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What Was American Religion Like in 1776? What Came Next?

What Was American Religion Like in 1776? What Came Next?

Last updated on: June 23, 2026 at 9:51 pm by Richard Ostling

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What Was American Religion Like in 1776? What Came Next? 2026-06-23T21:51:36-04:00 Richard Ostling

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Classic New England vista: the Community Church of Sandwich, New Hampshire / Bill McBee @ unsplash.com

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

In the Pew Research Center’s latest Religious Landscape Study, “only” 69% of Americans identify with a particular faith, 62% in some variant of Christianity, plus another 7% for other religions. That means 29% lack any affiliation or identity, in a 21st-century upsurge of religious “nones” that has provoked continual concern and commentary.

How were things when it all began, in 1776? We have sentimental thoughts of 13 colonies drenched in prayerful piety, perhaps with images of the Plymouth flock faithfully trudging through the snow to attend worship. However, experts tell us that in those pioneer days, when social institutions were only just emerging, an estimated 17% of the population were members of a religious group, leaving 83% as 18th-century “nones”!

Protestants operated 3,167 (or 98.3%) of the nation’s churches, compared with the Catholics’ 56. Even in Maryland, established as a discrimination-free refuge for Catholics, they were only 3% of the population. The only non-Christian faith of consequence, Judaism, consisted of five synagogues and perhaps 2,000 members. Their mass immigration did not occur till after the Civil War.

An Unregulated Market

Such data about the founding era and what happened to the nation in subsequent decades was researched for “The Churching of America 1776-1990,” an important 1992 study by sociologists Rodney Stark, (then) at the University of Washington, and his former student Roger Finke, (then) at Purdue University. They broke new ground and toppled many assumptions about the spiritual shape of America, which had a variegated and unregulated free market in religion to an extent that had rarely if ever existed before.

Upon the Founding, four brands of Protestants commanded the field. Congregationalists (emerging from the New England Puritans and Pilgrims, and forebears of today’s United Church of Christ) led the way with 20.4% of Americans who held church membership. Presbyterians (with roots in Scotland as well as England) had 19%. Episcopalians (Church of England missions that would become independent) had 15.7%. All three were central to the Atlantic coast’s cultural establishment led by educated clergy. Baptists, less elitist and centered in their refuge of Rhode Island, claimed 16.9%. The remaining 28% were scattered among Catholic, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Lutheran, Mennonite, Methodist, Moravian, Quaker, and assorted other groups.

That denominational competition meant that, unlike with European nations, no one of them could ever dominate. The Bill of Rights, added to the Constitution in 1791, said “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” or prohibiting its “free exercise.” To this day, jurists and politicians debate whether the “establishment” clause was written to forbid only a single official religion or, for instance, also rules out the Ten Commandments posted on classroom walls, or authorized school prayers, or taxpayer support for religious agencies.

The U.S. Supreme Court did not require the states to honor religious “free exercise” protection till 1925, followed in 1947 by nationwide application of the “establishment” clause. Present-day Americans accustomed to church-state separation may be surprised that Episcopalians originally benefitted from state establishment and funding in Georgia, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. The Congregationalists held on longer but eventually lost establishment funding in Connecticut (1818), New Hampshire (1819) and finally Massachusetts (1833). Baptist Rhode Island and three other states provided no such favoritism.

A Culture Overturned

The great drama portrayed by Finke and Stark came after the Revolution. Religious energies and competition had totally overturned American culture as of 1850, just before the slavery split temporarily devastated the nation. Overall, the rate of religious affiliation had doubled since 1776 to 34% of the population (and by these sociologists’ calculations rose steadily to 45% in 1890 and 62% by 1980).

Even more surprising, defying the fact that religious change normally occurs very slowly, America had undergone a thorough reconfiguration by 1850. The once-marginal Methodists claimed an impressive 34.2% of the religiously affiliated, followed by Baptists at 20.5%, Catholics at 13.9%, and Presbyterians at 11.6%. There was an astonishing relative decline for the once-regnant established churches of old, Congregationalists now at 4% and Episcopalians at 3.5%.

What happened? Finke and Stark examined in detail the rise of “upstart” Baptists and Methodists, who conquered rural turf and the western frontier while Congregationalists and Episcopalians were content to hold the cities and hug the coast, emphasizing a learned clergy over zeal. The more successful but divided Presbyterians were pulled in both directions.

A Second “Awakening”

This was the time of the 19th Century’s so-called Second Great Awakening, with its traveling evangelists, most notably Charles G. Finney, whose “new methods” and careful preparation were to set the pattern for Billy Graham and many others. While the Finney types worked towns and cities, emotion-laden, week-long “camp meetings” were the innovation that provided the equivalent for widely-scattered farm families.

The Methodist movement commissioned “circuit riders” who built a remarkable network of small frontier fellowships. Their first U.S. bishop, Francis Asbury, traveled nearly 300,000 miles on horseback, whatever the weather and despite ill health. Unlike the elite denominations with clergy who monopolized among the new nation’s college graduates, Baptists and Methodists welcomed legions of anonymous frontier preachers and lay workers with no more schooling than their flocks but ample passion to win souls and plant churches. All were poorly paid and many or most were unpaid, living off handouts or secular jobs with religious activity on the weekends.

Baptist and Methodist denominations began to predominate among African-Americans after the Civil War. By the controversial account of Finke and Stark, the white Methodists gradually lost their edge through more sophisticated secular learning, de-emphasis on distinctive lifestyle demands, and a loosening theology. Baptists became the most popular category in Protestantism permanently, and even more so if we include the baptistic style of churches among later Pentecostalists and today’s 21 million Americans in independent congregations. The Finke-Stark scenario from 1850 through the late 20th Century raises the intriguing long-ago question of Jesus, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36, King James Version).

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