Sectarian Impulse.

The revolutionary era saw the beginnings of a more diverse religious society than America or Europe had ever known. The basis of the religious pluralism of the United States today lay in the new religious movements of the 1770s and 1780s. Even earlier, groups of revivalists had broken away from the established churches of New England and the Chesapeake Bay area to form new religious communities. But these groups of Virginia Baptists or New Light Congregationalists did not reject the basic Calvinist theology that most English settlers had brought with them to the New World. During the revolutionary years a few new groups made a more radical attack on those Calvinist premises. In doing this they exhibited one of the most common features of Protestantism, the tendency of some people to break away from the dominant church and form a new group, or...