THE AMERICAN SCENE
Three things must be noted as characteristic of America in the period
which witnessed the beginnings of the Disciples of Christ. First, this
was a very young nation. Its population was small. Its frontier, which
began even east of the Allegheny Mountains, was sparsely settled, but
settlers were pouring into it rapidly. The Disciples began on the
frontier and moved westward with it. Second, the country’s religious
forces were divided into five or six large sects of approximately equal
size and many more small ones. The members of all these together
constituted only a small fraction, perhaps 10 per cent, of the total
population. In no other country was so large a proportion of the people
religiously unattached. Third, America had a kind and a degree of
religious liberty which had never before existed anywhere in
Christendom. Church and state were separated; the support of the
churches was purely voluntary; no church had legal advantage or social
pre-eminence over others; and every man had complete liberty to adopt
any form of worship and belief he thought right (or none), to propagate
his faith without hindrance, or to start a new religious organization if
he so desired. This combination of circumstances had never before
existed. These factors in the environment are immensely important for
our study.
Since the movements which produced the Disciples of Christ began so near
the beginning of the nineteenth century, we may take the year 1800 as a
suitable point at which to make a cross section of the United States and
observe, in a very general way, the state of the nation.
America in 1800
George Washington had died the year before. John Adams was president.
The country consisted of sixteen states, only Vermont, Kentucky, and
Tennessee having been added to the original thirteen. It had a
population of 5,308,483, less than 10 per cent of whom lived west of the
Alleghenies. (Twenty years later, in spite of the great westward
movement, 73 per cent of the people were still on the Atlantic slope.)
The population, wealth, industries, and cultural institutions were very
largely concentrated not only east of the mountains but in the eastern
part of the area east of the mountains. The Atlantic tidewater belt,
from Boston to Charleston, contained the great preponderance of
everything that made this a nation—except its land, its undeveloped
resources, and its pioneering spirit. But the eastern cities that loom
so large in history were still small: Philadelphia, 28,522; Boston,
24,037; New York, with 60,515 within the boundaries of present-day
Manhattan, had already taken first place. In the summer of 1800 the seat
of the national government was moved from Philadelphia to the unfinished
buildings in the almost uninhabited area that was to become the city of
Washington.
The vast region now occupied by the five populous states west of the
Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River had a grand total of 51,000
inhabitants. It had been organized as the Northwest Territory under the
Ordinance of 1787, and the Indians had been moved out of the eastern and
southern parts of it in 1795 under a treaty forced upon them after
Anthony Wayne’s expedition against them. Pittsburgh was a town of 1,565,
the head of navigation on the Ohio. In 1803 the state of Ohio was carved
out of the Northwest Territory. By 1830 it had a population of more than
900,000. So urgent was the drive toward the open frontier and so rapid
the development of its communities that, while trying to realize the
newness and emptiness of the region at a given period, one must be on
guard against failing to realize the rate of change. Moreover, some
parts of the area were much more advanced than others.
Kentucky was about a generation ahead of the adjacent Northwest
Territory in settlement and culture. It had a college, the first west of
the mountains, even before it got statehood in 1792. By 1800 it had a
population of 220,000. Lexington, a town of 1,797 (including 439
slaves), its metropolis, the seat of the college, and the social and
economic center of the Bluegrass Region, could make a plausible claim to
the title, “the Athens of the West.” The churches came to Kentucky, as
they did everywhere, with the first wave of settlers. By 1800 the
Presbyterians had a synod and several presbyteries. The most numerous
body was the Baptists, who reported 106 churches with 5,000 members. The
Methodists, with perhaps half that number in the state, organized a
Western Conference the next year, composed of circuits in Kentucky,
Tennessee, and the Northwest Territory. These were the three vigorous
and aggressive churches on the frontier.
The Mississippi River was the western boundary of the United States
(until 1803), and Florida was still a Spanish possession. Louisiana
Territory and Florida were both held by Roman Catholic powers, and
Protestant churches were not permitted.
