The Church in History – A Somewhat Slanted Look at the History of the Christian Church,
Article 64 in a series
By: Dr. T. Y. Hiter
Ask any schoolboy or girl “Why did people come to the English Colonies in the 1600s?” and you’ll almost always get the answer “Religious freedom”, or some variant of that. Actually, that’s not even close, though a few did, at least, come to avoid religious persecution, back in France, England, or somewhere.
The Pilgrims, who were Anabaptist dissenters left England to avoid persecution, but they went to Holland. They were already out of England, before deciding to come here. The Church they established continues to this day. It’s called the “United Church of Christ”. The other group that settled in the Massachusetts Bay region was the group that called itself Puritans. Puritans wanted nothing to do with religious “freedom”. In fact, it was a capital crime, at times, to worship differently from them.
The Quakers came to escape religious persecution, and in fact established religious freedom as being of prime importance, over here, especially in Pennsylvania, but it was quite some time before their influence spread elsewhere. The Friends were highly literate and highly urban, and that may well be where we get the idea that all or most of us came here for that reason. Few Baptists came here to either avoid or establish religious freedom, though they sought it avidly, once they were here. Actually very few English Baptists ever came here. Most American Baptists became so locally, either as part of the Great awakening of the 1740s, or even later, well after the Revolutionary War.
Maryland was created as a refuge for Roman Catholics, but ironically, they were not allowed to worship as such. So: it’s hard to call it religious “freedom”, when you’re not allowed to worship according to your religious beliefs. On the other hand, they were being burned at the stake in England, so freedom from that is certainly freedom of a sort, in any case. Other Roman Catholics came to these shores to escape persecution, too, and even more to escape racial or secular strife. The Acadians of Nova Scotia, some of whom settled in Southern Louisiana, and some of whom settled in South Carolina are examples. And Huguenots from France settled in Virginia and North Carolina.
Anabaptists like Mennonites and Schwenkfelders came to the Mid-Atlantic, especially Pennsylvania, where they were welcomed by the Quakers, and New York was settled by Dutch Reformed (or “Huguenots”) people, later displaced by English Presbyterians and Anglicans.
And, everywhere there were Church of England, or Anglicans, who had no ideas about religious freedom, at all, and who, in fact, where they could, established the Church of England as the state supported Church. In Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, much of New England and elsewhere, by 1725 or so, the religious makeup of the English Colonies was very much like England itself, and for much the same reasons.