary, where Jesus, who was Lord and judge, also became "brother" to humankind by paying their penalty.

Jesus explained the crucifixion to his disciples when he gave them bread and wine to drink. "This is my body, broken for you," he said. "This is my blood, shed for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

Liberal Christians read the same biblical texts, but as metaphors, not historical fact. The virgin birth does not mean that a human woman was impregnated by God from on high, but rather that to be fully human one must be open to spirit, as Jesus was. It means humans are at once physical and spiritual. Miracles mean that all is possible to those who see past the immediacy of our environment, who look for the possible even in the face of impossibility. Liberals differentiate between the historical man, Jesus of Nazareth, and, to use theologian Macus Borg's term, the "post-Easter" Jesus. By that he means that the spirit of Jesus was so powerful that his disciples realized he was still very much with them in that he was infused into their very personalities and being. Anyone who has ever heard the internal reproving or affirming voice of a parent long since deceased understands how people live on in us as long as we are alive.

In short, according to liberal interpretation, the events described in the Bible are universal and true, at once particular to each individual and all-encompassing to the entire human race. Indeed, to limit the Gospel to a story about a Christian God who somehow needs to be appeased by a bloody, painful sacrifice is to not only miss the point, it is downright blasphemous.

Some liberals view conservatives as totally misunderstanding what the biblical writers were talking about. By emphasizing individual need for salvation, they argue, conservatives wrap themselves into a religious cocoon that closes out social responsibility. This is why pro-slavery, born-again preachers could completely miss the New Testament verses that spoke of people being "neither slave nor free, but one in Christ" as they delivered their sermons. This is why the Ku Klux Klan could burn crosses "in the name of Jesus" as they hung black men just because they were not white. Liberals suggest that to cling to a literal view of the Genesis Creation story is to miss the truth of how God, the consciousness of the universe, created humans as a part of the whole-the very "dust of the earth" from which we sprang.

Indeed, conservative baggage associated with the word "God" is so prevalent that some liberal theologians have tried to find new words to use in its place-"Ground of Being," "Source," and "First Cause," to list just a few.

Liberal Catholic priests, mindful of how exclusionary the word "Father" was to feminists, especially those who might not have had positive parental experience, began to baptize "in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer," instead of "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." Conservatives from their own Church ruled such baptisms invalid.

Some swear that the name Christian can only be applied to those who believe that the facts of the Bible, especially those surrounding the life and ministry of Jesus, are historically true and accurate. Others insist this dishonors God and distorts the deepest and most profound metaphors God has given to the human race concerning what it means to be a child of God. As well, there is a vast middle ground between the extremes of conservative and liberal, and many Christians find themselves leaning sometimes toward aspects of one viewpoint, other times toward aspects of the other.

Sources: Borg, Marcus J. The God We Never Knew. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997. Borg, Marcus J. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994. Fackre, Dorothy, and Gabriel Fackre. Christian Basics. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991. Smart, Ninian. The Religious Experience. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

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Christianity, derived from Judaism to become the dominant religion of western Europe, has underpinned much of Britain's cultural heritage for fourteen centuries. Urban Christianity was sufficiently vibrant to send three bishops (London, York, Colchester) to the Council of Arles (314). Paganism, despite a brief revival 360-80, was in decline as the century ended, when historical figures such as Ninian and Patrick began to emerge. On the arrival of Anglo-Saxon invaders with their gods Woden and Thor, British Christianity was virtually extinguished except for the western Celtic fringes. Monasticism had reached the Celts at a formative stage in their Christianity, and monks rather than bishops led the church. Patrick (c.390-461) evangelized Ireland, Ninian (c.360-c.432) the Picts of Galloway, and Kentigern (d. 612) Strathclyde; Illtud (d. c.540) and David (c.530-c.589) worked in Wales, Columba settled in Iona (c.563), whence Aidan brought Christianity to Lindisfarne (635). When Roman missionaries under Augustine arrived in Kent (597), divergences between the two strands arising from differences in organization and disagreement about the date of Easter led to clashes unresolved until the Synod of Whitby (664), when Roman customs prevailed. Conversion had sometimes been slow, though helped when a ruler embraced the new faith (Æthelbert of Kent, Edwin of Northumbria), but a brief golden age followed statesman-archbishop Theodore's reorganization of dioceses, which produced scholars such as Bede, and missionaries like Boniface of Crediton. Attacks from Viking raiders during the 9th cent. destroyed religious houses but did not totally destroy the church.

