The Expanding Religious Culture of English Colonial America

1
The Expanding Religious Culture of English
Colonial America
2
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)

3
TULIP

• The Synod of Dort (1662) established the central
  doctrines of Calvinism (to which the Dutch
  Reformed and other Reformed churches would
  subscribe)
• 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

4
William Penns 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

5
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

6
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)

7
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)

8
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

9
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