The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy

by Roger Finke

Not all denominations shared in the immense rise in membership rates, and to the degree that denominations rejected traditional doctrines and ceased to make serious demands on their followers, they ceased to prosper. The churching of America was accomplished by aggressive churches committed to vivid otherworldliness.

"In America, every clergyman may be said to do business on his own account, and under his own firm. He alone is responsible for any deficiency in the discharge of his office, as he alone is entitled to all the credit due to his exertions. He always acts as principal, and is therefore more anxious, and will make greater efforts to obtain popularity, than one who serves for wages."

Perhaps the most celebrated European visitor of the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville ([1835] 1969, pp. 295, 296, 298) made similar observations. Like other European visitors he immediately noticed the "innumerable multitude of sects" and the religious zeal of the clergy and their members. He commented that "the religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States." When he asked others to explain this atmosphere, he reported that "all agreed ... the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state." De Tocqueville added that the "facts convinced me that I had been told the truth" and he later concluded that "any alliance with any political power whatsoever is bound to be burdensome for religion." Like Reed, Grund, and many other European visitors, de Tocqueville traced his explanation for the multitude of sects, the religious zeal of the clergy, and the grassroots support for religion to the separation of church and state, or what was commonly called the new voluntary principle.

And thus it is with clergy in America, who are duly and amply rewarded for their diligence, and very justly respected for the piety, talent, and zeal which they discover; but, who have no tenure of their places other than that of the will of the congregation. Two of the earliest surveys of American religion, not surprisingly, used the voluntary principle to explain the unique religious economy of America. Initially written for European audiences, America, by Philip Schaff (1855), and Religion in the United States of America, by Robert Baird

Ahlstrom was not alone. Martin E. Marty, Winthrop S. Hudson, and others of this era all chose to ignore the organizational aspects of the history of American religion, including the rise and fall of denominations, and instead cast the history of American religion as a history of religious ideas. There is nothing wrong with writing histories of ideas, of course. But when general historians have done so, they nearly always adopt (at least implicitly) a model of intellectual "progress." Their history is organized on the basis of showing how new religious ideas arose and were progressively refined. Moreover, the standards against which refinement is usually judged are entirely secular-parsimony, clarity, logical unity, graceful expression, and the like. One seldom encounters standards of theological progress or refinement based on how effectively a doctrine could stir the faithful or satisfy the heart. As a result, the history of American religious ideas always turns into an historical account of the march toward liberalism. That is, religious ideas always become more refined (i.e., better) when they are shorn of mystery, miracle, and mysticism-when an active supernatural realm is replaced by abstractions concerning virtue. This preference for theological

Twenty years later in the Righteous Empire Martin E. Marty (1970, p. 244) described the momentum of Protestant churches as "centrifugal" in the nineteenth century and "centripetal" in the twentieth.

He explained that "they noted the limits of their competition and division, experienced frustration in mission around the world, and began to draw back together in t...

Like the nineteenth-century European visitors before us, we will use economic language to explain the new sect system and the churching of America.

In this book, the history of American religion is the history of human actions and human organizations, not the history of ideas (refined or otherwise). But this is not to say that we regard theology as unimportant. To the contrary, we shall argue repeatedly that religious organizations can thrive only to the extent that they have a theology that can comfort souls and motivate sacrifice. In a sense, then, we are urging an underlying model of religious history that is the exact opposite of one based on progress through theological refinement. We shall present compelling evidence that theological refinement is the kind of progress that results in organizational bankruptcy.

That is, we will repeatedly suggest that as denominations have modernized their doctrines and embraced temporal values, they have gone into decline. The primary

On the eve of the Revolution only about 17 percent of Americans were churched. By the start of the Civil War this proportion had risen dramatically, to 37 percent.

By 1980 church adherence was about 62 percent.

This is the phenomenon we shall try to explain in this book. Why did the rate rise so greatly? Which denominations contributed most to the great increase in relig...

Nostalgia is the enemy of history. No educated person any longer believes that the ancients were correct about a fall from a Golden Age.

For the fact is that there never were all that many Puritans, even in New England, and non-Puritan behavior abounded. From 1761 through 1800 a third (33.7%) of all first births in New England occurred after less than nine months of marriage (D. S. Smith, 1985), despite harsh laws against fornication.

In any case, single women in New England during the colonial period were more likely to be sexually active than to belong to a church-in 1776 only about one out of five New Englanders had a religious affiliation.

Historians of American religion have long noted that the colonies did not exude universal piety. There was a general agreement that in the colonial period no more than 10-20 percent of the population actually belonged to a church

To develop these membership estimates, the first step was estimating the average size of congregations in 1776, for then membership rates required nothing but simple multiplication. We began by looking at the 1890 census. Here the average Protestant congregation in the nation had 91.5 members. Surely they would have been smaller than this in 1776, because population density was commonly cited by religious leaders of the time as a primary barrier to sustaining churches. But if churches were smaller in 1776, how much smaller were they? This question caused us to search for any membership statistics that might have survived.

The 1776 Minutes of the Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church report a total membership of 4,921. If we divide this number by the 65 Methodist congregations reported by Jernegan, we arrive at an average of 75.7 members.

the average Baptist congregation in 1784 ha...

The congregational size had risen to 109 members in Massachusetts by 1830, but remained far smaller in the more rural states. In 1857, Maine reported only 70 members per church. Each of these averages would have been lower in 1776. Finally, Herman C. Weber (1927) repor...

1776 had 75 members. If we multiply this by the 3,228 known congregations, we arrive at a total of 242,100 members. Factoring in children, in order to be comparable with later data, and dividing by the total population produces a national religious adherence rate of 17 percent for 1776. This percentage falls nicely within the ballpark limits, but holds two significant advantages.

