Although the Protestant awakening continued well into the nineteenth century, spreading the gospel to settlers, slaves, and Indians throughout the English-speaking Atlantic, the American Revolution had several far- reaching effects on the revival’s shape and character. During the war the Church of England was a favorite target of revolutionary mobs, who denounced its loyalty, defaced its chapels, and lynched its priests. Between 1775 and 1783 nearly two-thirds of the Church’s ministers fled, including most of those sponsored by the SPG, and every state that had possessed an Anglican establishment before the Revolution ended the Church’s privileged position. On the other hand, evangelicals prospered. Although some groups baulked at severing ties with Britain—especially when, like New England’s Baptists, they were a small minority—evangelicals of all stripes eventually flourished amid the civil millennialism of the new republic.
Notwithstanding these disruptions, the most striking effect of the Revolution was to consolidate and intensify patterns established during the colonial era. In the United States the end of state-supported religion coincided with further efforts to strengthen denominational institutions. In 1784 the Episcopal Church received its first American bishop, Samuel Seabury, consecrated at Aberdeen by the Episcopal Primus of Scotland. With Charles Inglis’s appointment as Bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787, the Anglican Communion in North America and the West Indies possessed the same ecclesiastical powers as its dissenting competitors. Meanwhile, American Baptists and Methodists, blending Protestantism and republicanism, sought to curb the autonomy of their congregations and cultivate a hierarchical, respectable evangelicalism. As the history of the Baptist revivals in New England and the Canadian Maritimes shows, such efforts opened fissures between evangelicals in the United States and British North America. Even in the backwoods of Maine, Baptists suppressed their denomination’s antinomian, ‘primitive’ tendencies. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, on the other hand, primitivism became the norm, giving rise to a far more ‘democratized Christianity and... depoliticized religion’. ‘I find none’, wrote Joseph Dimock of the Baptists he met in New York and New England, ‘that seem to have the life of God so pure in the soul as in Nova Scotia.’
Another of the Revolution’s consequences was to facilitate transatlantic collaboration through the creation of American missionary societies aligned with like-minded societies in Britain. Although some of these American ventures perpetuated the colonial tendency to replicate British originals, Protestant denominations in the United States increasingly acted as their own metropoles, working with British counterparts on terms of rough equality. The Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (founded in 1810) and the London Missionary Society (1795) cooperated extensively both in the western Pacific and in southern Africa. The same collaborative spirit was evident a generation later in the Young Men’s Christian Association, whose first American chapters followed closely on the organization’s founding in London (1844). Even when differences interfered, as at the London conference of the Evangelical Alliance (1846) over whether to exclude slaveholders from membership, the differences arose, at least in part, from an awareness of the many commonalities shared by Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘America is still a land of real Protestants,’ wrote Thomas Haweis of the London Missionary Society in 1812. ‘[T]he American colonies [sic] appear, not only rising into a vast consolidated empire, but . . . are, I hope, destined with us to spread the everlasting gospel to the ends of the earth.’
That Haweis could write these words on the eve of the Anglo-American War of 1812-14 attests to the religious ties that continued to bind the two English-speaking empires, even as his use of the word ‘colonies’ is a reminder that both the United States and Britain’s American colonies remained, in the suggestive words of Charles Cohen, a religious periphery ‘imperfectly rendered according to European models’. If the religious history of British America was distinctive, however, its distinctiveness was most apparent in comparisons with Protestantism’s European metropole. As George Whitefield’s career in ‘three countries’ suggests, the itinerant evangelism that he helped invent was ideally suited not only to America but also to the unchurched peripheries of Scotland and England—and, eventually, to the greater British frontiers of Africa, India, and Australasia. In religion, as in so many other areas, the much-vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ of American history turns out to have been anything but exceptional. Even as American denominations established their own metropolitan centres, they remained, in important respects, creatures of Britain’s religious periphery. In both capacities, their impact on the British Empire was considerable.