WEBVTT NOTE 28. Religious Trends in the Colonies 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.700 Volume 2, Chapter 28 – Religious Trends in the Colonies 2 00:00:06.700 --> 00:00:13.240 In the eighteenth century, an established church existed in most of the colonies. However, 3 00:00:13.240 --> 00:00:18.680 there was a fair amount of religious liberty, except for Roman Catholics, apart from the 4 00:00:18.680 --> 00:00:25.180 existence of the discriminatory establishment. The first years of the century saw a successful 5 00:00:25.180 --> 00:00:32.300 Royal Drive by liberal use of chicanery to impose an Anglican establishment on the majority 6 00:00:32.300 --> 00:00:38.980 of dissenters of North Carolina and South Carolina. Maryland had also been recently 7 00:00:38.980 --> 00:00:46.100 saddled with an Anglican establishment, and Virginia had long had a state church. When 8 00:00:46.100 --> 00:00:52.620 Georgia was founded, it too acquired an Anglican establishment. Never was the Anglican church 9 00:00:52.620 --> 00:00:59.620 The Church was able to take firm root in these colonies, however, especially in dissident North Carolina. 10 00:00:59.620 --> 00:01:09.620 Ministerial pay was sparse, and control was firmly exercised by the local vestries rather than by the Church in Great Britain. 11 00:01:09.620 --> 00:01:16.620 Attempts to impose an Anglican establishment on New York and New Jersey were unsuccessful. 12 00:01:16.620 --> 00:01:23.620 Local vestries in the former colony persisted in appointing Protestant ministers of other denominations, 13 00:01:23.620 --> 00:01:31.620 while the New Jersey Assembly, with a heavy non-Anglican majority, refused to pass an establishment law. 14 00:01:31.620 --> 00:01:37.620 Massachusetts and New Hampshire suffered a Puritan congregational establishment, 15 00:01:37.620 --> 00:01:43.620 while Connecticut's established church was essentially Puritan Presbyterian. 16 00:01:43.620 --> 00:01:51.620 Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, on the other hand, were completely free of an established church. 17 00:01:51.620 --> 00:01:57.620 Roman Catholics were a small but uniformly persecuted minority. 18 00:01:57.620 --> 00:02:08.620 This despite the fact that there were virtually no Catholics except in Maryland among the old Calvert aristocracy and among the Pennsylvania Germans. 19 00:02:08.620 --> 00:02:31.460 In the 18th century, religion, though still established, had lost its commanding power 20 00:02:31.460 --> 00:02:39.920 in Society, and its practitioners their old dogmatic zeal. The Puritan theocracy gradually 21 00:02:39.920 --> 00:02:45.580 but steadily dissolved during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Some of the reasons 22 00:02:45.580 --> 00:02:52.060 why Puritan zeal flagged were the debilitating effects of the growth of culture and worldly 23 00:02:52.060 --> 00:02:59.140 cosmopolitanism on it, plus the liberal trends emerging from within the Puritan Church to 24 00:02:59.140 --> 00:03:06.140 to become powerful in Harvard College, the very training ground of Massachusetts Puritanism. 25 00:03:06.900 --> 00:03:12.380 The liberal Puritans, incidentally, used the Salem witch hunt effectively as an object 26 00:03:12.380 --> 00:03:19.380 lesson of the consequences of unchecked religious superstition and frenzy. In the southern colonies, 27 00:03:19.960 --> 00:03:26.960 the Anglican establishment was largely a formal shell behind which religion, per se, had very 28 00:03:26.960 --> 00:03:39.520 The Virginia Squire was naturally and habitually a churchgoer and vestryman, but far more for 29 00:03:39.520 --> 00:03:47.440 institutional and social than for deeply religious reasons. The Anglican ministry had little influence 30 00:03:47.440 --> 00:03:53.060 in the southern colonies, even though the vestry in the state church was the basic unit 31 00:03:53.060 --> 00:04:00.220 of Local Government. In fact, there is generally a clearly discernible correlation between 32 00:04:00.220 --> 00:04:07.220 the governmental perquisite of an establishment and the dwindling of religious zeal in the 33 00:04:07.220 --> 00:04:15.220 society. Even in dedicated Pennsylvania, as we have seen, recently intense Quaker zeal 34 00:04:15.220 --> 00:04:22.100 faded rather rapidly and a more worldly and less principled Quaker generation replaced 35 00:04:22.100 --> 00:04:29.100 The Growing Liberalization of the Churches was also a function of the new spirit abroad 36 00:04:52.100 --> 00:04:58.760 The Great Rationalist Movement we know now as the Enlightenment. 