In the settled colonies Protestant missionaries and evangelical ministers confronted a population that, though nominally Christian, seemed at times to be no more thoroughly churched than the Indians to the west. Colonial church adherence rates—defined somewhat loosely as a ‘regular or steady attachment to institutional Christianity’—varied widely at midcentury, from two-thirds of eligible adults (men and women) in rural New England to less than 15 per cent in New York City. Despite pockets of religiosity, the general pattern was indifference, with the overall figure for the thirteen colonies that became the United States falling short of the 25 to 30 per cent that obtained on the eve of the Civil War, and well below ‘the 60 percent of adults who belonged to churches in America in the 1960s’. In the West Indies planter absenteeism probably intensified such patterns, making the settlers’ indifference still more pronounced. Even Patricia Bonomi, who has argued for higher rates of adherence, accepts that figures at the end of the eighteenth century were higher than those at its beginning and that the ‘era presents itself as one of rising vitality in religious life, an era not of decline but the reverse—of proliferation and growth’.
In part, low adherence rates reflected the relative scarcity of institutional assets like church buildings, religious books, and qualified ministers. In Virginia, where the Church of England was legally established, there were fifty parishes in 1680, only thirty-five of which had churches or priests. Elsewhere, churches and clergy were in even shorter supply; only Congregational New England and Anglican Barbados possessed the infrastructure necessary to meet the spiritual needs of most Protestant inhabitants. Many localities experienced similar shortages of religious literature. Until the first American edition appeared during the Revolution, even Bibles had to be imported from Europe. To rectify the situation, Thomas Bray, the Anglican commissary for Maryland, helped found the SPCK (1698) to distribute Bibles and religious tracts to British Atlantic territories. Bray also helped launch the SPG (1701), complaining that ‘the English Colonies... [had] been in a manner abandoned to Atheism; or, what is much at one, to Quakerism, for want of a clergy settled among them’. According to Hugh Jones, Anglican ministers in Virginia, most of whom were British or Irish natives, found their situation ‘very odd . . . being different to what they have been heretofore accustomed to’. Dissenting clergy who had been educated in Britain or Europe invariably agreed.
Some contrasts drawn between the colonies and Britain were more apparent than real. In their institutional poverty, the American colonies resembled other outlying regions of the British Atlantic, especially Britain’s Gaelic hinterland. Speaking of missions to Native Americans in the 1650s, Roger Williams remarked, ‘we have Indians at home [England], Indians in Cornewall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland’. According to an archdiocesan report from 1743, nearly a third of Yorkshire’s Anglican parishes lacked ministers. Not surprisingly, decentralized religious movements that flourished in America often experienced similar success in Britain and Ireland. During the second half of the eighteenth century, Methodist cells meeting in private homes, often under the leadership of devout women, took root wherever established churches were absent or under-represented: northern New England, Virginia’s Piedmont, the sugar plantations of the West Indies, rural Wales, and Yorkshire’s manufacturing districts. Yet if the problems that beset the colonies differed from those of the metropolis ‘in degree rather than in kind’, the differences still mattered. Even Anglicans in Britain could draw on institutional resources unavailable to their colonial brethren: ancient schools and universities, large ecclesiastical and charitable endowments, and—in some colonies—legal establishment. (The Church was established in two-thirds of the colonies.)
Compounding these institutional weaknesses was the indifference of colonists who did belong to churches. In Congregational New England such ‘horse-shed’ Christians accepted the teachings of the Church and attended services with some regularity, but substantial numbers refrained from taking communion, with men in particular postponing full membership until they were in their thirties or forties. In response, many churches adopted the compromise known as the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, which permitted the children of church members who had not yet ‘owned the covenant’ to become ‘half-way’ members. One result was to diminish the political and ecclesiastical influence of the seventeenth-century Puritan ‘saints’, bringing New England’s religious culture more closely into line with that of moderate Calvinists elsewhere in the British Atlantic. Another was to feminize the region’s churches. Because women continued to become full members just before or after marriage, nearly every Congregational church in New England had membership rolls with a female majority by the early eighteenth century.
Still another challenge to Christian authority was popular belief in the occult. Although the massive literature on New England’s seventeenth- century witch trials provides good reason to treat reports of popular occultism with scepticism, the ubiquity of statutes against witchcraft and other dark arts is a reminder that British Americans inhabited a world of imagined wonders. Colonial records are full of people like the Pennsylvania German Simon Graf, who ‘dealt in witchcraft and the exorcism of devils’; the Boston publisher Nathaniel Ames, who used astrological predictions of the future to boost sales of his almanac; and the Newport, Rhode Island, woman whom Ezra Stiles claimed sold urine cakes for divining. Although British colonists believed themselves immune to Indian and African black magic, they were also keenly aware of the ‘superstitions’ prevalent among non-Europeans living in their midst. The Indian raids that beset New England after 1676 probably heightened colonists’ fears of Satanism, contributing to the witchcraft accusations that crested at Salem in 1692.
In addition to these internal challenges, Protestants throughout the English-speaking Atlantic feared Catholicism. Although Europe’s Catholic revival did not directly affect British America, the colonies gave refuge to thousands of European Protestants with first-hand experience of the French Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), Louis XIV’s wartime devastation of the German Palatinate, and the German emperor Charles VI’s expulsion of the Salzburgers and Moravians. Such events suggested a life-and-death struggle between ‘the pure Religion of Jesus—as the Presbyterian Samuel Davies told the militia of Hanover County, Virginia, in 1755—and the forces of ‘Ignorance, Superstition, Idolatry, Tyranny over conscience, Massacre, Fire and Sword and all the Mischiefs beyond Expression, with which Popery is pregnant’. Although Davies was thinking in military terms, the struggle with Catholicism was also a battle for souls, one in which Protestant missions to the unchurched peoples of British America had a vital role to play.
Taken together, British America’s weak religious institutions, widespread indifference, and popular belief in the occult meant that ministers who took up residence as parish clergy found it necessary to adopt proselytizing roles conventionally associated with missionary activity. Meanwhile, the vulnerability felt by Protestants everywhere made such challenges seem all the more urgent. Speaking in the mid-175os of Pennsylvania’s substantial German population, William Smith of Philadelphia warned that the colony’s shortage of Lutheran and Reformed ministers made would-be parishioners ‘liable to be seduced by every enterprizing Jesuit, having almost no Protestant Clergy among them to put them on their Guard, and warn them against Popery’. As an opponent of the colony’s Quaker oligarchy, the Anglican Smith had partisan reasons for impugning the loyalty of immigrants who supported the ruling party’s candidates at the polls. But many Germans shared his concerns. The journals of the Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg, who emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1742, contain numerous accounts of false prophets and the congregations they duped into supporting them. George Whiteheld warned a Philadelphia congregation in 1746, ‘the rod is yet hanging over us’. Given the reality of irreligion at home and militant Catholicism abroad, Britain’s only hope was ‘a national reformation’ that brought all its people, ‘with one heart, to observe God’s Statutes, and keep his Laws’.