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New York - Religion Christianity entered the region of upstate New York from two directions, under two flags, and in two forms: ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church followed colonists from the Netherlands up the Hudson, and French Jesuit missionaries from the north early began to preach Roman Catholicism to the Iroquois. The Reformed Church made little effort to convert the Indians; the Jesuits, on the other hand, set the conversion of the natives as their sole aim. They endured torture and martyrdom and achieved some success, notably between 1668 and 1686. But their labors carried implications in the struggle between England and France for control of the fur trade. In some instances French punitive expeditions were sent against villages where Indian converts resided and, together with English intrigue, they largely undid the Jesuits' work. When the paths of the Dutch traders and French Jesuits crossed, their relations were friendly; and on several occasions the former rescued the latter from Indian captivity. The English, like the Dutch, allowed religious freedom to all but Roman Catholics. New Dutch churches were established, in some of which the English language was not used until the close of the Colonial period. Other foreign-language churches were established by German Lutherans on Manhattan Island, by French Huguenots in Flushing, New Rochelle, Staten Island, and New Paltz, and by German Palatines in the Hudson, Mohawk, and Schoharie Valleys. Presbyterian churches, established by New Englanders and Scotch-Irish immigrants, dotted the valley of the Hudson; in the 1740's they divided into Old Sides and New Sides, but were reunited in 1758. A number of Quaker meetings were organized in Putnam and Dutchess Counties and on Long Island. The Church of England received support and encouragement from the Mother Country, and a number of churches were established along the Hudson. Beginning in 1693, the Episcopal clergy in the counties of Westchester, Richmond, New York, and Queens were for a time supported out of public funds. West of Albany there were a few Indian chapels, such as Queen Anne's Chapel at Fort Hunter and the Mohawk Mission at the upper Mohawk Castle, the present Indian dastle. During the Revolution the Episcopal Church suffered because of its close connection with England and the Loyalists. In many cases the ministers were obliged to flee to Canada, and church edifices were desecrated. The State constitution of 1777 separated church and State and provided for 'the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference.' In the post-Revolutionary period the cause of organized religion suffered from the spread of deism, represented in New Rochelle by Tom Paine and in Newburgh by a society called the Druids. The frontier, notoriously irreligious, was chargeable with heavy drinking, Sabbath-breaking, and cursing. But the rapid settlement of the State and the spread of revivalism westward promoted the organization of churches. Immigrants brought their denominational preferences with them; Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Universalists, and Quakers spread across the State. Another division on points of theological doctrine occurred among the Presbyterians in 1837, but the schism was healed in 1869. The outstanding individual in the history of revivalism in New York was Charles Grandison Finney, who began his work in Western, Oneida County, in 1825 and achieved his greatest success in Rochester in 1830-1. Finney's emphasis on a life of practical piety stimulated church activity in missionary work, social reform, and education. From the churches developed home and foreign missionary agencies, temperance organizations, antislavery societies, Sunday Schools, benevolent institutions, academies, and colleges. The absence of excessive sectarian competition is illustraied in the organization of Union College by a number of denominations, principally the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed, and by the support of Hamilton College by Presbyterians'and Congregationalists. But for the training of ministers the denominations set up separate theological seminaries, many of which evolved into the present-day nonsectarian colleges. Colgate and Rochester are Baptist in origin; Syracuse, Methodist; Hobart, Episcopalian; Hartwick, Lutheran; St.Lawrence, Universalist; and Alfred, Seventh Day Baptist. In the decades before the Civil War, New York State. churches were centers of antislavery sentiment, and their members manned the Underground Railroad, opposing the Fugitive Slave Act as a religious duty. Samuel R. Ward, born a slave in Maryland, was licensed by the New York Congregational (General) Association in 1839 and between 1841 and 1851 served as pastor in white Congregational churches in South Bulter and Cortland. About 20,000 members of the Negro Cumberland Presbyterian Church met with white Presbyterian congregations, though a few Negro exhorters held separate meetings. Later they sought separate ecclesiastical organization and were set apart by the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1869. After the Civil War the Protestant churches shared in the general prosperity, expanded home and foreign missions, and developed lay auxiliaries and women's societies, including the W.C.T.U., the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., and Christian Endeavor. Intellectually they were for the most part stagnant, with no direct concern for the social changes, political and financial corruption, or philosophical upheavals. Scarcely before 1890 did modern Biblical criticism and evolutionary thought leave a mark; and then Protestantism was divided into 'conservative' and 'liberal' schools. During the 1920's this controversy assumed large proportions, the contending factions being known as 'fundamentalists' and 'modernists.' In the 1930's, however, attention shifted to social problems, and church groups were more concerned with unemployment, social security, and slum clearance than