The Americans

by Hugo Münsterberg

The old Calvinistic faith which was brought over by the Puritans to the New England colonies still lives in the Congregational Church. This church has played a greater political part than any other from the colonial days, when no one could vote who was not a communicant, down to the time when it took an active stand against slavery. Its expansion was limited by an agreement with the Presbyterian Church; only since this was given up, has it entered all the states of the Union. And yet to-day there are in Massachusetts almost 700 Congregational church buildings, and 400 in the small State of Connecticut; but only 300 in the State of New York, 100 in Pennsylvania, a few in the West, and still fewer in the South.

As in the case of all churches, the proportion of the population belonging to this church can only be approximately given. Since the official census may ask no questions concerning religion, we have to rely on the figures of the church itself, which regularly refer to the actual members in the congregations. Now in these Evangelical, Catholic, and Jewish congregations, the conditions for membership are so unlike that the figures are not directly comparable; and even among the Evangelical churches, it is clearly false to find the total number of souls allied to that church, as this is usually found, by multiplying the number of communicants by some average figure, like 3.5. In view of the social and ethnical differences between these churches, the percentage of children, for instance, is very different. It may be said then, although with caution, that the Congregational population embraces about two million souls; but their importance in the shaping of American civilization has greatly exceeded their numerical representation. The spirit of this church has lent ethical seriousness and a vigorous sense of duty to the whole nation. It has founded the first schools, and is responsible for the independence of the country.

It is even more necessary to weigh the votes and not to count them, when we speak of the optimistic daughter church of austere Calvinism, the Unitarian. Probably not more than one quarter of a million persons belong to the Unitarian Church; but the influence of these people on literature and life, science and philosophy, has been incomparable. The church has existed officially since 1815, although the new faith began to spread much earlier within the Calvinistic Church itself. There is nothing theologically new here, since the main teachings, that the Trinity is only a dogma, that God is One, and that Christ was an exemplary man but not God, go back, of course, to the fourth century. These are the Arian ideas, which have also been held in Europe in times past. The significance of the American Trinitarian controversy does not lie in the province of theology. In a sense, the Unitarian Church has no binding belief, but aims only to be an influence of ever-increasing faith in God, which welcomes investigation, advance, and difference of individual thought, within the unity of a moral and ideal view of the universe.

Thus it has been an entirely natural development, for example, for the theological faculty of Harvard University to go over from the Congregational to the Unitarian faith as early as the second decade of the last century, and in recent times to become non-sectarian and broadly Christian, filling its professional chairs with theologians of the most diverse denominations. The significance for civilization does not lie in the Unitarian view of God, but in its anti-Calvinistic conception of man. This church says that man is not naturally sinful, but, being the image of God, is naturally good, and that the salvation of his soul is not determined by a predestination of divine grace, but by his own right-willing. Channing was the Unitarian leader, and the thinkers and writers in the middle of the century followed in his footsteps. Their work was a source of moral optimism. This confession has necessarily remained small by reason of its radical theology, which too little satisfies the imagination of the profoundly pious; but the Unitarian ideas have come everywhere into the worship of aristocratic churches.

The Episcopalian faith, which is English Protestantism, came to the shores of the New World even earlier than the faith of Calvin. The English faith was organized in Virginia as early as 1607, and for a long time no other faith was even tolerated; and in the middle colonies the English High Church spread rapidly under the influence of many missionaries from England. The secession of the colonies from the mother country was destined to bring a check, but soon after the war the Episcopalian Church of America organized itself independently, and grew steadily through the East. It has to-day seventy-five bishops. It is governed by a council which meets every three years in two divisions—an upper, which consists of bishops, and a lower, composed of delegates sent from the various dioceses. The diocese elects its own bishop. Their creed is, to all intents and purposes, identical with that of the Church of England, and some two million souls are affiliated with this church.

Also the Presbyterian Church of the New World goes back to the seventeenth century; it was first definitely organized in the beginning of the eighteenth, under Scotch and Irish influences. It stands on a Calvinistic foundation, but the church government is the distinguishing feature; at its head are the elders, the Presbyters. Twelve different sects have grown out of this church—as, for instance, the Cumberland Presbyterians, who broke away in a popular religious movement in 1810; other sects had started already on European soil—as, for instance, the Presbyterian Church of Wales, which is perpetuated in America. The Presbyterian population amounts to about four million souls.

The Methodist and Baptist congregations are much larger. Methodism comes from that great movement, at the University of Oxford in 1729, of John and Charles Wesley, whose Sacred Club, with its Biblical bigotry, was, on account of its methodical precision, ridiculed as the Methodist Club; and the nickname was accepted and held to. It was a question of bringing the English church closer to the heart, of profoundly moving every individual and instilling a deeper piety in the people. In order to preach the word of God, it needed neither professional theologians nor church buildings; laymen were to be the preachers, and the canopy of heaven their church. The movement began to spread in America in 1766, and while in England it remained for a longer time nominally within the established church, American Methodism took very early a different course from Episcopalianism.

The peculiar organization of the congregation is a prominent feature. Candidates for membership are accepted after a six months’ probation, popular prayer-meetings are held at any chosen spot, the lay preachers are permitted to deliver religious talks without giving up their secular occupations, and no pastor may remain longer than five years over any congregation. These and other provisions are rather in the nature of concessions to the religious needs of ordinary people; the special items of faith differ slightly from those of the mother church, and are of comparatively little significance. The number of communicants has grown rapidly, especially among the negroes of the South, owing to the large camp-meetings, where many persons sing and pray together, and work themselves up to a more or less hysterical point of excitement under the open sky. As is usual among less cultivated classes, the tendency to form sects has been very great; small groups are continually breaking away, because they cannot believe in this or that feature of the main church. Seventeen principal groups may be distinguished, and some of these only by the colour of the communicants. The Methodist Episcopalians are by far the most numerous, and all the Methodist churches together must embrace more than sixteen million people.

The twelve or thirteen sects of Baptists are in some cases widely different in the matter of faith, although the main body of regular Baptists are Calvinistic, and the church is organized like the Calvinistic Congregational Church. Each congregation governs itself, and the one point which all have in common is that they renounce infant baptism; he only may be baptized who is formally able to acknowledge Christ, and he must be baptized not by sprinkling, but by immersion. This cult originated in Switzerland at the time of the Reformation, and gradually gained adherents all through Europe, but it first became widely spread in America, where it embraces about twelve million people. Just as Methodism is a sort of popular form of the Episcopalian Church, the Baptist faith is a popularization of the Congregational Church. The main division of the regular Baptists is made between the Northern and Southern churches, a division which originated in the middle of the century, owing to the diversity of opinion about slavery; and the third main group of Baptists is made up of negroes.

The first Lutherans to come to the New World were Dutchmen, who landed on Manhattan Island in 1623. But the Dutch authorities there suppressed all churches except the Reformed Church, and it was not until New York came into the hands of the English that the Lutheran Church got its freedom. Lutherans from the Palatinate settled in Pennsylvania in 1710, and in the middle of the eighteenth century began their definite organization into synods under the influence of their pastor, Mühlenberg. The church grew in consequence of German, and later of Scandinavian, immigration. Most of its communicants still speak German, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Icelandic, and those who speak English are mostly of German descent. All together they make a population of four million persons, of whom one-fifth live in Pennsylvania. The Lutherans have formed sixteen sects.