In 1630 King Charles I favored the middle path to reforming the
English church and began to persecute the Calvinists within it severely. As a
result, several tens of thousands of them fled to New England from 1630 to
1640, founding Boston and its surrounding towns, and eventually the colonies of
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. In order to assure themselves a
reliable supply of ministers, one of the first things the Puritans did was to
establish Harvard College (1636).
Because there was no national church on this continent Puritan
Calvinism soon became the dominant form of Christianity in British North
America. This is in sharp contrast to Europe, where the Calvinists usually
were in the minority. In New England almost everyone was initially a member of
a Puritan church; the churches constituted a kind of "national church"
especially in Massachusetts; and in the early 1600s one could not vote in local
and state elections unless one was a "saint," that is, had undergone a
conversion experience and had been admitted into a Puritan church.
The Church of England also came to America, but before the
Revolutionary War its power was nonexistent in New England and it was weak in
the Middle Colonies. In Virginia and south, where colonization initially was
sponsored by London-based investment companies, the Church of England was the
only recognized church; but priests didn't want to leave warm and comfortable
England to settle in the swamps and Indian-infested woods of Virginia. As a
result, there was about one priest for every four or five churches in the
American south, and the priests were often of low quality. The Church of
England is an episcopal church, that is, power resides in bishops. The bishops
appoint and direct the priests, and traditionally the lay people had very
little to do with the running of a local church. But in the South there was no
bishop at all and few priests, so the laymen ran the churches and often
administered communion or performed baptisms, which was against church law.
Because of the shortage of priests, even in the south the congregational form
of church organization became the dominant one.
In the Middle Colonies, many different groups settled and the area
acquired enormous religious diversity. William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania,
was a Quaker, and he settled many Quakers there. Because there weren't enough
Quakers willing to move to the New World, Penn invited many persecuted German
sects to settle in Pennsylvania, such as the "Pennsylvania Dutch" (Mennonites
and Amish). Often the sects were part of Germany's radical Reformation, just
as the Quakers were part of England's; thus the groups often felt an affinity
with the Quakers. Other Germans came over to settle near their countrymen;
they established the Lutheran church in America and the German Reformed
(Calvinist) church.
New York was first settled by the Dutch, who brought the Calvinist
Dutch Reformed church (the national Dutch church) to America. Later when the
English conquered New Amsterdam they introduced the Episcopal church. New
England Puritans migrated south to Long Island, New York, and northern New
Jersey and brought the Congregational church; many of them later joined the
Scots, who had especially settled in New Jersey, to establish the Presbyterian
church. Delaware was first settled by Swedes who established Lutheran
churches. Maryland was established as a colony for Roman Catholics.
No sooner were the various Protestant groups established in America
than they began to change, and often to split. The American environment, and
Protestantism's basic beliefs, caused the changes. Protestantism's two central
emphases--stress on the individual's relationship with God, and on the Bible as
the only ultimate source of guidance to the individual--also proved to be the
movement's great weaknesses. When one makes the Bible and the individual's
consciousness the standards of personal growth, the conscience can insist on
unusual interpretations of the Bible. In Europe the Calvinist sects were small
and often subject to persecution by the state and the state church; but in
America, generally, there was freedom of religion, and thus there was no
external force to control unusual interpretations. In Massachusetts the
Puritans did hang several women for being Quaker missionaries in 1659 and 1661,
but they were isolated cases. As a result of religious freedom, religious
imaginations ran wild, new interpretations of the Bible were set forth, and new
sects began to appear in America.
American culture was different from the culture of late medieval
Europe in several crucial respects. In America a white man could always
acquire land simply by packing up his wagon and riding to the frontier. In
Europe few owned land, and land ownership was the criterion for voting; in
America virtually all white men owned land and thus could vote. In New England
virtually all white men could read and write also, which was practically
unprecedented in human history. The country had no hereditary aristocracy and
very little poverty. In America there were no real wars, no starvation, and
because the population was scattered, no plagues. A typical New England farmer
and his wife would have eight to twelve children, and three quarters survived
to adulthood. Thus America experienced a population explosion literally
unprecedented in human history.
One result was a culture that was extremely optimistic about the
ability of individuals. The average person was seen to have "common sense"--an
idea that in Europe did not immediately become a commonly accepted assumption,
because of the hierarchical nature of society. Because the average American
could read the Bible himself, and had "common sense," he was capable of making
up his own mind about the truths in religion; this further encouraged the
tendency toward sectarianism and individualism. The doctrines of TULIP, which
stress the complete powerlessness of the individual to change his own
situation, came to be seen as unnecessarily pessimistic and harsh. Gradually
the Protestant churches moved away from it.
