Religous Views In America

Brady Cooper
HIST 2503
Prof. Burt
8 October 2014
Mid-Term Exam Religion played a huge role in the American colonies. The religious rulers in Europe wanted to create an empire in North America, but the settlers sought religious freedom. The pilgrims started by being the first people to stand up for what they believed in. After years of struggle, the colonists finally achieved religious freedom. That freedom continued to be important to the Americans through the Old Light Clergy era, the New Light Clergy era, the half-way covenant era, the witch era, the Great Awakening era.
One of the main reasons so many settlers wanted to come to the new world was to practice their own religious beliefs, rather than what the crown demanded. Pilgrims no longer agreed with the Anglican Church. The Protestant faith of the settlers motivated their move to the new world. People who disagreed with what the Roman Catholic Church preached were often executed. Even though these Protestants did not form a single church of their own, they did form different denominations in many regions of Europe. Some of the places these denominations were formed were located in German states, Switzerland, France, England, and the Netherlands. Anglicanism was formed when the pope did not annul the marriage of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. King Henry became upset with the pope. He denounced papal and established the Church of England. Even though Henry made the switch to a different religion, the Church of England still used many Catholic practices.
Religious disturbances in Europe added considerably to the building of an empire in North America. The Catholic and Protestant rulers wanted their followers to extend their religion across the ocean. The political disagreements between the Protestant and Catholic leaders followed the Reformation. The politicization of religious divisions caused laborer strife, financial disasters, and military conflicts that forced people to look for a new opportunity in the New World. So with these events religious changes in Europe drove people to build empires in the land we know today as America.
These new Americans moved far away from their homeland, Britain, because they wanted to have religious freedom and to get away from the monarchy. Although they did not break away from the monarchy for many years, they still got the opportunity to have the religious freedom they were looking for. Many people started their own churches and giving sermons on what they believed. At first these pilgrims formed large churches for everyone in the town to attend. These churches were tax supported and required a conversion experience. This worked for a while until people had started to get their own idea of what they had believed in. At this point, the first generation settlers were dying. It was the second and third generation of new Americans who started to want material wealth over religious wealth. Some of the people who had broken away from the ordinary churches had an emotional approach to preaching the gospel.
The emotional side of preaching would be to actually connect to the congregation in a more intimate fashion. These ministers at first would be invited into the old light churches, but later were banned. This is because the Old Light clergy had fears that revivalists had gone too far. The old light ministers, known for having an intellectual approach, saw God as a kind of rational “watchmaker”. They believed God had set the world into motion, but He did not intervene in the day to day workings. The new light ministers, known for having an emotional approach, had revivals with many of the colonists. With the Great Awakening was in full swing, it challenged the authority of legally established churches and their ministers. These ministers were worried about this movement because their congregation began listening to other sermons. When the New Light ministers were banned from churches they would go out into the streets and fields to preach. They would draw massive crowds of up to ten thousand people. The minister would walk through the field and speak to all of them. This must have been an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish without having modern day electronics to project their voices.
The half-way covenant church system was infecting the culture. The half way covenant was when a church provided only partial membership. That meant that the children and grandchildren of the church members would be able to be baptized in the church if the church member was a holder of the covenant. The covenant was entered into when the church member agreed to follow the church creed. Only covenant holders could participate in the Lord’s Supper. The puritan preachers anticipated that the halfway covenant would preserve the power that the church had in society. These preachers also hoped that the ‘half-way members’ would grasp importance of being a full member. If these half-way members would become a full member they would then be exposed to the piety and teachings. After becoming a full member they would hopefully be brought to a “born again” experience and eventually take the full oath of allegiance to the church. However, this did not work for everyone in the community. Many of the more religious members of the Puritan beliefs were upset with how the church was trying to fast track new members into their congregation. They felt as if it was not following proper procedures of being a church. Most of the half-members of the church were being groomed to become full-members but, they wanted a more personal encounter with the gospel.

Witches began to surface among the colonists. There were strong beliefs that Satan was existing and dynamic on Earth. The idea of this started in Europe in about the fifteenth century and it spread to North America was colonized. Witchcraft was mainly practiced by peasants. They would summon certain trinkets to increase the farming and agriculture of the land. This was seen as the devil living in these people and they were be persecuted. Joseph Glanvill wrote that if people denied the reality of spirits, which were inside the witches, that they didn’t only reject the fact of demons but they also denied the almighty Lord. These people were considered to be heretics because it also disproved their beliefs in angels. William Phips, who was the governor, put a stop to the persecution of “witches” when his wife was accused of being a witch.
The Great Awakening was a Christian movement that spread through the Protestant Europe and British America in the 1730s and 1740s. This movement had a large influence on the structure of the religious beliefs in the New England colonies. Congregational churches were being torn apart, forcing the members to choose between old light ministers and new light ministers. Christianity was made to be greatly personal to the regular citizen by creating a wide sense of spiritual conviction and recovery from the past.
During the time of the revival the people who were greatly affected by it started to study their bible from the safety of their own home. With this happening it was very difficult for religious matters to be informed to the public in one easy setting due to no one being at church every Sunday. Therefore making individualism a larger trend in the colonies. The lives of women were also changed greatly in the time of the Great Awakening. The women of the back-country had a much harder life than prior to the revival. This is because they would have to do all of the chores they already would have, plus read the bible, teach the children biblical stories, and they would also make their husbands sermons. The men were being cruel for treating their wives in this manner.
George Whitefield triggered many revivals which initiated the Great Awakening. He figured out that the growing systems of travel and communication were great ways for him to promote religion. During his career he made seven trips to America where he inspired many ministers in the colonies to expand his views to the colonists. Whitefield told his audiences that all of the droughts and locust that plagued the farmers and the epidemics and fires that threatened the cities were signs of God’s anger towards the ethical deterioration in the colonies. He would draw in huge crowds of people by dancing, yelling, and making dramatic motions on stage. Whitefield went all over America; he preached three hundred and fifty separate times in the course of one year. He once even attracted 20,000 people to a single event.
Religion in America has come a long way from where it began in Europe. The pilgrims sought religious freedom from the King Henry’s monarchy. The pilgrims rebelled and found freedom in the North American empire. However, the conflict did not end there. The New Light Clergy and the Old Light Clergy began to argue due to differing methods of preaching the same gospel message. Churches lost the importance of the message of God and focused more on church membership to the point where they initiated a “half-way covenant”. More issues arose when witchcraft became present in the colonies and lead to many unjustified executions of innocent people. The Great Awakening pushed people away from the oppressive churches and practiced and studied their religion in the safety of their own homes.
The pilgrims who had wanted to have religious freedom as well as political freedom had to go through many stages but they finally got what they were looking for. The people that had come all the way across the ocean to a new land fought for the rights that we have today. Religion has come a long way from the first settlers who landed in America to where it is now. I know that not everyone believes in one idea, but I do know that there is one creator who is all knowing. Jesus is the answer. He will show us the path to heaven as long as we allow him.