37 00:04:58.760 --> 00:05:06.760 The intellectual emphasis in England was shifting from a Calvinist preoccupation with pure faith, 38 00:05:06.760 --> 00:05:14.320 divine revelation and the depravity of man, to an Enlightenment belief in the supremacy 39 00:05:14.320 --> 00:05:20.980 of man's reason and in the possibility of his goodness and his progress. 40 00:05:20.980 --> 00:05:27.740 The Enlightenment emphasis was on individual liberty, including the sphere of religion. 41 00:05:27.740 --> 00:05:34.740 Isaac Newton's great achievement in the late 17th century gave a powerful impetus, despite 42 00:05:34.740 --> 00:05:41.700 the great physicist's own personal inclination, to the growth of rationalism. 43 00:05:41.700 --> 00:05:47.420 Here was a mighty achievement of man using his reason to uncover the hitherto hidden 44 00:05:47.420 --> 00:05:50.340 and mysterious laws of nature. 45 00:05:50.340 --> 00:05:57.620 For the 18th century, Newton's achievement had an enormously liberating impact. As the 46 00:05:57.620 --> 00:06:05.200 great poet Alexander Pope celebrated, Nature in nature's law lay hidden in night. God 47 00:06:05.200 --> 00:06:13.140 said, Let Newton be, and all was light. And in America, William Livingston, future governor 48 00:06:13.140 --> 00:06:19.880 of New Jersey, hailed the immortal Newton, whose illustrious name will shine on records 49 00:06:19.880 --> 00:06:26.780 of Eternal Fame. Even the Reverend Cotton Mather incurred the distrust of such hard-shell 50 00:06:26.780 --> 00:06:36.080 Puritans as Samuel Sewell in 1714 by accepting the Copernican system. Clearly, even Mather 51 00:06:36.080 --> 00:06:43.300 was displaying a softness toward modern trends. Newton's works graced libraries and private 52 00:06:43.300 --> 00:06:50.300 Bookshelves Throughout Colonial America. Also very popular in America was John Locke's 53 00:06:50.300 --> 00:06:59.300 late 17th century essay Concerning Human Understanding, which set forth an empiricist philosophy and 54 00:06:59.300 --> 00:07:06.560 psychology. The works of both Newton and Locke contributed to a more rationalist and liberal 55 00:07:06.560 --> 00:07:13.120 view of religion. While liberalism made great strides in New England, it had by no means 56 00:07:13.120 --> 00:07:19.060 Arminians completely conquered Puritanism, or even Harvard, by the end of the first third 57 00:07:19.060 --> 00:07:26.360 of the 18th century. Despite the great fears of the Orthodox that liberal Arminian doctrines 58 00:07:26.360 --> 00:07:32.480 were spreading in New England, there were few Arminian ministers and no Arminian works 59 00:07:32.480 --> 00:07:40.000 had yet been published in America. Arminians were followers of the Dutch liberal theologian 60 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:49.000 Jacobus Arminius, 1560-1609, who stressed the moral freedom and responsibility of the 61 00:07:49.000 --> 00:07:54.960 individual to achieve salvation partly by his own merits. 62 00:07:54.960 --> 00:08:01.680 Ensconced in the theology chair at Harvard was the impeccably orthodox Reverend Edward 63 00:08:01.680 --> 00:08:08.720 Wigglesworth, and at Marlboro the Reverend Benjamin Kent was forced out of the ministry 64 00:08:08.720 --> 00:08:16.600 for His Advanced Liberal Views. Still, by the end of the first third of the 18th century, 65 00:08:16.600 --> 00:08:23.680 liberalism was advancing, and religion was definitely declining as a vital force in the 66 00:08:23.680 --> 00:08:24.800 lives of the people.