For two centuries after about 1050, sustained attempts were made to apply gospel principles and canon law to society generally, through Gregorian reform, clergy discipline, and then modification of lay life. The Norman Conquest, which joined England politically and ecclesiastically with Europe's main states, led to a revival of religious life. Edward the Confessor had already rebuilt the abbey church at Westminster, but ecclesiastical administration was reorganized, cathedrals commenced, and the cathedral school at Oxford grew into a university. Monasticism again flourished, but with changed structure: diverging from the original Benedictines were Cluniacs, Cistercians, and Augustinians. A redemptive religion, one of Christianity's attractions was its promise of an afterlife. Since the prospect of punishment was more dramatic than that of paradise, the threat of eternal damnation was used to enforce ethics. By the 15th cent. explorers, merchants, and colonizers had started to spread Christianity beyond Europe. Empire-building not only involved colonization and trade, but active and purposeful extension of religion; the cross followed the flag, sometimes vice versa. Nevertheless, with late 20th-cent. decolonization, Christianity, far from dying in these newly independent territories, has become more vigorous, especially in Africa.

The principal sacraments (or ‘mysteries’) recognized by all Christians, except quakers, are the eucharist and baptism. Other sacraments, not universally acknowledged, are confirmation, marriage, ordination, confession, and anointing of the sick. The Bible is an important primary written source for most Christians, taken literally by some, but regarded as no more than a history book by others. The greatest challenges to Christianity have been the doctrinal upheavals that led to the Reformation (and the English church's rupture from Rome) and secularism. The Census Report on Religious Worship (1851-3) caused alarm by its revelation that nearly 40 per cent of the population were unwilling or unable to attend a place of worship. While Christianity remained Britain's established religion at the end of the 20th cent., the challenge from secularism has increased, compounded by the ethnic mix from immigrants with their own religions, and a growing interest in cults.

The religion which has shaped English culture for the past 1,500 years is Christianity, whether in its Catholic or its Protestant form; much English folklore embodies Christian ethics, echoes biblical themes, or presents a modified, secularized version of what was once a religious custom or festival. This ought to be self-evident, but folk-lorists have often neglected the obvious while pursuing archaic origins. They would brush aside as unimportant any element which did not spring from the distant past; moreover, many Victorians knew little about medieval Catholicism, and despised what they did know. Today, academic folkorists have a sounder historical sense, and build their interpretations on documentary evidence, not cross-cultural analogies. Regrettably, many current writers for the popular market are less rigorous. Greatly admiring prehistoric paganism, and wishing to prove it survived under a veneer of Christianity, they repeat the Victorian error by regarding intervening centuries as irrelevant except in so far as selected items can be made to support the argument for continuity.

In fact, medieval and early modern Christianity deeply affected folklore. Most old calendar customs (with the important exceptions of May Day and Midsummer) are ‘holidays’ related to ‘holy days’; to Catholics, there is nothing inappropriate in having secular amusements alongside church-going. Later, Queen Elizabeth Day and November the Fifth were deliberately created by Church authorities to celebrate Protestant deliverances from Catholic threats. However, Puritan Christianity usually opposed festivals, on four grounds: that it was wrong to consider any day (except Sundays) as more significant than another; that most festivals involved ‘popish’ doctrines or practices; that religion and merrymaking should be kept apart, with the few approved holy days, for example Easter, being stripped of secular elements; and that the merrymaking was reminiscent of classical paganism. At the Reformation, and again in the 17th century, Puritans campaigned to destroy calendar customs; so did some Victorians, disapproving of the associated drunkenness, brawls, and sexual opportunities. Thus, whereas medieval Christianity encouraged lively communal celebrations, later religious opinion often opposed them.

