250 Years of Faith: The Story of Christianity in America – Thomas S. Kidd

ABSTRACT: Whether the United States of America has ever been a Christian nation may continue to be debated. The undisputed truth is that Christianity has played a significant role in the 250-year history of America. Its influence is present from the beginning, even though the most prominent Founders did not have robust Christian faith. After the Founding, the Second Great Awakening brought America to a high point of evangelical faith in the decades before the Civil War. Though several denominations have experienced drastic declines in the century and a half since then, recent data suggests that the phenomenon of the “nones” is overblown. Christianity in America is changing, but it is not dying.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Thomas Kidd (PhD, University of Notre Dame), Research Professor of Church History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, to summarize the history of Christianity in America since its founding in 1776.

As the United States of America observes the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the question of the nation’s Christian roots seems more controversial than ever. Secularists tell us that biblical faith had virtually nothing to do with the Founding, while many today on the Christian right insist that the Founders were born-again believers who created America as a “Christian nation.”

Whatever role Christianity played at the nation’s birth, we have entered a post-Christian era in modern America. The reigning powers in American academia, business, entertainment, and law are typically hostile toward Christians and biblical morality. Freedom of self-expression has become the ultimate determiner of social justice. Traditional morality and even biological reality are often reviled as tools of oppressors. Our brave new world has made many Christians eager to recapture the nation’s spiritual origins.

In the following essay, I sketch the story of Christianity in America from the Founding to the present day, demonstrating that the church’s flourishing in America has depended not on a connection to the government but on the strength of its sovereign God.

Faith Among the Founders

America in 1776 doesn’t easily yield the image of uncomplicated biblical devotion that some Christians expect to find. To be sure, biblical concepts influenced America’s founding principles. To cite just one example, the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” makes no sense unless you assume (as the Founders did) that there is a created order perceptible via revelation, reason, or both. Thus, our equality and rights derive from our relationship to the Creator God. The Declaration’s view of humanity, then, is broadly based on Genesis 1 and 2.

However, saying that the founding ideals reflect a biblical worldview is not the same as saying that the Founders were orthodox, practicing Christians. Some of them surely were believers. Virginia’s Patrick Henry and Massachusetts’s Samuel Adams were outspoken Christians who insisted that America needed Christian morality and biblical beliefs to thrive as a republic. But when you look at the most prominent Founders, there are no obvious instances of personally devout and theologically sound Christians.

Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are perhaps the easiest Founders to diagnose theologically. Franklin called himself a Deist in his Autobiography, and through the end of his life he professed doubt regarding essential Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Christ and the reliability of the Bible.1 Jefferson was even more skeptical than Franklin for much of his life. Though he became convinced that Jesus was the greatest moral teacher in history, Jefferson still did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God.2 He famously prepared a Gospel compilation containing only Jesus’s parables and ethical teachings, with most of the miracles literally cut out with scissors.

John Adams was more supportive of a public role for Christianity than Jefferson was. Adams even backed the continuation of Massachusetts’s official church after the adoption of the US Constitution, believing that Christianity deserved state support because it was the primary wellspring of people’s virtue. But like Jefferson, Adams was a Unitarian, denying the doctrine of the Trinity.3

Other Founders, including George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, were guarded about their own beliefs, making them more difficult to label. Washington, like Adams, held a high view of Christianity’s social importance. But during his long career Washington said almost nothing about his personal convictions, and he clearly decided to never write the names “Jesus” or “Christ” or utter them in public. He held to this standard of silence about Jesus in all but a couple of instances.4 Washington also did not take communion for most of his life.5 Some reports suggest that he did partake prior to the American Revolution, but after 1776 he either did not attend church on communion Sundays or left the service before communion was served.

