Explore the History of Christianity in the United States

“Christianity in America is, in its inception, is a European story. If you look at a family tree of Christianity in America, it would reflect very closely Christianity in Europe. With the on-going expansion of non-European, non-Protestant immigrant communities across the United States, we’re increasingly challenged to think about how the United States can be one unified nation when so many different ethnic and religious communities live here.”

—Chris Armstrong

In The History of Christianity in the United States (CH241), Chris Armstrong explores how “the church innovated and reaffirmed its central identity in the face of these social changes and how Christians can live and minister better in America and in the world today.” Armstrong provides an introduction to the major movements, ideas, figures, and events in American church history from colonization to recent decades. You will learn “how transplanted European churches responded and American originals sprang up in the face of five centuries of challenges and opportunities in America. These challenges included colonization, the expansion of the frontier, wars of independence and unification, slavery, immigration, intellectual challenges to the faith, and the new political and social realities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”

Explore the trajectory of Christianity in America from “old world transplants that looked pretty much like they did back in Europe to groups that shaped by the American landscape to the democratization of the Church that Nathan Hatch talks about.” Armstrong examines how “different Christian groups respond[ed] differently to the many challenges and opportunities of colonization, the frontier. . . , immigration, slavery, and . . . even the political and social realities of the last few decades.”

As Armstrong says, “In the face of those social changes, you will see the Churches innovating but also reaffirming their central identity, and explore not only how American Christianity got to be the way that it is, but how perhaps we can live and minister better in the midst of it.”

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Get The History of Christianity in the United States CH241 today.