with the theory of evolution. The movement of rural populations to the cities has left rural churches weakened in numbers and financial resources. In the cities the older church edifices have been surrounded by business blocks or recent immigrant settlements. City church federations point the way to a higher degree of interdenominationalism; and Protestant-Catholic-Jewish co-operation presents a united front against the enemies of faith and tolerance. According to the United States Census of 1926 the Protestant churches of the State outside of New York City had a total membership of 1,200,000. The 14 principal Protestant denominations in New York City had more than 486,000 adherents. Among Negro congregations the Baptist denomination—generally dominant in the Nation—leads in membership and number of church edifices in the State, with iii buildings and 46,823 members. Total membership of Negro churches is 114,543, and number of edifices 352. The first Roman Catholic church in upstate New York, excepting the early mission chapels, was St. Mary's, established in Albany in 1797. In the early years of the nineteenth century additional churches were established in Utica, Rochester, Auburn, and a few other centers. In 1806 Francis Cooper, a Roman Catholic elected to the State assembly, was unable to take his seat because his conscience prevented him from taking the required oath abjuring all foreign allegiance, ecclesiastical as well as civil. The objectionable clause was removed and Cooper took his seat. Throughout most of the nineteenth century the Catholic Church was obliged to contend for equal rights in ministering to inmates of public institutions and in sharing in public funds allotted for education, as well as to fight against the propaganda of 'No Popery' movements in politics. An article in the constitution of 1894 prohibited the use of public money to aid denominational schools, but an amendment adopted in 1938 permits the legislature to provide for the transportation of children to and from any school. The Catholic Church grew rapidly as a result of Irish and German immigration, which began in the thirties and forties and reached a peak after the Civil War. St.Joseph's Seminary was established in Troy in 1864 to educate native priests. The diocese of Rochester was organized in 1866, the diocese of Ogdensburg in 1872, and the diocese of Syracuse in 1886. Bishop McCloskey, the first bishop of the Albany diocese, became the first American cardinal in 1875. In 1893 St.Bernard's Seminary was established in Rochester, and St.Joseph's in Yonkers in 1896. The large-scale immigration from eastern Europe beginning about 1890 added large numbers of foreign-born communicants to the Roman Catholic Church, especially Italians and Poles, who established and have retained separate parishes. Parallel with this growth has been the development of parochial schools, institutions of higher education, and religious and charitable institutions. In 1926, in the State outside of New York City, there were 1,381,470 members of the Roman Catholic Church, and in New York City there were 1,733,954. Early Jewish settlers in New Amsterdam, and later New York City, traded up the Hudson River, but the first Jewish residents of upstate New York settled little, if any, earlier than the first years of the nineteenth century. A significant increase occurred after the middle of the century, due principally to the immigration of German and English Jews, who concentrated in the population centers— Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. During the 30 years before the World War, immigration from Russia, Roumania, and Austria-Hungary swelled their number; but most of these settled in New York City, so that, while the Jews comprise about one sixth of the population of the Empire State, in 1926 outside the metropolis there were only about 135,000 Jews and 184 synagogues out of the 1,228 places of worship. In New York City, Jewish congregations had 1,765,000 members. Many of the congregations, principally those made up of German Jews, have modified the traditional orthodox doctrines and customs, and are known as reform congregations. In the last years of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century New York State was home to a number of new religious cults, some imported and some home-grown, the latter following the trail of New England migration across the State and explainable, from a religious standpoint, as the release under semifrontier conditions of the emotional tension caused by the inwardness and repression of New England theology. Mother Ann Lee and her original small following of Shakers came from England in 1774. In 1776 they settled in Niskayuna, near Albany; and in 1792 the first Shaker community was established at New Lebanon. At its peak before the Civil War the sect counted about 6,000 members; today it is almost extinct. But it has made a permanent impress on the State by its contributions to agriculture and by the products of its handicrafts. Jemima Wilkinson, the 'Public Universal Friend,' who established her short-lived ' Jerusalem' near Penn Yan in 1789, came from New England, as did John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community. Joseph Smith, the prophet of the Mormons, was the son of a farmer who migrated from Vermont. In 1831 William Miller of Washington County, also from Vermont, began preaching the Second Advent; in 1843 and 1844 his followers throughout the central part of the State were driven to fanatical extremes in preparation for the Day of Judgment. Those of his followers who survived the disillusionment met in Albany in 1845 and organized the parent body of the various branches of the Adventist Church. The Fox Sisters began their spiritualistic rappings in 1848 in Hydeville and in the same year moved to Rochester, where the mother church of modern Spiritualism was organized, though its theology was first formulated in the sixties by Andrew Jackson Davis, a Poughkeepsie tailor. Lily Dale, in the western part of the State, is today a well-known spiritualist center.