United States

The theocratic model, however, did not apply to nonmembers of the church, to whom the franchise was not originally extended, and problems soon arose in maintaining membership. Only those who had undergone a personal experience of “conversion” reassuring them of their salvation could be full members of the church and baptize their children. As the first generation died off, however, many of those children could not themselves personally testify to such conversion and so bring their own offspring into the church. They were finally allowed to do so by the Half-Way Covenant of 1662 but did not enjoy all the rights of full membership. Such apparent theological hair-splitting illustrated the power of the colony’s expanding and dispersing population. As congregations hived off to different towns and immigration continued to bring in worshippers of other faiths, the rigidity of Puritan doctrine was forced to bend somewhat before the wind.

Nevertheless, in the first few years of Massachusetts’s history, Puritan disagreements over the proper interpretation of doctrine led to schisms, exilings, and the foundation of new colonies. Only in America could dissenters move into neighbouring “wilderness” and start anew, as they did in Rhode Island and Connecticut. So the American experience encouraged religious diversity from the start. Even the grim practice of punishing dissidents such as the Quakers (and “witches”) fell into disuse by the end of the 17th century.

Toleration was a slow-growing plant, but circumstances sowed its seeds early in the colonial experience. Maryland’s founders, the well-born Catholic Calvert family, extended liberty to their fellow parishioners and other non-Anglicans in the Toleration Act of 1649. Despite the fact that Anglicanism was later established in Maryland, it remained the first locus of American Catholicism, and the first “American” bishop named after the Revolution, John Carroll, was of English stock. Not until the 19th century would significant immigration from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland provide U.S. Catholicism its own “melting pot.” Pennsylvania was not merely a refuge for the oppressed community who shared William Penn’s Quaker faith but by design a model “commonwealth” of brotherly love in general. And Georgia was founded by idealistic and religious gentlemen to provide a second chance in the New World for debtors in a setting where both rum and slavery were banned, though neither prohibition lasted long.

American Protestantism was also diversified by immigration. The arrival of thousands of Germans early in the 18th century brought, especially to western Pennsylvania, islands of German pietism as practiced by Mennonites, Moravians, Schwenkfelders, and others.

Anabaptists, also freshly arrived from the German states, broadened the foundations of the Baptist church in the new land. French Huguenots fleeing fresh persecutions after 1687 (they had already begun arriving in North America in the 1650s) added a Gallic brand of Calvinism to the patchwork quilt of American faith. Jews arrived in what was then Dutch New Amsterdam in 1654 and were granted asylum by the Dutch West India Company, to the dismay of Gov. Peter Stuyvesant, who gloomily foresaw that it would be a precedent for liberality toward Quakers, Lutherans, and “Papists.” By 1763, synagogues had been established in New York, Philadelphia, Newport (Rhode Island), Savannah (Georgia), and other seaport cities where small Jewish mercantile communities existed.

Religious life in the American colonies already had a distinctive stamp in the 1740s. Some of its original zeal had cooled as material prosperity increased and the hardships of the founding era faded in memory. But then came a shake-up. Bernard A. Weisberger

A series of religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening swept over the colonies in the 1730s and ’40s. Its impact was first felt in the middle colonies, where Theodore J. Frelinghuysen, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, began preaching in the 1720s. In New England in the early 1730s, men such as Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most learned theologian of the 18th century, were responsible for a reawakening of religious fervour. By the late 1740s the movement had extended into the Southern colonies, where itinerant preachers such as Samuel Davies and George Whitefield exerted considerable influence, particularly in the backcountry.

Edwards, JonathanJonathan Edwards.© North Wind Picture Archives