Sectarian Impulses.

American religion was reshaped in many ways, socially and intellectually, by the upheavals of the 1770s and 1780s. The clearest aspect of the process was the growth of new religious groups in America. As Americans established their independence from Britain, some of them sought other kinds of independence as well. Many looked for new ways of practicing their religious beliefs and new kinds of churches to join. Beginning in the 1780s, America experienced the full flowering of a sectarian impulse, the desire to break away from old churches and form new ones. Hundreds of new congregations gathered together in these decades. Some were short-lived, but others survive today. Some, like the Shakers, represented radically different alternatives to traditional Christianity.

Protestantism.

In part, sectarianism represented the continuing evolution of Calvinism, the form of Protestantism most Americans at the time...