We Were a Christian Nation, Sort Of, But Rather Different Than Today's Conservatives Think It Was.
My intent here is to point out that contemporary image of American Christian history held by many conservatives is simplistic. The subject is huge and I can make only a few points if this is to be kept readably short.
The claim that America has always been a Christian nation tends to see American religious history as Puritan, with white churches with steeples, bells on Sunday morning calling the community to worship, and godly families praying each evening before supper with dad reading from the Bible. That vision is wrong on several counts. For one thing, those New England Puritans were only one portion of a lively religious landscape. The Dutch in the Hudson Valley were Dutch Reformed. The Swedes and Finns in New Sweden (in what is now New Jersey) were Lutheran. The Spanish were Catholic (from Georgia along the Gulf coast across to California. The French were mostly Catholic (Great Lakes, Mississippi Valley, Louisiana). The Russians were Orthodox (Alaska). Puritan ministers orating about God in English is important, of course. But the languages of worship in what is now the United States included French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Dutch, Russian (even Danish if one includes the Virgin Islands).
Our territories had their own religions until missionaries got there (Hawai’i, Samoa, Guam, and so on). Slaves brought some African traditions, such as voudou (New Orleans). For another, the native peoples, who were mostly not Christian, outnumbered Christian colonists (and their slaves) until well into the 1700s.
The remarkable Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784) emigrated to New York (she’d joined the “Shaking Quakers” in Britain and had a vision telling her to emigrate). In a British jail, she received a visitation informing her she was the embodiment of the Second Coming of Christ. The Shakers were pacifists, believed in celibacy and racial and gender equality. They peaked in the 1830s at about 6,000 members in 19 colonies. Got that? Racial and gender equality in the 1780s, in a group founded by a woman who thought she was part of the Second Coming.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/4/4/1649616/-We-Were-a-Christian-Nation-Sort-Of-But-Rather-Different-Than-Today-s-Conservatives-Think-It-Was
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