# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S90
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

90 On America's Present and Future Church Condition.

...distant, and those will be very much mistaken who expect its arrival perhaps already in the next generation. According to the present state of affairs in America, as all knowledgeable and credible voices describe it — our author himself not least — North America's religious course of development can, in the nearer, though perhaps still several generations distant, future be predicted with fair certainty. The great number of the Christian parties there is, admittedly, altogether apt to make an unbiased judgment difficult; but even should they later be further increased by immigration from the Eastern Church (which is at least not among the impossibilities, nor even among the improbabilities), the actual state of the matter would still be simple and clear to an eye that does not cling to the surface of appearances. Not the multitude, not the endless splintering — no, the soil, the spirit that produces, sustains, and in the end again devours those parties, is alone what can properly come into consideration when the question is America's religious future. Even if all the confessions and sects of the Old World were to emigrate into the New, they could and would still form only 5 main groups, according to the chief factor, the vital element, of their religious outlook. Of these 5 groups, only three presently stand out in the United States — those that find their spiritual center either in Romanism, or in the evangelical Reformation, or in Calvinism; the group that clusters around Oriental Catholicism is not yet represented there at all, and the one rooted in enthusiasm, which chooses the "Spirit," the "inner light," "reason" as its guiding star, will hardly have influence to reckon with — more likely, as the example of the Mormons shows, hard resistance. If the question is now put in this way — which of those 3 chief religions determines American public and national life the most, and on which, accordingly, the nearer religious future of the country will chiefly depend — then the indisputable answer, because it is a matter of fact, is that against the dominant weight of the Calvinistic basic outlook every other recedes into the dark background. All American conditions and circumstances of life are permeated by Calvinism as though by a leaven; in it all the leading parties come together, like the separate branches of a tree in their common trunk; what the United States are in the present, they have become only through it. Schaff too says this repeatedly and with strong emphasis, as indeed it forces itself involuntarily upon every unbiased observer. But if the ground and soil on which the political, social, and religious life of North America moves is Calvinistic, then, by human judgment, it cannot be expected that the next ecclesiastical development of that country will proceed according to any principles other than those of Calvinism. A diminution of sects is hardly to be hoped for on this account: in the place of those that perish, new ones will again and again arise; — the