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the 1790s, alarm over irreligion and skepticism mounted. The leaders of
revolutionary France abolished Christianity and the worship of God. At the same time, Ethan Allen and Thomas
Paine's published anti-religious tracts. Paine's denunciation of Christianity
was particularly bitter:
Of all the systems of religion
that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more
unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself
than this thing called Christianity.
Nevertheless, The Age of Reason went
through eight American editions. Even
at Yale College, students debated the question, "Are the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments the Word of God."
In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), a series of extremely
popular essays, J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, a French immigrant, observed
that "religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of
the continent to the other.
Yet by the 1830s, no western nation appeared to
be more religious than the United States. Reported church membership doubled
between 1800 and 1830. In his classic Democracy
in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French commentator, observed:
"There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion
retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America."
According to one estimate, three-quarters of all Americans in 1860 had a
connection to a church. The nation's churches had 26 million seats for a
population of 31 million.