In some respects, Christianity offered strong support for folklore. Scriptural texts were cited by educated writers well into the 17th century as proving the reality of certain supernatural beings— ghosts, witches, giants, dragons, and of course demons—thus strengthening and prolonging popular belief in them. The great abundance of traditions about ghosts and witches in 19th-century folklore may reflect the seriousness with which the Church had discussed them two centuries earlier, as well as their enduring importance as an explanation for subjective experiences. In contrast, fairies lacked biblical endorsement, which may be one reason why belief in them dwindled to a pleasant whimsy. Folk medicine and verbal charms drew heavily on religion; to the users, this legitimized them, despite the opposition of Protestant clergy. Similarly, churches, churchyards, and graves were credited with various healing and magical powers because of their sanctity, as were sacraments. Many beliefs that are older and more widespread than Christianity nevertheless fitted easily into its framework; dreams, omens, and ghosts, for example, could all be viewed as sent by God with warnings or information.

Fairytales and other narrative genres intended as entertainment usually have no overt religious content, though their morality is generally compatible with principles of justice and kindness. Legends, however, often do, either directly or by implication. Particularly common are stories, supposedly true, which describe God's judgements on sinners and providential protection of the virtuous, and stories involving the Devil; saints also feature in a few local legends. Others carry traditional moral messages—murder will out, ill-gotten gains never prosper, pride comes before a fall, and so on—which are of course not unique to Christianity, but have long been associated with it.

See also CHURCHES, CROSS, PAGANISM, PILGRIMAGES, and SAINTS.

Christianity, in its many forms, has been the dominant religion of Europeans and their descendants in North America ever since Columbus. It proved as adaptable to the New World as it had been to the Old, while taking on several new characteristics. The ambiguous and endlessly debated meaning of the Christian Gospels permitted diverse American groups to interpret their conduct and beliefs as Christian: from warriors to pacifists, abolitionists to slave owners, polygamists to ascetics, and from those who saw personal wealth as a sign of godliness to those who understood Christianity to mean the repudiation or radical sharing of wealth.

Colonial Era

The exploration of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries coincided with the Reformation and Europe's religious wars, intensifying and embittering the international contest for possession of these new territories. Spanish, Portuguese, and French settlers were overwhelmingly Catholic. English, Dutch, Swedish, and German settlers were predominantly Protestant. Each group, to the extent that it tried to convert the American Indians, argued the merits of its own brand of Christianity, but few Indians, witnessing the conquerors' behavior, could have been impressed with Jesus's teaching about the blessedness of peacemakers.

Puritans created the British New England colonies in the early 1600s. They believed that the (Anglican) Church of England, despite Henry VIII's separation from Rome, had not been fully reformed or purified of its former Catholic elements. The religious compromises on which Anglicanism was based (the Thirty-nine Articles) offended them because they looked on Catholicism as demonic. The founders of Plymouth Plantation (the "Pilgrim Fathers" of 1620) were separatists, who believed they should separate themselves completely from the Anglicans. The larger group of Massachusetts Bay colonists, ten years later, remained nominally attached to the Anglican Church and regarded their mission as an attempt to establish an ideal Christian commonwealth that would provide an inspiring example to the coreligionists back in England. Neither group had foreseen the way in which American conditions would force adaptations, especially after the first generation, nor had they anticipated that the English civil wars and the Commonwealth that followed (1640–1660) would impose different imperatives on Puritans still in England than on those who had crossed the ocean. We are well informed about the New England Puritans and their reaction to seventeenth-century events because of their exceptional literacy and loquacity. From the works of Increase Mather (1639–1723) and his son Cotton (1663–1728), for example, we can reconstruct a worldview in which every storm, high tide, deformed fetus, or mild winter was a sign of God's "special providence." Theirs was, besides, a world in which devils abounded and witchcraft (notoriously at the Salem witch trials, 1692) seemed to present a real threat to the community.

