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CHAPTER III
THE AMERICAN SCENE

Three things must be noted as characteristic of America in the period which witnessed the beginnings of the Disciples of Christ. First, this was a very young nation. Its population was small. Its frontier, which began even east of the Allegheny Mountains, was sparsely settled, but settlers were pouring into it rapidly. The Disciples began on the frontier and moved westward with it. Second, the country’s religious forces were divided into five or six large sects of approximately equal size and many more small ones. The members of all these together constituted only a small fraction, perhaps 10 per cent, of the total population. In no other country was so large a proportion of the people religiously unattached. Third, America had a kind and a degree of religious liberty which had never before existed anywhere in Christendom. Church and state were separated; the support of the churches was purely voluntary; no church had legal advantage or social pre-eminence over others; and every man had complete liberty to adopt any form of worship and belief he thought right (or none), to propagate his faith without hindrance, or to start a new religious organization if he so desired. This combination of circumstances had never before existed. These factors in the environment are immensely important for our study.

Since the movements which produced the Disciples of Christ began so near the beginning of the nineteenth 29 century, we may take the year 1800 as a suitable point at which to make a cross section of the United States and observe, in a very general way, the state of the nation.