Before turning to this profile, however, we should briefly explain why our rates vary so dramatically from Bonomi and Eisenstadt's adherence estimate of 59 percent for 1780. We first checked to see if they had located more churches than Jernegan. The opposite was true. Their estimate for 1780 was based on 2,731 churches, 497 churches fewer than Jernegan's total despite being four years later. The source of the significant difference was that Bonomi and Eisenstadt estimated that each church had 480 adherents, compared to our estimate of 75 members (or about 106 adherents) per church. Relying primarily on the reports of Anglican clergy responding to the Bishop of London's queries in 1724, they assumed that each colonial congregation has an average of 80 active families, with an average of 6 members per family for a total of 480 adherents per church.

Although the immorality and incompetence of the Anglican clergy exiled in America might have been overstated by early historians, their sloth was not. The colonial Anglican clergy were a world apart from their distant bishop and faced little accountability ...

By 1890 the census reports that Protestant Episcopal churches averaged 106 members per church, only slightly higher th...

At best, we might suggest that the estimates reported by Bonomi and Eisenstadt more accurately reflect the percentage of the population that claimed a religious identity or who had stepped foot through church doors at some time in their lives-just as 85 percent of t...

Table 2.2 offers a profile of adherence rates by colony and region. The rates have been rounded to the nearest whole number because the use of even one decimal place would give an unwarranted impression of precision. There is substantial variation, from as low as 7 percent in Georgia and 9 percent in Vermont and North Carolina, up to 26 percent in New Jersey, 24 percent in Pennsylvania, and 22 percent in Massachusetts. The rates for New England (20 percent) and for the Middle Colonies (19 percent) are essentially th...

fact, the Church of England held until well into the nineteenth century that blacks were not sufficiently human to be baptized and several British colonies ...

As expected, Rhode Island is the most Baptist of colonies, but it wasn't very Baptist. Given that only about half of its churches were Baptist and that only 20 percent of Rhode Islanders were churched, only about one person in ten would have been a Baptist.

Founded by Lord Baltimore as a haven for Roman Catholics, Maryland was the most Catholic colony in 1776. But that wasn't very Catholic-about three people in a hundred.

To begin to answer these questions, it is important to realize that most colonial settlements, even in the eighteenth century, were part of an untamed frontier. Everyone knows that in the "Wild West" of the nineteenth century, towns such as Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood were not filled with God-fearing, Sunday-go-to-meeting folks, but were wide open, lawless capitals of vice and violence. Why should it have been any different when the frontier boom towns were New York or Charles- ton?4 It wasn't. On any given Sunday morning there were at least as many people recovering from late Saturday nights in the taverns of these seaport towns as were in church.

The real basis of the moral order is human relationships. Most of us conform to laws and social norms most of the time because to do otherwise would risk our relationships with others. When we are alone, even the most respectable of us act in ways we would not were anyone present.

In frontier areas, most people are deficient in attachments, and hence very high rates of deviant behavior exist.

Studies of migration stress two factors: those that push people to leave a place and those that pull them to somewhere else. Among the major pushes are (1) lack of opportunity, (2) weak attachments, (3) fear of punishment, (4) disgrace, and (5) persecution. Of the five, only the last (and then only when groups are involved) is likely to cause "solid citizens" to migrate. Lack of opportunity can produce desirable migrants too, but the other three will tend to overproduce troubled and troublesome migrants. Those who lack attachments tend to be people who have difficulty forming and maintaining relationships. Those who fear punishment have usually offended, as have those in disgrace.

The higher the male to female sex ratio, the lower the rate of religious adherence. In fact, in colonial America an extremely high negative correlation of -.95 exists (-1.0 is a perfect negative correlation) between the sex ratios and rates of religious adherence.

In a study based on 97 Congregational churches in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Richard D. Shiels (1981) found that 64 percent of all new members were women-a fact he described as the "feminization of American Congregationalism" (p. 46).

Cotton Mather's observation in 1691 that "there are far more Godly Women in the World than there are Godly Men" (in Cott, 1977, p. 127). One barrier to the churching of colonial America, and es...

It is estimated that from 1718 to 1775 at least 50,000 persons, most of them convicted of capital crimes, were forcibly transported to America by order of English courts. Another 16,000 or so wer...

But who would come? Few were willing, and so these denominations always were short of clergy-a fact that hindered the churching of the colonies. Worse yet, in light of the constant complaints from their parishioners, we must suspect that many if not most who did come seemed lacking in energy, morals, or even authentic credentials. Edwin S. Gaustad (1987, p. 15) has reported frequent grumbling by Anglican vestrymen "about clergy that left England to escape debts or wives or onerous duties, seeing Virginia as a place of retirement or refuge." In 1724 Giles Rainsford, an Anglican clergyman in Maryland, sent this dispatch concerning three of his colleagues to the Bishop of London: "Mr. Williamson is grown notorious and consumate in villainy. He really is an original for drinking and swearing. Mr. Donaldson is so vile that the other day, being sent for to a dying person, came drunk, and the poor expiring soul, seeing his hopeful parson in that condition, refused the Sacrament at his hands and died without it. Mr. Maconchie is a mere nuisance, and makes ye church stink. He fights, and drinks on all occasions, and as I am told alienas permolet uxores [forces his attentions on the wives of others]" (in Ritchie, 1976, p. 145). Later in the century George Whitefield ([17561 1969) noted in his journal that the Church of England might "flourish" in the colonies "were her ministers found faithful" (p. 386). Having heard of plans by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Forei...