States & Territories
Delaware
South
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Delaware's earliest European settlers were Swedish and Finnish Lutherans, who built the Old Swedes Church in Wilmington in 1698, one of the oldest church buildings in the country still standing on its original foundation. Dutch Reformed settlers followed along the Delaware River. Methodism took hold strongly in the eighteenth century under circuit riders trained in the Wesleyan tradition, and the peninsula shared by Delaware, Maryland and Virginia became known for camp meeting revivalism that shaped Methodist practice up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
Facts
Religion
Leading Religious AffiliationDelaware: tied at 19% of adults with Catholic, recorded as two facts rather than an arbitrary winner. Margin of error plus or minus 7.4 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/delaware/ Leading Religious AffiliationDelaware: tied at 19% of adults with Evangelical Protestant, recorded as two facts rather than an arbitrary winner. Margin of error plus or minus 7.4 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/delaware/ Law and State
Establishment StatusDelaware's founding charters under Swedish, Dutch and English rule never established a single church, and its early constitutions guaranteed free exercise, removing the last religious test for office in 1792. Geography
Census Region Identity
Jurisdiction Status Learn More
The Cradle of Methodism Sits in a Small Delaware Chapel
Barratt's Chapel, built in 1780 on land the landowner Philip Barratt donated near Frederica, is the oldest surviving church building in the country constructed by and for Methodists, and it earned the nickname the Cradle of American Methodism for one specific afternoon rather than for its age alone. On November 14, 1784, Thomas Coke arrived from England carrying instructions from John Wesley himself and preached to a large gathered crowd at the chapel. Francis Asbury, already the movement's leading figure in America, met Coke there after the sermon, and the two spent that day planning what would become, weeks later at Baltimore's Christmas Conference, the founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent American denomination separate from the Church of England. The sacramental ordinances were administered by Methodist clergy at Barratt's Chapel that same November day for the first time anywhere in America, months before the new church formally existed.
Circuit riders trained in that Wesleyan tradition carried Methodism up and down the Delmarva Peninsula in the following decades, building the camp meeting culture that shaped Methodist practice across the Eastern Seaboard, and it remains visible today in a state where Pew's 2023-24 study found Evangelical Protestant and Catholic identification tied at nineteen percent of adults each, recorded as two facts rather than an arbitrary winner.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Delaware directly: "Absalom Jones was born enslaved in Delaware, taught himself to read from a spelling book and a New Testament, and was brought to Philadelphia by his enslaver, where he attended night school for..."
This source names Delaware directly: "who arrived at Fort Christina on the Delaware River on 17 April 1640, as the first Lutheran pastor to organize a congregation in what would become the United States, and traces the Swedish colonial..."
This source names Delaware directly: "across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland."
This source names Methodism directly: "Dutch Reformed settlers followed along the Delaware River. Methodism took hold strongly in the eighteenth century under circuit riders trained in the Wesleyan tradition, and the peninsula shared by..."
This source names Delaware directly: "Day of Remembrance still held with the Delaware Nation each March, to keep the history from being forgotten."
This source names Delaware directly: "arrived at Fort Christina on the Delaware River, near present day Wilmington, on 17 April 1640, having sailed with the second expedition to the colony of New Sweden aboard the Kalmar Nyckel."
This source names Delaware directly: "Park and Museum now holds with the Delaware Nation each March."
Principal Tradition Of
Plurality religious identification among the state's adults per the source's survey; the state carries a second, comparably close plurality for Roman Catholicism.
Plurality religious identification among the state's adults per the source's survey; the state carries a second, comparably close plurality for Evangelical Protestantism.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.