Ohio has a tapestry of religions now, many with historical roots tied to the state's early settlement.
But numerous civilizations lived their lives on this land long before Ohio was in the United States.
The Delaware, Miami, Mingo, Ottawa, Shawnee and Wyandotte are a few of the societies that practiced a rich spirituality here.
When European immigrants pushed the frontier west, they brought different denominations of Christianity with missionaries with them. Conflict with the Native Americans ensued.
“There was a prophet, Neolin, who was an Ohio Native American living in Muskingum, who had a vision to unify Native Americans from multiple tribes against the whites,” said Dan Williams, a senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University.
Williams said the prophecy contained a mixture of Christian and Native American symbolism, that Neolin would have been familiar with Christianity because of the Christian missionaries.
The apocalyptic prophecy declared they needed to fight for their land. It inspired Pontiac’s rebellion.
“Pontiac was a warrior and tribal leader who united a number of Native American groups in what was a fairly successful, military revolt,” Williams said.
Eventually the British extinguished the rebellion using germ warfare – they spread smallpox on blankets. The whole experience was costly, though. So the British ordered the colonists not to antagonize the Native Americans. They banned the colonists from moving further west into Ohio in 1763.
“It also outraged the American colonists, and that was one of the reasons that eventually sparked the revolution of the 1770s,” Williams said.
So when the former colonies won their independence and formed the United States, the new Americans were eager to push further west and into Ohio.
Elements of Neolin’s prophecy of war and land loss appeared to come true.
That decade was filled with warfare. And by the end of it, most Native Americans were gone, taking their culture and spirituality with them. Many historians classify that destruction as a genocide.
“White settlers began pouring into Ohio, and there were a series of wars between the whites in it and the Native Americans in the 1790s, and by the end of the 1790s, Ohio was completely settled by whites,” Williams said.
Now, little remains of Native American culture in Ohio. Some locations carry Native American names, and the state is home to archaeological remains of an even older culture of Native Americans that is little understood.
Williams said the early American population was growing, doubling each generation. So, they wanted more land. The new American government paid veterans of the Revolutionary War with plots in Ohio – a frontier at the time.
“That very rapid population growth and dependence of people on farming meant that people had land pressures, that younger sons needed land. And the only way to get land was to move west,” Williams said.
They sent in missionaries supported by the government that started to shape the society in Ohio.
“They created schools. They taught people to read, they created newspapers. They essentially brought everything that people would imagine for the American republic into this new territory. And so, even before Ohio was a state, missionaries were involved in shaping the culture,” Williams said.
Around this time, the United States was still figuring out how to handle the First Amendment barring the government from establishing religion, said David Torbett, a professor of religion and history at Marietta College.
“When it was first passed, it was understood to apply to only the federal government. And there were religious establishments, state-supported churches, in the United States at the state level,” he said.
The state even helped found some churches with land grants, Torbett said.
The U.S. Supreme Court extended the clause to bar local and state governments from establishing or supporting religions in the 20th century.
Religious conflicts in Ohio were historically between different sects of Christianity. In the culture and the policies at this time, Christian beliefs were presumed.
“The mainstream view is that religion shaped people's virtue. It was important for virtuous public life. They had a distaste for religious establishments or imposing beliefs through political methods. But, there was a default assumption that most people were Christian,” Torbett said.
Many of the earliest settlers founded sects of Protestant churches.
“They come to the West, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, but what's really popular in Ohio are Methodist, and they eventually outnumber all the other, Christian groups,” Torbett said.
Few ministers from highly organized and centralized religions made journeys west to Ohio. The churches grew through farmers who preached the word.
“This do it yourself people, people who really stood on the basis of their Christian experience. They had little to no formal education. But they, road circuits, they form classes and they form churches,” Torbett said.
There was a turn away from the more formal, highly organized Calvinism practices in past churches.
“The idea that God had chosen certain people for salvation and had condemned others to damnation seems to many people to perhaps not be completely fair, not particularly democratic and maybe not entirely compatible with the idea of America,” Williams said.
Many congregations created churches that reflected the independent nature of the fledgling state. Religious revivals took place all over the country during the Second Great Awakening which reinforced the ideas.
“People were celebrating their own experiences, celebrating their individuality. If you go to a revival, the most important thing in the world is your personal conversion experience. And so what happened was people are making a lot of their religious experience and, forming their own churches, forming their own organizations,” Williams said.
