The American context at this time was completely different. The new Republic had been able to successfully fuse Enlightenment ideas with Christian ideology.
This is not to say the result was in keeping with New Testament Christianity, but given the North American context, the inherent contradictions were diluted by the distractions of the frontier – a nearly endless supply of land and resources for what was (at the time) a small population. In other words the contradictions and the crises these contradictions would produce were postponed and left for future generations to work out.
The American colonies did not have to overthrow the king, there were no extant feudal structures, and there were no stresses in terms of land and resources apart from the relatively small-scale battles with natives. And the Anglican Church never held supremacy and was not a major land owner or political force. Though close ideological cousins, the French and American Revolutions existed and came to bear in very different contexts. And this is further confused by the fact that the French Revolution went off the rails, degenerated into The Terror and eventually succumbed to Bonapartism.
In intellectual terms, America remained a generation or more behind Europe and given the different context, the ideas (when they arrived in America) functioned differently. The upheaval of nineteenth century Europe was very different from that of America – which experienced its version of upheaval in the context of the 1861-1865 Civil War. And so for example Romanticism (or Transcendentalism in the American context) produced very different results – the latter context carrying little in the way of cultural potency. Transcendentalism affects American culture but it is not the catalyst seen in the European context.
American cities would by late century face upheaval but the social and economic conflicts had already been raging in Europe since the early and mid-portions of the nineteenth century. One thinks of events like the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 – a British government desperate to quench any spark of revolution. Europe was also dealing with demographic stresses which again the US was able to avoid – at least in most cases, due to the seemingly endless room.
And with regard to the United Kingdom, the situation for Nonconformists or Dissenters, the Protestants outside the Anglican Church was also unique. With the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights issued the following year, their worship was tolerated. The Puritan social and political project was once and for all ended, but there was no longer a fear of persecution. This meant that Nonconformity was reduced to a kind of second-class citizenship. They could not hold political office and could not attend universities like Oxford and Cambridge but it was legally protected.
This situation began to change with the repeal of the Test and Corporations Act in 1828. This allowed nonconformists entry into government service. This was followed by marriage laws in 1836 that allowed nonconformists to legally marry outside the Church of England and the repeal of compulsory taxes or rates paid to the Church in 1868. This trend continued as nonconformists became an important component in the growing move toward a liberal political platform leading them to eventually ally with the likes of Gladstone and Lloyd-George.
Biblically-oriented Christianity on the continent emerged in the nineteenth century as a scattered remnant struggling to retain its identity in a sea of political upheaval and vibrant but declining Roman Catholicism. They wistfully looked back on the past and tried to recapture and retain something of its memory.
American Christianity was forward looking and in a friendly and economically prosperous climate it quickly adapted and assimilated the values of the host culture. This was largely true even of the groups that tried to retain historical expressions of the faith. Old prejudices (at least in terms of Christianity) were softened by the distance of time and geography and in the face of the kind of pragmatism that often ruled on the frontier.
One cannot be but sympathetic with the European situation though at times a more robust and nonconformist streak might be wished for. It is amazing though when one dives a little deeper into the social situation to discover just how oppressive and intolerant Europe remained even into the twentieth century. In this case I am referring to religious terms, the tolerance of independent church works and the like – a point I hope to visit in another upcoming article.
In the United States, one is forced to sigh in despair and drink deep of the irony. The land that was the refuge for Christians fleeing the troubles of the Old World created a cultural climate in which defenses were dropped, vigilance failed, and prosperity seduced. The sheer magnitude of building a new civilisation across a continent consumed men – work and money dominated thought, in some cases more than anything else. Christianity was ubiquitous and ambitious, but increasingly an empty form subjugated to the dominant and largely unchallenged American ideology. Absent the conflicts of old Europe that forced men to wrestle with their faith and reckon with the consequences, the struggles of daily life became questions of economics and the pseudo-dilemmas of progress. The inroads made by Freemasonry into Protestantism also testify to this compromise and syncretism – which remains a problem in some quarters.