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Jamestown Founded
The British colonists of Jamestown followed the Anglican faith, the official Church of England. Despite coming to Jamestown largely for economic gain, they also had the goal in mind of converting the Native peoples. -
The Pilgrams
The pilgrims were a group made up of Separatists, a religious minority in Britain. Most who were part of this denomination were former Puritans who felt the current Church was corrupt and that it was beyond saving, so they voyaged to North America to establish a new Church free of corruption in their newly established colony of Plymouth. They were very discriminatory and un-tolerant of other religions and denominations. It was also a very selective process on who was worthy to join the Church. -
Massachusetts Bay Colony
Established very much for the same reasons as Plymouth, in order to purify the Church of England from corrupt influences. John Winthrop, Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first president, famous for his “Model of Christian Charity,” where he said they have to be a city upon a hill for everyone else to see and model themselves after. -
Maryland Colony Founded
Lord Baltimore founded the colony in order to be a safe haven for Catholics to come and live without persecution. Although initially a religiously tolerant colony, disputes were common between the residing religions, with the Puritans even taking brief control before returned to the Baltimore family. -
Rodger Williams
Known for his religious toleration. He received the charter for Rhode Island, and upon doing so made it the first colony to separate Church and State. He was also credited for establishing one of the first Baptist churches in America. -
Founding of Connecticut
Found by Thomas Hooker. Hooker was a Puritan minister of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Despite this, he strongly advocated for a division of Church and State which is why he decided to leave the Bay Colony to found Connecticut. There, Hooker allowed for constitutional rule where voting rights were not dependent on religion. -
Anne Hutchison
Very outspoken women against the control of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She challenged predestination and patriarchal rule. She was eventually banned from the colony. Afterwards she and her followers established a settlement in Rhode Island shortly before she was killed by Natives in New York. -
Praying Towns
These were settlements set up by the Puritans in New England settlements where Native Americans from various tribes were sent to be Christianized. -
Toleration Act of 1649
Passed by the Maryland colony, it granted religious freedoms to all that followed the Christian faith. Historians believe that it inspired later legal protections for freedom of religion in the United States. -
Pietism Movement
Was a Lutheran movement that was put in place to re-vitalize religious values in the Church. It stressed personal piety and and the individual’s personal relationship with God. -
Founding of Pennsylvania
Colony was established by Quaker William Penn who granted freedom of religion to all that believed in God. Because of this, Pennsylvania became a safe haven for many persecuted religions, including German and Dutch Quakers, Lutherans, and Catholics. Despite these freedoms, animosity did rise from conflicting religious views within the colonies. -
Enlightenment
A new Western philosophy. Unlike the earliest colonists, enlightenment thinkers questioned institutions, customs, and morals. It started the age of reason that questioned many of the religious teachings. -
Salem Witch Trials
An incredible debacle where young girls claimed they had been bewitched by their neighbors in order to avoid punishment. These accusations were taken way too far and resulted in the hanging of multiple individuals who were all innocent. This marked the decline of Puritanism. -
First Great Awakening
I time of religious fervor and revival. The movement was in reaction to skepticism and decline in religious activity brought about by the enlightenment. Protestant ministers such as Jonathan Whitfield led revivals throughout the English colonies to stress the need for following faith. Their greatest tactic to get people more involved was fear. The first Great Awakening also prepared the colonists for their revolution against Britain. -
John Wesley
An Anglican cleric and theologian who, with his brother Charles and fellow cleric George Whitefield, founded Methodism. A key step in the development of Wesley’s ministry was to travel and preach outdoors. Although he was not a systematic theologian, Wesley argued for the notion of Christian perfection and against Calvinism—and, in particular, against its doctrine of predestination. -
George Whitefield
Famous preacher during the First Great Awakening. George Whitefield's preaching style relied heavily upon dramatics. He worked best in outdoor environments, where his flamboyant style and emphasis on the new birth necessary to become a Christian would mesmerize the masses who had gathered to hear him. This style of preaching was exactly what was popular and being sought out in the American colonies at this time. Goal was to carry John Wesley’s fervent message to America. -
Jonathan Edwards
Creator of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” during the First Great Awakening. The sermon featured a frightening central image: the hand of all-powerful God dangling a terrified believer over a fiery pit, ready on a moment's notice to drop him into the flames of eternal damnation. Edwards hoped his sermon would wake up the faithful and remind them of the terrible fate that awaited them if they failed to confess their sins and to seek God's mercy. -
