When the Pilgrims at Plymouth made the Mayflower Compact on November 11, 1620, swearing in the name of God to "Covenant and Combine [them]selves together into a Civil Body Politic," they were following a pattern familiar to them from earlier church covenants that was shaped by a tradition of "covenant theology" rooted in the background of the Reformation. Like other New England colonists, they were seeking to establish a community that would enact the Protestant Christian calling as they conceived it and thereby establish in the new world the true Kingdom of God and prepare the culmination of providential history. As often happens, the effects of this momentous undertaking turned out to be very different in many ways from what the founders had in mind.

What have been the effects of Protestant influence in America? The most important probably have been a culture of religious pluralism, buttressed by separation of church and state, and a culture of voluntary association that has contributed both to the way America has organized itself governmentally and to the tendency of groups to come together in various types of non-governmental organization for public purposes, such as the founding of our first major universities and later the abolitionist and temperance movements. Another important effect was the early impetus to settlement itself, since in the case of New England in particular only a strong belief in providential purpose and divine support could have encouraged people to move so far and to such an inhospitable environment--in greater numbers by 1700 or so than the entire European population of New Spain.

Pluralism, however, was hardly what most of the early Protestant settlers wanted; rather they generally sought polities in which church and political community would coincide so that true faith would be supported consistently by both custom and statute. Each of the early settlements had its own ideas about how to do this, and those with different views were encouraged to move on.

Who were the early American Protestants? The English colonies fell into three broad groups, each rather distinct in religious orientation: northern (New England), middle (from New York down to Maryland), and southern (from Virginia on south). The northern pattern was overwhelmingly Puritan, principally Congregationalist. There was greater diversity of religions, including Quakers and even some Roman Catholics, in the middle colonies, which therefore tended more toward religious pluralism from the start. The southern colonies were mainly Anglican in the early period and tended to be less preoccupied with religion.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the Puritans were the main driving force in American religion, and most of the other forms of American Protestantism, including Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists, grew mainly out of Puritan roots. Who, then, were the Puritans, and what did they believe? They were English reformers inspired by Calvinism, which was itself rooted in two main patterns of pre-Reformation thought: the ideas of William of Ockham (14th cent.) and those of Saint Augustine of Hippo (4th-5th cents.). In opposition to St. Thomas Aquinas (13th cent.) and others who thought God was bound by His nature to will only the good, Ockham had emphasized the radical freedom of God and claimed the good was simply whatever God might arbitrarily decree. Human beings were comparably free, to obey God or disobey, and would be rewarded or punished accordingly--though not because of any obligation on God's part but only because He "covenanted" to do so according to rules He arbitrarily established.

Martin Luther (1483-1546), whose mind was formed by Ockhamite teaching, found this God terrifying, but the conception of God he came eventually to oppose to it was still essentially arbitrary, choosing to treat sinners as though they were just even though they were not. For his conception of human being, however, Luther turned to Augustine's idea of Original Sin and interpreted humans as not free at all but bound inexorably either by sinfulness or by God's grace. John Calvin (1509-64) took up this pattern of thinking and formulated it as belief in double predestination: the idea that God arbitrarily, even before creation, destined some for salvation and some for damnation. He also taught that the former group, the "elect," should covenant with each other and with God to fulfill God's purposes on earth in political communities guided by His revealed law.

Thinking in this manner, the Puritans were powerfully motivated to believe themselves among the elect and sought assurance for this through such signs as a righteous life and the experience of divine blessing manifested as inward conversion. Different Puritan groups had different ideas about God's will for righteous community life. In general they involved industriousness and respect for laws, but they also involved varying ideas about church organization and membership. There were two main patterns of Calvinist church organization: Congregational (in which local congregations were comparatively independent) and Presbyterian (in which local congregations were subject to an overarching Presbyterian Assembly). With regard to church membership, both tended to believe it should be limited to the elect, for which the main evidence was a convincing account of a conversion experience.

The question of who had such evidence of eligibility naturally generated divisiveness and led, ironically, to the pluralism and church-state separation the Puritans generally did not want but which has become so central to American society. Communities split over degrees of restrictiveness as to who might be eligible for baptism or communion and over the legitimacy of government by people whose status among the elect was in dispute. Rhode Island, the first colony to adopt church-state separation, was founded in 1635 by Roger Williams "for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience," where he was joined by others expelled from Massachusetts, such as Anne Hutchinson (1637). Settlements in New Hampshire and Connecticut were founded by other expellees, such as John Wheelwright (1637) and Thomas Hooker (1639).

