Christianity in the NewWorld-
chronology of faith-
by Archbishop Dr. Uwe AE.Rosenkranz, MA, DD.
source: Noll, M. A. (2002). The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (S. 292–299). Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
We often talk in phrases of modern theology, especially, when american related christendom is mentioned.
But we sometime forget the "Old Religion" or think these are two contradictionary systems.
In fact, Europe has a 2 Millenium old christianity and culture. US american culture and spirituality has it´s roots in european christianity.
Pls have a look on the chronology:
CHRONOLOGY
1492 Columbus journeys to the New World with a hope that his voyage would discover “how [the Native Americans’] conversion to our Holy Faith might be undertaken.”
1493 Pope Alexander VI grants Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain control of the lands Columbus explored.
1521 Conquistador Hernán Cortés besieges the Aztec capital as Martin Luther speaks at the Diet of Worms.
1523–33 Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian missionaries arrive in Mexico baptizing as many as ten million Indians in the first two decades of Spanish rule.
1531 A Christian Indian in Mexico, Juan Diego, according to several reports, receives a visitation from the Virgin Mary at Guadalupe.
1537 Pope Paul III issues the bull Sublimis Deus, which, against colonial practice, defines the Indians as fully human and fully capable of becoming Christians.
1607 English Anglicans settle in Jamestown, Virginia.
1608 The French explorer Samuel de Champlain establishes the city of Quebec.
1619 The first Africans arrive in Virginia as indentured servants.
1620, 1630 Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, respectively, are settled by two different groups of Puritans (in 1691 they unite as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts).
1630–49 Father Jean de Brébeuf and fellow Jesuits contextualize the Christian message for the Huron Indians in what is now Ontario, Canada, before being martyred.
1634 George and Cecil Calvert establish the colony of Maryland as a refuge for English Roman Catholics.
1636 Roger Williams is banished from Massachusetts and soon founds the colony of Rhode Island with an unusual extension of religious freedom.
1636 The first college in the English colonies, Harvard, is formed by Massachusetts Puritans to train ministers and magistrates.
1638 Anne Hutchinson is banished from Massachusetts for her views on the freedom of God’s grace.
1663 Quebec Catholics found Laval, the first university in Canada.
1673 The French Jesuit, Jacques Marquette, joins Louis Jolliet’s exploration of the Mississippi River Valley for the purpose of preaching the gospel to Native Americans.
1681 Pennsylvania is established by William Penn as a Quaker colony, but open for settlement to all Christians.
1684 Francis Makemie, a Scots-Irish immigrant, establishes the first American Presbytery.
1692 Twenty Massachusetts residents are executed for witchcraft at Salem.
1707 The Philadelphia Association of Regular Baptists becomes the first Baptist organization in the New World.
1735–45 The colonial Great Awakening features George Whitefield (itinerant) and Jonathan Edwards (theologian) as central figures.
1740 George Whitefield, although a slaveowner himself, goes out of his way to preach to African Americans during his second visit to the colonies.
1763 Britain gains control of Quebec in the Treaty of Paris.
1769 The first Methodist preachers, commissioned by John Wesley, arrive in New York and Pennsylvania.
1771 Francis Asbury migrates to America and soon becomes the key figure in the establishment of an American Methodist church (1784).
1773 The first independent black church forms in Silver Bluff, South Carolina; many follow soon thereafter.
1774 The Quebec Act secures civil rights for Canadian Catholics that their co-religionists in Britain do not gain until 1829.
1776 On July 4, the thirteen American colonies declare their independence from Britain.
1784 John Carroll, the first American Catholic bishop, devotes several pages of a published work to rebutting the charge that Catholics stifle free inquiry.
1786 The Virginia legislature enacts Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.
1789 The First Amendment, which guarantees the free exercise of religion to all citizens and prohibits the establishment of any national religion, is added to the United States Constitution.
1790 A great mobilization of Protestants begins featuring the Methodists and Baptists but involving many other Protestant churches in what is sometimes called “the Second Great Awakening.”
1795 Russian Orthodox monks settle in Alaska and establish the first lasting Orthodox presence in North America.
1809 Elizabeth Ann Seton, an Episcopalian-born convert to Roman Catholicism, founds the Sisters of Charity, one of the first religious orders in the United States (in 1975 “Mother” Seton becomes the first North American-born person declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church).
1814 Richard Allen forms the first African American denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
1816 The American Bible Society is founded, emblematic of a great wave of new, mostly religious voluntary societies in the United States.
1821 Charles Finney converts to Christianity and begins work as a revivalist preacher.
1821 Mexico gains its independence from Spain.
1820s Joseph Smith begins to see visions that culminate in the publication of The Book of Mormon in 1830.
1827 Harriet Livermore, a revival preacher, becomes the first American woman to preach before the United States Congress.
1827 Jarena Lee, a black female associate of Richard Allen, travels over two thousand miles and preaches on 180 different occasions.
1831 Followers of Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone join ranks to form the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), from which later also come the Churches of Christ and the Christian Church.