Presbyterian Revival
In 1743, Samuel Morris, inspired by George Whitefield, led a group of Virginia Anglicans out of their congregation. Seeking a deeper religious experience, Morris invited New Light Presbyterian Samuel Davies to lead their prayer meetings. Davies’s sermons filled with erotic devotional imagery and urging Christians to feel ardent passion, sparked Presbyterian revivals across the Tidewater region, threatening the social authority of the Virginia gentry. -
Old Lights/New Lights of the Great Awakening
Conservative ministers, passionless old lights, according to the evangelists, condemned the cryings out, faintings and convulsions in revivalist meetings. Minister Charles Chauncey attacked the Pietist New Lights for allowing women to speak in public. In New England, New Lights left the Congregational Church and founded 125 “separatist” churches that supported their ministers through voluntary contributions. Others joined Baptistcongregations,which also condemned government support of churches. -
The Baptist Insurgency
During the 1760s, the vigorous preaching and democratic message of New Light baptist ministers converted thousands of white farm families. Slaves were welcome at baptist revivals. Native-born African Americans in Virginia welcomed the baptist's’ message that all people were equal in God’s eyes. Sensing a threat to the system of racial slavery, the House of Burgesses imposed heavy fines on Baptists who preached to slaves without their owner’s permission. -
Mother Ann and the Shakers
After Mother Ann’s death in 1784, the Shakers honored her as the Second Coming of Christ, withdrew from the profane world, and formed disciplined religious communities. Members accepted strict oversight by church leaders. They held that God was a dual person, both male and female. -
Sentimentalism
Originated in Europe as part of the Romantic movement and, after 1800, spread quickly through all classes of American society. Rejecting the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational thought, sentimentalism celebrated the importance of feeling a physical, sensuous appreciation of God, nature, and fellow humans. This new emphasis on deeply felt emotions pervaded the passionate rhetoric of revivalist preachers. -
Black Christianity
Black Christians adapted Protestant teachings to their own needs. They generally ignored the doctrines of original sin and Calvinist predestination as well as biblical passages that prescribed unthinking obedience to authority. Some African American converts envisioned the Christian god as a warrior who had liberated the Jews. Confident of a special relationship with God, Christian slaves prepared themselves spiritually for emancipation, the first step in their journey to the Promised Land. -
Bill of Rights
In the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights, the government guarantees freedom of religion in the United States. -
Republican Motherhood
Republican motherhood was the idea that a woman's role was to support her husband and guide her children from within the home. Christianity embraced the concept of Republican Motherhood as a method of passing down religious values to children. -
Second Great Awakening
The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant religious revival movement during the early 19th century in the United States. The movement began around 1790, gained momentum by 1800 and, after 1820, membership rose rapidly among Baptist and Methodist congregations whose preachers led the movement. This led to many of the reform movements from 1825-1855 such as the abolitionist movement and the women’s rights movements. -
Charles Grandison Finney
Finney’s message was that “God has made man a moral free agent” who could choose salvation. This doctrine of free will was attractive to members of the new middle class, who had accepted personal responsibility for their lives, improved their material condition, and welcomed Finney’s assurance that heaven was also within their grasp. Finney celebrated their common fellowship in Christ and identified them spiritually with pious middle-class respectability -
Religious Defense of Slavery in the South
Slavery’s defenders increasingly used religious justifications for human bondage. Protestant ministers in the South pointed out that the Hebrews, God’s chosen people, had owned slaves and that Jesus Christ had never condemned slavery. As James Henry Hammond told a British abolitionist in 1845: “What God ordains and Christ sanctifies should surely command the respect and toleration of man.” -
Anti-Catholic sentiments in the US during mass immigration
The social tensions stemming from industrialization intensified nativist and anti-catholic attitudes. Unemployed Protestant factory workers joined mobs that attacked Catholic immigrants. Many Protestant wage earners sided more with their Protestant employers than with their catholic co workers. Protestants supported the anti-Catholic movement for reasons of public policy. They opposed the use of tax resources for Catholic schools. -
Mormonism
Mormonism emerged from religious ferment among families of Puritan descent who lived along the Erie Canal and who were heirs to a religious tradition that believed in a world of wonders, supernatural powers, and visions of the divine. Founded by Joseph Smith. The Mormon’s rigid discipline and secret rituals, along with their prosperity, hostility toward other sects, and bloc voting in Illinois elections, fueled resentment among their neighbors. -
Joseph Smith Jr.
