DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
19 August 2008
Religious Diversity in Early America
By Catherine L. Albanese
The colonial period in U.S. history was marked by religious pluralism, as Native Americans, African slaves, and European settlers practiced their own diverse forms of religion. In this article, the author traces the roots and the establishment of religious tolerance in colonial times.
Catherine L. Albanese is the author of A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. She is also the J.F. Rowny Professor in Comparative Religions, and the Chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Three myths prevail in the common perception of American religious history:
• Myth One: The religious story is only about Europeans.
• Myth Two: The Protestant Christianity of European immigrants and settlers was monolithic in the nation's earliest decades.
• Myth Three: Religious pluralism is a late-breaking, 20th-century development.
There are several problems with this view of American religious history. First, it ignores the place of indigenous peoples — American Indians — who preceded the Europeans to these shores by centuries. Second, it also ignores the place of Africans who comprised a large minority of the colonial population. Third, on the European side of the story, it is important to notice that, while the early American population was largely Protestant, Roman Catholics and Jews were also among the settlers. Finally, even among Protestants, pluralism was widespread in early America and was an important feature of the American religious landscape. Sectarian developments in Britain in the period immediately preceding colonization guaranteed a pluralistic outlook, and so did sectarian immigration from, most notably, Germany. Meanwhile, settlers from other mostly northern European nations with their particular religious preferences were represented in early America as well.
Even with this short description of the actual religious diversity of early America, we can well ask questions about how the myth of monolithic Protestant identity began in the first place. The earliest historians of the American religious experience were themselves representatives of mainstream Protestant denominations. They came at history, not professionally, but from positions as clergy. Thus, only gradually did the study of American religious history become professionalized, and — with Protestants the clear majority in the nation until very recently — it is no wonder that the actual diversity in early America was ignored.
Traditions of Indigenous Peoples and African Americans
For centuries, in separate nations, indigenous peoples had developed their distinctive American cultures. Each Indian nation had its own belief systems, codes of conduct, and ceremonial practices that were, and today remain, distinct from one another. (Material here and in much of what follows is summarized from Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 4th ed., [Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 2007].) With some 550 distinct societies and languages in 17th-century America, American Indian culture was marked by greater diversity than most of us can fathom. But if we look at the commonalities among groups, American Indians demonstrated a strong sense of continuity with the sacred world, expressed in beliefs, ceremonies, and ways of living that told of their kinship with nature. They saw the material world around them as sacred and did not separate it from a supernatural realm in the same way that Europeans did. They found sacred reality, too, in interior dream states, and they saw their inner lives and outer reality as everywhere fluid and open to transformation. Sacred animals could become people and vice versa. In this context, the Indians' ethic might be described as one of living in complete harmony with the natural world. Moreover, the Indians were comfortable in situations of what later would be called religious plurality. Among Native Americans, religious differences were noticed, honored, and accepted. Different tribes had different spirits to claim, different ceremonies to perform, and different practices to observe.
Among Africans, in turn, religion did not disappear with slave status. Most of them came from West Africa and the Congo-Angola region, and many were Mandinke, Yoruba, Ibo, Bakongo, Ewe, and Fon peoples. Islam was the religion of choice for some, while others followed various and distinctive traditional African religions. Again, as for American Indians, certain themes prevailed among these indigenous forms. Community was key, and the sacred world was never far away, peopled by spirits and deities who included revered ancestors. Presiding over the sacred community was a high God, whose power the people appropriated through intermediary deities. Divination, animal sacrifice, music, and dance — with the insistent rhythm of the drum — all functioned to create and express spiritual meaning. In America, these religious ideas and practices took new turns in slave communities in which blacks adapted to Protestant Christianity and also incorporated themes related to the involuntary condition of servitude. So black Christianity, as it evolved, was never the same as the white European version. Alongside it, too, traditions of magic and healing, often called conjure, grew up and flourished, mingling with American Indian beliefs and practices and sometimes attracting whites in search of healing or material help through magical practice.
Traditions of the Earliest Europeans
The first Europeans in early America were the Spanish who, under Juan Ponce de Leon, made their way into the peninsula we call Florida in 1513. Only eight years later, Roman Catholic priests came to missionize the Indians, and by 1564 the Spanish had founded St. Augustine. Similar religious activity was under way hundreds of miles away, in the western regions of the new continent. Before the end of the 16th century, Franciscan missionaries were in what is now the state of New Mexico, and Jesuits began an Arizona mission at the beginning of the 18th century. Among the English, Catholics came not to convert the Indians but to settle. Indeed, the charter to launch the colony that became Maryland was given to a Roman Catholic. The English King Charles I granted the charter to Catholic George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore. His son Leonard in 1634 arrived as the colony’s first governor. The Maryland colony did not long remain in Catholic hands, but its existence at all was testimony to the power of religious minorities in the colonial era. Meanwhile, the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania welcomed Catholics, and the colony of New York, for at least part of its history, also tolerated them. There was even a Catholic governor in New York from 1682 to 1689 in Thomas Dongan.
New York also was home to the first Jews in early America. They had originally settled there in 1654 when it was still New Amsterdam (the colony changed hands from Dutch to English in 1664). These Jews — part of a Spanish-Portuguese refugee community that formed after Jews were expelled from these lands in the late 15th century — had initially settled in liberal Holland. Later they moved to eastern Brazil in a Dutch colonial venture until, with a take-over by Portugal, the Jews fled north to New Amsterdam. There they formed a tiny community of Sephardim, mainly tradespeople without rabbis. Intermarriage with non-Jews in the area meant that numbers of them melted into the local population, but by 1692 they had managed to establish the first synagogue in North America. Some of the Sephardim, too, settled in Rhode Island, and others — with northern European Jews who had begun to arrive — dotted East Coast cities with their small communities and religious congregations as far south as Charleston, South Carolina.