Communities of Quakers and Shakers, Mennonites and Amish emerged and defined their practices. Pentecostal, charismatic churches formed where congregants spoke in tongues.
Churches and towns were often established together and planned so churches and government buildings were close together.
That was to “reinforce the message that our state would be mindful of the role faith plays in our lives and that people would always be free to practice their faiths as they saw fit,” former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft wrote in “Religion in Ohio,” a book outlining the history of religions in the state, assembled during the bicentennial in 2004 by Ohio University.
As the decades went on, many of the churches differed in how people should be baptized, take communion or be ordained to minister. But there were often racial divides, too.
Many of the state’s Black congregations were born out of breaks from methodist or episcopal sects in the decades after slavery ended.
“Many of these denominations emerged because the people in them, black people in them, were not accepted by the largely white-controlled denominations. And so they were either intentionally oppressed and excluded, or they ultimately left because they could not worship, freely and equally in those spaces,” said Dr. Korie Little Edwards, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
She said the divides run deep. One denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, that was against abolishing slavery then, was against the teaching of critical race theory in recent years.
As more settlers came into Ohio, people from different countries and religions settled different regions in Ohio.
“What's interesting with the western settlement of the U.S., is that so often people moved in a straight line. So northern Ohio was settled by people from southern New England, and southern Ohio was settled by people from Pennsylvania,” Williams said.
Williams said that influenced where in the state there was supporters of things like temperance and abolition.
“The German immigrants tended to be predominantly Lutheran and Catholic, much more comfortable with alcohol, at a time when the temperance movement was really gaining ground in the mid-19th century,” he said. “People in northern Ohio were much more likely to be Congregationalist – much more sympathetic toward temperance, anti-slavery, social reform.”
And sometimes those groups came into conflict.
“Many people in northern Ohio felt like those in southern Ohio were not sufficiently abolitionist. Nearly everyone was anti-slavery, but to varying degrees. Many people in northern Ohio wanted to see immediate abolition, whereas those in southern Ohio were much more sympathetic to the colonization movement and, and to other measures that might see a more gradual end to slavery,” Williams said.
Even as the state diversified as Catholics and Jewish settlers arrived, there was still that assumption in public institutions that most of the country, that most of the state was Christian, of the Protestant denomination. The assumption was challenged in Ohio.
“Cincinnati was a multi-religious community. In fact, one of the most religiously diverse communities in the United States in the mid-19th century, and like most schools in the U.S. at the time, their public schools had a strongly Protestant flavor. So the school day started with the reading of the King James Bible and with singing Protestant hymns,” Williams said.
Catholic and Jewish families objected. The Cincinnati Board of Education complied with the request to end the practice.
“But that then led to a protest by other parents who said that this was an expulsion of the Bible from schools. This was wrong. They wanted bible reading to continue,” Williams said.
The case ended with a ruling in favor of the Catholic and Jewish families in the Ohio Supreme Court after lower courts sided with those in favor of the Bible readings.
It was reaffirmed in the U.S. Supreme Court a century later.
“There were a lot of debates constantly going on in Cincinnati about exactly how to navigate this multiracial population,” Williams said.
Some in Ohio used their religious beliefs as a base for social justice, fighting to abolish slavery, to help formerly enslaved people escape the south. Later, they’d fight Jim Crow laws. But these positions sometimes caused splits from the church when dissenters emerged, leading to more denominations and parishes.
Progressive churches taught the social gospel. Washington Gladden was an example in Columbus at the First Congregational Church on East Broad St.. He was a city council member and a minister in the Protestant Congregationalist denomination.
“He saw a very close relationship between Christianity and social outreach for the poor. And he believed that rather than just confining this to church, charity or a few small-scale efforts, that he really needed to take Christianity into politics in order to advocate for the type of social restructuring, including laws and economic policies that would reduce the incidence of poverty and help workers,” Williams said.
They formed hospitals, schools that welcomed women and minorities and fought for a living wage.
“For them, that social gospel would have included protection – legal protections for workers, protection of the right to unionize, protections for worker safety. There were a lot of problems, especially in cities, that exacerbated the growing divide between the rich and the poor,” Williams said.
Learn more about Washington Gladden from WOSU TV's Broad & High.
Catholics created charities, hospitals and parochial schools. They fought for living wages and to support and protect immigrants.
