Weird, Wicked, and Wild

Americans were sure that God was on their side. They sought to remake their world according to a new covenant. And in this new covenant, borders seemed wrong. There was land waiting for them in the West, and all they had to do was clear the way. Expansion would be a great national project, a realization of American manifest destiny. But manifest destiny resulted in a continental empire, increasingly divided over the national crime of slavery. God's chosen people entered a stolen promised land and took one more step toward American Armageddon.

On the heels of the American Revolution came a Second Great Awakening. It did not transform the U.S. into a Christian nation either, but it did something perhaps more volatile.

In a republic with no established church, faith became a matter of choice, and with that came power. Ordinary Americans claimed the authority to interpret Scripture, experience God directly, and remake the world around them. Camp meetings dotted the landscape into the 19th century, preaching that salvation was open to all and that society itself could be redeemed. A sense of Christian duty birthed reform movements seeking to fix all manner of social ills.

But the same movement that inspired people to challenge injustice also gave others the tools to defend it. In the North, revivalism fueled crusades against slavery. In the South, it helped sanctify slavery, wrapping inequality in the language of divine will.

The result was not a single moral vision, but a nation convinced that God demanded action. The problem was agreeing on what that action should be.

The Founders did not create a Christian nation. They created something stranger.

The American Revolution rejected the divine right of kings, but it did not reject sacred purpose. Instead, Americans transformed liberty, the nation, the Founders, and even the war itself into objects of near-religious reverence.

Thomas Paine preached revolution like a revival sermon. Jefferson invoked “Nature’s God” and “divine Providence.” George Washington became a providential deliverer in the public imagination.

The result was not a state church, but a civil religion -- a national faith that treated America itself as part of a divine mission.

A religiously pluralistic colonial people could never unite against an empire with a state-mandated faith, could it?

Thomas Paine thought it could, and while not advocating for a religious society, he deployed explicitly Christian reasoning when he called for independence in Common Sense, the wildly popular pamphlet Paine published in 1776.

Nobody was likely to make Congregationalists, Baptists, Anglicans, Quakers, Catholics, and revivalists agree on religious doctrine, or clerical authority, or even religious tolerance. But after years of perceived abuse by British policy, they could agree on one thing:

God was the only king they needed in America.

The Salem Witch Trials frightened people, not about witches, but about the dangers of rigid orthodoxy. The following decades into the eighteenth century saw the old Puritan guard lose its grip on New England.

Religion didn't disappear, but it cooled notably. Increased trade across the Atlantic and the arrival of Enlightenment thinking resulted in greater secularism in New England society, until George Whitefield arrived in the 1730s.

Whitefield was a charismatic itinerant preacher who helped usher in a wave of revivalism in England and in the colonies. Historians refer to the movement as the Great Awakening, and understanding its impact is crucial to understanding American Christianity.

A successful covenant is evidence of God's divine favor, but what if things go wrong? What does that prove?

Colonialism is hard work; nothing was ever going to go precisely according to plans, but when internal dissent, chaotic relationships with Indigenous peoples, and external political pressures mounted, Puritans rarely recognized that the nature 0f colonialism had anything to do with it. Instead, they were convinced Satan was stalking them.

That's bad for the covenant.

How Puritans responded was bad for religion.

Pilgrims and Puritans have an interesting reputation in American history. Popular culture has long flattened the truth about them to the point that they often come off as cartoon bad guys.

The real story is that they were devout people under enormous pressure to establish a model Christian society in an unfamiliar land. Their experiences were informed by religious zealotry, imperial agency, frontier colonialism, and ideas about divine collective "chosenness."

If our last episode set the stage for how wildly different American Christianity would be from the origins of the faith, this episode is all about how American Christianity took on its specific character. Those English settlers in Massachusetts planted seeds that took deep root in America.

Christian nationalism is the resulting thornbush.

Sometimes it's important to hear about the history before the history.

That's what this episode is about -- we'll discuss the condensed history of Christianity from the time of Jesus' crucifixion until it arrives in America. That's roughly 1600 years in about in just around an hour or so. We'll also introduce the series in a little more detail, explain why we're doing this, clarify what we're NOT doing, etc.

Everything has a beginning.

Here's our version.

Don't miss this preview of the rollercoaster season we have coming your way. We are swinging for the fences, and we'll probably gain a few enemies along the way. That's how we know we're doing our jobs right!

Forty-three men between 1789 and 2017 demonstrated the awesome and growing power of the American presidency. Sometimes they were blunt, other times much more deliberate. But in 2017, something shifted, and since then we've seen how extremely fragile the presidency is, too. The two men who've held the office since then have exposed its frailty over and over again. One battered norms with open contempt, mistaking spectacle for strength and grievance for governance. He treated institutions as obstacles to be humiliated into submission. The other stretched executive authority past its snapping point in the name of restoration, governing through emergency and exception. Then that first guy came back, but worse, and that's where we are now. Whether through chaos or consolidation, they both marked radical departures from the managerial, post-Cold War presidency. They weren't course corrections -- they were disruptions. Joe Biden and Donald Trump: the Aberration.