Religion In The Chesapeake Colonies

Religion in Colonial America: Trends, Regulations, and Beliefs

Learn about the religious landscape of colonial America to better understand religious freedom today.

Last Updated: April 28, 2022

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To sympathize how America's electric current balance amid national police force, local community practice, and individual freedom of belief evolved, it'due south helpful to empathise some of the common experiences and patterns around religion in colonial culture in the period between 1600 and 1776.

In the early years of what after became the United States, Christian religious groups played an influential role in each of the British colonies, and most attempted to enforce strict religious observance through both colony governments and local boondocks rules.

Almost attempted to enforce strict religious observance. Laws mandated that everyone attend a house of worship and pay taxes that funded the salaries of ministers. Eight of the thirteen British colonies had official, or "established," churches, and in those colonies dissenters who sought to practice or proselytize a different version of Christianity or a non-Christian faith were sometimes persecuted.

Although nearly colonists considered themselves Christians, this did not hateful that they lived in a culture of religious unity. Instead, differing Christian groups often believed that their own practices and faiths provided unique values that needed protection confronting those who disagreed, driving a need for rule and regulation.

In Europe, Catholic and Protestant nations often persecuted or forbade each other'southward religions, and British colonists frequently maintained restrictions against Catholics. In Great Britain, the Protestant Anglican church building had dissever into bitter divisions among traditional Anglicans and the reforming Puritans, contributing to an English civil war in the 1600s. In the British colonies, differences among Puritan and Anglican remained.

Betwixt 1680 and 1760 Anglicanism and Congregationalism, an offshoot of the English Puritan motion, established themselves as the main organized denominations in the majority of the colonies. Every bit the seventeenth and eighteenth century passed on, still, the Protestant wing of Christianity constantly gave birth to new movements, such equally the Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians and many more, sometimes referred to every bit "Dissenters." In communities where one existing faith was dominant, new congregations were often seen as unfaithful troublemakers who were upsetting the social order.

Despite the endeavor to govern society on Christian (and more specifically Protestant) principles, the offset decades of colonial era in nigh colonies were marked past irregular religious practices, minimal communication betwixt remote settlers, and a population of "Murtherers, Theeves, Adulterers, [and] idle persons."ⁱ An ordinary Anglican American parish stretched betwixt 60 and 100 miles, and was often very sparsely populated. In some areas, women deemed for no more than than a quarter of the population, and given the relatively small number of conventional households and the chronic shortage of clergymen, religious life was haphazard and irregular for virtually. Even in Boston, which was more highly populated and dominated by the Congregational Church, one inhabitant complained in 1632 that the "fellows which keepe hogges all weeke preach on the Sabboth."^two

Christianity was further complicated by the widespread practice of astrology, alchemy and forms of witchcraft. The fearfulness of such practices tin be gauged past the famous trials held in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693. Surprisingly, abracadabra and other magical practices were not altogether divorced from Christianity in the minds of many "natural philosophers" (the precursors of scientists), who sometimes thought of them as experiments that could unlock the secrets of Scripture. As we might wait, established clergy discouraged these explorations.

In turn, equally the colonies became more than settled, the influence of the clergy and their churches grew. At the centre of well-nigh communities was the church building; at the center of the calendar was the Sabbath—a period of intense religious and "secular" activity that lasted all day long. Later years of struggles to impose discipline and uniformity on Sundays, the selectmen of Boston at last were able to "parade the street and oblige everyone to go to Church building . . . on pain of being put in Stokes or otherwise confined," one observer wrote in 1768.³ By then, few communities openly tolerated travel, drinking, gambling, or blood sports on the Sabbath.

Slavery—which was also firmly established and institutionalized betwixt the 1680s and the 1780s—was also shaped by faith. The use of violence against slaves, their social inequality, together with the settlers' contempt for all religions other than Christianity "resulted in destructiveness of extraordinary breadth, the loss of traditional religious practices among the half-millions slaves brought to the mainland colonies between 1680s and the American Revolution."⁴ Even in churches which reached out to convert slaves to their congregations —the Baptists are a skillful example—slaves were most ofttimes a silent minority. If they received any Christian religious instructions, information technology was, more often than non, from their owners rather than in Sun schoolhouse.

