"The Surprising Religious Diversity of America's 13 Colonies" Topic

"The story of religion in America's original 13 colonies often focuses on Puritans, Quakers and other Protestants fleeing persecution in Europe, looking to build a community of like-minded believers. Protestants were indeed in the majority, but the reality was far more diverse. Colonial America attracted true believers from a wide array of backgrounds and beliefs, include Judaism, Catholicism and more.

And that's just the European émigrés. Myriad groups of Indigenous Americans who already lived along the Eastern seaboard had their own beliefs, many of which forged connections between the living, the departed and the natural world, according to Yale emeritus professor Jon Butler in his book New World Faiths: Religion in Colonial America. And African people transported to the colonies as part of the transatlantic slave trade brought their own multiplicity of spiritual practices, which included polytheistic, animist and Islamic beliefs, before merging into new variants of Protestantism…"

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Armand

Why is that surprising? The colonies were havens for many persecuted groups. Consider Massachusetts, founded by Pilgrims ANDS Puritans (different groups). Some of the Puritans thought they were too lenient and moved to found Connecticutt. Others thought they were not lenient enough and moved to found Rhode Island. So the protestant "majority" was no such thing, being divided into dozens if not hundreds of competing groups. Surely any serious student of the colonies knows this, and always has?

Not to mention the upheavals of the Great Awakening, which split many churches.

Not to mention that many early American colonists considered themselves 'Christian' but were loosely tied to specific churches. Many were free thinkers.

Gee, if only those disparate beliefs got together to enshrine religious freedom into the basic make up of the country… oh, wait, they did!

Surprising my heinie.

It is surprising (to me) what people find surprising!

Like when you tell people that there were African and Chinese sailors at the Battle of Trafalgar. "Really?" they say, in surprise. There were even some Americans on the British boats.

Yeah, really- the Press Gang may have been many bad things but racially discriminating it was not.

Is anyone really surprised that the non-Christian inhabitants of the Americas had their own religions? That's a solid "Doh!"

Bill, why were Brynden's comments deleted? I am unsure of what they contained that required deletion. Did I miss something? I see the account is locked. Was this the troll poster you mentioned?

Each of the three major denominations -- Anglican, Presbyterian, Puritan/Congregationalist -- advocated a single established church -- theirs. That is what a lot of the English/British civil wars of the 17th century were about. But there could be no NATIONAL establishment in the United States -- which is what the First Amendment actually says -- because there were three equal contenders, each dominant in a third of the country. Toleration was everybody's second choice.

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Our church-state constitutional confusion results, in part, from the Court's failures to understand how the founders agreed about religious liberty but disagreed about the separation of church and state. This book attempts to provide that understanding and construct the First Amendment's Religion Clauses on the basis of the founders' shared political philosophy of religious freedom, while remaining cognizant of and open to their (and our) disagreements about the separation of church and state.

Thanks.

Armand

Don't forget that Maryland (Mary's Land) was founded by Catholics. Many of the Irish and Scots-Irish were also Catholics that, at the time, hated the English and were hated by them as well. Jews were present from the beginning also.

Including apparently a Coptic or Ethiopian Orthodox convert to Roman Catholicism:

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Curiously, I was wondering only yesterday how Christian belief evolved among the enslaved Africans brought to the colonies.

To be fair to the author, the 'Surprising' strapline given undue prominence here is not the title of the article which on reading proves to be a brief survey of the diversity discussed above. As an agnostic, animist Limey I found it informative.

42, there is a vast literature on slave religion. Genovese's ROLL JORDAN ROLL is a good place to start. African-American Christianity is a powerful faith, and while sharing 90% of the common Christian beliefs (as is true of all the other Christian denominations) it has its own distinctives and insights.

Thanks, doc. Much obliged.

About the book that doc linked to "Religious Liberty and the American Founding by Vincent Phillip Muñoz"

Does it concern anyone that it's always deeply religious people who believe that the Founders never intended separation of church and state? When the conclusion is a given, one wonders why the author would even need to bother to back it up.

Charge, here's a question for you. WHEN did the various states end their respective church establishments? In several cases, LONG after the First Amendment was ratified, which DID NOT APPLY TO TH STATES. (It does now, via the 14th's incorporation.)

The Founders wanted separation of church and state as the national level, but left it to the states to do their own various ways.

They did not, however, want separation of church and society.

More states rights nonsense.

Whenever we start talking about what the Founders intended you need to start with "Which one?". Views on the role of the church and religion in society in 1776 varied, and those views evolved between the Declaration of Independence and the passage of the First Amendment. The vagueness in the First Amendment was so that the people who would need to sign on to it could see in it what they wanted to see.

dapeters, why "nonsense"? Come 2025 you are likely to be seeing blue states asserting "states rights" against the red-controlled federal government. We have a federal system, if you understand what that is? States are sovereign, and where the line is drawn between them and the national government is not always clear, and the line moves. Perhaps you need to go back to Civics class?

Bill. what do you consider "vague"?

I think you are being disingenuous doc. The First Amendment says Congress cannot pass a law respecting the establishment of religion. Establishment of a church is your interpretation of the meaning of those words. Others, both at the founding of the U.S. and today would not agree with that interpretation. Is that not vague?

