In the early nineteenth century, when theological disputes centered on suggestions of a kinder, gentler God, Yale's Nathaniel William Taylor brought to fruition America's “one great contribution to the theological thinking of Christendom,” the New Haven theology. Taylor's theology combined elements of Calvinist and Newtonian worldviews and centered on three critical assumptions: the benevolence of God, his moral government, and human free agency. Thus, Taylor held that God was both a wise and powerful creator and a good and just ruler, whose concern for and involvement with his creation extended into contemporary human affairs. Moreover, he believed that men and women were moral agents whose sinfulness was worthy of divine condemnation as well as empirically inevitable, but that human sin was in no way preordained or necessary to the prevailing System of moral government.

The decade of the 1960's was important for American scholars who studied religion. Prospects for employment brightened considerably as public and private universities and Colleges created undergraduate and graduate programs in religious studies. Becoming more self-conscious about their academic identity, professors who staffed these programs founded the American Academy of Religion in 1964, an organization designed to promote scholarship and publication in religion. One index to the growing prominence of religious studies was the survey of humanistic scholarship commissioned by Princeton University's Council on the Humanities and funded by the Ford Foundation. Of the thirteen volumes in this series, two were devoted to the field of religion: Clyde A. Holbrook's Religion, A Humanistic Field (1963), and Religion (1965), a summary of the various fields in religious studies, edited by Paul Ramsey.

Lemuel Haynes was a black Congregationalist minister to mostly white churches in New England and New York between 1788 and his death in 1833. Abandoned as an infant, Haynes was reared as an indentured servant in a pious white Massachusetts family. He served in the American Revolution in 1774 and 1775 as a Minute Man and in 1776 as a soldier in the march to Fort Ticonderoga. In 1776, Haynes composed an essay, “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-keeping.” After the Revolution, he acquired a reputation among his white contemporaries as an inspiring preacher. In 1788, Haynes accepted a call to minister in Rutland, Vermont, where he served for thirty years before being dismissed, perhaps because he was a black man. While at Rutland, he published a number of essays and sermons, including in 1801 The Nature and Importance of True Republicanism and in 1806 Universal Salvation. Universal Salvation ultimately appeared in seventy editions, fifty-four of them within Haynes's lifetime.

On Martha's Vineyard in the late seventeenth Century, a Native American called George suffered from being “Tormented” and “impotent” and sought out a renowned “Powaw,” or shaman, for help. According to Matthew Mayhew, who published the story in 1697, the shaman diagnosed George's troubles as effects of witchcraft and proceeded to “dance around a great fire” with George and other sick Natives “lying by.” Other Natives broke up the dance, claiming that the Powaw himself had “bewitched” the sick, and “threatened to burn him unless he cured the sick man.” Fortunately for the shaman, when he “felt the heat of the fire, the sick immediately recovered.”