Founder of the Latter-day Church. Smith came to believe that God had singled him out to receive a special revelation of divine truth. In 1830, he published the Book of Mormon, which he claimed to have translated from ancient hieroglyphics on gold plates shown to him by an angel named Moroni. Seeing himself as a prophet in a sinful society, he revived traditional social doctrines including patriarchal authority. Encouraged practices that led to success in capitalist markets. -
Transcenditalism
An intellectual movement rooted in the religious soil of New England. Its first advocates were Unitarian ministers from well-to-do New England families who questioned the constraints of their Puritan heritage. -
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As a unitarian, Emerson stood outside the mainstream of American Protestantism. Unlike most Christians, Unitarians believed that God was a single being, not a trinity. In 1832, Emerson took a more radical step by resigning his Boston pulpit and rejecting all organized religion. He wrote influential essays probing what he called the infinitude of the private man, the radically free person, creating the Transcendentalist movement. -
Young Men's Christian Association
One of the earliest and most successful promoters of athletic fitness. Introduced in Boston in 1851, the group promoted muscular Christianity, combining evangelism with gyms and athletic facilities where men could make themselves “clean and strong”. -
Nativist Movement
Confronted by Catholic and German-speaking immigrants, some American-born citizens formed nativist movements that condemned immigration and asserted the superiority of Protestant religious and cultural values. -
Charles Darwin
Created the influential book “on the origin of species”. By providing an account of the origin and diversity of organisms, Darwin was seen by some as mounting a serious challenge to traditional religious understandings of the creation of the world and humankind. Some adherents of religion have argued that Darwinian Evolution is utterly incompatible with religious belief. -
Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection
Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species which proposed a theory of evolution. It directly challenged the beliefs of many churches not only in America but in other places as well. -
In God We Trust on coins
In God We Trust became a more commonly accepted motto for America as the void between Church and State once again narrowed. -
Protestant Foreign Missions
From a modest start before 1865, the Protestant foreign missions peaked around 1915, a year when religious organizations sponsored more than 9000 overseas missionaries, supported at home by armies of volunteers. A majority of the missionaries served in Asia and Africa. Most saw American style domesticity as a central part of evangelism. Protestant missionaries won converts, in part, by providing such modern services as medical care and women’s education. -
Women's Christian Temperance Union
Union of a maternalist goal to curb alcohol abuse by prohibiting liquor sales. Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and members of other denominations condemned drinking for religious reasons, which supported the ideas behind this union. -
Perfectionism Movement
An evangelical Protestant movement of the 1830s. Perfectionists believed that Christ had already returned to earth (the second coming) and therefore people could aspire to sinless perfection in their earthly lives. -
Progressivism
Progressives working within these faith traditions applied religious morality to the task of transforming American society during the industrial age away from the exploitation of workers and toward more cooperative forms of economic life. These faith-driven progressives insisted that society and governments uphold the fundamental notion that all people are equal in God’s eyes and deserve basic dignity, freedom, political rights, and economic opportunities in life. -
American Protective Association
A virulently nativist group that expressed outrage at the existence of separate Catholic schools while demand that all public school teachers be Protestants. The APA called for a ban on Catholic officeholders. In its virulent anti-Catholicism and calls for restrictions on immigrants, the APA prefigured the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. -
Social Gospel Movement
a movement led by a group of liberal Protestant progressives in response to the social problems raised by the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and increasing immigration of the Gilded Age. The social gospel differentiated itself from earlier Christian reform movements by prioritizing social salvation over individual salvation. Achieved salvation through philanthropy and charity. -
Revival of the Ku Klux Klan
The 1920s brought a nationwide resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist group formed in the post-Civil War South. Its blunt motto was “native, white, Protestant supremacy”. KKK members did not limit their harassment to blacks but targeted immigrants, Catholics, and Jews as well. -
Scopes Trial
At the state and local levels, controversy erupted as fundamentalist Protestants sought to mandate school curricula based on the biblical account of creation. The American Civil Liberties Union intervened in the trial of John Scopes, a high school biology teacher who taught the theory of evolution to his class and faced a jail sentence for it. The jury found him guilty and later the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopes’s conviction. -
Nation of Islam
In the early 1960s, the leading exponent of black nationalism was the Nation of Islam, which fused a rejection of Christianity with a strong philosophy of self-improvement. Known as Black Muslims. Black Muslims preached an apocalyptic brand of Islam, anticipating the day when Allah would banish the white “devils” and give the black nation justice. Only numbered about 10000 converts but had a wide popular following in northern cities. -
Holocaust
When allied troops advanced into Poland and Germany in the spring of 1945, they came face to face with Hitler’s final solution for the Jewish population in Germany: the extermination camps in which 6 million Jews had been put to death, along with another 6 million Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other “undesirables”. -
Billy Graham
A graduate of the evangelical Wheaten College in Illinois, Billy Graham shot to national fame following a 1949 tent revival in LA. His success in LA led to a popular radio program, but he continued to travel relentlessly, conducting old-fashioned revival meetings he called crusades. -
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
In 1957, along with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and dozens of black ministers from across the South, Martin Luther King Jr. founded the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The black church, long the center of African American social and cultural life, now lent its moral and organizational strength to the civil rights movement. -
Malcolm X
The most charismatic Black Muslim was Malcolm X. A spellbinding speaker, Malcolm X preached a philosophy of militant separatism, although he advocated violence only for self-defense. He broke with the Nation of Islam and moderated his anti white views and began to talk of a class struggle uniting poor whites and blacks. -
Evangelical Resurgence of the 1960s-70s
Evangelical Protestant churches emphasized an intimate, personal salvation; focused on a literal interpretation of the Bible; and regarded the death and resurrection of Jesus as the central message of Christianity. These tenets distinguished evangelicals from mainline Protestants as well as from Catholics and Jews, and they flourished in a handful of evangelical colleges, schools, and seminaries in the post-war decades. -
Fourth Great Awakening
Graham and other evangelicals in the 1950s and 1960s laid the groundwork for the Fourth Great Awakening. But it was a startling combination of events in the late 60s and early 70s that sparked the evangelical revival. To seek answers and find order, more and more people turned to evangelical ministries, especially Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, and Assemblies of God churches. -
Religious Freedom Restoration Act
The law mandates that religious liberty of individuals can only be limited by the "least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest". Originally, the federal law was intended to apply to federal, state, and local governments. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court in City of Boerne v. Flores held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act only applies to the federal government but not states and other local municipalities within them.