I see the First Amendment religion clauses growing out of conflicts existing within various individual colonies before, during and after the AWI. Madison cut his teeth on these fights in Virginia before moving on to the Constitution Convention and then to Congress.

What is usually overlooked in the prejudice against Roman Catholics. The exceptions were Maryland and Pennsylvania which allowed Catholics to practice their religion freely.

Some Protestant denominations don't consider Catholics Christians, which is just ridiculous.

There are a lot of issues here. The first, among many, is why is it that only religious extremists are certain this is the case; that the Founders never intended for the state to be truly separated from Christianity? Why are there so few books that assert this? Why is an outlier book so certain that he is right and that, after 250 years, everyone else is wrong? Are we supposed to accept what this author writes as objective reasoning?

You're not suspicious in the least that the author has to make a complex argument in order to assert that it's all been obvious from the get-go? No?

He even invents another Constitutional interpretive gimmick.

"design originalism"

It's bad enough that Alito (another Federalist in the same religious mold as Vincent Phillip Muñoz) uses a prior Federalist Society constitutional fiction to interpret the constitution), this looks like another highly political alibi to give SCOTUS cover to give a whole lot of rights to religious groups based solely on overreach.

Design Originalism sounds like that scene in Mel Brooks' "History of the World Part 1" where the king invokes "Royal privilege" during a chess game to get three moves to his opponent's one.

In fact, several of the Evangelical intelligentsia are asking their fellow evangelicals to be less political, militant and to stop trying to shape culture. Further, that the pact was that minority religious groups would be tolerated (and not more) and not given protections/privileges in order that they could use them as a base to manipulate and exploit the rest of the nation.

In any case, when you're dealing with a man who's first books are all that America is really intended to be a theocracy, goes against established Constitutional super stars like Mike McConnell and has to invent a clever device to prove he gets exactly what he wants, an objective mind would like to ask; how is it that after 250 years of jurisprudence and irrespective of his personal wants and desires, the Constitution is 100% on his side and everyone else has been in error?

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Here ya go!

There was a broad, deep, and unquestioned Christian consensus, one that existed from the landing of Columbus down into the twentieth century. It did not result in a formal church establishment at the federal level, but it didn't have to. It was the kind of commitment that touched everything, and got into everything. It was the kind of Christian consensus that Francis Schaeffer spent so much time calling us back to. And it is still functioning in many parts of our country.

Charge, I agree that the Founders were concerned with establishing a new secular order. Some of them wanted no established church, others couldn't agree on which church it would be. hence the First Amendment. You seem to be areguing against what no one here is asserting.

"Our government rests upon religion. It is from that source that we derive our reverence for truth and justice, for equality and liberty, and for the rights of mankind. Unless the people believe in these principles they cannot believe in our government. There are only two main theories of government in the world. One rests on righteousness, the other rests on force. One appeals to reason, the other appeals to the sword. One is exemplified in a republic, the other is represented by a despotism."

Calvin Coolidge, 1924

What has to be remembered is that there was no Christian Church, but many, most of them being Protestant. Christianity is not, nor was it then, a monolith and persecution, religious prejudice, and open warfare in Europe during and after the Reformation, existed, and those differences were brought to England's American colonies.

Yes indeed. There was a general cultural Protestant establishment; whatever the Methodists, the Baptists, the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, etc. agreed on -- which is quite a lot -- was the defacto cultural establishment. Contrary views were not outlawed but had little influence.

But I also agree with the idea of the "triple melting pot": Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Immigrants retained their religious identity while becoming Americans. A Russian Jew became an American Jew and a Polish Catholic became an American Catholic.

"Contrary views were not outlawed but had little influence."

The Catholic religion was not allowed to be practiced in all but two of the original colonies. Call it what you wish, but the religion was de facto 'outlawed.'

Early on, yes.

doc, I am not worried about the Founders, rather I am worried about charlatans who are serving up the truth about what the Founders really wanted because it's usually what the author also always wanted…although that's usually just a coincidence…

I'm not sure we have to attend to the Founders' every whim. If the Founders didn't believe in using two pieces of bread to hold a slice of meat would we all be doomed to rolling salami up with our fingers?

Additionally, do you link to books that you don't also coincidentally believe in completely?

What exactly are we engaging in here? Are you advocating a point of view or not? Prof Munoz goes a step further than McConnell and says religion can be blended with government at the state level.

But he isn't really what I'm asking about. I'm fairly sure Munoz' book is simply a jibber-jabber-esque road map for SCOTUS to justify overturning this right and that right.

What I'm asking is why always insert things that are subjectively agreeable? Always cropped to ignore the broader conversation. The assumption is that we must live by the Founders' strictest intents and yet never addressed is why we cant judge the Founders by contemporary morals.

Look, you do what you want but it's one reason why your positions, even in a casual sense, are often so brittle. You simply cant always push forward what you like as the killer argument for why it has to be that way. There are plenty of things I don't like in the Constitution but I don't pretend they aren't there.

Charge, you are arguing with what you imagine I was thinking when I wrote what I wrote.