One Faith, Many Peoples: How American Christianity Became a Story of Religious Diversity, 1790–Present

Most textbooks present American Christianity as one tradition with Anglo-Protestant roots. In fact, many Christian communities had to win a place here. In 1790, George Washington promised Catholics equal protection. Within decades a Missouri governor ordered Latter-day Saints “exterminated or driven from the State,” and Philadelphia mobs burned Catholic churches. American churches split over slavery a generation before the nation did. Black Christians built their own institutions, and Pentecostalism was born in a multiracial Los Angeles mission in 1906.

This plan asks students one question: how did new Christian communities win a place in a nation that saw itself mainly as White Protestant, and what did that do to the nation? Students work with primary sources from 1790 to the present, including Washington’s letter, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Houston speech, and Supreme Court cases. They then examine today’s Christian community, now more Latino, Asian, African, and immigrant than ever before.

What’s inside

• A three-period inquiry lesson for Grade 11 U.S. History, with Grade 8 and Grade 12 civics adaptations
• A student source packet with nine sources (A–I), each with context notes, glossaries, and analysis prompts, plus a teacher key
• Eight full-page historical images, including Executive Order 44, an 1844 newspaper report of the Philadelphia riots, Douglass’s portrait, and the leaders of the Azusa Street Mission
• A section on what Christian communities built: schools, hospitals, refugee resettlement, and social services that serve Americans of every faith and none
• Recent data from the Pew Research Center and the FBI on the diversity of Christian Americans and the threats churches face today
• A state alignment worksheet, with completed examples for California, Texas, and New York, and an optional ING speaker panel

For educators: This plan meets the religion-in-American-life standards found in nearly every state. It also covers events you already teach, such as the Second Great Awakening, nativism, the churches and slavery, the civil rights movement, and the school-religion court cases. It treats Christianity the same academic way other plans in the series treat other faiths: as history, studied from documents, with no devotional activity. A panel of Christian speakers from different traditions, organized by ING, can bring the community’s own voices into your classroom, in person or virtually.

For community leaders: Share this plan with teachers, schools, and districts in your area. It helps students see that pluralism includes the majority faith. Christian Americans are themselves an intercultural community, and their history of exclusion and belonging is part of the same story that minority faiths tell.

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