More migration to Ohio in the 20th century continued to change the dynamics of religion in the state. Immigrants from Christian Orthodox faiths and non-Christian faiths started arriving in larger numbers.
And, many white people and Black people from the south and Appalachia came to places like Akron to work in rubber factories and other industrial centers.
The country’s two main political parties were also shifting. The Republican party that was against slavery in the 19th century fought for segregation with white former Democrats in the 20th century.
And the Democratic party that had been for slavery, attracted progressives. The party won over Black converts after the party sponsored the progressive policies of the New Deal.
White Protestants splintered as fundamentalist ideas emerged on early talk radio. Paired with Christian preaching, the medium grew exponentially over the decades, fueled by social conservatism, radio personalities and changes in technology.
“The televangelists and religious radio proved to be very useful in mobilizing these folks to not vote for Democrats, but to vote for Republicans,” said John Green, the emeritus director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.
As the country began to change after World War II, Ohio was once again at the center of controversy pitting religiously motivated morality against the secular interests of the country.
“In 1956, Charles Keating, who was a Catholic lawyer in Cincinnati, formed what became the largest anti-pornography organization in the United States. It was Citizens for Decent Literature. And they introduced legal action against pornographers,” Williams said.
They lobbied for stringent censorship laws and wanted local governments to restrict the availability of pornography.
“Their argument was that pornography corrupted citizens and it was not just immoral from a religious perspective, but, it was degrading to community standards. And ultimately it would weaken the nation,” Williams said.
They lost more cases than they won, but the effort influenced the Reagan administration.
In later years similar efforts led by televangelist Jerry Flawell’s “moral majority” boycotted stores that sold pornographic magazines.
Williams said the group was a precursor to the Christian right.
“That is, they took a religiously based sentiment and then channeled it into a secular argument, saying that certain behaviors that people in the organization considered immoral were corrupting society and threatening children,” he said.
That included rock ‘n’ roll music, too.
“A lot of social conservatives argued that juvenile delinquency or pornography or even rock and roll music would weaken the country in the face of the stand against communism. So those were powerful arguments at the time. And in many ways, the 60s social movements were a backlash against that sort of effort at social control,” Williams said.
Black Churches Fight For Civil Rights
Black churches played key roles in organizing for civilrRights, and forming political alliances to get more black people elected to office. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X spoke at Cleveland's Cory United Methodist Church, a center of organizing.
Churches were safe places to gather at a time when it was hard for Black Americans to assemble freely.
“But not only that, they provided a theological impetus for people to put their bodies on the line. This was the amount of sacrifice that the civil rights movement demanded of people was quite extraordinary,” Williams said.
Activists faced jail, death and serious injury.
White evangelicals pulled away from the Democratic Party even more in the coming years. In Ohio, the voting block helped elect Jimmy Carter to his first term in the 1970s. But, they turned away from him when he faced Ronald Reagan.
“They viewed Carter as too willing to compromise on the culture war issues that they cared about. Abortion, the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, gay rights, were all concerns,” Williams said.
They opposed secularization.
“The Christian right in 1980 was a movement that was designed to put into power people who would be willing to vote for the particular issues that the Christian right cared about issues such as abortion, gay rights, strong stance against communism, school prayer and Bible reading restored to public schools, all of those things packaged together,” Williams said.
Soon the more conservative evangelicals and Catholics that had clashed in prior decades, found allies in the fight to control access to abortion and to limit the rights of the LGBTQ+.
They fought against anti-discrimination laws and petitioned against LGBTQ+ teachers.
Once the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that marriage equality was a right, gay marriage was the issue at the forefront and fights against gay teachers and to implement bible lessons fell to the wayside.
Many Ohio lawmakers were on board. In 2004, state lawmakers banned same-sex marriage until it was overturned when an Ohio man won the right at the Supreme Court in 2015.
Some Christian denominations pushed back on the more right-leaning sects of their faith and fought for the environment and other progressive causes.
“Liberal mainline Protestant denominations like Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Episcopal church – most of them have engaged in a lot of political lobbying on the left for progressive causes,” Williams said.
They spoke out against the war in Iraq, and advocated for marriage equality, reproductive justice and anti-poverty policies.”
“There's a much stronger relationship between organized
Christianity and the politics of the left, then a lot of people realize that is sometimes obscured by the much larger Christian right organization, who represent a larger constituency today,” Williams said.
