Overall, American Protestants have demonstrated a strong commitment to global missions and missionary work throughout their history, urging the importance of converting others to Protestant Christianity. This emphasis began during the early days of American settlement by Europeans, with mission efforts among Native Americans, those of African descent, and eventually overseas groups. American Protestant mission efforts peaked during the modern missionary movement of the nineteenth century, with thousands of missionaries – including women and students – serving around the world with strong support from churches and mission boards. During the twentieth century, support for missions among mainline Protestants declined because of secularism and religious pluralism, while evangelical Protestants undertook innovative new forms of missions. Throughout the centuries, a commitment to missions has both reflected and shaped American Protestant self-understanding.

Evangelical revivalism was the first purely American worship tradition and has been the single largest Protestant movement in America since the 1700s. Liturgical practices that developed during the early American evangelical revival period have affected the worship piety of nearly every American Protestant tradition and movement since, and the revivalist worship piety of evangelicalism has by and large remained consistent and prevalent in American Protestantism to the current day. The chapter provides a broad survey of the worship customs and mindsets that developed in America over the past 300 years through the agency of the evangelical revival movement, identifying significant factors that influenced American evangelical worship practice and piety.

Methodism – the Christian tradition that traces its heritage to John Wesley – became the largest religious group in the United States by the 1840s. Its rapid growth began during the early years of the American republic and extended throughout the decades of the nineteenth century. The Methodist tradition as a whole remained the largest expression of American Protestant Christianity from the 1840s to the 1920s; religious historians refer to the 1800s as “the Methodist age in America.” The Wesleyan family of Methodist and Holiness churches has remained the third largest religious group of denominations and the second largest Protestant tradition in America throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Owing to the breadth of geography, ethnicity, and social class that characterizes Methodism’s demographic spread, historians and sociologists often view Methodism as the quintessential example of American religious identity.

The Reformed tradition, from the beginning, systematically refashioned medieval Catholicism according to what it believed to be the pattern laid out in the Bible and the early church. Reformed Christians saw Scripture as a comprehensive manual for Christian faith with relevance for political and social issues as well as strictly theological ones. Compared to other Christian traditions, they gave the Old Testament more direct relevance to life in Christian community and spoke of the entire sweep of salvation history as the story of one people of God – heirs of the same promises, subject to the same judgments. This habit powerfully influenced not only the theology of American Protestantism, but Americans’ sense of their identity as a nation. The polarity between the desire for “more light” and confessional Reformed orthodoxy defines the space in which all versions of Reformed Protestantism exist.

Two competing impulses around gender have come to characterize Protestant life: one that insists on a particular God-ordained gender order, often starting with the home and moving outward to church and society and another that downplayed or sometimes altogether dismissed gender injunctions and hierarchies as contrary to divine intention. Protestantism’s “modernist–fundamentalist” divide, usually seen as a far-reaching dispute over how to read the Bible, is closely connected to and driven by wider cultural debates regarding gender. Gender has functioned as one of the most active organizing forces in Protestant life. Protestants drew on gender to control behaviors and regulate boundaries as well as to question and challenge them. The sectarian nature of Protestantism as it grappled with gender shaped Protestant theologies, rearranged alliances, and splintered institutions.

The Episcopal Church is the direct descendant of the Church of England in colonial North America and the primary claimant to the Anglican tradition in the United States. A member of the Anglican Communion, its structure combines a traditional hierarchical denomination with an American democratic approach. American Anglicanism also includes the Anglican Church in North America, a coalition of church bodies some of whom departed from the Episcopal Church as early as 1873. Churches of the Anglican Communion accept the 39 Articles of Religion as a common statement of faith, and worship according to a mandatory written liturgy. The Church of England was the first denomination in British colonial North America, but membership plummeted at the American Revolution; nevertheless, it retained importance after independence due to the prominence of its parishioners in public life and to its leadership in ecumenism, education, and social ministry.

This chapter discusses the commitment to biblical authority in American Protestantism, including the ongoing debate over how to read and interpret the Bible; and the doctrines most common to American Protestant churches and denominations, including doctrines about God, creation, human nature and sin, the atoning work of Christ on the cross, the work of the Holy Spirit, salvation, the church and sacraments, and the future of the world. In each case, the Bible is often the source of disagreement and debate.

This chapter frames the historical and theological development of American Protestant understandings of work and vocation around three themes. First, American Protestant theologies of work and vocation reflect an ongoing tension between the spiritual and temporal planes. Second, American Protestant practices and articulations of work and vocation are interwoven with prevailing American Protestant theologies: eschatology, doctrines of God, anthropology, and soteriology. Yet, despite this, American Protestant understandings of work and vocation frequently exhibit theological inconsistency. Finally, a third theme prompting consideration is the heightened and somewhat unique context of consumerism that shapes American Protestant understandings of work and vocation. Consumerism presents an especially potent challenge for contemporary American Protestants who must resist the subtle co-opting of theologically informed understandings of work and vocation by the “consumerist machine.”