Within this early American world of religious diversity, Protestants collectively held the majority position. Two pandemics in the early 17th century decimated the Indian peoples on the North American continent — vanquished by European microbes much more than by European guns. The other groups — Africans, Catholics, and Jews — were always clearly in the minority, even if African populations were sizable in some places. Thinking of the Protestant settlers collectively, however, belies the situation of religious difference that actually characterized these European immigrants. Many of them exhibited a cultural Protestant Christianity but lived, too, in touch with a series of metaphysical beliefs and behaviors akin to those of Indians and blacks — turning to the magical practice of cunning folk, to astrological forms of guidance, and to elite forms of esotericism (see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], and Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007]).
Moreover, the settlers in the two early colonies that were major players in later political developments were settled by different religious groups. The Virginians, with their first permanent colony at Jamestown from 1607, were officially members of the Church of England. So stringent was their Anglicanism that, in 1610 and thereafter for nearly a decade, Virginia law required attendance at Sunday worship with a threat of death for a third offense of nonattendance (we have no record that anybody was ever actually executed). In New England, by contrast, settlers in both the Plymouth (1620) and Massachusetts Bay (1630) colonies (which later joined together) were Puritans, members of two different groups of reformers who rejected the practices of the Church of England. In Plymouth, Separatist Pilgrims — who had earlier settled in Holland — understood themselves as totally outside the English church. In the larger Massachusetts Bay colony, Non-Separatists worked to change the Church of England from within. Both groups stressed the role of conversion to a true and pure Christianity based on personal religious experience. Both were heavily influenced by Calvinist theology with its message of the sovereignty of God, the sinfulness of humanity, and the arbitrariness of the divine election to heavenly glory or eternal hellfire. Both also admired the free, or gathered, church that had grown up in the Anabaptist (Radical) Reformation of 16th-century Europe. Both groups also stressed the role of this gathered congregational church as the keeper of a covenant between the people and the Almighty.
Even the Puritan reformers in Massachusetts Bay, though, were not pure enough for some of the new Protestant settlers. For example, Rhode Island became home to Baptist believers after Roger Williams founded the colony in 1636. Williams had been exiled from Massachusetts Bay when it became increasingly clear that he found his fellow Puritans wanting. He was joined in Rhode Island by other religious dissidents, such as the outspoken Anne Hutchison, who claimed that she was under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. Further south, New York Protestants included the Dutch Reformed settlers from its earlier days as the New Amsterdam colony. In addition, other European Protestant groups — French Calvinists, German Lutherans, New England Congregationalists, Quakers, and Baptists — made their home there, even as the colony identified itself officially as Anglican (see Richard W. Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Religious Diversity [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988]). New Yorkers came to regard their diversity as positive, seeing its religious and political benefits.
In New Jersey, in turn, Dutch and other northern European immigrants joined New Englanders and English Quaker settlers. And in Pennsylvania, especially, Quakers found a safe haven and a ruling position in the colony for a time. An ideology of toleration prevailed after William Penn established Pennsylvania as a Quaker colony from 1681. Penn, the son of an admiral and a Quaker convert, obtained proprietorship of the colony when he received a vast tract of land in payment of an old debt the Duke of York had owed his father. Quakers, with their mystical beliefs in the “divine light” within all, translated their religious message into social and political sanctuary for all. In Pennsylvania, one could worship freely, and rights of conscience were upheld. Penn's regard for Indian peoples in his treaty arrangements with them and his avoidance of warfare as a policy initiative were also striking.
Throughout parts of the American South, English Quaker and Baptist missionaries made their way, and religious diversity became a normal feature of the religious landscape. Presbyterians, too, were an important part of the mix, and so were a series of smaller dissident groups. Meanwhile, German sectarians spread out in Pennsylvania and elsewhere — Mennonites, Dunkers, and Moravian Pietists among them. Wherever German and Scandinavian peoples settled, too, a strong Lutheran presence developed, as well as a Reformed (Calvinist) representation among the Germans. What we might today call fringe groups were also present, such as the Woman in the Wilderness community not far from Philadelphia — an esoteric brotherhood, which practiced a version of blended pagan, Christian, and Jewish elements in their own form of nature religion.
The Influence of Revivals
With such a mix of religious identities and competing religious views among people who were often missionary in orientation, revivals — episodes of intense mass evangelism — became commonplace by the 18th century. In these gatherings, emotions were aroused and convictions stirred, so that ordinary folk would commit to new religious groups or reinvest in old ones. Historians like to point to the period from the late 1730s through the 1740s and 1750s as a time of special attention to revival claims (see William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978]). Called the Great Awakening, or sometimes the First Great Awakening, this era was dominated by the preaching of two figures. The first was English itinerant preacher George Whitefield, a follower of John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) with Calvinist leanings, who came to the North American colonies and preached to raise money for an orphanage in the southern colony of Georgia. The second was the Puritan who has been called America's greatest theologian — Jonathan Edwards, who from his pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts, revived a stern Calvinist message of doom and condemnation for those not chosen for salvation. Nor were these revival preachers alone. For example, in the Middle Colonies — Pennsylvania and New Jersey especially — Presbyterians also offered their own version of awakening.
The language of revival, seemingly, became the religious language of the United States. Indeed, historians point to the role of the revival in creating and fostering religious dissent, even as they notice its role in bringing colonists together with a sense of common ground. In this regard, one prominent thesis that explains how the American Revolution became ideologically possible in the late 18th century argues for the role of the Great Awakening in producing the sense of common identity that would be necessary to start the Revolution at all (see Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966]). However we judge this argument, it is clear that by the late 18th century, American religious diversity was strikingly apparent, and it remains a prominent feature on the nation's social landscape today.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
