Christianity-The Most Dominant Religion in the United States

Introduction

Christianity came to North America with European explorers, colonizers, and settlers, expressing in a New World version enduring continuity but also substantial change. Albanese (pp. 123-135) mentions in what became Canada and the United States (the limits of North America for this article), national and political considerations proved important, but smaller, regional forms of Christianity also flourished. North American Christianity struggled with its plurality, perhaps, ironically, achieving its greatest unity in its large-scale dedication to mission (Albanese, pp. 123-135). In this paper, I discuss Christianity as the dominant religion in United States of America.

Christianity-The Most Dominant Religion in the United States

Intrinsic to the Christian vision was a commitment to mission—to the task of bringing all peoples to God through the saving power of his son Jesus Christ. So far did the ideology of mission extend in North America that, even in the case of those reared ostensibly as Christians, the mission to convert became in many instances a major concern (Albanese, pp. 123-135).

Aims for the conversion of indigenous North American peoples figured large in the rhetoric of the colonizing nations. But the religious impulse was also molded by the political ambitions of European nation-states. Hence, conversion went forward as an arm of the colonial ventures of the Spanish, French, and English governments.

In an often-cited debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1550), the Spanish had pondered the question of whether native North Americans were slaves by nature or fit subjects for Christianization. The outcome, supporting Sepúlveda and Aristotle's theory of natural slavery, was not surprising, since the Spanish already considered Aztec religion, with its human sacrifice, worship of the devil. Similarly, both English and French called the Indians "savages," (Albanese, pp. 123-135) wild men without law or religion. Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw them as "minions" of the devil, heathen who practiced nefariously in the forests. French Franciscans argued that until Indians were civilized they were not capable of Christianity. And French Jesuits, in the most positive estimate, saw a natural nobility in the "savage" peoples. These early opinions, if expressed more subtly, continued to inform the ideas and work of missionaries who, after Canada and the United States became political realities, carried on their work among the Indians.

As early as the 1520s, Roman Catholic priests were in Florida and the Chesapeake, and by 1595 there was serious missionary work in Florida. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, Franciscan friars had accompanied the Spanish conquerors, and in 1598 they began an era of forced mission presence among reluctant Pueblo peoples. In California, efforts to convert the Indians proceeded less violently under the missionary leadership of the fabled Franciscan priest Junípero Serra (1713-1784). At its height, the system of missions established by Serra attracted over 21,000 Indians, who settled around the missions, Christianized and living according to Spanish order in farm communities (Dorrien, pp. 34-47).

If the Spanish arrived in the New World as conquistadores, the French came, especially, as ...