Persecution and Escape: Christianity in Colonial North America
This is part 1 of a four-part series on Christianity in the USA: In colonial North America, some were persecuted, while others were escaping persecution.
Suppose one is to understand Christianity as it developed in colonial North America, where the USA would eventually be established. In that case, it is helpful to understand something about Christianity in early modern Europe. The following post might be useful:
1492 Was Big: Christianity, Slavery, Colonialism and Imperialism
By the time of the English colonies, the dominant religion along the eastern seaboard of North America was Protestant Christianity; however, the character of Christianity in the USA overall would also be shaped by the Roman Catholicism introduced earlier and elsewhere on the continent, by the conversion of African peoples forcibly imported to North America for enslavement, by the kinds of Christianity that would develop during the era of westward expansion and violent displacement of indigenous peoples, and by forms of Christianity brought through waves of immigration.
The earliest Christians to arrive on the North American continent were Spanish conquistadors. These professional warriors were representatives of the newly unified Spanish crown, endeavoring to coercively establish a single national identity during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Spain was still essentially feudal, with a population consisting mostly of poor peasants. The nobility made up two percent of the population and owned ninety-five percent of the land.
However, under emerging capitalist systems, gold rather than land would be the mark of wealth because it could buy anything. Gold is what was sought in the ‘New World’. Whenever indigenous populations failed to produce it, the response was genocide, or in some cases, enslavement as a substitute form of wealth generation. At the very least, there was tension over land use and resources. And so, what Christóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus, 1452–1506) did to the Arawaks of the present-day Bahamas, Hernán Cortéz (1485–1547) did to the Aztecs of what is now Mexico, Francisco Pizarro (1471-6–1541) to the Incas of what became Peru, and to some extent, the English settlers to the Powhatans in Virginia and Pequots in Massachusetts.
In Spain, as in other European nation-states, the marriage of monarchy and church meant that the gold used to enrich and empower the monarchy was sought in the name of God, and the Christian symbols used to forge national identities on behalf of the crown and aristocracy. Columbus (who had been promised ten percent of profits and governorship of conquered lands) used highly religious language when reporting on his journeys and requesting further financial and material support from Isabella I and Ferdinand II.
Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.
Priests accompanied the conquistadors to instruct and educate soldiers, write letters and official documents, and generally provide administrative functions. Dominican friar and priest Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) documented the early years of post-Columbian colonization in the Caribbean, including the atrocities committed against indigenous people. Various Catholic religious orders participated in the conquest of the Caribbean and the Americas, evangelizing and pacifying indigenous populations along the way. Spanish colonists arrived in the wake of the conquistadors. They established chains of missions through Florida and the southeast, and later in the southwest of the continent that would one day become spanned by the USA. Their purpose was to convert indigenous people, to facilitate control of colonial areas, and to prevent colonization by France and England. Four hundred years after the systematic displacement and Hispanicization of indigenous populations had begun, the proud Hispanic society and culture that had developed in California would itself be displaced by white supremacist forms of governance introduced in the mid-nineteenth century.
All attempts by French explorers to establish permanent colonies in North America during the sixteenth century failed. During the seventeenth century, French colonists established forts and settlements in the Great Lakes, up and down the Mississippi River, and along the Gulf Coast. Seeking territory, but lacking the obsession with gold exhibited by Spanish conquistadors, the French were more interested in establishing trade, exports, and an inland route to the Pacific.
Roman Catholicism was further introduced in conjunction with French settlement. French relations with indigenous populations were usually peaceful. Rather than slaughtering them outright like the Spanish or vacillating between disregard and violent overreaction like the English, the French embraced and intermarried with indigenous people. Under the European conflation of church and crown, indigenous converts to Catholicism automatically became naturalized French subjects.
To understand the dominant form of Christianity in the English colonies, it helps to know something about Enlightenment-era Christianity in Europe. The following posts might be useful:
Newton’s God as First Cause and Physical Force Behind Nature
The Non-Interactive, Non-Intervening, Scientifically Provable God
After unsuccessful attempts in the late sixteenth century, English colonists, like the French, founded lasting settlements in the early seventeenth century. Jamestown in the Virginia Colony was settled in 1607, and the Church of England was legally established there in 1619. Parish vestries of laypeople functioned as a de facto government, administering justice and levying taxes for roads, poverty relief, and clergy salaries. Church attendance was expected of the entire populace, which was largely indifferent to its rituals and teachings.
In contrast to Virginia, English colonists in Massachusetts were opposed to the Church of England. Those who settled the Plymouth Colony in 1620 were part of a Calvinist sect from the north of England, by way of the Netherlands, who believed that true churches were voluntary, democratic communities, rather than whole Christian nations, that worship should be independent of any trappings, traditions, or centralized organization. These were separatists who fled persecution in England, where failure to attend Church of England services was considered seditious, and subject to a fine for each missed service. For all the persecution they and their forebears had faced, they ended up establishing a repressive, theocratic society of their own making.
These ‘Pilgrims’ at Plymouth were a subgroup of the English Protestants known as Puritans. Puritans held the same Calvinist beliefs as the Pilgrims, but tended toward non-separatism, believing that the Church of England could be reformed and purified from within, purged of its residual ‘Catholicism’. Puritans established the much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 to escape persecution and obtain the liberty to worship as they chose, independent from the Church of England. Meanwhile, the Church of England was developing a middle way of Catholic ritual and Protestant theology. The legacy of Puritanism is the Congregationalist tradition in the USA.