More southerly colonies, Virginia and the Carolinas, were commercial tobacco ventures whose far less energetic religious life was supervised by the established Church of England. Maryland began as a Catholic commercial venture but its proprietors reverted to Anglicanism in the bitterly anti-Catholic environment of the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689) in the late seventeenth century. The middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, by contrast, were more ethnically and religiously diverse almost from the beginning, including Dutch Calvinists, German Lutherans and Moravians, Swedish Baptists, and English Quakers.

All these colonies, along with New England, were subjected to periodic surges of revival enthusiasm that are collectively remembered as the Great Awakening. The Awakening's exemplary figure was the spellbinding English preacher George Whitefield (1714–1770), who brought an unprecedented drama to American pulpits in the 1740s and 1750s and shocked some divines by preaching outdoors. The theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) of Northampton, Massachusetts, welcomed the Awakening and tried to square Calvinist orthodoxy with the scientific and cognitive revolutions of Newton and the Enlightenment.

Christianity in the Revolution and Early Republic

By the time of the Revolution (1775–1788), growing numbers of colonists had joined radical Reformation sects, notably the Quakers and Baptists, belonged to ethnically distinct denominations like the Mennonites, or were involved in intradenominational schisms springing from Great Awakening controversies over itinerant preaching and the need for an inspired rather than a learned clergy. The U.S. Constitution's First Amendment specified that there was to be no federally established church and no federal restriction on the free exercise of religion. Some New England states retained established Christian churches after the Revolution—Congregationalism in Massachusetts, for example—but by 1833 all had been severed from the government.

This political separation, however, did not imply any lessening of Christian zeal. To the contrary, the early republic witnessed another immense upsurge of Christian energy and evangelical fervor, with Baptists and Methodists adapting most quickly to a new emotional style, which they carried to the rapidly expanding settlement frontier. Spellbinding preachers like Francis Asbury (1745–1816) and Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) helped inspire the revivals of the "Second Great Awakening" (see Awakening, Second), and linked citizens' conversions to a range of social reforms, including temperance, sabbatarianism, and (most controversially) the abolition of slavery. Radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) denounced the Constitution as an un-Christian pact with the devil because it provided for the perpetuation of slavery. John Brown (1800–1859), who tried to stimulate a slave uprising with his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, saw himself as a biblical avenger. He anticipated, rightly, that his sacrificial death, like Jesus's crucifixion, would lead to the triumph of the anti-slavery cause. Christian abolitionists who had prudently declined to join the rising, like Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), claimed him as a martyr. Beecher's sister Harriet published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, a novel saturated with the sentimental conventions of American Victorian Protestantism; it popularized the idea that abolition was a Christian imperative.

In the South, meanwhile, slaves had adapted African elements to Gospel teachings and developed their own syncretic style of Christianity, well adapted to the emotional idioms of the Second Awakening. Dissatisfied with attending their masters' churches, they enjoyed emotional "ring shout" meetings in remote brush arbors, or met for whispered prayers and preaching in the slave quarters. Slave owners too thought of themselves as justified in their Christianity. Well armed with quotations to show that the Bible's authors had been slaveholders and that Jesus had never condemned the practice, they saw themselves as the guardians of a Christian way of life under threat from a soulless commercial North. The historian Eugene Genovese has shown that on purely biblical grounds they probably had the stronger argument.

