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- Religion has played an outsized role in U.S. history and politics, but it's one that has often gone unrecognized in U.S. museums.
www.npr.org/2017/06/28/534765046/smithsonian-exhibit-explores-religious-diversitys-role-in-u-s-historyTo Understand How Religion Shapes America, Look To Its Early ...
Religion in the United States began with the religions and spiritual practices of Native Americans. Later, religion also played a role in the founding of some colonies, as many colonists, such as the Puritans, came to escape religious persecution.
Throughout American history, religion has bound us together: In communities. Within families. As a search for meaning that crosses racial, political, and cultural lines. Yet binding is not always positive. Religion has also kept people in bondage. It has created boundaries. It has led to violence.
- Overview
- Colonial culture
- From a city on a hill to the Great Awakening
America’s intellectual attainments during the 17th and 18th centuries, while not inferior to those of the countries of Europe, were nevertheless of a decidedly different character. It was the techniques of applied science that most excited the minds of Americans, who, faced with the problem of subduing an often wild and unruly land, saw in science the best way to explain, and eventually to harness, those forces around them. Ultimately this scientific mode of thought might be applied to the problems of civil society as well, but for the most part the emphasis in colonial America remained on science and technology, not politics or metaphysics. Typical of America’s peculiar scientific genius was John Bartram of Pennsylvania, who collected and classified important botanical data from the New World. The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1744, is justly remembered as the focus of intellectual life in America. Men such as David Rittenhouse, an astronomer who built the first planetarium in America; Cadwallader Colden, the lieutenant governor of New York, whose accomplishments as a botanist and as an anthropologist probably outmatched his achievements as a politician; and Benjamin Rush, a pioneer in numerous areas of social reform as well as one of colonial America’s foremost physicians, were among the many active members of the society. At the centre of the society was one of its founders, Benjamin Franklin, who (in his experiments concerning the flow of electricity) proved to be one of the few American scientists to achieve a major theoretical breakthrough but who was more adept at the kinds of applied research that resulted in the manufacture of more efficient stoves and the development of the lightning rod.
American cultural achievements in nonscientific fields were less impressive. American literature, at least in the traditional European forms, was nearly nonexistent. The most important American contribution to literature was neither in fiction nor in metaphysics but rather in such histories as Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia (1705) or William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (1728–29, but not published until 1841). The most important cultural medium in America was not the book but the newspaper. The high cost of printing tended to eliminate all but the most vital news, and local gossip or extended speculative efforts were thus sacrificed so that more important material such as classified advertisements and reports of crop prices could be included. Next to newspapers, almanacs were the most popular literary form in America, Franklin’s Poor Richard’s being only the most famous among scores of similar projects. Not until 1741 and the first installment of Franklin’s General Magazine did literary magazines begin to make their first appearance in America. Most of the 18th-century magazines, however, failed to attract subscribers, and nearly all of them collapsed after only a few years of operation.
The visual and performing arts, though flourishing somewhat more than literature, were nevertheless slow to achieve real distinction in America. America did produce one good historical painter in Benjamin West and two excellent portrait painters in John Copley and Gilbert Stuart, but it is not without significance that all three men passed much of their lives in London, where they received more attention and higher fees.
The Southern colonies, particularly Charleston, seemed to be more interested in providing good theatre for their residents than did other regions, but in no colony did the theatre approach the excellence of that of Europe. In New England, Puritan influence was an obstacle to the performance of plays, and even in cosmopolitan Philadelphia the Quakers for a long time discouraged the development of the dramatic arts.
America’s intellectual attainments during the 17th and 18th centuries, while not inferior to those of the countries of Europe, were nevertheless of a decidedly different character. It was the techniques of applied science that most excited the minds of Americans, who, faced with the problem of subduing an often wild and unruly land, saw in science the best way to explain, and eventually to harness, those forces around them. Ultimately this scientific mode of thought might be applied to the problems of civil society as well, but for the most part the emphasis in colonial America remained on science and technology, not politics or metaphysics. Typical of America’s peculiar scientific genius was John Bartram of Pennsylvania, who collected and classified important botanical data from the New World. The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1744, is justly remembered as the focus of intellectual life in America. Men such as David Rittenhouse, an astronomer who built the first planetarium in America; Cadwallader Colden, the lieutenant governor of New York, whose accomplishments as a botanist and as an anthropologist probably outmatched his achievements as a politician; and Benjamin Rush, a pioneer in numerous areas of social reform as well as one of colonial America’s foremost physicians, were among the many active members of the society. At the centre of the society was one of its founders, Benjamin Franklin, who (in his experiments concerning the flow of electricity) proved to be one of the few American scientists to achieve a major theoretical breakthrough but who was more adept at the kinds of applied research that resulted in the manufacture of more efficient stoves and the development of the lightning rod.
