It is not entirely clear when American colonists started becoming “American”, rather than English. Many historians place the beginnings of the “Americanism” phenomena near the end of the French and Indian War. That War itself marks the beginning of a change of sorts. In Europe, it was (and still is) referred to as “The Seven Years War”, but over here it was (and still is) called “The French and Indian War”. So, it’s clear that we Americans no longer saw ourselves as purely English. To us, even though we were part of the English army, saw ourselves as fighting against our own enemies, not England’s. That war also served as a training ground for leadership that would come to full fruition during the American Revolution, twenty years later. Much the same sort of watershed seems to have occurred in American attitudes towards religion during the 1740s and 1750s, during the Great Awakening.
Even though most of the clergymen who led the Awakening were Church of England, and even though most of those who were “awakened” were Church of England, as well, a case can be made that after it ended, many if not most of the people were no longer in fact, Church of England, but rather a new thing: an American Church, in the making, if not entirely in fact.
In New England, where the Puritan faction of the Church of England held sway, the old Calvinist Puritan Church began to give way to a whole new religious tradition. Many “puritans” became Congregationalists, and indeed that whole denomination was formed there and then. Others founded and supported the Unitarian Church. An unusual amalgamation of Dutch Reformed, Quaker, Baptist and Congregationalist bodies joined in New York and Pennsylvania, to form what eventually began to be called “Mainline Protestant” churches, based especially in the cities of the mid-Atlantic region. The rigorously Scottish Presbyterians began to change, too, especially as that Church moved out to the frontier, and the Baptist movement, especially under the leadership of the Craigs, in Virginia, became a regular force in the communities where they preached.
Most of all, a new spirit of toleration began to be noticed among all the Churches. This did not apply, of course, to the handful of Roman Catholics who had found their way to these shores, but by the end of the French and Indian War, there was emerging a new and distinctively American “religion”. Local congregations might call themselves almost anything, but in general almost all belonged to a nascent American protestant Church that required believer’s baptism, fostered dynamic preaching, adopted a benign form of Calvinist theology, and generally favored local independence in thought, word and deed. Then, too, visitation between them all was common, if not encouraged, and movement of membership between them all became acceptable. This is where we stood when those first revolutionary shots were fired in Massachusetts.