American Churches in 1800
The term, “the Church,” had little meaning in America at and after the
beginning of the federal period. There was no _Church_, either as a
visible and functioning reality or as an ideal; there were only
_churches_. If we call them “sects,” it is not to criticize but simply
to describe the fact that the church had been _cut_ into many parts. In
view of the kind of compulsory unity (or attempted unity) in European
and British Christianity out of which these sects arose, the divisions
were not to their discredit. Sectarianism was a stage through which
Christianity had to pass on the road to freedom and unity. But the fact
of division is the one now before us.
The largest denominations were the Congregational, Episcopal,
Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist. There were also important bodies
of Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, French Huguenots, Lutherans,
Quakers, and Roman Catholics, and such smaller groups as the Moravians,
Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, and the Ephrata Society.
The original settlement of the first Atlantic Seaboard colonies,
especially Virginia and New England, combined the religious with the
economic motive. Even the nationalistic impulse to extend British power
was as much religious as political, for it included zeal for the
extension of Protestantism on a scale to match and check the Spanish
Roman Catholic empire which already included Florida, the West Indies,
Mexico, and most of South America.
Virginia was Anglican by intention, but from the start the Puritan
element in both the company and the colony was strong. When the first
settlement was made, and for a good while after, the Puritans were still
a party in the Church of England. Episcopacy remained established in
Virginia until the Revolution, though there was a strong influx of
Scotch-Irish (Presbyterian, of course) and of Baptists in the eighteenth
century. Since there was no Anglican bishop in America during all these
years, there could be no confirmations. As always with established
churches, nominal adherents greatly outnumbered communicants, and many
were content with a “gentlemanly conformity.” Episcopacy was established
also in North and South Carolina, though it never had a majority in
either colony, and in New York after the British took it from the Dutch
in 1667.
The great Puritan migration to New England had for its religious purpose
the founding of a Puritan state somewhat on the pattern of Calvin’s
Geneva. The developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
produced, instead, a group of colonies—states in the American union by
1800—in which Congregationalism was the “standing order,” or established
church, and one state, Rhode Island, in which, thanks to Roger Williams
and the Baptists, complete religious liberty, deliberately adopted as a
matter of conviction, got its first fair trial as a principle of
government. But Congregationalism, though clinging to some of its legal
advantages, had also grown tolerant, partly because dissenters and
noncommunicants had become so very numerous. As early as 1760, the
president of Yale estimated that 12 per cent in the four New England
colonies were dissenters, and that not more than one-fifth of the others
were communicant members of Congregational churches.
New England Congregationalism, though already disturbed by the
theological controversy which later produced the Unitarian defection,
was in the main soundly Calvinistic. It differed from Presbyterianism
only in its tradition of the independence of the local church, and even
this was qualified by the growth of what was called “associationism” by
those who viewed it with alarm. So, when an interest in home missions
began to appear, about 1800, the Plan of Union was formed under which
Congregationalists and Presbyterians cooperated until 1837 in carrying
the gospel to the new settlements, first in western New York and then in
the regions beyond. The Presbyterians ultimately got most of the
churches organized in the Middle West by Congregational missionaries
operating under this plan.
Presbyterians came from England, Scotland, and North Ireland. They never
had a colony of their own, though they missed having Massachusetts Bay
only because the Presbyterian Puritans who founded it became
Congregational. Puritans who came to other colonies generally were and
remained Presbyterians. They found a footing in New York, New Jersey,
Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia and were among the first
settlers of Kentucky. Pennsylvania became the scene of some of their
most vigorous activities, both in and around Philadelphia and in the
central and western part, where they were the most numerous and
influential group. William Tennent’s “Log College” at Neshaminy (1720)
initiated theological education in America, at least outside of
Harvard’s effort to provide a learned clergy for New England. It trained
evangelists as well as scholars, and led to the founding of Princeton.
