The settlement of North America by Protestant England was in significant part an act of religiously inspired nationalism designed to counteract the colonial presence of Roman Catholic Spain and France.
English visions of a Protestant America were aided by the geography of the Atlantic coast, whose wide and navigable rivers, fertile river valleys, large bays, and fine harbors were conducive to settlement, agriculture, and commerce and allowed the English rapidly to establish a string of prosperous seaboard colonies.
By the mid-18th century, the English controlled North America from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachian mountains. The subsequent westward spread of Anglo-American culture after the American Revolution, coupled with the decline of French and Spanish power in North America, meant that English Protestantism, transformed by American experience, would have a profound defining influence on religious and cultural life in the United States.Perhaps one should say “Protestantisms,” for the colonists brought with them the many varieties of English Protestantism that had developed during the 16th and 17th centuries. England colonized North America amid intense religious division and political turmoil. It had been an officially Protestant nation since Henry VIII’s 1534 rupture with the Roman Catholic Church and founding of the government-supported (“established”) Church of England (or Anglican church), but many felt that the new church remained corrupted by Roman doctrines and practices and proposed competing visions of England’s religious future. Aiming to purify the Church of England were Puritans, who favored an austere Calvinist theology of total divine sovereignty and human depravity, stricter standards of personal behavior and church membership, an end to bishops’ authority, and THE elimination of “Romish” liturgies. Others, called “Separatists,” repudiated the Anglican church altogether. Puritans differed among themselves on whether church membership should be confined to confirmed believers; whether church governance should rest with elected representatives (the Presbyterian position) or the autonomous congregation (the Congregationalist position); whether clerical mediators between God and the individual were unnecessary (the position of Quakers and others); and whether only adult believers should be baptized (the Baptist position).
Differing positions on these issues became the bases for the variety of groups that proliferated in England, particularly during the 1650s, when the national church establishment was for a time displaced by the Puritans’ temporary seizure of the government.
The establishment of Jamestown by English Protestants in 1607 was depicted on this map by John White. Protestantism became the dominant religion in America.
Emigrating to the colonies for various religious, economic, and political reasons, members of these groups coexisted uneasily in a new geographic setting that powerfully shaped their development—both individually and in relation to each other—and prevented a duplication of the British religious landscape. Oceanic separation from England and the challenges posed by frontier conditions were particularly important factors, weakening the state-supported Anglican church but allowing dissenting groups to survive—even flourish—and, in some cases, to achieve political power and regional dominance. Relative tolerance in Rhode Island and the mid-Atlantic colonies, meanwhile, fostered diverse groups of dissenters. The weakness of the English religious establishment, the scattered and fragmented nature of seaboard settlement, distance from Europe, and, in some colonies, official toleration also attracted many non-English and/or non-Protestant groups, including Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites, Moravians, Dunkers, Catholics, Jews, and others.
The result was considerable religious diversity, mostly but not entirely Protestant. The pluralism of the colonial environment undermined the European tradition of established churches and helped generate the open model that became encoded in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Still, English Protestant dominion and a powerful shared sense of English Protestant identity among most colonists were central facts of colonial religious life. French Catholics to the north Indian groups to the west loomed to many English colonists as obstacles to a divine plan of Anglo-Protestant expansion, and violence either religiously motivated or religiously sanctioned ensued. A Great Awakening further enhanced the cohesiveness of an emerging Anglo-Protestant culture by infusing it with an ecumenical evangelicalism that would become central to American religious life. By the time of the American Revolution, interpreted by many ministers in terms of Protestant destiny, the landscape east of the Appalachian mountains had already become substantially Protestantized.