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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
Central Beliefs
The central teachings of traditional Christianity are that Jesus is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; that his life on earth, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven are proof of God's love for humanity and God's forgiveness of human sins; and that by faith in Jesus one may attain salvation and eternal life (see creed). This teaching is embodied in the Bible, specifically in the New Testament, but Christians accept also the Old Testament as sacred and authoritative Scripture.
Christian ethics derive to a large extent from the Jewish tradition as presented in the Old Testament, particularly the Ten Commandments, but with some difference of interpretation based on the practice and teachings of Jesus. Christianity may be further generally defined in terms of its practice of corporate worship and rites that usually include the use of sacraments and that are usually conducted by trained clergy within organized churches. There are, however, many different forms of worship, many interpretations of the role of the organized clergy, and many variations in polity and church organization within Christianity.
Divisions within the Religion
In the two millennia of its history Christianity has been divided by schism and roiled by heresy, based on doctrinal and organizational differences. Today there are three broad divisions, Roman Catholic, Orthodox Eastern, and Protestant; but within the category of Protestantism, there is a particularly large number of divergent denominations. Because of the complexity of these differences this article will describe the history of Christianity only to 1054, when the schism between Eastern and Western churches became final. Separate articles detail the history and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Eastern Church and of the other churches of ancient origin, the Armenian Church, the Coptic Church (see Copts), the Jacobite Church, and the Nestorian Church. In the 16th cent. another major schism took place in the Western Church with the Protestant Reformation. For the Protestant churches, see Protestantism and articles on the separate churches. For the 20th-century movement that seeks to end the divisiveness in Christianity and achieve reunion, see ecumenical movement.
Early Christianity
Christianity is in a direct sense an offshoot of Judaism, because Jesus and his immediate followers were Jews living in Palestine and Jesus was believed by his followers to have fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah. Following a trend of proselytization in the Judaism of that period Christianity was from its beginnings expansionist. Its early missionaries (the most notable of whom was St. Paul, who was also responsible for the formulation of elements of Christian doctrine) spread its teachings in Asia Minor, Alexandria, Greece, and Rome. Missions have remained a major element in Christianity to the present day.
For the first three centuries of Christianity, history is dependent on apologetic and religious writings; there are no chronicles (see patristic literature). Historians differ greatly on how far back the 4th-century picture of the church (which is quite clear) can be projected, especially respecting organization by bishops (each bishop a monarch in the church of his city), celebration of a liturgy entailing a sacrament and a sacrifice, and claims by the bishop of Rome to be head of all the churches (see papacy). There is evidence for these features in the 2d cent. A first problem for Christians was how to resist attempts to interpret the new beliefs in pagan terms (e.g., Gnosticism). The earliest sectarian deviations were those of Marcion and of Montanus (2d cent.). They were handled resolutely by the church; the teachers of novelty were expelled (excommunicated).
For 250 years it was a martyrs' church; the persecutions were fueled by the refusal of Christians to worship the state and the Roman emperor. There were persecutions under Nero, Domitian, Trajan and the other Antonines, Maximin, Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian and Galerius; Decius ordered the first official persecution in 250. In 313, Constantine I and Licinius announced toleration of Christianity in the Edict of Milan. In the East the church passed from persecution directly to imperial control (caesaropapism), inaugurated by Constantine, enshrined later in Justinian's laws, and always a problem for the Orthodox churches. In the West the church remained independent because of the weakness of the emperor and the well-established authority of the bishop of Rome.
Controversy and Growth
For 300 years after A.D. 275 the church in the East was occupied with doctrinal controversies—Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and Monotheletism. These arguments concerned the manner in which Jesus is both divine and human. Decisions were made at a series of general councils of bishops (see council, ecumenical); at them was composed the Nicene Creed. These centuries saw a series of Christian writers of unequaled influence (the Fathers of the Church): Origen, St. Athanasius, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. John Chrysostom, and Theodoret writing in Greek; St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine writing in Latin. Origen and St. Jerome had a special role in the church's work of determining and preserving the text of the Bible.
From the 3d cent. monasticism was one element of the church. It was first organized by St. Basil. In the West monasticism was central to the missionary work of St. Martin (Gaul, 4th cent.) and St. Patrick (Ireland, 5th cent.). It received definitive shape from St. Benedict and St. Gregory the Great, who thereby generated a mode of life of continuing vitality in the Roman Catholic Church.
German invasions slowed the conversion of Western Europe (e.g., that of England was recommenced in the 6th cent.). Most of the first invaders were converted to Arian Christianity, but the pagan Franks (with Clovis) adopted orthodox Christianity, a fact that probably helped to consolidate their rule. Out of this kingdom came Pepin and Charlemagne, who, by alliance with the papacy and proclamation of an empire (800), charted an ideal of the Middle Ages.
Schism between East and West
In the 7th and 8th cent. the Eastern Church lost to Islam all Asia except Asia Minor. Alienation from the West was exacerbated by the bitter struggle over iconoclasm; ecclesiastical animosity between Rome and Constantinople came to a head in the schism of the 9th cent. This schism centered on the addition of the Filioque to the Nicene Creed (see creed) in the West and on the western church's use of unleavened bread in the celebration of the mass and insistence on clerical celibacy. The division between East and West grew wider and attained a sort of legal permanence in 1054 (see Leo IX, Saint). Eastern and Western Christendom were already in the 9th cent. two different cultures; their one common tie was the Christian doctrine—even worship and practices were very different. From this time it is customary to distinguish Christian history in its Eastern and Western streams as that of the Orthodox Eastern Church and Roman Catholic Church.