Local variations in Protestant practices and ethnic differences among the white settlers did foster a religious diverseness. Wide distances, poor communication and transportation, bad atmospheric condition, and the clerical shortage dictated religious multifariousness from boondocks to town and from region to region. With French Huguenots, Catholics, Jews, Dutch Calvinists, German language Reformed pietists, Scottish Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and other denominations arriving in growing numbers, near colonies with Anglican or Congregational establishments had petty choice but to display some degree of religious tolerance. Just in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania was toleration rooted in principle rather than expedience. Indeed, Pennsylvania's first constitution stated that all who believed in God and agreed to live peacefully nether the civil government would "in no way be molested or prejudiced for their religious persuasion of practice."⁵ However, reality oft brutal brusk of that ideal.

New England

Almost New Englanders went to a Congregationalist meetinghouse for church services. The meetinghouse, which served secular functions every bit well every bit religious, was a small wood edifice located in the middle of town. People sat on difficult wooden benches for most of the day, which was how long the church building services usually lasted. These meeting houses became bigger and much less crude equally the population grew after the 1660s. Steeples grew, bells were introduced, and some churches grew large enough to host as many equally one grand worshippers.

In contrast to other colonies, there was a meetinghouse in every New England town.¹ In 1750 Boston, a metropolis with a population of 15000, had 18 churches.² In the previous century church attendance was inconsistent at best. After the 1680s, with many more churches and clerical bodies emerging, religion in New England became more organized and attendance more uniformly enforced. In even sharper contrast to the other colonies, in New England almost newborns were baptized by the church, and church building omnipresence rose in some areas to 70 percent of the adult population. By the eighteenth century, the vast majority of all colonists were churchgoers.

The New England colonists—with the exception of Rhode Island—were predominantly Puritans, who, by and large, led strict religious lives. The clergy was highly educated and devoted to the study and teaching of both Scripture and the natural sciences. The Puritan leadership and gentry, specially in Massachusetts and Connecticut, integrated their version of Protestantism into their political construction. Government in these colonies contained elements of theocracy, asserting that leaders and officials derived that authority from divine guidance and that civil authority ought to be used to enforce religious conformity. Their laws causeless that citizens who strayed abroad from conventional religious community were a threat to civil order and should be punished for their nonconformity.

Despite many affinities with the established Church of England, New England churches operated quite differently from the older Anglican system in England. Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut had no church courts to levy fines on religious offenders, leaving that function to the civil magistrates. Congregational churches typically owned no property (even the local meetinghouse was owned by the town and was used to conduct both town meetings and religious services), and ministers, while often called upon to propose the civil magistrates, played no official role in town or colony governments.

In those colonies, the ceremonious government dealt harshly with religious dissenters, exiling the likes of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams for their outspoken criticism of Puritanism, and whipping Baptists or cropping the ears of Quakers for their determined efforts to proselytize. Official persecution reached its tiptop between 1659 and 1661, when Massachusetts Bay'south Puritan magistrates hung four Quaker missionaries.

Yet, despite Puritanism's severe reputation, the actual experience of New England dissenters varied widely, and penalty of religious difference was uneven. England'southward intervention in 1682 concluded the corporal penalization of dissenters in New England. The Toleration Deed, passed by the English Parliament in 1689, gave Quakers and several other denominations the correct to build churches and to behave public worship in the colonies. While dissenters connected to endure discrimination and financial penalties well into the eighteenth century, those who did not challenge the authority of the Puritans directly were left unmolested and were not legally punished for their "heretical" behavior.

Mid-Atlantic and Southern Colonies

Inhabitants of the middle and southern colonies went to churches whose fashion and decoration look more than familiar to mod Americans than the plain New England meeting houses. They, too, would sit in church for most of the mean solar day on Sunday. After 1760, every bit remote outposts grew into towns and backwoods settlements became bustling commercial centers, Southern churches grew in size and splendor. Church omnipresence, abysmal every bit it was in the early days of the colonial menstruum, became more consistent afterwards 1680. Much like the north, this was the event of the proliferation of churches, new clerical codes and bodies, and a organized religion that became more organized and uniformly enforced. Toward the terminate of the colonial era, churchgoing reached at to the lowest degree 60 percent in all the colonies.

The middle colonies saw a mixture of religions, including Quakers (who founded Pennsylvania), Catholics, Lutherans, a few Jews, and others. The southern colonists were a mixture equally well, including Baptists and Anglicans. In the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland (which was originally founded as a oasis for Catholics), the Church of England was recognized by constabulary as the country church, and a portion of tax revenues went to back up the parish and its priest.

