Overview:
To sum up, public Protestantism was and still is the dominant religion of
the United States, this even despite loss of influence over the course of
the twentieth century. Present from colonial times in Calvinistic Christianity,
sheer numbers, political and social prestige, economic power, and an early
educational monopoly all contributed to the ascendancy of public Protestantism
as the "one religion." The many who were not Protestant also contributed
to its ascendancy by their acceptance of its influence and by their imitation
of its ways. Hence, as both extraordinary and ordinary religion, public
Protestantism shaped the country. As a religious system, this public Protestantism
offered a code, a cultus, and a creed to Americans, the three elements closely
interlinked to form a whole. The code began in conditions of democratic
equality and religious liberty, later expressed legally in separation of
church and state. These conditions for the existence of religion encouraged
the growth of denominationalism and voluntaryism as organizational characteristics
of the one religion. Against this backdrop, patterns of activism, a search
for simplicity (reductionism, nonintellectualism, ahistoricism), and --
most prominently -- moralism flourished in the Protestant behavioral code.
Related to the code, the public Protestant cultus of revivalism stressed
activism in working through to conversion, simplicity in its religion of
bare essentials, and moralism in its emphasis on belief in sin and a need
for purification. Historically, the revivals helped to deal with estrangement
by creating a place and time in which private feelings could legitimately
be expressed in public. In this way people could have a sense of community
without confronting their lack of knowledge of one another or their absence
of intellectual agreement. Code and cultus were connected to the creed of
public Protestantism in which beliefs about the importance of the individual,
higher law, and millennialism were key. While individualism was often more
an ideal than a reality and while a higher law could be manipulated to practical
advantage, in millennialism public
Protestantism shaped and was shaped by a central belief in American culture.
Moralistic in code, revivalistic in cultus, and millennial in creed, the
dominant and public religion of the land acted as a solvent for the separate
centers of the many religions. The dominant and public tradition worked
to help break down barriers and to confuse boundaries so that a religious
culture of oneness might be formed. As a key element in that oneness, millennialism
inevitably led toward the political state on which postmillennialists heaped
their expectations and premillennialists, at least theoretically, their
suspicions. Civil religion -- the religion of nationalism -- existed in
American religious history as a further way to help weaken boundaries between
peoples and bind the many into one. We need to look again at the American
flag that Billy Sunday chose to wave.
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