New England Puritans, because of their congregational organization, had
very few mechanisms above the local church level that could control the
theology of the ministers, and consequently they underwent the most theological
diversification and drift. One of the biggest issues that arose among the
Congregational churches concerned whether infants should be baptized, or only
confessing adults; the churches baptized infants, but Jesus never did. Those
who insisted that baptism was a sacrament reserved only for the born again
gradually withdrew to form baptist churches.
Anglicans had never been Calvinist in the first place, and still had many
Catholic tendencies, hence they moved in a liberal direction as well.
Presbyterians had a hierarchy of ministers and elders who controlled ordination
and could discipline errant clergymen, so they resisted the efforts to modify
Calvinism very successfully.
The Nineteenth Century
Much of the religious innovation occurred on the frontier. This was
partly because churches had not yet been established there, so new ideas faced
less resistance. Furthermore, most frontiersmen had come from small settled
towns where everyone had known everyone else; in contrast, the frontier was a
place where complete strangers were thrown together. Because they experienced
considerable personal upheaval on the frontier, people had to think in new
ways, and yearned to establish homes and churches where the familiarity of
settled life back east could be duplicated.
As a result, many sects arose on the frontier or came there and
flourished. The Universalists said that no one was damned eternally to hell,
but everyone eventually would be saved (their name comes from their doctrine of
"universal" salvation). Free Will Baptists championed free will over total
depravity. Both of these sects first became strong in northern New England
right after the Revolution, when that area was undergoing rapid settlement.
Both opposed the doctrines of TULIP with more optimistic views of human nature.
Baptists grew along the New England frontier and spread south. The Methodists,
originally a movement within the Church of England that stressed free will and
the perfectibility of human beings, took over many of the Anglican churches in
the south, for they permitted laymen to perform many of the duties of priests.
After the Revolution the Church of England that was left in this country could
no longer call itself English, so it changed its name to the Protestant
Episcopal church, or simply the Episcopal church. ("Protestant" is an
important part of its name because the Methodists also have bishops and are
often called the "Methodist Episcopal" church.)
In spite of their differences, however, most of these groups saw revivals
as an important tool for making converts. The first large-scale revivals
occurred in the 1730s; a second awakening followed the Revolution. The need to
convert the frontier population to Christ and organize it into local churches
often caused Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists to
band together to plan revivals. These four denominations, and a few smaller
regional churches (like the Disciples of Christ) came to be called the
"evangelical" or "mainline Protestant" churches because of their theological
affinities.
However, revivals often created as much disunity as unity, and
furthered the tendency toward religious individualism. In western New York
state in the first three decades of the 1800s, sect creation became unusually
common. Most of the people settling there had been born into Puritan families
in New England and were reacting against its strictness. So many evangelists
toured the area, holding "camp meetings" in order to save souls, that the area
came to be called the "Burnt Over District." Joseph Smith started Mormonism
there, partly in reaction against all the conflicting revivals and theological
claims. William Miller lived just outside the area there and preached there;
he proclaimed that Christ would return in 1844, and started a movement that
would eventually produce the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses.
The Oneida colony experimented with eugenics and a religious-based socialism.
The Fox sisters heard the rappings of spirits in their house in western New
York state and started Spiritualism, with its seances, communication with the
dead, and ouija (pronounced "wee-jee") boards. Ann Lee, the founder of
Shakerism, settled there, and the movement (which advocated communal living and
celibacy) flourished.
In the cities, especially in New England, new ideas from Europe also
brought new sects into existence. In Boston, European philosophy caused many
to reject total depravity, the trinity, and other traditional Calvinist
doctrines, and become Unitarians (the name refers to their rejection of the
trinity and their belief in the unity of God). Later, Unitarianism spawned
Transcendentalism, which rejected all Christian dogmas in favor of an
individual mystical relation with nature and with God. Unitarianism, by the
end of the nineteenth century, came to include a large number of persons who
did not consider themselves Christians--only theists--and a few who, rejecting
belief in God, considered themselves humanists.
In the late nineteenth century Boston also became the center of Christian
Science, which stresses healing. Toward the end of the nineteenth century
millions of rural Americans began to move to the cities to get manufacturing
jobs. Among them were many Methodists, who were shocked by how lax Methodism
had become in the cities. To protect their children against the sins of liquor
and dancing these people formed the Church of the Nazarene.
Confrontation with New Ideas
After the Civil War, new issues arose which were unlike any that
Christianity had ever faced before, and which eventually proved fatal to the
unity of mainline Protestantism. The first was Darwinism. The Origin of
the Species was published in 1859, but not until after the Civil War did it
become widely read and debated. The initial reaction, actually, was quite
favorable, and by the turn of the century most Protestants had accepted
evolution. It was only after World War One, when conservative Protestantism
became increasingly vocal, that it became an issue.
