Academic literature on the topic 'Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. Southern Reformed Presbytery'

The American Revolution inspired new movements with a longing to restore what they believed was a primitive and pure form of the church, uncorrupted by the accretions of the centuries. Unlike most Canadians, Americans were driven by the rhetoric of human equality, in which individual believers could dispense with creeds or deference to learned ministers. This chapter argues that one manifestation of this was the Restorationist impulse: the desire to recover beliefs and practices believed lost or obscured. While that impulse could be found in many Protestant bodies, the groups classified as ‘Restorationist’ in North America emerged from what is today labelled the Stone-Campbell movement. They were not known explicitly as Restorationists as they identified themselves as ‘Christian Churches’ or ‘Disciples of Christ’ in a bid to find names that did not separate them from other Christians. The roots of this movement lay in the Republican Methodist Church or ‘Christian Church’ founded by James O’Kelly on the principle of representative governance in church and state. As its ‘Christian’ title implied, the new movement was supposed to effect Christian unity. It was carried forward in New England by Abner Jones and Elias Smith who came from Separate Baptist congregations. Smith was a radical Jeffersonian republican who rejected predestination, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and original sin as human inventions and would be rejected from his own movement when he embraced universalism. The Presbyterian minister Barton W. Stone was the most important advocate of the Christian movement in Kentucky and Tennessee. Stone was a New Light Presbyterian who fell out with his church in 1803 because he championed revivals to the displeasure of Old Light Presbyterians. With other ministers he founded the Springfield Presbytery and published an Apology which rejected ‘human creeds and confessions’ only to redub their churches as Christian Churches or Churches of Christ. Stone’s movement coalesced with the movement founded by Alexander Campbell, the son of an Ulster Scot who emigrated to the United States after failing to effect reunion between Burgher and Anti-Burghers and founded an undenominational Christian Association. Alexander embraced baptism by immersion under Baptist influence, so that the father and son’s followers were initially known as Reformed (or Reforming) Baptists. The increasing suspicion with which Baptists regarded his movement pushed Alexander into alliance with Stone, although Campbell was uneasy about formal terms of alliance. For his part, Stone faced charges from Joseph Badger and Joseph Marsh that he had capitulated to Campbell. The Stone-Campbell movement was nonetheless successful, counting 192,000 members by the Civil War and over a million in the United States by 1900. Successful but bifurcated, for there were numerous Christian Churches which held out from joining the Stone-Campbell movement, which also suffered a north–south split in the Civil War era over political and liturgical questions. The most buoyant fraction of the movement were the Disciples of Christ or Christian Churches of the mid-west, which shared in the nationalistic and missionary fervour of the post-war era, even though it too in time would undergo splits.

Presbyterians and Congregationalists arrived in colonial America as Dissenters; however, they soon exercised a religious and cultural dominance that extended well into the first half of the nineteenth century. The multi-faceted Second Great Awakening led within the Reformed camp by the Presbyterian James McGready in Kentucky, a host of New Divinity ministers in New England, and Congregationalist Charles Finney in New York energized Christians to improve society (Congregational and Presbyterian women were crucial to the three most important reform movements of the nineteenth century—antislavery, temperance, and missions) and extend the evangelical message around the world. Although outnumbered by other Protestant denominations by mid-century, Presbyterians and Congregationalists nevertheless expanded geographically, increased in absolute numbers, spread the Gospel at home and abroad, created enduring institutions, and continued to dominate formal religious thought. The overall trajectory of nineteenth-century Presbyterianism and Congregationalism in the United States is one that tracks from convergence to divergence, from cooperative endeavours and mutual interests in the first half the nineteenth century to an increasingly self-conscious denominational awareness that became firmly established in both denominations by the 1850s. With regional distribution of Congregationalists in the North and Presbyterians in the mid-Atlantic region and South, the Civil War intensified their differences (and also divided Presbyterians into antislavery northern and pro-slavery southern parties). By the post-Civil War period these denominations had for the most part gone their separate ways. However, apart from the southern Presbyterians, who remained consciously committed to conservatism, they faced a similar host of social and intellectual challenges, including higher criticism of the Bible and Darwinian evolutionary theory, to which they responded in varying ways. In general, Presbyterians maintained a conservative theological posture whereas Congregationalists accommodated to the challenges of modernity. At the turn of the century Congregationalists and Presbyterians continued to influence sectors of American life but their days of cultural hegemony were long past. In contrast to the nineteenth-century history of Presbyterian and Congregational churches in the United States, the Canadian story witnessed divergence evolving towards convergence and self-conscious denominationalism to ecclesiastical cooperation. During the very years when American Presbyterians were fragmenting over first theology, then slavery, and finally sectional conflict, political leaders in all regions of Canada entered negotiations aimed at establishing the Dominion of Canada, which were finalized in 1867. The new Dominion enjoyed the strong support of leading Canadian Presbyterians who saw in political confederation a model for uniting the many Presbyterian churches that Scotland’s fractious history had bequeathed to British North America. In 1875, the four largest Presbyterian denominations joined together as the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The unifying and mediating instincts of nineteenth-century Canadian Presbyterianism contributed to forces that in 1925 led two-thirds of Canadian Presbyterians (and almost 90 per cent of their ministers) into the United Church, Canada’s grand experiment in institutional ecumenism. By the end of the nineteenth century, Congregationalism had only a slight presence, whereas Presbyterians, by contrast, became increasingly more important until they stood at the centre of Canada’s Protestant history.