The American Experiment*The American Experiment*After the United States had won its battle for independence, Europeans continued to arrive from many countries, each group bringing its own theological slant and cultural heritage. While Europeans were immigrating to the new country or coming as indentured servants, Africans were being kidnapped from their villages, sold to slave traders who abused and imprisoned them before shipping them under horrific conditions to the Americas, where they were scattered by sale auction to plantation owners.
During the same period, native peoples of North America found themselves forced off their tribal lands as U.S. national boundaries expanded further westward. Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Eastern tribes of Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek were force-marched along the "Trail of Tears" to the Oklahoma territory. Eventually most Indian nations were forcibly relocated as the U.S. government broke every treaty it made with native peoples. Millions died from disease and genocidal* war. Survivors were confined to "reservations" on the worst lands.
Protestant Christians used the Bible to defend and justify these realities. Slavery was rationalized because Africans were not Christian, therefore labeled "heathens" and considered sub-human. The Promised Land theology of the book of Joshua with its model of military conquest was used to justify the wars against indigenous peoples, the "Canaanites" of the New World. The Puritans who came to the New World saw themselves as God’s elect, called to establish the New Israel. Frontier individualism and the optimism of progress through expansion and wealth led to the political slogan "Manifest Destiny," which reflected Christian triumphalism, a biblical interpretation that encouraged an attitude of the moral and economic superiority of white Christians over all others, and justified the taking of land.
In America, Deists and Protestants forged a satisfactory union in the interests of American founding principles and independence. Through the influence of prominent, educated Americans such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin [left], Thomas Paine and most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, many of whom were also members of churches, Deism is reflected in the God-language and egalitarian thinking of such founding documents as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S Constitution.
As upper class intellectuals, influenced by the scientific rationalism of the eighteenth century, Deists were more concerned with ethics than spirituality, and sought social harmony. Deists believed in one God--a uniform supreme being--who existed outside of history; there was no divine intervention in human affairs. Natural laws controlled the function of the universe, which had been set into motion by God and continued to run like a clock.
In England, Deism grew out of the Puritan conflicts within the Church of England to devise a simple, rationalistic creed with which all Christians could agree. Influenced by the rationalism of philosophers like David Hume and John Locke, some Deists wished to cleanse Christianity of its "myths and falsehoods"--that is, the miracles and prophetic elements of revelation. These assertions cast doubt on the credibility of the biblical accounts and therefore on the authority of Scripture. Later, Christians who believed in miracles were ridiculed and felt their best defense was a literal interpretation of Scripture. The effects of Deism continued to shape the expression of American Christianity into the twentieth century.
Protestants formed denominations that reflected their European roots. The Lutheran church emerged from the reforms of Martin Luther; from Zwingli and Calvin came the Presbyterians; the Anabaptist reform led to the Mennonites. In America the Church of England evolved into the Episcopalian church and Puritan reformers of the Church of England gave rise to the Congregationalists. Baptists drew from both Puritans and Anabaptists. From an emphasis on personal piety emerged the German Moravians, Evangelicals, and under Boehm and Otterbein’s work, the United Brethren. Quakers who shared George Fox’s search for the guidance of the inner light fled persecution in England and started the American Society of Friends, from which Mother Ann Lee began the movement known as Shakers. The followers of John Wesley’s movement of personal piety and social activism formed American Methodism. In the nineteenth century, the Salvation Army was also inspired by Wesleyan theology in response to urban poverty and inclusion of women ministers, first in England and then in the United States. Unitarians rejected the Trinity, believed in one deity, the goodness of humanity and its achievements, and moral leadership, while Universalists believed that all would be saved. Unitarian-Universalists greatly influenced religious and social thinking in the northeastern United States.
Prosperous white women raised issues about their role in this new country from the beginning. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John Adams in 1776: "Emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining absolute power over Wives....if particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." Cries for fair working conditions in the city and against the agonies of infant mortality and illness, the need for educational opportunities, and eventually the vote, were met with biblical quotes about the subordination of women to men as God’s will. Belief that women’s brains would burst their skulls if they learned too much was common.
The practice of slavery took hold in the 1660s when the early American colonists moved from a system of labor based on indentured servitude (service to a landowner for seven years) to legalized, institutionalized, racial slavery. From the introduction of African slaves to the northern and southern colonies in the mid-1600s, until 1808 when the United States banned their importation, over 450,000 Africans sold into bondage became the foundation on which the colonial and then national economy was built. The need for laborers in both the fields of the agrarian South and the emerging industrial centers of the North seemed insatiable. Wealthy plantation owners George Washington [right] and Thomas Jefferson--in fact, six of the first eight presidents-- were slaveholders, a position that contradicted the principles of freedom set forth in the Declaration of Independence. The efforts of some of the "Founding Fathers" to eliminate slavery through the Constitution were voted down by others.
Tensions mounted after American independence as Northern states developed industrial economies that reduced the need for slavery. The Industrial Revolution created growing urban centers with mills, mining, and factories. A wage economy quickly became the norm. Women, children, and especially new immigrants became sources of cheap labor and worked in oppressive conditions that later served as a catalyst for social justice movements.
By the early 1800s slavery had become a Southern phenomenon. Slaves often rebelled but were brutally crushed, and anti-slavery sentiment grew in the North. Legal battles determined which Western territories and new states could hold slaves. Southern politicians retaliated by passing even more repressive laws against slaves, which culminated in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. This law required anyone who came upon an escaped slave, even in the North, to turn the slave over to authorities for return to his or her "owner" --even if that person had lived as free for many years. Reprisals were swift for those who resisted.
The graphics on this page were scanned from A. B. Hyde, The Story of Methodism Throughout the World (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1889) and are in the public domain.