The great Scotch-Irish immigration, about the middle of the eighteenth
century, brought both regular Presbyterians, in communion with the
Church of Scotland, and Seceder Presbyterians, representing the Great
Secession of 1733. Large numbers of both came to the western parts of
Pennsylvania and Virginia, where these Presbyterian Ulstermen “formed an
American Ulster larger and richer than that they had abandoned,” as one
of them wrote, with some exaggeration of the degree of their occupancy
though not of the size and resources of the area. Thomas Campbell was
following a stream of Scotch-Irish Seceder Presbyterians when he
migrated from the vicinity of Belfast, Ireland, to the southwestern
corner of Pennsylvania.
Baptist beginnings in America are easily localized in Rhode Island, but
their dispersal and multiplication cannot be simply diagramed. They went
everywhere, on their individual initiative, with no general
organization, were persecuted wherever intolerance ruled, and generally
despised by their more conventional and respectable neighbors, chiefly
because they insisted that religion was a purely voluntary matter, that
Christian, Turk, Jew, or atheist should be allowed to follow his own
convictions about faith and worship, and that the state had nothing to
do with it. That position seemed almost equivalent to anarchy. The fact
that most of the Baptist preachers were ignorant men, or self-taught and
uncouth, and that a great many of them were farmers six days in the week
and preachers only on Sunday, made the matter worse. But the Baptists
did have a college, founded in 1764, which became Brown University. In
cities and towns their preachers became more urbane, but they kept the
aggressiveness and the popular appeal which brought immense success to
their cause in the Middle West and in the South. Regular Baptists were
Calvinistic. Their Philadelphia Confession, which was very similar in
doctrine to the Presbyterians’ Westminster Confession, was commonly used
as a standard of orthodoxy. It taught that Christ died only for the
elect. But there were also “General Baptists,” who believed in a general
atonement, or that Christ died for all. The difference between the two
became significant.
Methodism in America began when two or three lay preachers came in the
1760’s, and when John Wesley sent two preachers from England in 1769.
But the revival of 1740, known as the Great Awakening, had prepared the
way for it. Through the Revolution and until 1784, Methodism remained
nominally a movement in the Anglican Church, but it had its societies,
preachers, classes, and circuits, and its evangelists converted
thousands of the religiously indifferent. Formal organization began with
the Christmas conference, 1784. The Methodist system of supervision by
“superintendents,” who promptly became bishops, and by presiding elders,
with preachers riding circuits and class leaders conserving local gains,
constituted a planned economy in the business of serving the religious
needs of the frontier. But without tireless energy and zealous devotion,
all this machinery could not have been effective. Methodism began on the
Atlantic Seaboard and it had good success there, but the scene of its
most spectacular growth was in the West and South. By 1800 the
Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians had become the great “popular
churches” on the frontier; and the frontier itself was on the verge of a
startlingly rapid transformation.
It must not be supposed that the attitudes of the denominations toward
each other were altogether those of mutual hostility and competition, or
even of isolation. There was much of this, but there was also much of
mutual respect and friendliness. From 1800 to about 1837 there was a
noticeable increase of cooperation among the members of many
denominations. This is seen in the earliest phases of Sunday school
work, in Bible publication and distribution, in certain aspects of
foreign and home missionary activity, and in the antislavery and
temperance societies. But the most conspicuous feature of American
Christianity continued to be its divided state.
Land of the Free
One reason for this sectarian condition was that this was a free
country. Under the First Amendment to the Constitution, which is the
first article of the Bill of Rights, no church could ever receive
special favors from the government nor could there be discrimination
against any. When the American Government adopted this hands-off policy,
leaving the whole matter of religion to the churches and to the people,
the old compulsory unity disappeared—even the ghost of unity which
England had, with its one national church and a number of “dissenting”
bodies still under certain legal handicaps.
It is little wonder that America had many churches. Colonists had come
from many countries bringing all the varieties of religion that existed
in all those countries. Many of them had come as refugees from
persecution. In later years, some divisions occurred on American soil,
but the sects that were here in 1800 had all been imported from Europe.
