Denominationalism and the New World

Timothy L. Smith offers a vivid portrait of the “loneliness and danger,” as well as the fragmentation of traditional social networks, that the earliest American settlers had to face (contribution to Denominationalism, 50-1):

“Gone was the material heritage of the European village – the cottages and garden plots, the dam and the mill, the oven and the threshing floor, the sheds and fences, roads and bridges which man and beast required. Even if the land had not lured tradesmen from their crafts, reconstructing the specialization of skills and the extensive division of labor that the colonists had known in Europe would have taken a generation. Nor had they found room about the ships for many of the tools and utensils they required. Homes had to be built at once, and crude furnishings – if possible, at least, a bed – fashioned out of materials found nearby. Fields must be cleared and planted and laboriously tended, and boats built by unaccustomed hands for fishing and trade. They must soon begin the arduous toil of making linen cloth, using spinning wheels and looms also constructed on the spot.” 

He goes on, but the point has been made: The settlers had to recreate the technological and domestic environment more or less from scratch. They may have thought of themselves as the new Israel, but the old Israel had at least the advantage of conquering a land of strong cities, vineyards, orchards, fields, and roads.

Many had left behind kin networks too; they didn’t have family connections to rely on any more than they had homes they could move into. Not only that, but the ships that brought settlers over were sometimes “Noah’s arks” of all varieties of faiths (54; the description is from Mennonite Francis Daniel Pastorius). Some brought groups of like-minded folks along, but people kept moving along, seduced by the possibility of abundant fresh land. Many of the sects that came were radical, and divisive. Smith say, “The religious congregation . . . like the family, suffered profound shock from the fragmentation and uprooting which migration to the New World involved.” At the same time, the churches’ bore even more responsibility for caring for their members. Fewer hands, bigger responsibilities.

This is the setting, Smith claims, in which we need to understand the denominational form that American Christianity took: “A sense of spiritual and moral kinship, rooted in voluntary adherence to a congregation, was to remain throughout the eighteenth century and long beyond the key to neighborhood stability, ordered family life, and the education of children. Legislation having proven inadequate, pastors and lay leaders of each persuasion united to form an inter-colonial association to counter the weaknesses stemming from the diversity and mobility of the membership of congregations. These associations, later called denominations, became in the eighteenth century the mainstay of beleaguered local brotherhoods” (59). Local churches made up for what was lacking in the settlers’ social network; denominations provided a faux-clan network beyond the local.