Eighteenth-century colonists could choose from almost as many religions as consumer goods. Virtually all of the many religious denominations represented some form of Christianity, almost all of them Protestant. Slaves made up the largest group of non-Christians. A few slaves converted to Christianity in Africa or after they arrived in North America, but most continued to embrace elements of indigenous African religions. Roman Catholics concentrated in Maryland as they had since the seventeenth century, but even there they were far outnumbered by Protestants.

The varieties of Protestant faith and practice ranged across a broad spectrum. The middle colonies and the southern backcountry included militant Baptists and Presbyterians. Huguenots who had fled persecution in Catholic France peopled congregations in several cities. In New England, old-style Puritanism splintered into strands of Congregationalism that differed over fine points of theological doctrine. The Congregational Church was the official established church in New England, and all residents paid taxes for its support. Throughout the plantation South and in urban centers such as Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia, prominent colonists belonged to the Anglican Church, which received tax support in the South. But dissenting faiths grew everywhere, and in most colonies their adherents won the right to worship publicly, although the established churches retained official support.

Many educated colonists became deists, looking for God’s plan in nature more than in the Bible. Deism shared the ideas of eighteenth-century European Enlightenment thinkers, who tended to agree that science and reason could disclose God’s laws in the natural order. In the colonies as well as in Europe, Enlightenment ideas encouraged people to study the world around them, to think for themselves, and to ask whether the disorderly appearance of things masked the principles of a deeper, more profound natural order. Leading colonial thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson communicated with each other seeking both to understand nature and to find ways to improve society. Franklin’s interest in electricity, stoves, and eyeglasses exemplified the shift of focus among many eighteenth-century colonists from heaven to the here and now.

Most eighteenth-century colonists went to church seldom or not at all, although they probably considered themselves Christians. A minister in Charleston observed that on the Sabbath “the Taverns have more Visitants than the Churches.” In the leading colonial cities, church members were a small minority. Anglican parishes in the South rarely claimed more than one-fifth of adults as members. In some regions of rural New England and the middle colonies, church membership embraced two-thirds of adults, while in other areas only one-quarter of the residents belonged to a church. The dominant faith overall was religious indifference. As a late-eighteenth-century traveler observed, “Religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other.” [[LP Photo: P05.07 George Whitefield/ROA_704115_05_P07.JPEG]]

The spread of religious indifference, of deism, of denominational rivalry, and of comfortable backsliding profoundly concerned many Christians. A few despaired that, as one wrote, “religion . . . lay a-dying and ready to expire its last breath of life.” To combat what one preacher called the “dead formality” of church services, some ministers set out to convert nonbelievers and to revive the piety of the faithful with a new style of preaching that appealed more to the heart than to the head. Historians have termed this wave of revivals the Great Awakening. In Massachusetts during the mid-1730s, the fiery Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards reaped a harvest of souls by reemphasizing traditional Puritan doctrines of humanity’s utter depravity and God’s vengeful omnipotence. A member of Edwards’s church noted that his sermons caused “great moaning and crying through the whole [church]—What shall I do to be saved—oh I am going to Hell . . . the shrieks and cries were piercing and amazing.” In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, William Tennent led revivals that dramatized spiritual rebirth with accounts of God’s miraculous powers. The most famous revivalist in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world was George Whitefield. An Anglican, Whitefield preached well-worn messages of sin and salvation to large audiences in England using his spellbinding, unforgettable voice. Whitefield visited the North American colonies seven times, staying for more than three years during the mid-1740s and attracting tens of thousands to his sermons, including Benjamin Franklin and Olaudah Equiano. Whitefield’s preaching transported many in his audience to emotion-choked states of religious ecstasy, as he wrote, with “most lifting their eyes to heaven, and crying to God for mercy.”

Whitefield’s successful revivals spawned many lesser imitations. Itinerant preachers, many of them poorly educated, roamed the colonial backcountry after midcentury. Bathsheba Kingsley, a member of Jonathan Edwards’s flock, preached the revival message informally—as did an unprecedented number of other women throughout the colonies—causing Edwards’s congregation to brand her a “brawling woman” who had “gone quite out of her place.”

The revivals awakened and refreshed the spiritual energies of thousands of colonists struggling with the uncertainties and anxieties of eighteenth-century America. The conversions at revivals did not substantially boost the total number of church members, however. After the revivalists moved on, the routines and pressures of everyday existence reasserted their primacy in the lives of many converts. But the revivals communicated the important message that every soul mattered, that men and women could choose to be saved, that individuals had the power to make a decision for everlasting life or death. Colonial revivals expressed in religious terms many of the same democratic and egalitarian values expressed in economic terms by colonists’ patterns of consumption. One colonist noted the analogy by referring to itinerant revivalists as “Pedlars in divinity.” Like consumption, revivals contributed to a set of common experiences that bridged colonial divides of faith, region, class, and status.