Moreover, since the United States was formed by the union of thirteen
colonies, the new nation, of course, had as many different churches as
all the colonies together had had. In some colonies, especially Rhode
Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, there had been a considerable
variety of churches enjoying equal liberty. In others the situation was
much as it was in England at the same time, with their established
churches and with dissenting bodies existing as best they could under
the shadow of the favored church. The founders and builders of the
American colonies, with a few exceptions, had not believed in the
separation of church and state or in equal liberty for all religious
groups. But the idea of religious liberty had been growing, and the
multiplicity of churches in the new nation made the establishment of any
one of them as _the_ national church a practical impossibility. No one
even suggested it in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
It is hard for us now to realize how continuous and almost universal had
been the belief that the welfare of the state was bound up with
religious uniformity. For more than a thousand years, and throughout
Christendom, practically everybody except little bands of heretics and
rebels believed that the institutional unity of the church was essential
to the security of the state and the stability of the social order, and
that it was the state’s duty to enforce this unity. That belief
furnished the reason—and when not the reason, the excuse—for most of the
persecutions that have occurred. Roman Catholics, of course, believed
it, and it is still the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
But most Protestants also believed it. Only the Baptists and Quakers and
some small separatist sects in Germany believed in religious liberty as
a matter of principle. But the established and respectable bodies
considered these as wild-eyed radicals.
Episcopalians and Puritans who founded colonies in America brought with
them this idea of a state church and a religious unity enforced by the
police power, not because they were bigoted or cruel by preference but
because they believed, as almost everybody had believed for centuries,
that in no other way could a political society be strong enough to
survive. Surprise is sometimes expressed at the “inconsistency” of the
Puritans, who “came seeking religious liberty” and then persecuted the
Quakers and Baptists. But there is no inconsistency, for they did not
come seeking religious liberty. They came to establish a Puritan state.
They had to learn religious liberty after they arrived, and they were
rather slow in learning it. But even the vestiges of the colonial
religious establishments withered away after the Revolution, and America
became, in fact as well as in constitutional theory, a nation in which
all churches, like all individuals, are free and equal before the law.
A new epoch in the history of religion began when a nation was born
which (_a_) disclaimed for its civil power the right and duty of giving
special protection to a favored church, (_b_) declared implicitly, as
the Virginia Bill of Rights in 1776 had done explicitly, that religion
must be purely voluntary, and (_c_) abandoned the medieval political
philosophy which justified intolerance on the theory that the state must
enforce religious uniformity in the interest of its own stability and
security.
These new American conditions had, among others, three results that are
of vital importance in connection with the present study:
First, the removal of the repressive hand of government made it easier
for new religious movements to spring up or for old ones to divide.
Hence new divisions in the church arose in addition to those which had
been imported from Europe. The divided state of the Christian forces
became more acute and called more urgently for correction.
Second, the problem of Christian union ceased to be in any sense a
political problem and became a purely religious problem to be solved by
religious means. Seventeenth century advocates of union had, to be sure,
preached brotherly love and made some statements about uniting on the
simple essentials of Christianity; but they had sought support largely
from political leaders, trying to show them how a national church,
united by making concessions to bring back the dissenters, would
increase the nation’s strength, or how an alliance between the churches
of different countries would be a good stroke of diplomacy. The
conceptions of complete religious liberty for the individual and of free
churches in a free state introduced an entirely new approach to the
question of union. Those conceptions had to be thoroughly worked out
before the problem of Christian union in the modern sense—which is also
the primitive sense—could even be stated; and they had to be made
operative in government before a solution could be hopefully attempted.
There had to be complete freedom to divide before there could be a union
that would not deny freedom.
Third, separation of church and state and recognition of the voluntary
character of religion threw directly upon the members of churches the
whole responsibility for supporting the churches and promoting their
work by voluntary contributions. The Christian discovery and conquest of
America was to be organized and financed on a voluntary basis.
Such, in bare outline, was the American scene in which the forerunners
and fathers of the Disciples of Christ, about the beginning of the
nineteenth century, began to advocate a simple and noncreedal
Christianity, the union of all Christians on the basis of the essential
and primitive conditions of discipleship, and the restoration of such
features of the “ancient order of things” as might be agreed upon as
designed to be permanent practices of the church.