“John Calvin was the virtual founder of America.” ~ German historian Leopold von Ranke
Presbyterianism in Colonial America
Francis Makemie (Scots-Irish Minister) is primarily viewed as founding Presbyterianism in America, which dominates the middle colonies and seeps in both the North and South. The four strongholds of early colonial Presbyterianism were New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.
Makemie established the Synod of Philidelphia in 1706
Presbyterianism fights over revivalism and evangelicalism
In 1738 a requirement is added that all ministers must complete Seminary Education, something the evangelicals/revivalists resent and resist. The church briefly splits between the ‘old side’ and ‘new side’, with both largely in unity about all other aspects. Jonathan Edwards baptized some pietism into reformed Evangelicalism, but many Presbyterians ardently resisted this.
Talk about how Presbyterians are largely middle-class/bourgeoise/yeoman types
Presbyterianism in the American Revolution
“The Revolution of 1776, so far as it was affected by religion, was a Presbyterian measure. It was the natural outgrowth of the principles which the Presbyterianism of the Old World planted in her sons, the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, the French Huguenots, the Dutch Calvinists, and the Presbyterians of Ulster.”
George Bancroft, who also called Calvin “the father of America,” and added, “He who will not honor the memory and respect the influence of Calvin knows but little of the origin of American liberty.”
As well as Loraine Boettner
“Calvinism has been the chief source of republican government.”
Nearly a third of the founding fathers graduated from Princeton
“When Cornwallis was driven back to ultimate retreat and surrender at Yorktown, all of the colonels of the Colonial Army but one were Presbyterian elders. More than one-half of all the soldiers and officers of the American Army during the Revolution were Presbyterians.” ~ J.R. Sizoo
As well as
“From 1706 to the opening of the revolutionary struggle, the only body in existence which stood for our present national political organization [republicanism] was the General Synod of the American Presbyterian Church… The Congregational Churches of New England had no connection with each other, and had no power apart from the civil government. The Episcopal Church was without organization in the colonies, was dependent for support and a ministry on the Established Church of England, and was filled with an intense loyalty to the British monarchy. The Reformed Dutch Church did not become an efficient and independent organization until 1771, and the German Reformed Church did not attain to that condition until 1793. The Baptist Churches were separate organizations, the Methodists were practically unknown, and the Quakers were non-combatants.” ~ Dr. W.H. Roberts
Presbyterianism and the Civil War
Presbyterian Ministers, namely James Henley Thornwell, Benjamin Palmer, and Robert Lewis Dabney were at the forefront of fomenting civil war
At the outbreak of the war Thornwell would write
“The parties in the conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders. They are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake.”
Southern and Conservative Presbyterians both during and after the Civil War believed themselves to be THE custodians of orthodoxy against an onslaught of Prussianism
Union Theological Seminary represented these german theological ideas that had begun to come over during and after the civil war, most critically the higher criticism of Julius Wellhausen and David Friedrich Strauss. This comes to a head when the head of Union Theological Seminary, Charles A. Briggs, preached a sermon in 1891 which stated the Bible contained many errors and could not be inerrant.
The Portland Deliverance
In response 63 presbyteries wrote to the general assembly demanding action. Briggs was denied the chair of Union Seminary, but Union secured alternate funding to install him there anyway.
The next year the Portland Deliverance is secured, which compels all PCUS ministers to affirm Biblical inerrancy or cease to be PCUS ministers. Briggs would be convicted under this declaration the following year and defrocked, but the march of Higher Criticism could not be stopped.
The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, Machen’s defection
The Fundamentals are published by two Presbyterian elders 1910-1915, funded by Lyman and Milton Stewart, two California oil men. Three million volumes were distributed in the United States1
The fundamentalists have two chief enemies - higher criticism, and ‘darwinism’. Even as PCUS leadership is increasingly liberal, conservative insurgence grows at Princeton
J. Gresham Machen writes in Christianity and Liberalism. “Christ died--that is history; Christ died for our sins--that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.”
The South splits once more: The PCUS crumbles and the PCA is born
The PCUS’ leftward drift had continued since the days of Machen, and the denomination was contemplating unions with several Presbyterian Synods which ordained women to both the position of elder and minister. In the wake of this and fallout from the war over Civil Rights, the Southern churches of the PCUS where names like Thornwell, Dabney, and Machen still held weight broke from the PCUS to form the Presbyterian Church in America, or the PCA, in 1973. John Edward Richards, who helped lead the charge, wrote a book about the reasons the PCA separated. In it he decried “The Socialists, who declare all men are equal. Therefore there must be a great leveling of all humanity and a oneness from privilege and possession” as well as “The Racial Almalgomist who preaches that all the races should be merged into one race and differences erased in oneness.”
In 2016 the PCA ‘lamented’ its founders as racists.
“Whatever the cause, the Calvinists were the only fighting Protestants. It was they whose faith gave them courage to stand up for the Reformation. In England, Scotland, France, Holland, they, and they only, did the work, and but for them the Reformation would have been crushed…. If it had not been for Calvinists, Huguenots, Puritans, and whatever you like to call them, the Pope and Philip would have won, and we should either be Papists or Socialists.” ~ Sir John Skelton
Marsden, George M. (2006). Fundamentalism and American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 118–119.