Congregation, State and Denomination: The Forming of the American Religious Structure

Abstract

HE history of religion in America has seemed to most of its stuT dents a story best told in terms of the differences among denominations. To Philip Schaff's generation of church historians these differences seemed the outcome of varying doctrinal traditions. The Presbyterians were Calvinists, the Methodists Arminian; Baptists insisted upon a believer's church, while Anglicans revered the apostolic succession; hence the variations in their development.' Shortly after World War I, another group of students set out to explain denominational patterns by means of sociological and economic analysis, following the example of the German scholar Ernst Troeltsch. They identified as right wing communions those in which liturgy and confessionalism were predominant-Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and German Reformed. These represented the old social classes whose status, whether gentlemen, yeomen, or peasants, had traditionally been determined by their relationship to land. The Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Friends, by contrast, ministered to the rising bourgeoisie, and the Methodists and the Baptists to the workers whom the commercial revolution had deprived of both status and property.2 More recently still, Winthrop Hudson and Sidney Mead have proposed a context of interpretation which places the emphasis upon the emergence of denominationalism itself. First in Cromwell's England but more dramatically in colonial America, they have told us, Protestant dissenters came to see their communions not as established churches on one hand, or sects, on the other, but as members of a family of related