Colonial Virginia's ministers complained churchgoers dozed, whispered and ogled fashionable women
Early Anglican clergy in Virginia were not impressed by their flocks. Parishioners slept, gossiped, wandered in and out, and stared out the windows. With too few ministers to go round, the clergy urged devotion at home instead, a shift toward personal piety that helped open the door to the First Great Awakening.
Christianity reached North America through several colonial powers at once. Spain and France brought Catholicism, while Britain and the German states brought a patchwork of Protestant traditions, including Anglicans, Calvinists, Lutherans, Quakers, Anabaptists, Methodists and Moravians. The Dutch made their Reformed Church official in New Netherland in 1628, and New Sweden on the Delaware adopted the Church of Sweden from 1638.
Religious freedom had surprisingly early roots. In 1657 about thirty residents of Flushing petitioned Peter Stuyvesant to lift his ban on Quaker worship, and their Flushing Remonstrance is often seen as a forerunner of the Bill of Rights. The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, and the far larger Puritan movement founded Massachusetts Bay in 1629 with 400 settlers, joined by another 2,000 within two years.
Spanish missions left their stamp on the map. Franciscan friars named the settlement that became Los Angeles after the Virgin Mary in her role as queen of the angels, with a nod to a nearby river, and San Antonio, Santa Fe and Saint Augustine honour Anthony of Padua, Francis of Assisi and Augustine of Hippo. Saint Petersburg in Florida breaks the pattern: it takes its name from the Russian city rather than the apostle.
Today roughly 235 million Americans identify as Christian, the largest Christian population of any country, and more than 150 million of them are Protestant. Catholics form the biggest single denomination at 22.7 percent, with the Southern Baptist Convention second. The overall share has fallen steadily, from 85 percent in 1990 to 65 percent in a 2020 survey, largely because more people from Protestant backgrounds now report no religious affiliation.
Source: Christianity in the United States
