Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T06:40:49.547Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

22 - ‘Christian America’ and ‘Christian Canada’

from PART II - THE CHURCHES AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Mark Noll
Edited by
Sheridan Gilley  and
Brian Stanley
Sheridan Gilley
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Brian Stanley
Affiliation:
Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge
Get access

Summary

In the century from 1815 to 1914, the churches of North America experienced an expansion all but unprecedented in the modern history of Christianity. In an era of break-neck population growth (United States, from 8,400,000 to 99,100,000; Canada, from about 600,000 to about 8,000,000), rates of church adherence increased even more rapidly–in the United States from under one-fourth of the population to over two-fifths, and in Canada from an even smaller proportion at the start of the period to an even higher proportion at the end. Yet this era was just as noteworthy for how innovatively religion was being organised as for how rapidly the churches were growing. Christian believers in the United States gloried in their ‘freedom’, by which they meant they neither enjoyed nor sought the protection of establishment. In Canada, there was less enthusiasm about disestablishment, but by the second half of the century a similar state of affairs prevailed there. The self-starting efforts of denominations and the mobilisation of voluntary societies had taken the place of formal church–state ties, but the result was a more thorough Christianisation of the population than in Europe and an exertion of social influence at least as powerful as in the old world. In 1854 the learned Swiss émigré Philip Schaff returned to Europe and reported on his new land. Schaff granted that Americans had taken an unprecedented step in separating the churches from ‘the temporal power’, but insisted none the less that ‘Christianity, as the free expression of personal conviction and of the national character, has even greater power over the mind, than when enjoined by civil laws and upheld by police regulations.’ To Schaff, the proof could be discerned in practice:

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 359 - 380
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A religious history of the American people, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Andrews, Dee E., The Methodists and revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Appleby, R. Scott, ‘Church and age unite’: the modernist impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Blumhofer, Edith L., Her heart can see: the life and hymns of Fanny J. Crosby (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).Google Scholar
Blumhofer, Edith, L. and Noll, Mark A. (eds.), Singing the Lord’s songin a strange land: hymnody in the history of North American Protestantism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Brekus, Catherine, Strangers and pilgrims: female preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Brown, Candy Gunther, The word in the world: evangelical writing, publishing, and reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Calhoun, John C., The works of John C. Calhoun, vol. iv: Speeches of John C. Calhoun, delivered in the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States, ed. Crallé, Richard K. (New York: D. Appleton, 1854).Google Scholar
Carey, Patrick W. (ed.), American Catholic religious thought (New York: Paulist Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Carwardine, Richard, Evangelicals and politics in antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flanagan, Thomas, Louis ‘David’ Riel: prophet of the new world, 2nd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Gaustad, Edwin Scott and Barlow, Philip L., New historical atlas of religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Gauvreau, Michael, The evangelical century: college and creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene D., A consuming fire: the fall of the Confederacy in the mind of the white Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Grant, John Webster, A profusion of spires: religion in nineteenth-century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutjahr, Paul C., An American Bible: a history of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Hatch, Nathan O., The democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Hennessey, James, S.J., American Catholics: a history of the Roman Catholic community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Leighly, John, ‘Biblical place-names in the United States’, Names 27 (March 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lippy, Charles H. and Williams, Peter W. (eds.), Encyclopedia of the American religious experience, 3 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1988).Google Scholar
Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American culture… 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
McGreevy, John T., Catholicism and American freedom: a history (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).Google Scholar
Meinig, D. W, The shaping of America: a geographical perspective on 500 years of history, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986–2004).Google Scholar
Miller, Randall M., Stout, Harry S. and Wilson, Charles Reagan (eds.), Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Noll, Mark A., A history of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992).Google Scholar
Noll, Mark A., America’s God, from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York Oxford University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nord, David Paul, Faith in reading: religious publishing and the birth of mass media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rawlyk, George A. (ed.), Aspects of the Canadian evangelical experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Schaff, Philip, America: a sketch of its political, social and religious character, ed. Miller, Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Mansfield, Harvey Claflin and Winthrop, Delba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Die, Marguerite, Religion, family, and community in Victorian Canada: the Colbys of Carrolcraft (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Wacker, Grant, Heaven below: early Pentecostals and American culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Westfall, William, Two worlds: the Protestant culture of nineteenth-century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×