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 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. They were excluded from most of the provinces, and any suspected Catholic was treated with hate and fear as a menace to society, a subversive, and a probable agent of France or Spain.

By the first decades of the eighteenth 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 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 little impact on the people. The Virginia squire, for example, 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 old “holy experiment.” Moreover, in Pennsylvania, the Quakers were by midcentury far outnumbered by other creeds. As for the Ulster Scot frontiersmen, they were almost devoid of ministers during much of this period. Hence religious activity slackened greatly in that numerous group.

The growing liberalization of the churches was also a function of the new spirit abroad in Europe: 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 seventeenth 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 eighteenth century, Newton’s achievement had an enormously liberating impact. As the great poet Alexander Pope celebrated:

Nature and 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 Sewall 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 seventeenth-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 completely conquered Puritanism or even Harvard by the end of the first third of the eighteenth 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 Marlborough 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 eighteenth century, liberalism was advancing and religion was definitely declining as a vital force in the lives of the people.