The system of dehumanization through the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery drew upon racism as its economic and religious rationale. White Protestants, who predominated among the earliest white settlers, developed their theology and social ethics in a concretized context of Black subjugation. The vast majority of the enslaved, exposed to Protestantism in British North America, never abandoned sensibilities derived from their African religious background. Postbellum and twentieth-century society saw a growth in missions, Social Gospel work, church-building, the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, activism and justice movements, and political involvement among Black Christians – often resisted by white Christians every step of the way. Today’s Black church increasingly identifies with the Black Lives Matter movement and the importance of critical race theory, which posits that racism pervades sacred and secular structures and systems in American society.

This chapter traces developments in American Protestant responses to mental illness. The professionalization of medicine, shifting theological emphases, and cultural forces shaped reactions that ranged from benign neglect by many to impassioned advocacy by a few. Christians enter the narrative in various roles: ministers, physicians, sufferers, family members, advocates, seminary professors, and a variety of mental health professionals. The identities of some spanned those categories. Across time, churchgoers and religious leaders deployed terms for distress that included distraction, possession, madness, melancholy, insanity, mental illness, and later, diagnostic terms such as depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia. Regardless of labels, as individuals and groups of believers thought about mental illness, sought meaning, and responded amid distress, their context-specific claims of what seemed awry shaped assessments of how best to deploy available resources.

Long before the United States was any more than a collection of British colonies in North America, Protestants viewed Catholicism as a threat to national identity, individual liberty, personal salvation, and the stability of free government. Their fears continued up through the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. Understanding why Protestants viewed Catholicism with fear and loathing reveals much about the evolution of American understandings of freedom, which for decades were forged unabashedly in opposition to the Catholic Church and its understanding of what freedom was and how people could attain it. To be sure, social issues like birth control and gay marriage have helped to create a “new ecumenism.” Just as important, however, have been the inequities caused by the advent of modern industrial capitalism, which have forced American Protestants to stop using the Catholic Church as a foil when defining freedom and the conditions that sustain it.

There are three broad types of Pentecostalism: first, Classical Pentecostalism, which emerged from the overflow of the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles (1906-1909) and led to the founding of denominations like the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, and the Church of God in Christ; second, the Charismatic Movement, which arose in the early 1960s and took shape within long-established Christian traditions, both Catholic and Protestant; and third, Neo-Pentecostalism or the Neo-Charismatic Movement, which constitutes the post-denominational and largely indigenous “Third Wave” of renewal. Pentecostals coalesce around a focus on Jesus; a flow of praise; a thirst for the Scriptures; an expectation of God’s present-day speaking and acting; an urgency in mission; an awareness of the powers of evil; the use of charismatic gifts, including tongues, healing, and prophecy; a fervent expectation of the Parousia; and a commitment to the renewal of the churches through the life-giving power of the Spirit.

Protestants have played a role in shaping the political ideology of every major party in the United States and in formulating nearly every major public policy. Most American Protestants have believed that the US government should not create a religious establishment or endorse one religious denomination or sect to the exclusion of others; they have been suspicious of any religious organization’s attempt to control the minds or votes of its followers and impose its religious principles on others through public law; and they have also generally seen political activity as a moral enterprise, governed by broadly shared (Protestant-inspired) norms. These tenets of political behavior are so deeply engrained in the nation’s consciousness that their appeal has extended well beyond Protestant circles. But as uncontroversial as most of these tenets might seem to Americans today, their development was a contested part of the nation’s history.

In the heyday of temperance reform, temperance – like women’s suffrage and abolitionism – stood in the foreground of the progressive reform agenda, and temperance reformers believed themselves to be basing their actions on the latest scientific research and on up-to-date sound philosophical arguments, specifically the prominent philosophy of Scottish common-sense realism. Their biblical and scientific arguments took place in a larger philosophical and cultural context which sheds light not only on temperance, but on other nineteenth-century reforms.

Over the last three decades, there has been an explosion of scholarship related to American Protestantism. Hundreds, if not thousands, of monographs and journal articles have appeared on this broad topic across the fields of history, theology, ethics, politics, sociology, and literary studies. Numerous scholarly societies – including the American Academy of Religion, the American Historical Association, the American Society for Church History, and the Southern Historical Association, to name just a few –have taken the breadth and diversity of American Protestantism as a subject for extensive discussions.