During the years immediately following 1783, as the new American nation began to address the question of political organization, the colonial denominations likewise began to take on formal structure. Episcopalians (i.e., Anglicans) organized themselves nationally between 1785 and 1789. Methodists established a national organization in 1784. Presbyterians did the same in 1788, and the (historically Dutch) Reformed Church organized itself in 1792.
The situation in America during the early national period gave still a further set of characteristics to denominationalism. As organizations, these denominational bodies emphasized purposefulness, instrumentality, and nationality—all of which were key elements for survival during this period. In contrast with many forms of sectarianism that taught that the proper religious response to the social order was withdrawal, denominations were socially active in orientation and involved in their cultures. Indeed, denominational organization was often for the purpose of action. Typically it was because of the need to become involved in such tasks as home MISSIONS that denominational organization emerged. The emphasis on purposefulness also gave to denominations a self-perception of instrumentality. Church structures were tools or instruments for a higher good and not ends in themselves. Finally, no higher good was more pressing than the extension of Christian organization and influence across the new nation. As the nation poured out into the trans-Appalachian west, the churches, it was argued, needed to follow. Only through organization and cooperation could this great national need be met.
The emphasis on denominations as instruments for a purpose greater than themselves can perhaps best be seen in the celebrated Plan of Union of 1801 that united Presbyterians and Congregationalists. Both of these bodies had emerged out of the Puritan protest of the Elizabethan settlement. They differed, however, concerning the basis of church order. Congregationalists believed that the fundamental Christian unity was the individual congregation and were wary of overarching ecclesial structures. Presbyterians believed that ordained ministers and lay elders should be associated in session meetings above the congregational level and be involved with oversight. This issue of polity had divided Presbyterians and Congregationalists (see PRESBYTERIANISM AND CONGREGATIONALISM) since the middle of the seventeenth century. But the combination of a perceived need for mission, coupled with a sense of evangelical camaraderie flowing from the Great Awakening, convinced both bodies that cooperation was possible. Hence the Plan of Union, while recognizing ecclesial diversity, set forth a plan of cooperation between the two bodies for missionizing the west.
With the collapse of the Standing Order of Connecticut (which had established the Congregational church in that state) in 1818, the last major colonial religious establishment came to an end, and denominationalism became the dominant motif in American Protestantism. Denominational Protestantism was marked during these years by two attributes, both tied to the dynamics of denominationalism. The first of these was a vigorous emphasis on institution-building that included evangelization, church planting, largescale PUBLISHING, and the creation of institutions of learning. In the religious marketplace of antebellum America, denominations competed for persons and resources. The vigor and activity of this competition, and its effect on the larger society, impressed foreign observers. The German church historian PHILIP SCHAFF, in his work America (1854), famously contrasted the number, size, and strength of the independent churches of the city of New York with that of his native Berlin, where church and state were still united. A second characteristic was that, despite the competition, there was a degree of cooperation between the religious communities. In one of the earliest accounts of the state of American Protestantism, Robert Baird, in Religion in America (1843), argued that this coop-eration stemmed from the fact that all of the “evangelical denominations” (by which he excluded Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Jews, Mormons, and others) were on the same social footing and were united in maintaining the religious health of the nation. This common task engendered a spirit of unity. The unwritten compact of cooperation by Protestant denominations to strengthen the role of religion in the society, joined with full sympathy for the separation between the state and any individual religious community, has sometimes been called the “voluntary establishment.”
During the nineteenth century, the denominational idea of ecclesial differences, coupled with cooperation, found an international voice in the Evangelical Alliance, an association of European and American Protestant churches. Founded in 1845, the Evangelical Alliance was the first pan-Protestant cooperative organization. As early as 1867, it sponsored prayer for Christian unity. The Evangelical Alliance was concerned primarily with cooperation. As one spokesperson at an early meeting explained, “Alliance is a well-chosen term. It solves the question immediately by force of definition. It expresses all union expedient or possible among Christians who conscientiously differ in forms of administration; while it admits full liberty of individual opinions, within a range agreed upon” (Bedell 1874:151).
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