The history of religion in the original 13 American colonies often focuses on Puritans, Quakers, and other Protestants fleeing persecution in Europe, seeking to build a community of like-minded believers. Protestants were indeed the majority, but the reality was much more diverse. Colonial America attracted true believers from a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs, including Judaism, Catholicism and more.
And these are only the European emigrants. According to Yale Professor Emeritus Jon Butler in his book New World Beliefs: Religion in Colonial America. And the Africans transported to the colonies as part of the transatlantic slave trade brought their own multiplicity of spiritual practices, which included polytheistic, animistic and Islamic beliefs, before blending into new variants of Protestantism.
In 1630, English Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, invoked the phrase “the city on the hill” to describe the new Christian religious community that he and his fellow colonists should aspire to build in the service of “Almighty God”. “But the various believers drawn or brought to the colonies built many proverbial cities, on many hills. Five generations later, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence without mentioning the word “Christ”, nor the neither “God” nor “Christ” appear in the United States Constitution, written and ratified a decade later. Both documents came to enshrine the ideals of a new nation that had a religious foundation, but developed a secular soul.
17th century: An emphasis on religious uniformity
Public Adoration at Plymouth by Pilgrims, print by artist Albert Bobbett, c. 1870
The Print Collector/Getty Images
The English colonies in North America were founded as separate Protestant societies, with their own charters and, with few exceptions, an emphasis on religious uniformity.
In Virginia, the oldest of the original 13 colonies, religion was a major topic when the first colonial assembly, the House of Burgesses, first met in 1619. Representatives passed laws requiring citizens to “service of God”, including mandatory attendance. in the Church of England (aka the Anglican Church, the Protestant denomination established by the British state which had moved away from the long-dominant Roman Catholicism in Europe).
After the Pilgrims arrived in New England in 1620, the Puritans followed in the 1630s. Both had split from Anglicanism, believing in the strict Protestant teachings of John Calvin, who was critical of the Church of England as still tainted by Catholicism. Once in the New World, the Puritans gave their version of Protestantism a new name: Congregationalism.
Anglicans and Congregationalists became the two dominant forces in American religious life for much of the 17e century, with nearly all new colonies having one or the other as their established religion. At the beginning of the 18e century, the American colonies were a place where “religion was fundamentally the culture,” says Alan Taylor, a history professor at the University of Virginia. Despite geographic and linguistic diversity, he says, the colonies were dominated by the near-uniform “belief that there will be more social peace and better moral order if everyone goes to the same church”.
WATCH: “Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower” on HISTORY Vault.
Father Andrew White celebrating the landing of the first settlers in Maryland, the only American colony founded as a refuge for English Catholics, March 25, 1634.
Charles Phelps Cushing/ClassicStock/Getty Images
There were notable exceptions to this attitude among the colonies.
One was in Rhode Island, where a dissenting Puritan named Roger Williams, who had been expelled from Massachusetts in 1635, imagined his new settlement on Narragansett Bay as a “refuge for those in distress of conscience”. He promoted the idea of a society where religion should not be regulated by the state.
The other took root in 1680, when King Charles II repaid a debt by granting 45,000 square miles on the west side of the Delaware River to William Penn, son of an English admiral Penn. A follower of Quakerism, the radical and reviled Protestant sect that rejected nearly all the trappings of church ritual and hierarchy, Penn went on to found Pennsylvania, a tolerant new colony that attracted not just Anglicans, but a variety German Protestants, Lutherans. to the Pietists, and even to certain Catholics.
For its part, Maryland was founded in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics fleeing the wars of religion in Europe.
WATCH: The Religion Collection on HISTORY Vault.
The “great awakening” ushers in even more diversity
George Whitefield, a key figure in an evangelical movement known as the Great Awakening, preaching outdoors.
