Section 22

Conditions confronting Christianity

One of the conditions was the rapid and enormous growth in area

Along with growth in territory went an even greater one in population.

The result of an even more striking multiplication of wealth.

Christianity seemed ill-prepared to meet the threat and the challenge.

Advance of the Frontier

It was on the frontier that Christianity made some of its most striking advances.

In 1847 most of its 267 colporteurs were in the Mississippi Valley, in much of which frontier conditions still prevailed.

After 1815, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, more generally known as the Mormons was added.

The chief growth was not by Mormons but by Baptists, Methodists, and the Disciple of Christ or Christians.

Winning the Immigrants: Roman Catholic

Whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, the success of the Church in holding the immigrants was not due entirely or even chiefly to sociological factors.

Theological seminaries for training youths for priesthood were begun.

Several of the Uniate Churches were represented among the immigrants.

This meant that the clergy and especially the bishops were of necessity promoters, organizers, and administrators.

Winning the Immigrants: Protestant

It was Pietists and those who held staunchly to unmodified older Lutheranism who were mainly responsible for the founding of Lutheran Churches in United States.

The Protestant denominations of the older American stock attracted a greater number from the immigrants of Protestant background than they did from Roman Catholic and Orthodox.

Of the Jewish immigration only a small minority became Christians.

Christianity, mainly Protestantism, made headway among the Chinese and Japanese.

The intellectual challenge

Many believed that science was outmoding Christianity.

On campuses voluntary student Christian movements sprang up and flourished.

Theological seminaries went to other lands to spread the faith and to plant and nourish churches.

The reaching out across ecclesiastical barriers in the effort to unite Christians in the endeavor to win all mankind to the faith.

World-wide spread of the faith

The Protestants, not content to winning the Indians and Negroes, and de-Christianized whites about them, spread the faith on the other side of the Atlantic.

As the 19^th Century progressed American Protestant foreign missions were augmented.

By 1914 more missionaries served from the U.S. in the overseas extension of Protestant Christianity.

Americans served in every continent.