Madison certainly had a strong background in traditional Christian theology, both from his upbringing in the Anglican Church and from his studies under the Presbyterian pastor John Witherspoon at Princeton College. But after college, Madison also became largely silent about his own beliefs. Aside from his attending an Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, as president, scholars have little evidence with which to assess Madison’s own convictions.6

Finally, Alexander Hamilton was no one’s idea of a sanctified Christian, but he was more deeply rooted in orthodox Christian belief than either Franklin or Jefferson.7 And the dying Hamilton did request to take communion after Aaron Burr shot him in a duel.8

Free to Proclaim and Practice

Given the mixed personal record of the American Founders, what accounts for our nation’s impressive history of Christian devotion? The most important factor was the Lord’s providence working through thousands of churches to spread the gospel. A second essential factor in America’s robust religious history was the unusual freedom that churches and Christians enjoyed due to religious liberty.

In other words, America’s Christian strength was not dependent on the government somehow being “Christian.” We have seen the dismal results in countries such as England that have maintained an official state church.9 Political compromise and theological corruption are the inevitable products of church-state collaboration. America’s religious vitality was based on God’s power moving through zealous churches operating in a free environment. American history is a case study of the benefits of a “free church” ministering in a “free state,” a situation that the Baptist Faith and Message of the Southern Baptist Convention describes as the “Christian ideal.”

Founders such as Madison and Jefferson desired religious liberty for more “Enlightenment”-type reasons than evangelical Christians did. Jefferson thought religion was a private matter not subject to government oversight. Evangelicals, especially the Baptists, wanted religious freedom because the official state churches had often persecuted them as dissenters.10 But evangelicals and Enlightenment-influenced politicians reached the same conclusion about religious liberty: Christianity would thrive better when freed from government interference. This theory of religious freedom and vitality proved true in the American experience.11

Not that religious freedom guaranteed Christian dynamism. Even by the 1730s, Christian commitment in colonial America had faltered to the point that the First Great Awakening was necessary to revitalize the slumbering churches. Casual Christian observers might assume that America was the most distinctively religious at the Founding, and that the nation has become increasingly secular ever since. But it is more accurate to see America’s Christian history as a series of cycles, with regular intervals of decline and revival continuing through present day. Thankfully, those cycles largely came after 1776, without much religious persecution against Christians. The imprisonment of dissenting evangelical preachers largely ended with the Revolution.12

Still, there was no golden age of church life in American history. Each era had its strengths and weaknesses. We understandably look back to the First Great Awakening as a high point for doctrinally rigorous preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. But even that era was tainted by these pastors’ complicity in the moral blight of slavery.

Second Great Awakening

In terms of evangelism, missions, and church planting, the greatest era in American Christian history was not the First but the Second Great Awakening. Many Reformed and evangelical believers look askance at the Second Great Awakening because of the theological novelties introduced by the popular Presbyterian preacher Charles Finney. In the late stages of the Second Awakening, Finney forged a human-centered system of revivalism. He declared that a revival was no miracle but merely an event that depended on a pastor’s efforts and the application of effective techniques.13 Calvinists also have mixed feelings about the dominant position that Arminian, free-will Methodists took in American Protestantism by the 1830s.

Despite such theological concerns, we shouldn’t forget the Second Awakening’s quieter but beneficial accomplishments. We may disagree with Methodists on issues such as free will and universal atonement, but the Methodist Church of the Second Great Awakening remained unambiguously evangelical. Methodist circuit riders such as Francis Asbury possessed a zeal for gospel preaching that few have ever matched. Between 1776 and 1861 (the beginning of the Civil War), Methodists went from a tiny sect in America to an evangelical behemoth. By the 1850s, the Methodists had helped to make America more evangelical and gospel-saturated than it had ever been before or has been since.

Running a close second to the Methodists in church planting were the Baptists, most of whom remained broadly Calvinist. Baptists saw particular successes in the backcountry South, which many observers (ironically) regarded as the least-churched part of America in 1776. Baptist and Methodist preachers traveled to remote villages and farms across the South and Midwest, leading to countless conversions and church plants, thus heralding the advent of the “Bible Belt.”

Baptists and Methodists also made the first major evangelistic inroads among African Americans during the Revolutionary era, highlighted by the conversion of the Baptist pastor and enslaved man David George. Around 1773, George became pastor of the first enduring African-American-led congregation, the Silver Bluff Church in South Carolina. After the Revolutionary War, George evacuated with the British to Nova Scotia in Canada, where he evangelized the Black Loyalist population. Eventually George and many of his Canadian congregation left Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone in West Africa, where George planted yet another Baptist church.14 George’s story illustrates the way that evangelicals were beginning to take the gospel across cultures and oceans.