Cultural Club/Getty Images
Then, in the middle of the 18e century, came the most important religious event of pre-revolutionary America: the “Great Awakening”. It was then that an evangelical style of preaching upended religious traditions and helped reinvigorate American religious culture, making it more energetic, diverse, and independent, especially outside of New England. The movement’s key figure, an Anglican minister named George Whitefield, toured the colonies several times between 1739 and his death in 1770. With a lively acting voice and stage manner, Butler writes, he attracted huge crowds, addressing the greatest concern of all. Protestant believers: eternal salvation.
Scroll to continue
Whitefield and other inspired preachers helped establish new communities of Protestants, including Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians.
The Great Awakening led to greater female participation in the New Baptist movement and the first significant attempts to convert enslaved Africans.
It also enshrined the act of choice in American life. Before the Great Awakening, Taylor says, what was normal in the colonies was “everyone in a community went to the same church.” What was normal after the Great Awakening, he says, “is the individual making choices.”
Enslaved Africans bring their own beliefs; Some become Baptists
Slaves are baptized in a Moravian congregation, as depicted in a German history of the Moravians in Pennsylvania, 1757.
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
As the transatlantic slave trade increased dramatically, nearly 1 in 5 of the 1.1 million people living in the 13 colonies were black by the mid-18e century.
Enslaved Africans brought with them a range of religious beliefs. Some practiced Christianity, which had found converts on the West African coast from the 16e century. Some were Muslims. Most practiced animistic beliefs, worshiping spirits that permeate people, animals, and inanimate objects. They kept these beliefs alive through music, dance, healing arts, and other types of cultural expression.
Relatively little is known about the religious life of slaves in early colonial America, says James Sidbury, a history professor at Rice University. “North American slave owners cared little for the beliefs of their slaves,” he says, and “a deeply paternalistic interest in the religious development of slaves” did not take hold until the 19e century.
After the Great Awakening, black church membership, including slaves and freedmen, increased dramatically, Sidbury says, as Baptists, Methodists and some Presbyterians sought converts of all races.
The first handful of black Protestant churches were Baptist, founded in the 1770s in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia. But most slaves would have worshiped alongside white people or carved out spiritual spaces for themselves.
Religious life on the southern plantations, says Sidbury, “must have been a very complicated mix of true Christian converts and lots of curious people and others who clung to more traditional ways of life”. Tolerance in this world was important, he adds, because the deep oppression and violent reality of chattel slavery meant that cooperation among slaves was a matter of survival.
Small pockets of Islam and Judaism
Print showing the holiday of Purim, a Jewish holiday commemorating the deliverance of the Jews in the Persian Empire, celebrated in the Touro Synagogue, Rhode Island, 1712.
Photo Archive/Getty Images
Islam was the dominant religion in the upper regions of sub-Saharan Africa, and there is evidence of Muslim believers among enslaved Africans in North America, particularly in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Listings of escaped slaves from the region sometimes referred to Muslim origins.
Jews became an integral part of colonial life from the second half of the 17ecentury, when Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal arrived in New Amsterdam (later renamed New York). Jews also settled in Philadelphia, Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, and Newport, Rhode Island, where the Touro Synagogue, dedicated in 1763, survives as the oldest synagogue building in the United States.
The beliefs of the founders
On the eve of the American Revolution, no Protestant denomination could claim more than one-fifth of the colonies’ religious followers, according to Butler. The Church of England – once dominant and gradually resurrected as Episcopalism after the break with England – had fallen to around 15%.
The main founders – including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison – were all nominal Christians, but scholars have noted that they tended to eschew doctrinal beliefs. And the American Revolution itself is considered a “profoundly secular event,” writes Butler.
Many founders were adherents of deism, a loosely based set of Enlightenment ideas in opposition to religious orthodoxies, marked by skepticism, rationalism, and close observation of nature. Some deists, like Thomas Paine, rejected Christianity outright.
Former colonies, which became new states, generally still had established religions. (The Congregational Church remained Massachusetts’ state religion well into the 1830s.) But the founding documents of the Revolutionary period recalibrated the role of religion away from government, beginning at the national level, followed by the states.