Virginia imposed laws obliging all to attend Anglican public worship. Indeed, to whatever eighteenth observer, the "legal and social dominance of the Church of England was unmistakable."³ After 1750, as Baptist ranks swelled in that colony, the colonial Anglican elite responded to their presence with forcefulness. Baptist preachers were often arrested. Mobs physically attacked members of the sect, breaking up prayer meetings and sometimes beating participants. As a upshot, the 1760s and 1770s witnessed a rise in discontent and discord within the colony (some argue that Virginian dissenters suffered some of the worst persecutions in antebellum America).⁴

In the Carolinas, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, Anglicans never made up a majority, in contrast to Virginia. With few limits on the influx of new colonists, Anglican citizens in those colonies needed to accept, however grudgingly, ethnically diverse groups of Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and a diverseness of German Pietists.

Maryland was founded by Cecilius Calvert in 1634 as a safe haven for Catholics. The Catholic leadership passed a police force of religious toleration in 1649, simply to run into it repealed it when Puritans took over the colony's assembly. Clergy and buildings belonging to both the Catholic and Puritan religions were subsidized by a general revenue enhancement.

Quakers founded Pennsylvania. Their religion influenced the way they treated Indians, and they were the beginning to issue a public condemnation of slavery in America. William Penn, the founder of the colony, contended that civil authorities shouldn't meddle with the religious/spiritual lives of their citizens. The laws he drew up pledged to protect the civil liberties of "all persons . . . who confess and acknowledge the one almighty and eternal God to be the creator, upholder, and ruler of the world."^five

Religious Revival

A religious revival swept the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. Shortly after the English evangelical and revivalist George Whitefield completed a tour of America, Jonathan Edwards delivered a sermon entitled "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," stirring up a moving ridge of religious fervor and the first of the Great Awakening. Relying on massive open-air sermons attended at times by as many as fifteen,000 people, the movement challenged the clerical elite and colonial establishment by focusing on the sinfulness of every individual, and on salvation through personal, emotional conversion—what we phone call today beingness "born once more." By discounting worldly success as a sign of God'southward favor, and by focusing on emotional transformation (pejoratively dubbed by the establishment as "enthusiasm") rather than reason, the motility appealed to the poor and uneducated, including slaves and Indians.

In hindsight, the Great Awakening contributed to the revolutionary movement in a number of ways: it forced Awakeners to organize, mobilize, petition, and provided them with political experience; it encouraged believers to follow their beliefs even if that meant breaking with their church; it discarded clerical authorisation in matters of conscience; and it questioned the correct of civil authority to intervene in all matters of religion. In a surprising way, these principles sat very well with the basic beliefs of rational Protestants (and deists). They also helped clarify their mutual objections to British civil and religious rule over the colonies, and provided both with arguments in favor of the separation of church and land.

Rationalism

Despite the evangelical, emotional challenge to reason underlying the "Great Awakening," past the end of the colonial period, Protestant rationalism remained the dominant religious force amidst the leaders of most of the colonies: "The similarity of belief amongst the educated gentry in all colonies is notable. . . . [In that location] seem to be bear witness that some form of rationalism—Unitarian, deist, or otherwise—was often present in the faith of gentlemen leaders past the late colonial period."⁶ Whether Unitarian, deist, or even Anglican/Congregational, rationalism focused on the upstanding aspects of religion. Rationalism besides discarded many "superstitious" aspects of the Christian liturgy (although many continued to believe in the human being soul and in the afterlife). The political edge of this argument was that no man institution—religious or civil—could claim divine authorisation. In addition, in their search for God's truths, rationalists such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin valued the written report of nature (known as "natural religion") over the Scriptures (or "revealed religion").

At the core of this rational belief was the idea that God had endowed humans with reason and so that they could tell the difference between right and incorrect. Knowing the departure too meant that humans made gratuitous choices to sin or bear morally. The radicalization of this position led many rational dissenters to fence that intervention in human decisions past civil authorities undermined the special covenant between God and humankind. Many therefore advocated the separation of church and state.

Taken farther, the logic of these arguments led them to dismiss the divine potency claimed by the English kings, besides as the blind obedience compelled by such dominance. Thus, past the 1760s, they mounted a ii-pronged set on on England: outset, for its desire to arbitrate in the colonies' religious life and, 2nd, for its claim that the king ruled over the colonies by divine inspiration. Once the link to divine potency was broken, revolutionaries turned to Locke, Milton, and others, concluding that a government that abused its power and injure the interests of its subjects was tyrannical and as such deserved to be replaced.

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