The Expanding
Religious Culture of
English Colonial
America
Religious Diversity in the Middle
Colonies
• Besides England, Spain and France, other
countries like the Netherlands, Germany
and Scandinavia were making
themselves, and their religions, known in
America
• Immigrants from various Scandinavian
countries represented a strong Lutheran
presence
• The Dutch Reformed Church, a Calvinist
denomination, settled primarily in New
York (originally called New Amsterdam)
“TULIP”
• The Synod of Dort (1662) established the central
doctrines of Calvinism (to which the Dutch
Reformed and other Reformed churches would
subscribe):
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Total Depravity
Unconditional Election
Limited Atonement
Irrestistible Grace
Perseverance of the Saints
• From 1662 on, these five principles were seen as
the standard of Calvinist orthodoxy in America
William Penn’s “Holy
Experiment”
• Penn, a Quaker, settled Pennsylvania in 1681 as a
proprietary colony (one formed under the
direction of a particular individual by decree of
the king)
• Being of a pacifistic and minority tradition, Penn
founded his colony on the idea that God shaped
“inner light” in people in variant forms and that it
was counterintuitive to force others to believe a
certain way
– Pennsylvania enjoyed a rather open policy toward
religious diversity, demonstrating the possibility of
such peaceful pluralism in a single society
• Quakers, German Pietists, Presbyterians, Baptists
and even Catholics lived alongside one another in
relative harmony
Maryland and the Carolinas
• Maryland, founded by George Calvert, Lord
Baltimore, was also a proprietary colony
experiencing religious diversity
– Specifically, Maryland became a safe haven for
English, and later French, Catholics
– In 1649, the second Lord Baltimore, issued a decree
for “religious toleration” intent on “assuring the
legal rights of minority religions” (35)
• The Carolinas, though bearing no official act of
toleration, harbored a great number of different
religions, including a burgeoning Jewish
population
– Eventually divided into North Carolina and South
Carolina, the original colony only required its
settlers to profess their belief in God
The Great Awakening
• In spite of the growing number of different faith
traditions, there did exist established churches
• Yet disregarding church boundaries, a general
revivalistic fervor swept through the colonies
during the 1730s through the 1750s
– This general period of renewal is referred to as “the
Great Awakening”
– This period helped give birth to a whole new set of
ways to be religious and helped in part to bring
about the current American system of
denominationalism
• The two preachers most associated with the
upsurge of revivals were Jonathan Edwards (a
Calvinist pastor) and George Whitefield (an
Anglican itinerant)
The Great Awakening
• Since the revivals highlighted a particular style of
being religious- namely having a personal and
singular experience of conversion- this type of
religious movement is called evangelical
– This particular experience was perceived therein as
“key to authentic religion” (39), and affected
American Protestantism from then on
• Such experiences were often marked by physical,
even ecstatic, reactions
• “Itinerating”, or traveling from church to church
to preach, became a trademark of renowned Great
Awakening preachers (Whitefield was one, also
John and Charles Wesley, the founders of
Methodism)
“Rational” Religion
• Critics of the Great Awakening saw certain elements of
the revivals as destabilizing to more established
churches or excessive , particularly the physical
responses and the “door-to-door” preacher method of
itinerancy
– Many of these critics had been profoundly influenced
by the Enlightenment
• The Enlightenment brought forward the idea that
reason acted as the primary lens through which all,
including religious, phenomena should be examined
• Some of the more extreme proponents of rational
religion rejected religion entirely, suspecting anything
that based itself on “miracles” or revealed truth; others
were more moderate and tried to reconcile particular
religious beliefs to reason
“Rational” Religion
- Enlightenment rationalists were more lax when it
came to ideas of religious liberty, believing in
great part that it was a matter of personal
conscience what one worshipped
- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George
Washington all supported the idea that rationalism
would lead people to a general sense of shared
morals and ethics
- Deism (based on the idea that the existence of
God can be deduced from the natural world) and
Unitarianism (a religion based on the rational
excavation of certain doctrines of scripture,
namely the trinity) are both seen as religions that
grew either directly or indirectly out of the
Enlightenment