Faith Works 5-27-06
Jeff Gill

Religion Meets Democracy

With one more installment to come in our journey through the history of Christian church groups from an American viewpoint, we just put our feet on US soil last week.
As European dissent, reformers, and revivals fueled the trends, independence, individualism, and democracy quickly shaped the structures and leadership styles in the last 200 years of religious development.
Even Judaism saw the rise of a "Reform" movement in this country, rooted in the frontier as Cincinnati was when first called "The Queen City of the West," and where a Jewish presence is still strong. Orthodox Christian bodies sprang up around Cleveland and the Mahoning Valley when Eastern European ethnic groups came to mine and work the mills, carrying their homeland traditions with them. But they have seen tugs at their hierarchical system from congregations expecting more say in spending and personnel decisions than would be true even today in their countries of origin.
In fact, for most of the first century of the American experiment, faith and ethnicity were still closely tied. If your name was Sirovic, you were Serbian Orthodox, or if Podgorsky, then Catholic, albeit a member of a Polish Catholic parish (probably St. Stanislaus), while the O’Malleys walked to St. Patrick’s, the Irish Catholic parish. Muellers and Schmidts went to the Lutheran church, Bontragers and Millers were likely Mennonite if not Amish, and all the easy to spell names went to Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Congregational congregations. Episcopalians were usually easy to spell, but had middle names and bank accounts, or at least weren’t buying their seed on credit at the general store.
The Civil War transformed this landscape as much as it did so many other features on the American scene. First, many of those aforementioned groups split North and South, despite their official leadership’s efforts to hold each communion together. With the exception of the Episcopal Church, they all had major splits just before, or in the case of the Restoration Movement (Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ groups today), just after the 1861-5 conflict. Some were over abolitionist pro- or con- sentiments, and others were over membership for people of African or Native American descent, creating new ethnic churches.
Membership, the "laity" of the church, no longer deferred to ordained or clerical leadership, but spoke out and even organized themselves, multiplying or fracturing (depending on your point of view) the structures, echoing into today with – for instance – American Baptists, Southern Baptists, General Baptists, National Baptists, Missionary Baptists, Primitive Baptists, not to mention "Two-seed in the Spirit Predestinationist Conservative" Baptists.
Evangelism in the early Colonies, under the first "Great Awakening," and even the second so-called with the Cane Ridge, KY revivals of 1801, had been largely aimed at reviving one’s own. In the wake of the vast mixing of the Army of the Potomac, Army of Northern Virginia, and the rest of the Civil War, evangelism began to reach across ethnic, if not class boundaries; sometimes proselytism but often just a new sense of what was acceptable. Feeneys became Baptist (of whatever sort), Yoders converted to Catholicism, and Joneses went from Welsh Methodist to Presbyterian to Episcopal as the economy grew and mobility increased in the late 1800’s.
Ironically, along with the increased segmentation of American religion through this period came an interest in what became the ecumenical movement of the 1900’s, especially in the cities, where the "Social Gospel" movement focused on local mission and co-operative efforts. Global missionary efforts around 1900 were woefully sectarian, but with different groups reading in the newspapers and magazines of the day about each others’ work around the world, awareness took on a new character, moving beyond worldly competition. "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" was the greeting of reporter and explorer Henry Stanley to the long-feared missing David Livingston, found ministering in the heart of Africa; the account sold thousands of papers and later books to an avid readership of all denominations, inspiring a young Albert Schweitzer to do the same.
Global Christianity, at the dawn of the 20th century, cast a missionary net and built a network of relationships that literally did span the world. New forms of communication, ease of travel, and then two world wars, saw that network spark a transformation which reverberated both ways, with resonances that ripple across today’s truly transformed religious landscape.
We’ll trace those and where they may be heading next week, on Pentecost Eve!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; contact him through disciple@voyager.net.