The early republic also witnessed the creation of new Christian sects, including the Assemblies of God, the Shakers, the Oneida Perfectionists, and the Mormons. Those with distinctive sexual practices (Shaker celibacy, Oneida "complex marriage," and Mormon polygamy) were vulnerable to persecution by intolerant neighbors who linked the idea of a "Protestant America" to a code of monogamy. The Mormons, the most thriving of all these groups, were founded by an upstate New York farm boy, Joseph Smith (1805–1844), who received a set of golden tablets from an angel. He translated them into the Book of Mormon (1830), which stands beside the Bible as scripture for Mormons, and describes the way in which Jesus conducted a mission in America after his earthly sojourn in the Holy Land. Recurrent persecution, culminating in the assassination of Smith in 1844, led the Mormons under their new leader, Brigham Young (1801–1877), to migrate far beyond the line of settlement to the Great Salt Lake, Utah, in 1846, where their experiments in polygamy persisted until 1890. Polygamy had the virtue of ensuring that the surplus of Mormon women would all have husbands. Mormonism was one of many nineteenth-and twentieth-century American churches in which membership (though not leadership) was disproportionately female.

The Mormon migration was just one small part of a much larger westward expansion of the United States in the early and mid–nineteenth century, much of which was accompanied by the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, according to which God had reserved the whole continent for the Americans. No one felt the sting of manifest destiny more sharply than the Indians. Ever since the colonial era missionaries had struggled to convert them to Christianity and to the Euro-American way of life. These missions were sometimes highly successful, as for example the Baptist mission to the Cherokees led by Evan Jones, which created a written version of their language in the early nineteenth century that facilitated translation of the Bible. The Georgia gold rush of 1829 showed, however, that ambitious settlers and prospectors would not be deterred from overrunning Indians' land merely because they were Christian Indians; their forcible removal along the Trail of Tears was one of many disgraceful episodes in white-Indian relations. Southwestern and Plains Indians, meanwhile, often incorporated Christian elements into their religious systems. The New Mexican Pueblo peoples, for example, under Spanish domination until 1848, adapted the Catholic cult of the saints to their traditional pantheon; later the Peyote Way, which spread through the Southwest and Midwest, incorporated evangelical Protestant elements.

Further enriching the American Christian landscape, a large Catholic immigration from Ireland, especially after the famine of 1846–1849, tested the limits of older citizens' religious tolerance. It challenged the validity of the widely held concept of a Protestant America that the earlier tiny Catholic minority had scarcely disturbed. A flourishing polemical literature after 1830 argued that Catholics, owing allegiance to a foreign monarch, the pope, could not be proper American citizens—the idea was embodied in the policies of the Know-Nothing political party in the 1850s. Periodic religious riots in the 1830–1860 era and the coolness of civil authorities encouraged the Catholic newcomers to keep Protestants at arm's length. They set about building their own institutions, not just churches but also a separate system of schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages, and charities, a work that continued far into the twentieth century. The acquisition of Louisiana in 1804, and the acquisition of the vast Southwest after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), also swelled the U.S. Catholic population.

Soldiers on both sides in the Civil War (1861–1865) went into battle confident that they were doing the will of a Christian God. President Lincoln, and many Union clergy, saw their side's ultimate victory as a sign of divine favor, explaining their heavy losses in the fighting according to the idea that God had scourged them for the sin of tolerating slavery for so long. The defeated Confederates, on the other hand, nourished their cult of the "lost cause" after the war by reminding each other that Jesus's mission on earth had ended in failure and a humiliating death, something similar to their own plight. The slaves, freed first by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and then by the Fifteenth Amendment (1865), treated President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) as the Great Liberator and compared him to Moses, leading the Children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt.

Christianity and Industrial Society

Rapid industrialization in the later nineteenth century prompted a searching reevaluation of conventional theological ethics. Fluctuations in the business cycle, leading to periodic surges of urban unemployment, made nonsense of the old rural idea that God dependably rewards sobriety and hard work with prosperity. The theologians Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), George Herron (1862–1925), and Washington Gladden (1836–1918) created the Social Gospel, adapting Christianity to urban industrial life and emphasizing the community's collective responsibility toward its weakest members. Vast numbers of "new immigrants"—Catholics from Poland, Italy, and the Slavic lands; Orthodox Christians from Russia and Greece; and Jews from the Austrian and Russian empires—continued to expand America's religious diversity. They established their own churches and received help from religiously inspired Protestant groups such as the Salvation Army and the settlement house movement.

