5.7 Religion in American Society: Disestablishment, Diversity & Schism (1776–1877)

The Blueprint Theme

"The changing role of religion in American society" is a named CLEP theme spanning the full exam period. The Great Awakenings are covered elsewhere in this guide; this section supplies the connective structure — how church and state separated, how the denominational map was redrawn, and how religion divided along the same line that divided the nation.

From Establishment to Voluntarism

At independence, nine of the thirteen states had established churches supported by taxation: Anglican in the South and in parts of New York, Congregational in New England (Rhode Island always excepted). Two forces dismantled them: Enlightenment rationalism, which regarded compelled belief as tyranny, and dissenting evangelicals — especially Baptists — who resented paying to support another denomination's ministers.

The counterintuitive outcome is the point most often tested: ending state support made American religion stronger, not weaker. In a voluntary system churches had to recruit, and the ones that recruited best grew fastest. Historians call this the American religious "marketplace," and the churches that thrived were the ones organized for competition.

The Winners: Methodists and Baptists

In 1776, Congregationalists, Anglicans, and Presbyterians together held the great majority of American church adherents. By 1850, Methodists and Baptists together held roughly two-thirds of Protestant membership. Their advantages were organizational:

• Circuit riders. Methodist itinerants under Francis Asbury covered enormous territories on horseback, reaching settlements too small and scattered for a settled minister.
• Camp meetings. The Cane Ridge, Kentucky revival (1801) drew perhaps 20,000 people over several days and became the template for frontier revivalism.
• A licensed lay ministry. Baptists ordained farmer-preachers who needed no seminary degree and no salary, so a congregation could form wherever a handful of believers gathered. Presbyterians, who required a classically educated ministry, could not match the pace.
• Arminian theology. The evangelical message that salvation was available to anyone who chose it fit a democratic, mobile society far better than Calvinist predestination.

Diversification

• Roman Catholicism. Fewer than 50,000 Catholics lived in the United States in 1790. Irish and German immigration made Catholicism the largest single denomination by 1850, with roughly 1.6 million adherents, and it built a parallel institutional world of parishes, parochial schools, orphanages, and hospitals — partly because Protestant Bible reading was standard in the public schools. The First Plenary Council of Baltimore (1852) organized the American church nationally.
• Judaism. A small Sephardic community of colonial origin was transformed by German-Jewish immigration after 1840. Isaac Mayer Wise led the Reform movement, founding the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873 and Hebrew Union College in 1875.
• Unitarianism and Universalism. Liberal New England Congregationalists broke away over the Trinity; William Ellery Channing's 1819 Baltimore sermon is the movement's manifesto, and Harvard Divinity School became its center.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Founded by Joseph Smith in western New York in 1830 — squarely inside the revival-saturated "Burned-Over District" — and driven west after Smith's murder in 1844.
• Adventists and Millerites. William Miller predicted Christ's return in 1843–44; the "Great Disappointment" that followed produced the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
• Free-thought and Deism persisted among the educated, though never as a mass movement.

Religion and Reform

Evangelical Perfectionism — the belief that individuals and societies could be purged of sin — supplied the moral engine for temperance, prison and asylum reform, public schooling, Sabbatarianism, missions, and abolition. The "Benevolent Empire" of interlocking voluntary societies (the American Bible Society, 1816; the American Tract Society, 1825; the American Temperance Society, 1826) built a national infrastructure of print and organization that reformers of every stripe then used.

Religion also supplied both sides of the slavery argument. Abolitionists cited the Golden Rule and the Exodus; defenders of slavery cited the Hebrew patriarchs, the Curse of Ham, and Paul's letter to Philemon. Because scripture could be quoted either way, the argument could not be settled by argument.

The Sectional Schisms

This is the highest-yield fact in the section. The great national evangelical denominations split over slavery years before secession:

John C. Calhoun grasped the significance immediately, calling the churches "cords" binding the Union that were snapping one by one. When the largest voluntary national institutions in the country divided into northern and southern bodies, the moral consensus that made compromise imaginable was already gone.

African American Religion

Enslaved people fashioned a distinct Christianity that read Exodus as a promise of deliverance, held clandestine worship in the "invisible church" of brush arbors and cabins, and blended African musical and ritual forms into the spirituals. White ministers preached obedience; enslaved congregations heard liberation.

Independent Black churches emerged wherever law allowed. Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1816 after being pulled from his knees at a segregated service; the AME Zion church organized in New York in 1821. After emancipation, freedpeople left white-controlled congregations en masse — the Colored (now Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church formed in 1870, and the National Baptist bodies grew rapidly.

The consequence shaped Reconstruction directly. Black churches were the only major institutions African Americans wholly controlled, so they doubled as schools, mutual-aid societies, political meeting halls, and the training ground for Black officeholders — Hiram Revels, the first Black U.S. senator, was an AME minister.