Bibliography
See J. Lebreton and J. Zeiller, A History of the Early Church (4 vol., 1944–46; repr. 1962); H. Lietzmann, The History of the Early Church (4 vol., tr. 1961; repr. 1967); A. Finkel, The Pharisees and the Teacher of Nazareth (1964); H. Marrou et al., The Christian Centuries (1964); J. G. Davies, The Early Christian Church (1965); H. Chadwick, The Early Church (1967); R. M. Grant, Augustus to Constantine (1970); R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970); R. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion (1998).
This entry includes two subentries:
Eastern Orthodox Christianity
Western Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic[1] religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as depicted in the New Testament.[2] Most Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God and the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament, and that the New Testament records the Gospel that was revealed by Jesus. With an estimated 2.1 billion adherents, or approximately 33% of the world's population in 2007,[3] Christianity is the world's largest religion. It is the predominant religion in Europe, the Americas, Southern Africa, the Philippines and Oceania.[4] It is also growing rapidly in Asia, particularly in China and South Korea, Africa and Middle East.[5]
Christianity began as an offshoot of Judaism,[6] and includes the Hebrew Bible (known to Christians as the Old Testament) as well as the New Testament as its canonical scriptures.[7] Like Judaism and Islam, Christianity is classified as an Abrahamic religion (see also, Judeo-Christian).[8][9]
The name "Christian" (Greek Χριστιανός Strong's G5546), meaning "belonging to Christ" or "partisan of Christ",[10] was first applied to the disciples in Antioch, as recorded in Acts 11:26.[11] The earliest recorded use of the term "Christianity" (Greek Χριστιανισμός) is by Ignatius of Antioch.[12]
In spite of important differences of interpretation and opinion, Christians in the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant traditions share a common faith.[13] Although Christianity has always had a significant diversity of belief on bordering issues, most Christians share a common set of doctrines that they hold as essential to their faith. This common Christian heritage of beliefs has been given such titles as "Great Tradition of Christian teaching," “consensual Christian tradition” and “mere Christianity,”[13] The core Christian belief is that, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, sinful humans can be reconciled to God and thereby are offered salvation and the promise of eternal life. [Ref. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Romans 10:13 KJB]
While there have been theological disputes over the nature of Jesus, Christians generally believe that Jesus is God incarnate and "true God and true man" (or both fully divine and fully human). Jesus, having become fully human in all respects, suffered the pains and temptations of a mortal man, yet he did not sin. As fully God, he defeated death and rose to life again. According to the Bible, "God raised him from the dead,"[14] he ascended to heaven, to the "right hand of God,"[15] and he will return again[16] to fulfil the rest of Messianic prophecy such as the Resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment and establishment of the physical Kingdom of God.
According to the Gospels, Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary. Little of Jesus' childhood is recorded there in comparison to his adulthood, especially the week before his death. The Biblical accounts of Jesus' ministry include: his baptism, miracles, preaching, teaching, and deeds.
Christians consider the resurrection of Jesus to be the cornerstone of their faith and the most important event in human history.[17][18].
According to the Gospels, Jesus and his followers went to Jerusalem the week of the Passover where they were eagerly greeted by a crowd. In Jerusalem, Jesus drove money changers from the Temple,[19] and predicted its destruction[20] - heightening conflict with the Jewish authorities who were plotting his death.[21]
After sharing his last meal with his disciples, Jesus went to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane where he was betrayed by his disciple Judas Iscariot and arrested by the temple guard on orders from the Sanhedrin and the high priest Caiaphas. Jesus was convicted by the Sanhedrin of blasphemy and transferred to the Roman governor Pilate, who was forced, by the close to rioting crowds, to have crucified for "inciting rebellion." Jesus died by late afternoon and was entombed.
Christians believe that God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day, that Jesus appeared to his apostles and other disciples, commissioned his disciples to "make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son (Jesus) and of the Holy Spirit."[22] and then ascended to heaven. Christians also believe that God the Father sent the Holy Spirit (or Paraclete)[23] to the disciples. Many modern writers such as members of the Jesus Seminar and other Biblical scholars such as Michael Ramsey (a former Archbishop of Canterbury) have argued that the historical Jesus never claimed to be divine. John Hick observes that it is generally agreed among scholars today that Jesus did not claim to be God.[24] Many also reject the historicity of the empty tomb (and thus a bodily resurrection) and many other events narrated in the gospels. They assert that Gospel accounts describing these things are probably literary fabrications.[25] However, many other scholars and historians have maintained that the Gospel accounts of Jesus are, in fact, historically reliable. For example, the late scholar Sir Frederic Kenyon, referring to the New Testament canon, asserted that:
"The interval then between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Sciptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established." [26]
The purpose of Jesus' death and resurrection is described in various doctrines of atonement. Some see Jesus as a Sacrifice (substitutionary atonement) made to take away the sin of the world (John 1:29} in a manner similar to Old Testament sacrifices. Others see Jesus' dying and suffering on the cross as a sign and demonstration from God the Father that His Son was willing to endure the shame and suffering of the cross because of his agape (parental, self-sacrificing) love for humanity. In other Scriptures which record Jesus' death and resurrection, The Gospel According to St. John compares the crucifixion of Jesus to the lifting up of the Nehushtan (brass serpent) saying that "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:14-16)
Christians believe salvation is a gift by means of the unmerited grace of God, a gift from a loving heavenly Father who sent His only begotten Son Jesus to be their savior. Christians believe that, through faith in Jesus, one can be saved from sin and eternal death. The crucifixion of Jesus is explained as an atoning sacrifice, which, in the words of the Gospel of John, "takes away the sins of the world." One's reception of salvation is related to justification.[27]
The operation and effects of grace are understood differently by different traditions. Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy teach the necessity of the free will to cooperate with grace.[28] Reformed theology places distinctive emphasis on grace by teaching that mankind is completely incapable of self-redemption, but the grace of God overcomes even the unwilling heart.[29]
