Some Religious Right activists believe that were it to be accepted as a fact that pre-1800 Americans were deeply Christian, a new light would be cast on current debates about where (if anywhere) to draw a line between Church and State today. In the sense of the Supreme Court’s search for “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, Christian dogma would be an originalist justification for, say, reintroducing prayer into schools. But the story of Early American religion is, in fact, a quite different one.

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The impression of great piety among the settlers is a common view of the past, probably rooted in the outsize role that the Puritans play in our mental pictures of Early America. The Puritans, however, were an odd lot in America—the exception, not the rule. (They are a prominent exception, thanks to the cultural power of their New England descendants and the voluminous records they left. One historian has complained that we “know more about the Puritans than any sane person should want to know.”)

Over the wider American landscape, however, colonists were notably “unchurched” and “un-Christian.” Scattered around in separate households (unlike the Puritans who concentrated in villages), most Americans had no church to go to and little connection to what we would call organized religion. Even where there were churches to attend, many went either irregularly or simply because the church was one of the rare places—along with the tavern—to see people in a sparsely-developed society.

Stepahnie Wolf, in her study of Revolutionary-era Germantown, Pennsylvania, estimated that only about half of the residents attended church, and that is probably a high watermark, since the community was urban and well-off, and the period was one of religious enthusiasm.

Such waves of enthusiasm (“Awakenings”) in some places and at some times rallied some people to faith, but the clergy generally despaired of the heathens who had settled the new continent. One minister trying to save souls in the American heartland in the early 1800s wrote that “there are American families in this part of the country who never saw a bible, nor heard of Jesus Christ [. . .]  the whole country, from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico, is as the valley of the shadow of death.”

Most early Americans were not believers in the sense that affirming Christians are today. They were likelier to understand spells, potions, and omens than theological doctrines. Almanacs sold briskly in part because they provided guides to the occult. It took a lot of hard missionary work to displace magic with Christ.

The colonial elites, some of whom became Founding Fathers, themselves tended to be vaguely Christian. Even John Adams, a cultural conservative who struggled against the radical Thomas Jefferson, was “only” a Unitarian.

Evangelical movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sent preachers out to Christianize the unorganized settlers.  They competed against religious ignorance, but also against each other and the established churches. Their message of a democratic faith, in which the poor, the uneducated, and even the fallen, not just the pre-elected elite, could someday sit at God’s throne eventually brought the upstart Protestant movements, such as Methodism, Baptism, and others, like Mormonism, increasing success.

Later, over the course of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans in great numbers formed and joined churches and by the twentieth century, they had made church-going a norm. Importantly, it was around 1900, give or take a generation, that religious fundamentalism took form in reaction to the growing role of science. That “old time religion,” ironically, may be only about a century or so old.

The “normal” religious life many Americans seem to remember is the life of the 1950s, when church-building and church-attending boomed—not coincidentally, along with the Baby Boom. Those years were the peak of church membership and attendance in American history—much higher than in Early America—but not that much higher than today.

We err if we project that 1950s culture back to the early days of America. And we underestimate the accomplishment of legions of traveling ministers who eventually, rural hollow by rural hollow, Christianized America.

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This story, well-known to historians of religion, casts light on current controversies.

For example, Michael Hout and I have pointed out the growth since about 1990 in the proportion of Americans who answered “none” when asked in surveys what religion they were. Some readers were led to cheer or to bemoan an increase in atheism and agnosticism. That is not what is happening. What may be on the rise is a reorientation away from standard, organized religion. What many people mean by their answers of “none” is that they have no religion in particular, or that they prefer their spirituality outside the walls and rules of an organized institution.

In the history of American religion, such developments would be no more radical than the sorts of orientations Americans of earlier generations had. Many in the nineteenth century, for example, were of whatever faith happened to be preached at this season’s camp revival. Others insisted on combining elements of Christianity with theologically incompatible folk beliefs and superstitions. The history of religion in America puts the perturbations of today’s religious activities in perspective. And thus, also, the debate over Christian Early America.

If people want to justify a larger role for religion in the public square, there are grounds to do so. But appealing to an “original” Christian America is inaccurate and probably unnecessary.

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Another version of this post appears at http://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/. Expansion on these points can be found in Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character.—ed.

We identified political tension and generational succession as the main sources of the trend away from religious affiliation. In the most recent data—collected in 2006 and 2008, and combined to improve statistical precision—28 percent of political liberals answered “no religion” when asked what their religion was, compared with 15 percent of political moderates, and 5 percent of political conservatives—a gap of 23 percentage points from left to right on the political spectrum. From these contrasts and other supporting tabulations we concluded that the growing identification between organized religion and a conservative social policy agenda was pushing liberals and moderates with weak attachments away from organized religion.

Generational change has two parts. People who were raised without religion from the 1960s onward are less likely than previous generations to acquire a religion in adulthood. For examples, the majority of the small group of people who were born in the 1930s and raised without religion stated a religious preference when they were interviewed as adults, while 24 percent remained without a religious preference through adulthood. In contrast, among people born in the 1960s and raised without religion, 58 percent preferred no religion as adults; among people born in the 1980s and raised without religion, 79 percent prefer no religion now.

The other part of generational change is a trend away from organized religion among people raised with religion. People who were raised with religion from the 1960s onward are also less likely than previous generations to stay with religion in adulthood. Looking to the same cohorts as before, only 4 percent of people born in the 1930s and raised with religion had no religious preference when they were interviewed as adults. In contrast, among people born in the 1960s and raised with religion, 11 percent preferred no religion as adults; among people born in the 1980s and raised with religion, 21 percent prefer no religion now.

These changes have more to do with organized religion in particular than with religion more generally. While affiliation and identification with organized religion has waned, religious belief has not. American adults are as likely to believe in god and life after death now as they were twenty years ago. In 2008 62 percent of American adults entertained no doubts about the existence of god, compared with 64 percent in 1988; 3 percent do not believe in god in any way, compared with 2 percent in 1988. In both 1988 and 2008 88 percent of American believed in life after death.

We call the people who believe in god or an afterlife but do not have a religion “unchurched believers.”  In 2008 11 percent of American adults were unchurched believers, compared to 4 percent twenty years earlier. There is a complementary category of “churched unbelievers”: people who state a religious preference but do not believe in god or life after death. Very few of those who prefer a religion do not believe in god: 3 or 4 percent in any given year. Many of them used to prefer a religion but not believe in life after death. That combination of affiliation and unbelief used to be quite common, but is far less so these days. In the early 1970s 20 percent of American adults had a religious preference but did not believe in life after death; in 2006 and 2008 this figure was 12 percent.

Liberal and younger Americans distanced themselves from organized religion over the last twenty years without giving up their traditional beliefs in god, an afterlife, and other spiritual matters.