This question was spurred by a show I saw part of recently called a History of Christianity.
The portion of the show I saw was talking about the myriad different denominations of Christianity found within the USA, and posited a theory that the founding fathers decision to separate church and state led to this affair, as with no ‘mandated’ ‘correct’ religion, and in combination with the freedom of religion, Americans were free to create splinter faiths, and do their own thing.
I’m neither religious nor American, so am a little uneducated on the subjects, but it got me to thinking, what if? What if America’s founding fathers hadn’t decided to formally declare a separation of church and state, what would of America’s development been like?
Would religion in the States be more homogeneous? and if so what shade of Christianity would have run out the winner, would Joseph Smith and his Mormon movement have been destined for oblivion if the various States and the Country as a whole were run by high placed members in another denomination.
Even more interesting to me, would America have developed into an Iran-like State, only with Christian priests running the show rather than Imam’s. That then got me thinking, about what a Fundamentalist Christian State would be like, and what impact that would have on the world, if a superpower like the US was fundamentalist Christian?
I’ve heard the opposite hypothesized; that the separation of church and state is why America is so religious. The idea is that separation of church and state (imperfectly as it has been followed) has forced Christians to behave in a more civilized fashion than they did in Europe since they generally couldn’t just toss members of rivals sects into jail or have them executed. Christian sects may have gotten themselves into the law of various European countries as the state religion, but what they did with that power alienated people to such a degree that the population turned away from religion on a large scale. Meanwhile in America, religion especially Christianity has been spending the same period trying to build up the idea that religion is benevolent, and has focused much of its oppressive tendencies on small unpopular groups like homosexuals.
I don’t think religion in the USA would be homogenous – too many states were started preciselt because the founders were not the same as others, and wanted to get away from the prevailing religion. This the Pilgrims on the Mayflower (although living in a religiously tolerant Netherlands, but were afraid, I am told, of losing their “englishness” and being absorbed into the Dutch people) not only went to America, but stayed in New England instead of Virginia in order to keep away from those Anglicans in Jamestown. (There’s even a theory that they connived to land near Boston, instead of near Virginia, where they were supposed to). The Puritans were oppressive in their ow n right, and chopped down Thomas Morton’s Maypole at Merrymount and arrested him. Roger Williams founded Providence because of his troubles and disagreements with the Boston churches. Anne Hutchinson had the same problem, and founded her own settlement in Rhose Island before moving on to Connecticut. William Penn famously started Pennsylvania as a religious haven for the Quakers and anyone else. Maryland started out as a haven for Catholics.
The Americas also were seen as Someplace Away from the Intolerant for the Shakers, the Amish, the Mennonoites. In addition to these groups that came over from elsewhere, you began to have new sects born in the Americas, such as the utopiam communinites like the Oneidas and the Fruitlands bunch. Then you had the Mormons and the Millerites (who became the Seventh Day Adventists) and the Christian Scientists.
This isn’t by any means an exhaustive list. You had other utopian groups and a host of splinter groups.
Even if you ignored the smaller bunches, the colonists weren’t all the same stripe of Christianity – You certainly had Church of England types starting Virginia and being dominant in the Middle Atlantic, but you had Baptists and other Protestant groups coming in soon enough and forming majorities. Catholics weren’t a majority outside Maryland untril waves of immigrants from Southern Europe started coming in, but the territories that had been French and Spanish always had large Catholic populations, such as Louisiana and California. I don’t think the US could ever have been a majority any particular religion.
John Barry recently published a really good popular biography of Roger Williams. It is a really good discussion of religion in the New England colonies.
It’s worth noting, however, that some colonies did have established churches into the early statehood period. There is some historical evidence that the establishment clause in the first amendment was intended to protect those state churches from being superseded by a federal church.
There was a certain amount of religious pluralism that came about simply from the fact that there were multiple colonies rather than a unitary American polity, but the amount of religious diversity within any particular colony varied quite a bit, I think.
I think the USA was populated by people from all over Europe in the early days so a wide spread of religious views was always going to happen.
In Australia we see a much more homogeneous tableau of Christians due to the majority of our early immigrants coming from the British Isles.
We did see a major influx of Lutherans in the 1950’s with the Snowy River Scheme but largely we have been a COE and Catholic country, maybe that’s why we don’t really buy into the whole “born again” movements.