Precedents such as David George’s church-planting efforts notwithstanding, the formal missionary movement in America began in 1810 with the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Inspired by William Carey’s British Baptist Missionary Society (1792), American churches joined the effort to send missionaries to the nations. Among the first missionaries appointed by the ABCFM were Adoniram and Ann Judson, who departed for India in 1812. The Judsons were Congregationalists, but as they sailed to south Asia, they reconsidered the issue of baptism and became convictional Baptists. This change ultimately led to the creation of the Baptists’ Triennial Convention, the first Baptist national organization in America. The Triennial Convention promoted global Baptist missions.15

In addition to evangelism, church planting, and missions, we could cite other facets of the vast complex of Christian growth that the Second Great Awakening entailed. Obviously it included revivals, highlighted by the Cane Ridge awakening in Kentucky in 1801. But even the revivals did not appear out of nowhere: The “camp meetings” were the product of local churches cooperating in special evangelistic events with round-the-clock gospel preaching.

Churches also partnered in Bible societies to print and distribute the Scriptures in record numbers. Evangelicals engaged in the great social and political causes of the day, including the antislavery movement. Southern white evangelicals (many of them slaveowners) enlisted on the proslavery side, however, leading to the division of the Baptist and Methodist denominations in the 1840s. Poignantly, the 1845 Baptist breakup was not just about slavery in general but about whether slaveowners could legitimately serve as missionaries. Here, as so often in church history, we see people’s capacity to corrupt seasons of blessing with their own sinful and selfish agendas.

One way to define a “Christian nation” is a country with an unusually high percentage of Christian believers. By that metric, America was probably the most Christian during the mid-nineteenth century, after the Second Great Awakening. Church planting, evangelism, and revivals had brought unprecedented numbers of whites and blacks into gospel-preaching churches. (Native-American conversions lagged far behind, despite Baptists and other evangelicals making some advances among tribes such as the Cherokees.) But the specter of slavery loomed over the evangelical triumph of the mid-1800s. The denominational splits of the 1840s heralded the even more catastrophic national schism that precipitated the Civil War in 1861. The greatest moral question of the age would be decided by the clash of armies, not the reasoned deliberations of pastors and theologians.

Christianity During the Civil War and Beyond

If the mid-nineteenth century represented evangelicalism’s apex in America, what transpired over the next century and a half? How did the heavily evangelical nation of 1861 become the America of 2026, in which evangelicals now live in a culture that treats Christians with a combination of indifference and hostility? It is an extremely complex story, but the transformation started with the Civil War itself. The war undermined the moral authority of churches, who conspicuously failed to take a unified stance on slavery. The late-nineteenth century also saw a great wave of Catholic and Jewish immigrants who permanently diversified the religious landscape, undercutting Protestantism’s numerical dominance. That diversification broadened in the mid-1960s to include more immigrants from Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious backgrounds.

Leading denominations in the late 1800s also began to face the theological and philosophical rot of Darwinism and higher biblical criticism, which brought basic issues such as humanity’s origins and the Bible’s authority into question. Tragically, many Protestant theologians and pastors were more interested in academic novelty and cultural prestige than biblical fidelity. Thus, once-evangelical denominations such as the Methodist Church began a long, painful slide into liberalism and cultural irrelevance. By the mid-twentieth century, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had overtaken the Methodists as the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Even the SBC could not avoid the reefs of theological liberalism and higher criticism, however. Bitter controversies over liberal advocacy racked SBC seminaries for the century between the 1870s and 1970s. My own institution, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, saw one of its Old Testament professors (Ralph Elliott) publish the controversial book The Message of Genesis in 1961. Elliott presented Genesis largely as a symbolic and mythological account, not one describing actual historical events.16 The SBC’s conservative resurgence, beginning in 1979, corrected the recurring problem of liberal seminaries in a largely traditionalist denomination. By the 1990s, SBC seminaries had become uniformly conservative and inerrantist. Not coincidentally, in the twenty-first century SBC institutions play a dominant role in American seminary education, putting an indelible mark on the future of pastoral ministry and missions.17

The conservative turn made the SBC an outlier, however, among historic Protestant denominations. Mainline denominations such as the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) embraced progressive views on issues including higher criticism of the Bible, ordaining women as pastors, and affirming the LGBTQ+ agenda. The mainline largely followed broader American patterns of secular egalitarianism and expressive individualism. These denominations entered a devastating pattern of decline starting in the 1960s.

