Religion and the Class Structure

Almost from the beginning, Protestantism has tended to be the religion of the ruling and advantaged groups in the United States. In the early New England theocracies, church membership and the political franchise were closely associated, and both were restricted to a small minority. At the time of the first Federal census in 1790, less than 10 per cent of the population were church members; less than 10 per cent of the church members were Roman Catholics. By this time, most of the formal ties between religious affiliation and political power had been broken, but church membership continued to be confined largely to the more privileged groups. The great Protestant revivals during the nineteenth century broadened the social base of church affiliation immensely. So did the waves of immigration during the latter half of the century; most of the new immigrants after 1880 were Roman Catholics, and their arrival greatly increased the strength of the Catholic Church in the United States, and also gave that church close connections with the growing mass of urban industrial workers. During the same period, Protestant churches were gaining strength in the rural population, among the American Negroes, and in the middle and upper classes of the rising cities. These broad tendencies in the relation of religion to social classes have gradually developed into the present patterns.