Meanwhile, Christianity faced an unanticipated intellectual challenge, much of which had been generated from within. Rapid advances in historical-critical study of the Bible and of comparative religion, and the spread of evolutionary biology after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), forced theologians to ask whether the Genesis creation story and other biblical accounts were literally true. These issues led to a fracture in American Protestantism that persisted through the twentieth century, between liberal Protestants who adapted their religious ideas to the new intellectual orthodoxy and fundamentalists who conscientiously refused to do so. In the fundamentalists' view, strongly represented at Princeton Theological Seminary and later popularized by the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), the Bible, as God's inspired word, could not be fallible. Anyone who rejected the Genesis story while keeping faith in the Gospels was, they pointed out, making himself rather than the Bible the ultimate judge.

Observers were surprised to note that in the twentieth century American church membership and church attendance rates remained high, indeed increased, at a time when they were declining throughout the rest of the industrialized world. Various theories, all plausible, were advanced to account for this phenomenon: that Americans, being more mobile than Europeans, needed a ready-made community center in each new location, especially as vast and otherwise anonymous suburbs proliferated; that church membership was a permissible way for immigrants and their descendants to retain an element of their families' former identity while assimilating in all other respects to American life; even, in the 1940s and 1950s, that the threat of atomic warfare had led to a collective "failure of nerve" and a retreat into supernaturalism. Twentieth-century Christian churches certainly did double as community centers, around which youth clubs, study classes, therapeutic activities, "singles' groups," and sports teams were organized. Members certainly could have nonreligious motives for attendance, but abundant historical and sociological evidence suggests that they had religious motives too.

Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century

Christianity remained a dynamic social force, around which intense political controversies swirled. In 1925 the Scopes Trial tested whether fundamentalists could keep evolution from being taught in schools. A high-school biology teacher was convicted of violating a Tennessee state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution, but the public-relations fallout of the case favored evolutionists rather than creationists. In the same year the Supreme Court ruled (in Pierce v. Society of Sisters) that Catholic and other religious private schools were protected under the Constitution; the legislature of Oregon (then with influential anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan members) was ruled to have exceeded its authority in requiring all children in the state to attend public schools.

In 1928 a Catholic, Al Smith (1873–1944) of New York, ran as the Democratic candidate for president in a religiously superheated campaign. Southern whites were usually a dependable Democratic block vote, but their "Bible Belt" prejudice against Catholics led them to campaign against him. This defeat was not offset until a second Catholic candidate, John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), was elected in 1960, keeping enough southern white votes to ensure a wafer-thin plurality. After this election, and especially after the popular Kennedy's 1963 assassination, which was treated by parts of the nation as martyrdom, American anti-Catholicism declined rapidly. Kennedy had declined to advocate the federal funding of parochial schools and had refused to criticize the Supreme Court when it found, in a series of cases from 1962 and 1963, that prayer and Bible-reading in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

While the Supreme Court appeared to be distancing Christianity from politics, the civil rights movement was bringing them together. A black Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), led the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) and became the preeminent civil rights leader of the 1950s and 1960s. Ever since emancipation, ministers had played a leadership role in the black community, being, usually, its most highly educated members and the men who acted as liaisons between segregated whites and blacks. King, a spellbinding preacher, perfected a style that blended Christian teachings on love, forgiveness, and reconciliation, Old Testament visions of a heaven on earth, and patriotic American rhetoric, the three being beautifully combined in the peroration of his famous "I have a dream" speech from 1963. Like Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi, to whom he acknowledged a debt, he knew how to work on the consciences of the dominant group by quoting scriptures they took seriously, interpreting them in such a way as to make them realize their failings as Christians. Religious leaders might disagree about exactly how the movement should proceed—King feuded with black Baptists who did not want the churches politicized, and with whites like the eight ministers whose counsel of patience and self-restraint provoked his "Letter from Birmingham Jail"—but historians of the movement now agree that he was able to stake out, and hold, the religious high ground.