The second issue was comparative religion. Western Europeans and
Americans, before the nineteenth century, had virtually no contact with
non-Christians, except occasional Turks (in Europe) and Indians (in America).
With the creation of factories, steam ships, railroads, and the telegraph,
imperialistic empires were established that brought westerners in contact with
nonwesterners on a large scale. Western missionaries went out to enlighten the
poor, ignorant, immoral heathen, and discovered that the nonwesterners were
considerably more intelligent, sophisticated, and capable than they had
imagined. The naive view that everyone would convert to Christianity as soon
as the non-Christians were exposed to true religion very quickly evaporated.
By the 1890s swamis were touring the United States, preaching Hinduism, and
Buddhist teachers were lecturing as well. This is the time the
Bahá'í Faith arrived in America as well. American Christians had
to reevaluate their view of other religions, and in the process had to face the
question of the uniqueness of Christianity.
The third issue was biblical criticism. Careful, rigorous examination of
the Bible in its original languages took a new turn in the early nineteenth
century. Scholars became increasingly certain that none of the gospels were
accounts by eyewitness, that Isaiah did not write all of the Book of Isaiah,
and that Moses did not author the Pentateuch. These and other similar
conclusions undermined the assumption that the Bible was a revelation from God.
Before the Civil War, no one worried about whether the Bible was inerrant or
literal; its reliability was assumed, and adjectives were rarely used to define
its reliability. But after the Civil War debate about the nature of the Bible
became increasingly sharp. Since the Bible was the basis of Protestantism, the
debate cut to the very core of the movement.
Mainstream Protestantism began to bifurcate into liberals and
conservatives, starting in the 1880s and 1890s. The debate became more sharp
after 1900, and became a schism after World War One. At that time the
conservatives--who were dubbed Fundamentalists by their opponents, and who
accepted the name--became vocal in their opposition to biblical criticism and
Darwinism, and moved to take over the Protestant denominations from the
liberals, who had controlled them. The Scopes trial, where a high school
biology teacher was put on trial for teaching evolution, made conservative
Protestantism the laughing stock of the nation, even though the conservatives
won the case. At the same time fundamentalism completely failed to conquer the
denominations. As a result, fundamentalism as a movement dropped out of the
limelight after 1925.
However, it did not disappear. The mainline denominations continue to
have liberal and conservative factions to this day. The southern Baptists
became dominated by fundamentalism and are now threatened with schism over its
role in church policy. Conservative Protestant colleges grew rapidly during
the depression and conservatives soon dominated the new fields of radio and
television evangelism. After World War Two a more moderate evangelical
Protestantism became respectable--Billy Graham was its primary spokesman.
Starting about 1970 a new, more vocal evangelicalism emerged; the Moral
Majority and Jerry Falwell is one manifestation of this movement.
Conclusion
Sect formation has occurred rampantly in Protestantism because of its
concept of authority: authority is invested in the individual's interpretation
of the Bible. The Protestants have tried hard to curb variant interpretations
with catechisms and creeds, but ultimately they recognize no external authority
that can control the individual's interpretation beside the judgment of God.
As a result, Protestant sects have formed over every conceivable question.
Some are separated over the right form of church government (whether it should
be congregational, presbyterian, or episcopal); some are separated over the
nature of the Christian sacraments (such as the importance of baptism); others
divide over theology (such as universal salvation and free will). Some go
beyond the Bible entirely: the stress in Protestantism on individualism leaves
open the possibility of a personal revelation; thus the Mormons and Christian
Scientists claim a new holy book, revealed through a new prophet. Other
churches have split over seemingly irrelevant matters; the "Christian church"
in the Midwest split into two sects in 1906 over the question of whether local
churches could have organs.
The United States was only the first example of a country with rampant
and continuous Christian sect formation. In the twentieth century many
Christian sects have formed in Africa as African Christians, reading the Bible
themselves, have rejected the European assumptions of their missionary teachers
and have interpreted the Bible in a way consistent with African culture and
experience.
Study of the process of sect formation helps Bahá'ís
appreciate the power of the Covenant in maintaining unity in belief and
practice, as well as the sense felt by all Bahá'ís of being
members of one giant world-wide family. It demonstrates clearly the difference
between Christian heresy and Bahá'í Covenant Breaking. Finally,
it gives us a vision of what the Bahá'í Faith would be like, if
it did not have the Covenant to hold the believers together; in the thousand
sects of Christianity we have a glimmer of those "thousand sects" that
'Abdu'l-Bahá says would form in a day.