Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Cultural Sin Throughout American history, religious groups have used the religious freedom given by our government to establish various forms of worship towards numerous Gods. Each of these religious groups has come up with their own interpretations of religious documents, group hierarchies and most of all, differing perceptions of sin. These perceptions not only differed in who was most sinful, but also how sin was understood and how it affected the religious group. The first religious movement of the nineteenth century was that of the Calvinists, a group who emphasized the wrathful nature of God and the selfishness of human nature. The Calvinists stressed that all humans by nature were sinners and that in order to be saved they must undergo a conversion process. This process was one in which the participant give themselves up to God, and when their will was gone, they would be able to accept grace and know salvation. For them it was true that “God can offer a sinner no other terms than repentance” (Calvinsm 8). This process, however, did not mean your acceptance into the religion. Once the conversion was completed, the participant would have to stand before a counsel that decided if the experience was valid an