The middle colonies tended toward religious pluralism early on. Maryland was founded as a refuge for English Roman Catholics, but since it had a Protestant majority, it quickly espoused pluralism and passed an Act of Toleration in 1649. The most important middle colony was Pennsylvania, founded by the Quaker, William Penn (1644-1718), in 1681. The Quaker movement grew out of the Puritan focus on inward experience of salvation but emphasized it to the point of minimizing both the sacraments and the function of an ordained clergy. Quakers were excluded almost everywhere until the founding of Pennsylvania, the success of which eventually made them the most potent religious force outside New England. Philadelphia, multi-ethnic and religiously pluralist from the start, also became a major center of the Presbyterian, Baptist, Roman Catholic, and Lutheran traditions. The first black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was founded there in 1816.

Philadelphia was also a major center of Enlightenment thought, giving birth to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The American Enlightenment was not a religious movement, but here it was far less anti-clerical than in Europe, and its concern with human rights was influenced by the Puritan and Quaker emphasis on the experience of conscience. Philadelphia Quakers organized the first anti-slavery society in 1775, and in 1776 they expelled slave-holding members.

Over time the inner division of the Puritan heritage over free will (from Ockham's influence) versus divine determinism (from Augustine's) led to a gradual decline of predestinarianism and the increase of "Arminianism" (belief in freedom of the will). This in turn led eventually to a gradual shift in denominational leadership from the original Puritan Congregationalists and Presbyterians to the Methodists and Baptists.

An important stimulus to these developments, and a major feature of American religious history generally, has been revivalism. Beginning around 1734-35 there was a spontaneous outburst of religious enthusiasm in group experiences of conversion. This became known as the Great Awakening. Some, such as Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), hailed it as a sign that the millennium and the reign of the Holy Spirit were at hand; others distrusted it for the way it deviated from denominational control and the leadership of ordained clergy. After the Revolution, around 1798-1801, there was a similar burst of revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening.

How did revivalism develop, and what have been its effects? One important influence was Puritan focus on the experience of conversion; in fact, Puritanism has itself been called an extended revival movement. Another important influence was Pietism, which came from Lutheran and Hussite traditions in Central Europe. The charismatic preaching of Edwards, George Whitefield (1714-70), and others was also an important stimulus. One of revivalism's most important characteristics is that it tended to be interdenominational, which led to the formation of many cross-denominational voluntary associations to carry out the good works conversion inspired, such as the Sunday School movement, abolitionism (leading eventually to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery) and the temperance movement (leading to Prohibition, 1919-1931).

Revivalism generated enormous growth in denominations attuned to it, especially the Baptists and Methodists. By 1890 these two, which spread widely in the West through revivals, outnumbered all the other Protestant denominations put together. Another effect was an increase of belief in free will (with which to choose salvation at a revival) as compared with divine determinism--a development that was also furthered by the general optimism in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

The Revolution had a major impact on American religion, especially through the constitutional separation of church and state and its effective canonizing of religious pluralism. But Protestant Christianity in turn had a powerful influence on the new nation. The secular national idea of Manifest Destiny, for example, had roots in Puritan conceptions of the divine calling to establish the Kingdom of God in America. Even more momentous was the idea of human rights as grounded in the individual conscience and its relation to divine law. This led from the early Quaker opposition to slavery through the broadly Protestant abolitionist movements that began in the 1830s to the Civil War (1861-65), which abolished slavery but split many churches along North-South lines and destroyed the previous economy of the South.

These effects of the Civil War have had a complex history since. During Reconstruction, the northern Protestant churches pressed for the extension of full civil rights to the freed blacks and established a number of black colleges, but this impetus faded after the 1880s. Black Baptist and Methodist churches eventually developed to become the most important black institution in the South after the family and later played the leading role, along with black non-church organizations, in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s.

The white South, distrustful of all the change forced on it by the Civil War, became a stronghold of conservatism that resisted most modern challenges to religious thought. At the time of the trial of John Scopes in 1925, for example, for teaching Darwinian evolution, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida all had laws against teaching Darwin, and similar laws had failed only by small margins in Louisiana and North Carolina.

The intellectual influence of Protestantism in America has thus been ambiguous, with much of it a tug of war between traditionalist and modernizing tendencies. Puritan emphasis on divine revelation as a law to guide conduct and community life carried the implication that scripture must be studied with the full panoply of scholarship, which in turn implied a need for institutions of learning that could develop it. This led to the founding of Harvard (1638), Yale (1701), Princeton (1746) and other early colleges--and to later struggles over the critical implications of such scholarship. Among the good works growing out of revivalism was the founding of numerous educational institutions, especially in the mid-west. But its focus on feeling in the conversion experience often led to anti-intellectualism and in the 20th century to Fundamentalism--a story that has not yet ended, though mainline churches in most of the US have become committed to modern science and scholarly inquiry.

Ahlstrom, Sidney E., A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press 1972).

Bloom, Harold, The American Religion: The Emergence of The Post-Christian Nation (Simon and Schuster 1992).

Clebsch, William, From Sacred to Profane America: The Role of Religion in American History (Harper and Row 1968).

Marty, Martin. Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (Little, Brown 1984).

-----. Religion and Republic (Beacon Press 1987)

-----. Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (Dial 1970).