Among the theological influences on King was the work of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). Born and raised in a German evangelical family in Missouri, Niebuhr was the preeminent American Protestant theologian of the century. Reacting, like many clergy, against the superpatriotic fervor of the First World War years (in which Christian ministers often led the way in bloodcurdling denunciation of the "Huns"), he became in the 1920s an advocate of Christian pacifism. During the 1930s, however, against a background of rising totalitarianism in Europe, he abandoned this position on grounds of its utopianism and naiveté, and bore witness to a maturing grasp of Christian ethics in his masterpiece, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). His influential journal Christianity and Crisis, begun in 1941, voiced the ideas of Christians who believed war against Hitler was religiously justified. He became, in the 1940s and 1950s, influential among statesmen, policy makers, and foreign policy "realists," some of whom detached his ethical insights from their Christian foundations, leading the philosopher Morton White to quip that they were "atheists for Niebuhr." Niebuhr had also helped bring to America, from Germany, the theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965), who became a second great theological celebrity in the mid-century decades, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), who worked for a time in the 1930s at Union Seminary, New York, but returned before the war and was later executed for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

To match these Protestant theological celebrities—of whom Niebuhr's brother Richard (1894–1962) was a fourth—the Catholic Church produced its own. The émigré celebrity was the French convert Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), who wrote with brilliant insight on faith and aesthetics, while the homegrown figure was John Courtney Murray (1904–1967), whose essays on religious liberty were embodied in the religious liberty document of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Men like King, the Niebuhr brothers, Maritain, Tillich, and Murray enjoyed almost the same prominence in mid-twentieth-century America that the Mathers had enjoyed in the seventeenth century, Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth, and the Beechers in the nineteenth—another sign of the persistence of Christian energy in America.

Ever since the Scopes Monkey Trial the evangelical Protestant churches had retreated from politics, but they had continued to grow, to organize (taking advantage of broadcasting technology), and to generate exceptionally talented individuals of their own. None was to have more lasting importance than Billy Graham (b. 1918), whose revivals became a press sensation in the late 1940s. Graham eschewed the sectarian squabbling that many evangelists relished. Instead he tried to create an irenic mood among all evangelicals while reaching out to liberal Protestants with an emotional message of Christian love, forgiveness, and Jesus as personal savior. He traveled worldwide, befriended every president from 1950 to 2000, and said, perhaps rightly, that more people had seen him and knew who he was than anybody else in the world.

Another skilled evangelical, the Baptist Jerry Falwell (b. 1933) shared many of Graham's skills but brought them directly into politics in a way Graham had avoided. Falwell, convinced that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the feminist movement, the counterculture, and the changing nature of the American family were signs of decadence and sin, catalyzed the Moral Majority, a pressure group that contributed to the "Reagan Revolution" in the election of 1980. That election was particularly noteworthy as a moment in Christian history not only because of the sudden reappearance of politicized evangelicals but also because the losing candidate, President Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), was himself a self-proclaimed born-again Christian and Baptist Sunday school teacher.

Nearly all America's Christian churches with a liberal inclination participated in a religious protest against nuclear weapons in the 1980s. Nearly all those with a conservative inclination participated in campaigns against legalized abortion. Indeed, as observers noted at the time, both sides in these and other sundering political controversies were strongly represented by Christian advocates. Collectively they demonstrated the extraordinary vitality and diversity of American Christianity into the third millennium.

Bibliography

Ahlstrom, Sidney E. A Religious History of the American People. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972.

Albanese, Catherine L. America, Religions and Religion. 2d ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992.

Fox, Richard Wightman. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: W. Morrow, 1986.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

May, Henry F. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. 2d ed. New York: Octagon Books, 1977.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind. 2 vols. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.

Morris, Charles R. American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners who Built America's Most Powerful Church. New York: Times Books, 1997.

Noll, Mark. A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdman's, 1992.

Ostling, Richard N., and Joan K. Ostling. Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1999.

Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

—Patrick N. Allitt

This entry includes two subentries:
Eastern Orthodox Christianity
Western Christianity