When Europeans sailed west to explore and conquer the New World, one of their goals was to convert the Natives to Christianity. For medieval Europeans, there was no separation between church and state. Religion was an important everyday concern, not just something celebrated once a week. Religion was also used as a weapon against minorities and a rationale for war.
Christianity is a worldwide religion of those who believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, the son of God who died for the sins of humankind. Because it is a missionary religion, Christianity has spread to practically every corner of the globe.
Except for small pockets of Jews in urban areas throughout Europe and the Muslim Moors who invaded Spain, Europe was entirely Catholic throughout the Middle Ages. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century came about because various Europeans felt that Catholicism had become corrupted; they attempted to force reforms that would “return” the church to “true” Christianity. This Protestant Reformation was one of the reasons for the 17th-century migration to North America and had a lasting effect on American religion.
The Protestant Reformation entailed the rejection of clerical authority as represented by the pope and the celibate orders of clergy. While Roman Catholics held that priests were intermediaries between God and the faithful, Protestants emphasized direct communication between God and an individual believer. This emphasis on the individual had its parallel in the 18th-century Enlightenment ideals of the importance of the individual.
The Reformation resulted in the establishment of numerous Protestant churches. Broadly speaking, followers of Martin Luther believed in justification by faith, while follower of Calvin believed that a chosen few were predestined for eternal salvation. In the North American colonies, Calvinist Puritans established a stronghold in New England, German and Swedish Lutherans in the Middle Colonies, and Anglicans in the South. During the early 1700s a long period of religious revival began, inaugurating evangelical forms of Protestantism that would later become known as Fundamentalism.
The Anglican Church was born when the pope refused to grant King Henry VIII (1509-47) a divorce from Queen Catherine. Henry’s solution was to deny the pope’s supremacy over the king of England, to establish an English church with himself as its head, and to grant his own divorce. Anglicanism remains very similar to Catholicism in most respects apart from the supremacy of the pope and a celibate clergy.
Puritans who migrated to New England embraced the idea of “predestination,” a Calvinist doctrine holding that God chose some human beings for eternal salvation. These “elect” could not fall from grace nor refuse to be saved. Their salvation did not depend on virtue; it was arbitrarily decided for them, nor could salvation be earned by excessive virtue. A blameless life was no more than a sign that a person might be among the elect. Congregationalism was a brand of Puritanism that vested authority in the hands of each congregation rather than in a church hierarchy. New England was the stronghold of Congregationalism; the punitive measures to which it resorted to uphold its rigid standards were, in part, responsible for its failure to establish itself throughout the rest of the colonies. Massachusetts and Connecticut were the primary homes of Congregationalism. Rhode Island, on the other hand, declared people of all faiths welcome in 1663; the colony contained hundreds of Baptists and Quakers.
Pennsylvania, founded by Quaker William Penn in the 1680s, also preached and practiced religious tolerance. Pennsylvania quickly became home to people of such diverse faiths as Calvinism, Judaism, and Catholicism. New England generally resisted religious groups other than Puritans until after 1700, while the Middle Colonies welcomed all faiths.
Maryland was founded in 1634 as a Catholic colony and continued thereafter to have the highest percentage of Roman Catholics, although the colony grew more Anglican as time passed. In 1648 Catholic governor Calvert was driven from the colony and a Protestant named in his place. In 1689, with the Glorious Revolution in England, Protestants overthrew Maryland’s Catholic government.
A wood engraving of missionary John Eliot preaching to a group of Native Americans (Library of Congress)
Protestant-Catholic tussles in the colony continued until the colonies declared their independence.
The Anglican Church in North America was established in Virginia. Church membership, attendance, and conformity were required by law. However, Virginia did not make a success of its attempt to establish the Anglican Church. In the early years of the 17th century mere survival was the most important consideration. Afterward, many factors combined to make it difficult for the church to play a major role in Virginia. The population was too widely scattered, there were no bishops, and economic prosperity was of much greater concern to many than spiritual well-being.
Anglicanism remained limited to the area around the Chesapeake Bay for many years, but by the mid-18th century missionaries from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel ensured that there were Anglican churches in all the thirteen colonies. American Anglicans pleaded for the English church to send bishops to the New World, but representatives of almost every other faith protested. Experience told them that bishops were far too likely to become politically powerful, and they wanted to weaken rather than strengthen English authority in the colonies. North Carolina and Georgia were home to a diverse religious population. In 1758 Georgia officially established and supported the Anglican Church.
Deism is a belief in a logical God who created a rational universe. Deists believe that God was bound by the same physical laws and moral standards as his creatures. Although many believed in an afterlife as an incentive for good behavior on earth, Deists were skeptical of any element of religion that appeared to entail superstition. Deism was a philosophy more than it was a religion. Most deists in the American colonies were Anglicans or Protestants of other denominations.
Deist beliefs in the rationality of the universe, the perfectibility of humankind, and the supremacy of intellect rather than birth or titles all supported the revolutionary mood that swept the colonies after the Seven Years’ War. Deism grew especially among urban artisans and among intellectuals like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Its insistence on rational thought also helped to secularize the United States, just as was the case in Europe.
During the early days of colonization the church and the state were unified. British Protestants, Swedish Lutherans, and Dutch Reformed all established small communities within which the church was supported by taxes and full church membership was required for citizenship. Only church members could vote, hold public office, and serve on juries.
However, this system was challenged by the arrival of thousands of immigrants of many faiths. Many Protestants, Jews, and Roman Catholics migrated west to escape religious persecution or to establish places in which they could worship as they chose, without state interference. The existence of so many faiths meant that toleration was often necessary to survival. Rhode Island was the first colony to guarantee religious tolerance in its charter of 1663. In the 1680s William Penn made it clear that Pennsylvania welcomed all peaceable worshipers of God—everyone was to be left alone to worship as he or she chose.
During the 18th century important political leaders in both Europe and North America concluded that people should be free to worship in any institution they chose, without fear of political pressure or oppression. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison worked together to try to weaken the Anglican church establishment in Virginia, arguing that officials of the government were no more theologians than they were physicists or mathematicians and thus were not competent to establish the rules by which people worshipped. In 1786 Jefferson wrote a Statute for Religious Freedom that, when passed, carried the case for religious freedom.
The first amendment to the Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state. The roots of this separation lie in the religious pluralism that was always a fact of life in the American colonies.
Further reading: Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (New York: Penguin, 1985); Clifton E. Olmstead, History of Religion in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1960).
—Stephanie Muntone
World History