1831–32 Alexis de Tocqueville visits North America from France and then publishes Democracy in America (1835, 1840), a work stressing the free nature of American religion as a key to its success.
1833 The Congregationalist Church of Massachusetts is disestablished; it is the last American denomination to retain vestiges of state support.
1834 A Boston mob burns an Ursuline convent, illustrating the strong anti-Catholicism of many American Protestants.
1835 Phoebe Palmer, a Methodist writer and speaker, begins an influential home meeting in New York City where she teaches “holiness,” or entire consecration to God.
1836 Angelina Grimké publishes a widely-read abolitionist tract (her sister Sara does the same in 1838).
1837 Northern and Southern Presbyterians split over issues of church order and theology (and secondarily of whether to tolerate slavery).
1842 Immigration to the United States tops 100,000 for the first time, with almost half of the immigrants from Ireland and their presence increasing the Roman Catholic numbers in America.
1843 Thousands of followers of William Miller wait for the return of Christ on March 21 and then on October 22, 1844 as Miller prophesied (several denominations spring from the “Disappointment” when nothing happens, the most important being the Seventh-day Adventists of Ellen White).
1844 The two largest and most widespread American denominations, the Baptists and Methodists, both divide North and South over the question of slavery.
1845 Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and himself a Christian, attacks the use of Christianity to protect slavery.
1850s Religious arguments sharpen North-South tensions and so help prepare for the violence of the Civil War.
1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel with many religious themes supporting its denunciation of slavery.
1854 The American (or Know Nothing) party organizes with the intent of keeping Roman Catholics and immigrants from gaining political office.
1855 An anonymous Definite Synodical Platform circulates among Lutherans and calls for a revision of the Augsburg Confession along lines dictated by American revivalism; rejection of this proposal indicates the growing influence of confessional Lutheranism.
1861–65 During the American Civil War there are widespread revivals among soldiers in the camps, but changes stimulated by the war undercut the influence of the country’s historic Protestant churches.
1865 The United States Congress passes legislation to place the phrase “In God We Trust” on certain gold and silver coins.
1865 African American churches in the South break from white control, resulting in several new denominations.
1867 The Dominion of Canada is formed.
1868 The Fourteenth Amendment passes with the intent of guaranteeing civil rights to freed slaves.
1874 Frances Willard and associates found the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
1875 Dwight L. Moody returns from a successful revival tour in Britain and embarks upon a noteworthy career as an urban evangelist in the United States and Canada.
1880 Amanda Berry Smith, an African American, visits India; later she carries out preaching and social work in Liberia and then her native Chicago.
1880 The Salvation Army opens its work in the United States (two years later in Canada) and soon is sponsoring the most effective Protestant outreach to the continent’s burgeoning cities.
1881 Immigration to the United States tops 500,000 for the first time, with Germany providing the most immigrants and the presence of Germans increasing the number of Lutherans (along with high immigrant totals from Scandinavia), Catholics, Jews, and “free thinkers” in the country.
1884 The construction and maintenance of parochial schools is the prime matter for discussion by the third plenary council of American Catholic archbishops and bishops.
1885 Josiah Strong, later secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, publishes Our Country, a work warning against the religious effects of immigrants, Roman Catholicism, and city life.
1886 Augustus Tolton becomes the first American of pure African descent to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest.
1886 Catholic parents in Edgerton, Wisconsin petition their local school board to stop readings from the King James Version of the Bible.
1895 Pope Leo XIII issues the encyclical Longinqua Oceani, followed by Testem Benevolentiae in 1899, addressed specifically to curb “Americanism,” or excessive accommodation to democratic liberalism.
1905 Immigration to the United States tops one million for the first time, with countries of Southern and Eastern Europe accounting for most of the immigrants and their presence increasing the number of Catholics, Jews, Orthodox, and nonbelievers in the country.
1906 Black and white worshipers at a chapel on Azusa Street in Los Angeles speak in tongues and inaugurate the worldwide Pentecostal movement.
1906 A federal census reveals astounding growth in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, reaching 12 million adherents (14 percent of the U.S. population) and over 15,000 clergy.
1907 Tikhon Bellavin, the Russian Orthodox bishop in North America, convenes the first All-American Council of Orthodox Churches.
1908 The Federal Council of Churches is formed to promote cooperative action by the older, mainline Protestant denominations.
1909 Oxford University Press publishes the Scofield Bible, the most influential publication promoting the theology of dispensational premillennialism.
1910–15 The Fundamentals: A Testimony to Truth are published as a way of defending traditional Christian doctrines against the new proposals of theological modernists.
1912 The publication of Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianizing the Social Order is the fullest statement of the Social Gospel, a movement of moderate and liberal Protestants aimed at alleviating the inhumane conditions of recently industrialized cities.
1914 World War I and legislation in Congress from the 1920s dramatically reduce the number of immigrants arriving in the United States.