American cultural achievements in nonscientific fields were less impressive. American literature, at least in the traditional European forms, was nearly nonexistent. The most important American contribution to literature was neither in fiction nor in metaphysics but rather in such histories as Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia (1705) or William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (1728–29, but not published until 1841). The most important cultural medium in America was not the book but the newspaper. The high cost of printing tended to eliminate all but the most vital news, and local gossip or extended speculative efforts were thus sacrificed so that more important material such as classified advertisements and reports of crop prices could be included. Next to newspapers, almanacs were the most popular literary form in America, Franklin’s Poor Richard’s being only the most famous among scores of similar projects. Not until 1741 and the first installment of Franklin’s General Magazine did literary magazines begin to make their first appearance in America. Most of the 18th-century magazines, however, failed to attract subscribers, and nearly all of them collapsed after only a few years of operation.
The visual and performing arts, though flourishing somewhat more than literature, were nevertheless slow to achieve real distinction in America. America did produce one good historical painter in Benjamin West and two excellent portrait painters in John Copley and Gilbert Stuart, but it is not without significance that all three men passed much of their lives in London, where they received more attention and higher fees.
The Southern colonies, particularly Charleston, seemed to be more interested in providing good theatre for their residents than did other regions, but in no colony did the theatre approach the excellence of that of Europe. In New England, Puritan influence was an obstacle to the performance of plays, and even in cosmopolitan Philadelphia the Quakers for a long time discouraged the development of the dramatic arts.
The part played by religion in the shaping of the American mind, while sometimes overstated, remains crucial. Over the first century and a half of colonial life, the strong religious impulses present in the original settlements—particularly those in New England—were somewhat secularized and democratized but kept much of their original power.
When the Pilgrim Fathers signed the Mayflower Compact in 1620, resolving themselves into a “civil body politic,” they were explicitly making religious fellowship the basis of a political community. But even from the start, there were nonmembers of the Leiden Separatist congregation on the passenger list—the “strangers” among the “saints”—and they sought steady expansion of their rights in Plymouth colony until its absorption into Massachusetts in 1691.
The Puritans were even more determined that their community be, as John Winthrop called it in his founding sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” a “city on a hill,” to which all humankind should look for an example of heaven on earth. This theme, in various guises, resounds in every corner of American history. The traditional image of Massachusetts Puritanism is one of repressive authority, but what is overlooked is the consensus among Winthrop and his followers that they should be bound together by love and shared faith, an expectation that left them “free” to do voluntarily what they all agreed was right. It was a kind of elective theocracy for the insiders.
The theocratic model, however, did not apply to nonmembers of the church, to whom the franchise was not originally extended, and problems soon arose in maintaining membership. Only those who had undergone a personal experience of “conversion” reassuring them of their salvation could be full members of the church and baptize their children. As the first generation died off, however, many of those children could not themselves personally testify to such conversion and so bring their own offspring into the church. They were finally allowed to do so by the Half-Way Covenant of 1662 but did not enjoy all the rights of full membership. Such apparent theological hair-splitting illustrated the power of the colony’s expanding and dispersing population. As congregations hived off to different towns and immigration continued to bring in worshippers of other faiths, the rigidity of Puritan doctrine was forced to bend somewhat before the wind.
Nevertheless, in the first few years of Massachusetts’s history, Puritan disagreements over the proper interpretation of doctrine led to schisms, exilings, and the foundation of new colonies. Only in America could dissenters move into neighbouring “wilderness” and start anew, as they did in Rhode Island and Connecticut. So the American experience encouraged religious diversity from the start. Even the grim practice of punishing dissidents such as the Quakers (and “witches”) fell into disuse by the end of the 17th century.
Toleration was a slow-growing plant, but circumstances sowed its seeds early in the colonial experience. Maryland’s founders, the well-born Catholic Calvert family, extended liberty to their fellow parishioners and other non-Anglicans in the Toleration Act of 1649. Despite the fact that Anglicanism was later established in Maryland, it remained the first locus of American Catholicism, and the first “American” bishop named after the Revolution, John Carroll, was of English stock. Not until the 19th century would significant immigration from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland provide U.S. Catholicism its own “melting pot.” Pennsylvania was not merely a refuge for the oppressed community who shared William Penn’s Quaker faith but by design a model “commonwealth” of brotherly love in general. And Georgia was founded by idealistic and religious gentlemen to provide a second chance in the New World for debtors in a setting where both rum and slavery were banned, though neither prohibition lasted long.
The Algonquian Bible is a touchstone of American religious history: It was the first Bible published in English North America, predating by 80 years its earliest successor, a German text used...
Jun 3, 2018 · Display in Religion in Early America. The role of religion in the formation and development of the United States was at the heart of this one-year exhibition that explored the themes of religious diversity, freedom, and growth from the colonial era through the 1840s.
Mar 17, 2015 · The exhibition will focus on three themes: the diversity of religious traditions in America during this period, the principle of freedom of religion that became a guiding principle in American life, and the growth of religion in the early republic.
