From our nation’s beginnings, Americans have feared the death of religion. The Puritans had not even arrived in the New World before they started predicting what would happen should they prove faithless to the Lord. In his “Model of Christian Charity” address, given to English Puritans departing for New England in 1630, Massachusetts Bay Company governor John Winthrop gave the travelers a chilling warning. They were engaging in a great, godly mission: establishing a true Christian society in the American wilderness. “If we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us,” Winthrop proclaimed, “we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us.” What if they neglected their high calling? They would be “consumed out of the good land whither we are going.” They would be crushed by God’s wrath.
The Puritan fear of falling away set an enduring American pattern: the dread of spiritual inactivity, passivity, indifference, and non-belief. The Puritans did everything people could reasonably do to make sure colonists were in church on Sundays (and on Thursdays for the customary midweek service). They legally required church attendance. They often enforced this rule, especially in the 1600s in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Those colonies, and then states, had an “established” church: the Congregationalist denomination. One of the jobs of an “establishment of religion” (as the First Amendment to the Constitution termed it) was to make people go to church. People had to go, whether they were devout or not.
Some committed believers worried when the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791 declined to establish a national denomination in law. The Founders – especially James Madison – based the new American nation’s religious commitment on the voluntary principle of “free exercise of religion.” Everyone knew that “free exercise” could also mean the freedom not to exercise religion. But in the old Puritan colonies of New England, state establishments of religion endured for decades after the First Amendment. That amendment said nothing about official churches in the states. Massachusetts kept its established church in place all the way to 1833.
By 1791, America still retained its characteristic fears about its people falling away from God. But Enlightenment-influenced thinkers such as Madison and Thomas Jefferson, backed by legions of upstart evangelical groups such as the Baptists, added a new wrinkle to that ancient fear. True religious commitment, they asserted, could only be voluntary. The state couldn’t coerce or create authentic piety. Going back for centuries, people in Europe and much of America had assumed that strong religion needed government backing. England maintained the Church of England (it does today) as the official church of the nation. A lot of people back then didn’t go to church regularly. Even fewer do in England today. But at least everyone knew the British had an official Christian church. Everyone knew where you went to have newborns baptized, to get married, and to bury the dead.
America took a new path, fueled by the Enlightenment and by the massive revivals of the Great Awakening in the 1740s. We often think of Enlightenment and Christian revival as enemies, but they weren’t in this case. Both evangelicals and toleration-minded liberals wanted religion to operate on free market principles. Churches that competed for adherents would flourish without bureaucratic obstacles. Churches that didn’t compete, or pastors that failed to work hard, would fail. The people themselves – “we the people,” as the Constitution put it – would decide where to go to church. They would decide whether to go to church at all. But to many religious Americans, this voluntary arrangement, this free market of faith, seemed like a gamble of historic proportions.
For our purposes, 1791 was a bigger turning point than 1630, when the Puritans arrived. Most of the early colonists, even in relatively business-minded settlements like Virginia, assumed that established churches would hold American religion together. Early Virginia law even threatened to bore a hole through the tongue of a blasphemer! (Thankfully this provision does not appear to have been strictly enforced.) A couple colonies, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, declined to establish any particular denomination, but both still required forms of generic Christian observance, such as honoring the Sabbath. After 1791, the nation headed in a more voluntary direction. You might even say it went in a more “secular” direction. But this was true only in the sense that American government was stepping back from enforcing religious adherence.
America between 1791 and 1861 (the beginning of the Civil War) was decidedly not secular in its soaring numbers of religious adherents. Because of the breakout growth of denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists, those seventy years became the greatest era of Christian expansion in American history. This was the era of the Second Great Awakening. No one in 1791 knew that the Second Great Awakening was imminent, however. Instead, many feared that the new nation, with no government support for religion, would fall into spiritual decay. They even had a name for new, rising masses of people they imagined falling away from church. They didn’t call them the “unchurched” or the “nones,” as we would today. They called them “nothingarians.”
In The Convert (1857), the influential Catholic writer Orestes Brownson’s iconic story of religious pilgrimage, he tells of the delirious confusions of New England’s Second Great Awakening. No one instructed him about sacraments or the institutional church, but they insisted that he needed to “get religion” and be born again. He spent the most time at Churches of Christ and Methodist meetings. The main difference between the two, as far as he could tell, was that “the Methodist preachers appeared to have the stronger lungs; they preached in a louder tone, and when they preached, the people shouted more.” He could not settle down, however, and by age fourteen he “fell in with the new sectaries, universalists, deists, atheists and nothingarians, as they are called with us, who profess no particular religion.” Brownson would make his spiritual home for a time with Unitarians and Transcendentalists, before turning to the churchly rootedness of Roman Catholicism in 1844.[1]
“Nothingarians, as they are called with us, who profess no particular religion.” The term “nothingarian” reveals a forgotten presence in America’s early decades: the religiously unaffiliated. Journalistic accounts of the unaffiliated today often imply that this issue is new in American history. It’s not. The unaffiliated have had different names, and reflected somewhat different fears, throughout the American past. Although it seems to have originated much earlier, as a term for a little-known sect in Rhode Island, “nothingarian” would come to connote the irreligious, ambivalent, or unaffiliated person, one whom pollsters of religion today would call a none.
The fear of nothingarians was especially acute in the early 1800s because of the widespread disestablishment of official denominations, rapid settlement on the frontier, and deep uncertainties about American national cohesion after independence in 1776. The British Empire and British Protestant faith served as cultural “scaffolding” for pre-Revolutionary America. The Revolution destroyed that scaffolding, but it did not wholly eliminate the assumptions about religion and nation that had bolstered it. Legally and circumstantially, these disruptions accelerated the process by which being religious became more of a choice than an inherited identity. Many observers in the 1790s and following decades feared that disestablishment and religious choice would lead not to massive numbers of conversions, but to masses of indifferent, skeptical, or unaffiliated people.
The term nothingarian is important because it was widely used (if poorly defined). It reflected widespread fears about preserving religious affiliation and building a new American nation without state churches or a national establishment. Actual nothingarians were somewhat elusive, and seem rarely to have used the term as a self-descriptor. (We make the same point about the nones’ elusiveness today.) Yet critics attached huge significance to religiously unaffiliated people in a post-disestablishment American nation. Popular fears about the unaffiliated drove the conversation. In that sense, there’s nothing new under the sun in American religion.[2]
Editor’s note: This essay is a slightly reframed excerpt from Byron R. Johnson and Thomas S. Kidd’s new book, The Death of Religion? Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith (B&H Academic, 2026).
[1] Henry F. Brownson, ed., The Works of Orestes A. Brownson (Detroit, 1885), 5: 7-9.
[2] Katherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 22, 52; Lincoln A. Mullen, The Chance of Salvation: A History of Conversion in America (Harvard University Press, 2017), 18-20.