Some conservative denominations such as the SBC have also experienced slow decline in recent decades. But just when you start thinking that the American church is in a death spiral, signs of new life appear. The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), for example, has seen recent major increases in professions of faith by children and adults, as well as slow membership growth.18 The growth of global Christianity has also had unexpected effects on American churches. Conservatives in the Anglican Church in North America, for example, have disaffiliated with the progressive Episcopal Church and aligned with traditionalist Anglican provinces in the global South. The United Methodist Church likewise saw many evangelical congregations break away to form the Global Methodist Church in 2022.

What Statistics (Don’t) Show

Pollsters of American religion have produced many breathless accounts of the “nones,” or the growing numbers of Americans who say they have no religion.19 However, as Byron Johnson and I show in our forthcoming book The Death of Religion? there are good reasons to suggest that the “nones” phenomenon is overblown.20 To be sure, there are more Americans today who tell pollsters that they really don’t have any religion. A generation ago, many of these people would likely have said they were Christians, even if they never went to church. Switching from a nominal, non-practicing “Christian” to a non-practicing “none” is a change of self-identification but not necessarily a departure in religious practice or belief. From a Christian perspective, it is probably a welcome change, as nominal Christianity is not true Christianity anyway.

But standard surveys of churches, such as the much-discussed US Religion Census, vastly undercount the actual number of American congregations, usually by at least 25 percent.21 Why the massive undercount? Demographers often miss relatively new churches and denominations because they are unknown to the surveyors, or the congregations don’t report membership statistics. These are the “others” missing in typical religion surveys, and they are a big cohort. In the religion media, the “others” might as well not exist, while the “nones” seem to be taking over the whole religious landscape.

The “others” are disproportionately evangelical and Pentecostal, they tend to be people of color, and their churches are often pastored by immigrants. Sometimes the “others” meet in a storefront or another church’s building; sometimes they represent megachurches with thousands of regular attenders.

The uncounted churches and congregants are especially strong in urban areas, including cities like Boston and New York, which have a missiological reputation of being secular and hard to reach with the gospel. The sociologist Tony Carnes, for example, studied one South Bronx neighborhood that reportedly had only 44 Christian congregations. Carnes discovered 156!22 This is an extreme instance, but it still reflects a vital matrix of often-unnoticed churches that represent the future of American religion.

Johnson and I conservatively estimate that there are about ten million Americans who regularly attend church but don’t appear in standard religion surveys. Reformed Christians would be uncomfortable with the theology of some of the “others,” especially those who embrace the deceptive promises of the prosperity gospel. The point, however, is that while Christianity in America is definitely changing, it is not dying. Even the relatively inhospitable environment of post-Christian culture isn’t able to kill it off. The church is a hardy plant, and it enjoys the care of a perfect, sovereign Gardener.

Evangelical Exceptionalism

So, where does all this leave us on America’s 250th anniversary? In God’s providential plan, America is just one nation among many. Many American saints will be represented in the great throng of worshipers from every tribe, tongue, and nation (Revelation 7:9), but America doesn’t have an exceptional role in divine history; it is not the modern equivalent of biblical Israel.

What has made American Christianity exceptional, however, is religious liberty and the vitality of its evangelical churches. The American church has been unusually strong not because we were founded as a “Christian nation” but because the Founders believed the church would thrive best when it operated free from government meddling. The American government traditionally valued religion so much that it left churches to do what only churches should do: proclaim the gospel, preach the word, send out missionaries, and serve as embassies of God’s kingdom. Across the generations, the American church has produced legions of faithful pastors, missionaries, and laypeople to answer that call. May it continue to be so, as long as the American experiment endures.

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