“The colonists believed” is usually the beginning of an oversimplification. British North America contained different churches, different arrangements between religion and government, and people who did not share the dominant church's faith. There was no single colonial confession binding every colony.
This matters for understanding American Protestantism. Later disputes over religious freedom, voluntary membership, and revival did not emerge from a uniform Christian society. They developed among communities that already disagreed about worship, baptism, authority, and the proper role of civil power.
Start with institutions, not a modern slogan
The Library of Congress's survey of early American religion describes settlers carrying European religious conflicts into colonial life. New England Puritan communities and colonies shaped by the Church of England did not represent interchangeable forms of Christianity. Other settlers brought further confessional identities and expectations.1
Puritanism was a project of further reform within the English Protestant world, not an early name for every serious Christian. Likewise, Anglican identity involved a particular church and its worship, not simply a general belief in God. Treating these names as synonyms for generic biblical faith erases the disagreements their adherents considered important.
An institutional map also has limits. A church's legal standing does not tell us what every resident believed or how faithfully its members practiced. It does not encompass the religious lives of all Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, dissenters, or people outside formal membership. Laws reveal what authorities required or permitted. They do not provide a complete census of conscience.
What did their confessions actually teach?
The New England synod at Cambridge in 1648 endorsed the substance of Westminster's doctrinal confession while making exceptions concerning church order. This places an important part of Puritan New England within a recognizable Reformed confessional world. It was not merely a movement for stricter manners.2
The Westminster Confession taught the Trinity, humanity's fallen condition, God's election, and justification by faith. It also retained infant baptism. Those commitments help explain why later Baptist and revival controversies were theological arguments rather than disagreements about religious enthusiasm alone. The modern OPC edition reproduces these doctrines, although its provisions on the civil magistrate include later revisions.3
The Church of England's Articles of Religion likewise confessed the Trinity, affirmed Scripture's sufficiency for salvation, and retained the baptism of children. Colonial Anglicanism therefore should not be imagined as modern non-denominational Christianity with older music. Its inherited confession supplied specific doctrinal and sacramental commitments.4
The search for freedom could coexist with coercion
Some settlers sought freedom from authorities they believed were obstructing true worship. That did not necessarily mean they intended to grant an equal freedom to every religion in their own community.
The conflict surrounding Roger Williams and the persecution of Quakers in Massachusetts show the problem clearly. The Library of Congress documents Williams's exclusion from Massachusetts and the execution of Quakers, including Mary Dyer in 1660. These were disputes within a society that took religion seriously, not examples of indifference to it.5
The difference is crucial. Freedom to establish what one regards as a godly society is not identical to freedom of conscience for people who reject that society's religious conclusions. Modern readers should not substitute the second meaning whenever a colonial writer uses language associated with the first.
Maryland's toleration had a defined boundary
The Maryland Act Concerning Religion of 1649 is often invoked as evidence of early religious toleration. It did provide protection for people professing belief in Jesus Christ, subject to the act's conditions. The same law prescribed severe punishment for denying the Trinity or blaspheming God.6
Both features belong in the account. Calling it simply religious freedom imports a breadth the text did not possess. Calling it merely persecution misses its attempt to protect coexistence within a defined Christian boundary.
For an Orthodox reader, the presence of Trinitarian language should not end the evaluation. A law can affirm a doctrine Christians regard as true while raising a different question about whether civil punishment is an appropriate means of securing belief. Doctrinal content and political enforcement require separate judgments.
Pennsylvania offered another arrangement
Pennsylvania's 1682 laws provided protections for people acknowledging God as Creator and rejected compelled support of religious worship. Yet the same legal framework required officeholders, Assembly and Council members, and even those entitled to vote for them to profess faith in Jesus Christ.7
Again, a binary description is inadequate. This was a substantial protection of religious practice combined with a religious qualification for public participation. Worship rights and eligibility for office did not always expand together.
Reading the actual provisions helps readers recognize different kinds of toleration. A government may permit worship, refuse to compel financial support, allow religious criticism, and open public office to minority believers. Those are related freedoms, but they are not the same legal act.
Rhode Island matters because it was distinctive
Rhode Island's royal charter of 1663 protected religious difference within the conditions of civil peace and obedience. Its significance becomes clearer when it is read alongside the narrower arrangements elsewhere. It should not be treated as the policy of all colonial America.8
Nor should Rhode Island's protections be interpreted as a declaration that theology was unimportant. Its example makes sense precisely because people with strong religious convictions were asking what a civil government could properly compel.
The colonial record therefore does not lead to a neat story in which every colony either embraced modern pluralism or rejected every form of toleration. It shows experiments, limits, exclusions, and disagreements that later Americans inherited.
An Orthodox way to read this history
Orthodox Christians should distinguish Christian truth from the history of American Protestant institutions. A colony's public religious language does not make its church order apostolic. Nor does the protection of multiple religions imply that all religious claims are equally true.
The New Testament's call to make disciples requires teaching and a response of faith. It cannot be evaluated merely by counting how many residents lived under a Christian legal establishment. A government can regulate outward conduct without producing repentance or love of God.
The best starting point is therefore specific: which colony, which date, which church, and which document? That approach makes the history more accurate and the theological assessment more useful. Colonial America was deeply shaped by Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity. It was also a place of real religious division. Both facts are necessary to understand what followed.
Sources and notes
- Library of Congress, America as a Religious Refuge, Part I. Institutional overview of settlers and religious conflict. ↩
- Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, Volume I, § 103, American Congregational Creeds: The Synod of Cambridge, 1648. Historical discussion reproducing the synod’s primary statement of qualified assent to Westminster. ↩
- Westminster Confession, Chapters 2, 3, 6, 11, and 28, OPC edition. Primary doctrinal text in a later American recension, not used here for the original civil-magistrate provisions. ↩
- Church of England, Articles of Religion, Articles I, VI, and XXVII. Primary confessional text. ↩
- Library of Congress, America as a Religious Refuge, Part I, continued. Williams, Quakers, and religious persecution. ↩
- Maryland Act Concerning Religion, 1649, in The Founders’ Constitution, University of Chicago Press. Primary legal text. ↩
- Laws Agreed Upon in England for Pennsylvania, 1682, in The Founders’ Constitution. Primary legal provisions on conscience and public office. ↩
- Rhode Island Royal Charter, 1663, annotated primary document supplied by the Rhode Island Department of State. ↩