What did the colonists believe about religion when they first came and how did this view change over time?

Robert Bruce Mullin (A World History of Christianity, North America) says that the North American colonies were founded as part of the great outpouring of religious excitement associated with the Reformation era. Of the religious traditions brought from England in the seventeenth century, the Puritan experience was to have the most far-reaching effects. They saw the Church of England as incompletely reformed in a number of areas. Colonial Anglicanism, for its part, discarded the emphasis on theology and emphasised reason, balance, human freedom and morality.

The Great Awakening brought about both religious and political changes in the middle of the eighteenth century. An important effect here was known as Pietism, with an emphais on piety and a zeal for missionary activity.

Slavery had existed in English-speaking America since 1619, but already in the eighteenth century many were finding themselves uneasy with the institution. Quakers led the way in attacking it, and some theologians such as Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803) also criticized the practice. By the end of the eighteenth century there was an increasing consensus, in both the North and the South, that slavery was in some ways a blot upon the republic.

Southerners saw the institution of slavery as their 'peculiar institution' and as a foundation for their distinctive way of life. Southern religious figures claimed that slavery was a positive good and a Christian institution. Northerners found this a difficult argument to counter, as a close reading of Scripture demonstrated that the biblical authors seemed to accept slavery as an institution and nowhere explicitly condemned it, and this theological question became a troubling aspect of the American crisis. The Presbyterian theologian Chades Hodge insisted, "nothing is obligatory upon the conscience but what [the Bible] enjoins; nothing can be sin but what it condemns." If there had been an emphasis on human freedom, this emphasis by now excluded those held in slavery.

The eighteenth century was also the time of the Enlightenment, a time when old religious certainties were being questioned. Several of the Founding Fathers appear to have rejected Christianity in favour of Deism, belief in a God who, having created the world, took no further interest in it. Thomas Jefferson went as far as to produce the "Jefferson Bible", which contained the biblical moral teachings, but rejected all talk of miracles and the divinity of Jesus. Humanists had become too closely associated with the French Revolution, and in its aftermath, Enlightenment thought became seen as inappropriate. Deism became unfashionable.

Late nineteenth century American Protestants seemed to take the question of evolution remarkably in their stride, but the era of the First World War brought about a dramatic reveral, with evolution seen as undergirding a naturalistic world-view, and undermining the idea of a Christian democracy. Throughout the early 1920s a number of southern state legislatures began to pass legislation banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. In 1921, the Tennessee law was challenged in the now-famous Scopes Trial. Nevertheless, the United States remains the principal region of opposition to the concept of evolution.