1917 Mexico enacts a new constitution with many rules against religion, particularly Catholicism. When it is enforced nine years later, it sparks violence and civil war that finally results in the restoration of church privileges.
1917 The National Catholic War Council is established during World War I to oversee chaplains in the military; later it evolves into the National Catholic Welfare Council and other national Catholic organizations.
1919 Pressure from many religious groups, mostly Protestant, leads to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the sale or use of alcoholic beverages (the amendment is repealed in 1933).
1923 Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson employs the radio as one of the first in a great flood of American religious figures who exploit the same medium.
1925 At the trial of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan defends the rights of states to ban the teaching of evolution, while Clarence Darrow attacks such laws as bigoted.
1927 Dorothy Day is converted to Roman Catholicism and soon thereafter founds, with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker Movement.
1928 Al Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, is the first Roman Catholic nominated by a major party for president (he is defeated by the Republican Herbert Hoover, at least in part because of fear of his Catholicism).
1930s During the Great Depression, mainline Protestant churches lose ground, but fundamentalist, holiness, Pentecostal, and African American continue to grow.
1932 The publication of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society establishes his reputation as the most influential public theologian of the period.
1933 Jacques Maritain, the French neo-Thomist, lectures for the first time in North America (Toronto) and in so doing supports Catholic engagement with Thomism in many spheres of life.
1940, 1947 Decisions of the United States Supreme Court apply to the states the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion that have hitherto been considered a check only on the national government.
1943 The establishment of the National Association of Evangelicals marks the desire of some Northern fundamentalists to move beyond the narrow confines of that movement.
1945 In the economic boom that follows World War II, there is also a boom in new church construction for both Protestants and Catholics.
1949 Billy Graham holds a successful evangelistic campaign in Los Angeles and soon emerges as the most visible American Protestant in the United States and abroad.
1950 The National Council of Churches is formed as a successor to the Federal Council; soon it broadens its membership to include Orthodox churches and invites Roman Catholics as observers.
1952 A copy of the new Revised Standard Version, the first translation of the Bible besides the King James Version to gain a large American following among Protestants, is presented to President Harry Truman.
1954 The Supreme Court ends the racial segregation of American schools, sparking the large-scale Civil Rights movement of the next two decades.
1950s Mainline Protestant denominations, following the earlier example of several Holiness, Wesleyan, and Pentecostal denominations, begin to ordain women to the ministry.
1960 A Standing Conference of Canonical Bishops is founded to improve dialogue among the Orthodox churches, which by this time include Byelorussian, Albanian, Romanian, Serbian, Egyptian, Bulgarian, and Syrian as well as Russian, Ukrainian, and Greek congregations.
1960 John F. Kennedy becomes the first Roman Catholic elected as president of the United States.
1962–63 The U.S. Supreme Court prohibits prayers and Bible readings as mandated activities in public schools.
1962–65 The Second Vatican Council leads to much greater Catholic/non-Catholic dialogue in all areas of North American life.
1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers the climactic closing address at a massive March on Washington to promote civil rights.
1963 John F. Kennedy’s assassination, followed by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. (both 1968), adds to the feeling of crisis in a tumultuous decade.
1973 The United States Supreme Court legalizes most forms of abortion, thus laying the groundwork for the rise of the New Christian Right.
1974 An International Congress on World Evangelization is held in Lausanne, Switzerland, connecting American evangelicals with many delegates from around the world.
1975 Willow Creek Community Church is formed outside Chicago and serves as a model for “megachurches.”
1976 Jimmy Carter becomes president while not hiding his Christian convictions and attempts to put those convictions into practice throughout his time in office (1977–81).
1979 Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister, founds the Moral Majority, the forerunner of the Christian Coalition and a general rallying point for the New Christian Right.
1980s Pentecostal Hispanic churches are recognized as being among the fastest growing in North America.
1984 The United States establishes full diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
1987–99 The American Catholic church deals with pressure for clerical marriage and the ordination of women amidst the decline in religious vocations.
1992–94 A renewed wave of conservative political activism leads to the formation of the Christian Coalition and other right-wing religious political organizations.
1995 Donald Argue (a minister of the Assemblies of God) becomes head of the National Association of Evangelicals, demonstrating the entry of Pentecostals into the mainstream of American Protestant life.
1996 A series of arson attacks strike Southern black churches (seventy-five fires in eighteen months).
1997 Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s organization, holds the largest reported religious gathering in U.S. history to promote fidelity and renewed religious commitment for husbands and fathers.
1997–99 Almost-daily revival services continue at a congregation of the Vineyard Movement outside Toronto and at the Brownsville Assemblies of God Church in Pensacola, Florida.
1997–2000 Mainline Protestant churches continue to debate whether to ordain practicing homosexuals and whether to bless same-sex unions.
2000 Federal elections in the United States, Mexico, and Canada feature heightened attention to religious questions; in the United States, Joseph Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, is nominated as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate and speaks freely about the importance of religion for American public life.
Noll, M. A. (2002). The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (S. 292–299). Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
