The Church of England was the established church of colonial North Carolina but was never a dominant force among the early immigrants. Scottish Presbyterians settled in the upper Cape Fear Valley, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians occupied the piedmont after 1757. Lutheran Evangelical Reformed Germans later moved into the Yadkin and Catawba valleys of the same region. The Moravians, a German sect, founded the town of Salem (later merging with Winston to become Winston-Salem) in 1766 as the center of their utopian community at Wachovia. Methodist circuit riders and Separate Baptists missionaries won thousands of converts among blacks and whites, strengthening their appeal in the Great Revival of 1801. In the subsequent generation, a powerful evangelical consensus dominated popular culture. After the Civil War, blacks left the white congregations to found their own churches, but the overall strength of Protestantism persisted. When many North Carolinians left their farms at the end of the 19th century, they moved to mill villages that were well supplied with churches, often at the mill owners' expense.
The majority of North Carolinians are Protestant. The churches of the Southern Baptist Convention reported 1,512,058 adherents in 2000; the United Methodist Church claimed 638,785; and the Presbyterian Church USA, 203,647. The next largest Protestant denominations were the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 88,830 adherents; the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), 81,037; the Episcopal Church, 80,068; the United Church of Christ, 50,088; the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, 50,265; the Original Free Will Baptists, 46,020; Independent Charismatic Churches, 42,559; and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) 40,936. In 2000, the state had 315,606 Roman Catholics, an estimated 25,545 Jews, and about 20,137 Muslims. There are still about 18,180 Moravians in the state. Over 4.3 million people (about 54.6% of the population) were not counted as members of any religious organization.