It should not be overlooked that from the beginning, English colonists in both Virginia and Massachusetts engaged in cycles of violence and mutual massacre with the people of indigenous tribes, who were assumed to be inferior and an impediment to progress. Concerning land and its use, the Puritans placed a legal standing of their devising above any natural rights, appealing to scripture: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” (Psalms 2:8) “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” (Romans 13:2) The same scriptures would later be similarly taken out of context to justify chattel slavery.
Roger Williams (1603–83), a Puritan minister, theologian, and author, was not only a staunch advocate for religious freedom and separation of church and state but also for fair dealings with Native Americans, and was one of the first abolitionists. In 1635, he was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for spreading “new and dangerous ideas.” He founded Providence Plantations, which became the colony of Rhode Island, and the first Baptist church in America. The southern faction of the tradition he founded would become the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, but not after completely abandoning his values in support of the forced relocation of indigenous people, chattel slavery, the Confederacy, Jim Crow society, and Cold War-inspired Christian nationalism.
The colonies in North America became a haven for groups persecuted under the sectarian nationalism of European societies. Since there was no state religion in North America, no state at all for that matter, and since dissident Protestant sects lacked any central authority, the Protestant Christianity of the English colonies became very diverse in its own right. Swedish and Finnish Lutherans settled in New Sweden (Delaware), Reform Protestants in New Netherland (parts of New Jersey and New York), English Quakers, and German Mennonites in the private colony of Pennsylvania.
Though it had existed elsewhere on the continent, Roman Catholicism was introduced to the English colonies with the establishment of Maryland by Jesuits accompanying English settlers in 1634. Though there was some tolerance expressed for Catholicism, the English colonies, in general, were overwhelmingly Protestant, and the anti-Catholic sentiment was rife. By the American Revolution, Catholicism had dwindled, so Catholics formed less than one percent of the population in the thirteen colonies. In contrast, about one-fourth of the U.S. population is Roman Catholic today.
Presbyterianism in the USA began with immigrants from Scotland and Ireland in the seventeenth century, with Francis Makemie establishing the first American presbytery in 1706. The church experienced growth and divisions, including the Old Side–New Side Controversy, and later splits over slavery and theological issues, leading to the formation of various denominations. Methodism in the USA began in the mid-eighteenth century with preachers like Laurence Coughlan and Robert Strawbridge, evolving from the British Methodist revival movement led by John Wesley. The Methodist Episcopal Church was officially organized in Baltimore in 1784, with Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury as leaders, later becoming the largest denomination in the USA during the nineteenth century.
Scientific learning spread quickly from Europe to the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, New England Puritan minister and prolific author Cotton Mather (1663–1728) conducted scientific experiments with plant hybridization, reporting to the Royal Society in London. His essentially deistic beliefs are reflected in his 1721 work, The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, with Religious Improvements.
The Christian Philosopher was both a science book for the general reader and a work of religious apologetics. Newton’s laws revealed the grand design of the universe, pointing to a Creator. The universe was a temple with God as its architect. Mather thought the gospel of this ‘philosophical’ religion should appeal to Christians and Muslims alike, ending what was understood as ‘atheism’ at the time (see my post, Discovering and Defining God Through the “Machine” of Nature).
On the other hand, Mather illustrates how newer and older ideas can exist simultaneously. In 1689, he published Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions. His insistence on the Satanic origins of various misfortunes did much to fan the agitated fear that eventually resulted in the Salem witch trials of 1692, in which he played a prominent if moderating role. But like Newton, Mather thought of God as a scientific necessity, not just a theological one. Disbelief in God was as perverse as disbelief in gravity.
New England Calvinist preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), who was conversant with Newtonian science and held deistic beliefs, moved so far from an interventionist view of God that he denied the efficacy of petitionary prayer. On the other hand, he defended the older concept of belief not only as intellectual assent based on evidence but also as “esteem and affection” for the truths of religion.[1] Thomas Jefferson would have none of it; he defined belief as simply “the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.”[2]
Reflecting Jefferson’s view, Congregationalist pastor Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66) taught that belief in God should be based entirely on evidence. But he also taught the importance of an intimate relationship with a God who would respond to prayers and intervene in one’s life. In short, eighteenth-century theology in North America was a mixture of Deism and traditional mythos, while the emphasis on empirical evidence was changing the concept of ‘belief’. (See my post, Is Religious Belief About Facts Outside Us, Or Realities Within?)
Along with other dualisms that characterized modern thinking (mind/matter, church/state, reason/emotion), a polarity developed within religion between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’. In the supernatural realm, God was a loving Father who was involved in the lives of his worshipers; in the realm of nature, the Creator had established the laws of the universe, set the universe in motion, given it sustenance, and then retreated from intervening in it. In the past, the Divine had been part of every individual, accessible through the intellectus (see my post, Christianity: The Spiritual Realm Is Inside Your Consciousness); now, there was a dichotomy between the natural world within which human beings lived, and the spiritual world in and through which they encountered the Divine. Such a split is unhelpful in resolving the paradox between what is objectively observable through the senses and rational mind, and what is subjectively experienced in the realm of individual consciousness.
When the ‘heart’ and the ‘head’ are disconnected in this way, faith can degenerate into a form of emotional indulgence. This was noted by fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart (1250-60–ca. 1328), who, along with others, was critical of an emotional style of mysticism. Such emotionalism was also a hallmark of the religious revival ca. 1730–55 known as the ‘Great Awakening’ in the English Colonies, and the ‘Evangelical Revival’ in Britain. Part 2 of this series—next week’s post—has more on that.
[1] Ewards, Jonathan. C. C. Goen, ed. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 4, The Great Awakening. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. p. 249.
[2] Cappon, Lester J., ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters, Vol. 2. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. p. 368.