Volume 2, Chapter 28 – Religious Trends in the Colonies
In the eighteenth century, an established church existed in most of the colonies. However,
there was a fair amount of religious liberty, except for Roman Catholics, apart from the
existence of the discriminatory establishment. The first years of the century saw a successful
Royal Drive by liberal use of chicanery to impose an Anglican establishment on the majority
of dissenters of North Carolina and South Carolina. Maryland had also been recently
saddled with an Anglican establishment, and Virginia had long had a state church. When
Georgia was founded, it too acquired an Anglican establishment. Never was the Anglican church
The Church was able to take firm root in these colonies, however, especially in dissident North Carolina.
Ministerial pay was sparse, and control was firmly exercised by the local vestries rather than by the Church in Great Britain.
Attempts to impose an Anglican establishment on New York and New Jersey were unsuccessful.
Local vestries in the former colony persisted in appointing Protestant ministers of other denominations,
while the New Jersey Assembly, with a heavy non-Anglican majority, refused to pass an establishment law.
Massachusetts and New Hampshire suffered a Puritan congregational establishment,
while Connecticut's established church was essentially Puritan Presbyterian.
Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, on the other hand, were completely free of an established church.
Roman Catholics were a small but uniformly persecuted minority.
This despite the fact that there were virtually no Catholics except in Maryland among the old Calvert aristocracy and among the Pennsylvania Germans.
In the 18th century, religion, though still established, had lost its commanding power
in Society, and its practitioners their old dogmatic zeal. The Puritan theocracy gradually
but steadily dissolved during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Some of the reasons
why Puritan zeal flagged were the debilitating effects of the growth of culture and worldly
cosmopolitanism on it, plus the liberal trends emerging from within the Puritan Church to
to become powerful in Harvard College, the very training ground of Massachusetts Puritanism.
The liberal Puritans, incidentally, used the Salem witch hunt effectively as an object
lesson of the consequences of unchecked religious superstition and frenzy. In the southern colonies,
the Anglican establishment was largely a formal shell behind which religion, per se, had very
The Virginia Squire was naturally and habitually a churchgoer and vestryman, but far more for
institutional and social than for deeply religious reasons. The Anglican ministry had little influence
in the southern colonies, even though the vestry in the state church was the basic unit
of Local Government. In fact, there is generally a clearly discernible correlation between
the governmental perquisite of an establishment and the dwindling of religious zeal in the
society. Even in dedicated Pennsylvania, as we have seen, recently intense Quaker zeal
faded rather rapidly and a more worldly and less principled Quaker generation replaced
The Growing Liberalization of the Churches was also a function of the new spirit abroad
The Great Rationalist Movement we know now as the Enlightenment.
The intellectual emphasis in England was shifting from a Calvinist preoccupation with pure faith,
divine revelation and the depravity of man, to an Enlightenment belief in the supremacy
of man's reason and in the possibility of his goodness and his progress.
The Enlightenment emphasis was on individual liberty, including the sphere of religion.
Isaac Newton's great achievement in the late 17th century gave a powerful impetus, despite
the great physicist's own personal inclination, to the growth of rationalism.
Here was a mighty achievement of man using his reason to uncover the hitherto hidden
and mysterious laws of nature.
For the 18th century, Newton's achievement had an enormously liberating impact. As the
great poet Alexander Pope celebrated, Nature in nature's law lay hidden in night. God
said, Let Newton be, and all was light. And in America, William Livingston, future governor
of New Jersey, hailed the immortal Newton, whose illustrious name will shine on records
of Eternal Fame. Even the Reverend Cotton Mather incurred the distrust of such hard-shell
Puritans as Samuel Sewell in 1714 by accepting the Copernican system. Clearly, even Mather
was displaying a softness toward modern trends. Newton's works graced libraries and private
Bookshelves Throughout Colonial America. Also very popular in America was John Locke's
late 17th century essay Concerning Human Understanding, which set forth an empiricist philosophy and
psychology. The works of both Newton and Locke contributed to a more rationalist and liberal
view of religion. While liberalism made great strides in New England, it had by no means
Arminians completely conquered Puritanism, or even Harvard, by the end of the first third
of the 18th century. Despite the great fears of the Orthodox that liberal Arminian doctrines
were spreading in New England, there were few Arminian ministers and no Arminian works
had yet been published in America. Arminians were followers of the Dutch liberal theologian
Jacobus Arminius, 1560-1609, who stressed the moral freedom and responsibility of the
individual to achieve salvation partly by his own merits.
Ensconced in the theology chair at Harvard was the impeccably orthodox Reverend Edward
Wigglesworth, and at Marlboro the Reverend Benjamin Kent was forced out of the ministry
for His Advanced Liberal Views. Still, by the end of the first third of the 18th century,
liberalism was advancing, and religion was definitely declining as a vital force in the
lives of the people.