United States: A nation that wrote “all men are created equal” into its founding document took nearly 200 years to begin making good on those words. Keys to the culture: Freedom / Liberty · Self-made · Accountability · Race. Geography and history, the church, films and books, and prayer for this land.
A nation that wrote “all men are created equal” into its founding document took nearly 200 years to begin making good on those words.
The United States covers about 9.8 million square kilometres and has roughly 340 million people—an area comparable to China, with about a quarter of its population.
The first key to understanding the United States is scale itself. Driving from the East Coast to the West Coast takes four or five days and crosses four time zones. That scale creates a reality many outsiders underestimate: a ‘state’ is more than an administrative division; people experience it as a distinct place. Laws, taxes, driving licences, gun regulations, school systems, and even whether alcohol may be sold on Sunday differ from one state to another. Cross a state line and the rules change. ‘Moving to another state for a fresh start’ is therefore a normal American option, and tension between federal and state power is a permanent structure of the country, not an occasional political story.
From east to west lie the old Appalachian Mountains; the central Great Plains, one of the world’s largest continuous areas of arable land, linked by the Mississippi River; the Rocky Mountains; and then the West Coast. The climate varies enormously—Alaska, Hawaii, and Florida all sit under the same passport. The southeastern coast is hurricane country, the centre has Tornado Alley, and California has suffered recurring wildfires and drought in recent years.
One more fact is easy to forget: before Europeans arrived, hundreds of peoples lived on this continent and spoke hundreds of languages. The term ‘New World’ makes sense only when viewed from one side.
Hundreds of Indigenous nations lived on this continent before Europeans arrived. The English founded Jamestown in 1607 to pursue commerce; in 1620 the Puritans of the Mayflower landed at Plymouth seeking religious freedom. America has two beginnings, and from the start they represented two different Americas. Yet people who came for religious freedom established colonies with state churches and still expelled dissenters.
The Declaration of Independence stated in 1776 that ‘all men are created equal.’ The Constitution followed in 1787, with slavery embedded in its compromises. Over the next eighty years the contradiction tightened until it ended in the Civil War of 1861–1865, which killed more than 600,000 people and remains the deadliest war in American history. The church must remember one fact from this history: the same Bible was quoted by both sides—in the South to defend slavery and in the North to abolish it.
Slavery ended in 1865, but nearly a century of racial segregation followed. Change did not come until the 1954 Brown decision and the civil rights movement that followed, with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed in 1964 and 1965. The Black church provided the movement’s organisational base: pastors led it, meetings were held in churches, and its songs were hymns.
Several other threads run through the same period: westward expansion meant removal and massacre for Indigenous peoples, including the Trail of Tears; the Gilded Age brought industry and waves of immigration; and the country passed through two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the space race.
The Chinese American story belongs directly in this history. Chinese migrants began arriving in large numbers with the Gold Rush in 1849 and later built the transcontinental railway. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882—the only law in US history to ban immigration comprehensively on the basis of ethnicity. It was repealed only in 1943. Large-scale Chinese immigration followed the 1965 immigration reforms, and most Chinese American communities today were formed after that turning point.
After the Second World War, the United States dominated the global economy and culture for half a century. Manufacturing moved away from the 1970s onward, leaving a Rust Belt across the Midwest; then came the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic. The question history leaves for the present is always the same: a nation that writes its ideals on paper must keep confronting the gap between what is written and what exists on the ground. That gap is both its driving force and the place where it repeatedly tears apart.
The first thing to know about American church history is that it has two beginnings. The Puritans crossed the sea seeking religious freedom, yet the Massachusetts Bay Colony they founded united church and government. Roger Williams was expelled for advocating their separation and went on to found Rhode Island. Religious freedom in America was not there from the beginning; it was won by people who had been driven out.
The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s—associated with Jonathan Edwards in New England and George Whitefield, who crossed the Atlantic from Britain—made a structural change: faith became a personal decision rather than an identity received at birth. That has shaped the voluntary character of American religion ever since. The First Amendment in 1791 prohibited both an established religion and interference with religious exercise. When Tocqueville visited in the 1830s, he concluded that the church was so vigorous precisely because it did not depend on the state, unlike the established churches of Europe.
The Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century brought camp meetings and rapid Methodist and Baptist growth. It also directly inspired movements for abolition, temperance, and women’s rights—evangelicals were once an engine of social reform.
Slavery then split the church in two. Baptists and Methodists divided between North and South; the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 partly over the claim that slaveholders could serve as missionaries. In the midst of this struggle the Black church emerged: the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816, and the ‘invisible church’ of enslaved people meeting in the woods. This is one of the most important and often least understood threads in American church history. A century later, the civil rights movement grew from these congregations. In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention publicly apologised for its history of supporting slavery.
In the twentieth century, the modernist–fundamentalist controversy of the 1920s drew lines that still shape the church. Billy Graham’s mass evangelistic meetings brought evangelicalism into the mainstream. The United States sent more missionaries than any other country in the twentieth century, and churches around the world still read American books, sing American hymns, and use American discipleship materials. From the 1970s onward, evangelicals became heavily involved in political mobilisation.
The present situation must be described honestly. Sunday attendance has fallen over a long period. The number of people claiming no religious affiliation is rising rapidly, especially among the young, and one repeatedly cited reason for leaving is the church’s entanglement with political parties—a social fact stated here without judging which party is right. Multiple denominations have faced scandals involving sexual abuse and concealment; the Southern Baptist Convention released an independent investigation in 2022. Sunday morning is often called ‘the most segregated hour of the week’ because racial separation remains a fact of American church life. At the same time, some of the most vibrant growth is in immigrant churches: Chinese, Korean, Latin American, and African congregations are flourishing in American cities.
The American church has given much to the world, and it has exported its problems too. Its present struggles therefore offer an advance warning to churches elsewhere, rather than merely news about someone else.