Colonies In 1600s

England wanted to establish their colonies. Religious conflict, moreover, disrupted England in mid-century, after King VIII let go of the relationship with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, then launching the English Protestant Reformation. Christian religious groups played an influential role in each of the British colonies, and most attempted to enforce strict religious observance through both colony governments and local town rules.

In Europe, Catholic and Protestant nations often persecuted or forbade each other's religions, and British colonists frequently maintained restrictions against Catholics. In Great Britain, the Protestant Anglican church had split into bitter divisions among traditional Anglicans and the reforming Puritans, contributing to an English civil war in the 1600s. In the British colonies, differences among Puritan and Anglican remained. Between 1680 and 1760 Anglicanism and Congregationalism, an offshoot of the English Puritan movement, established themselves as the main organized denominations in the majority of the colonies. As the seventeenth and eighteenth century passed on, however, the Protestant wing of Christianity constantly gave birth to new movements, such as the Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians and many more, sometimes referred to as “Dissenters.” In communities where

one existing faith was dominant, new congregations were often seen as unfaithful troublemakers who were upsetting the social order.
As time went on, Puritans grew increasingly unhappy over the snail-like progress of the Protestant Reformation in England.

They burned with pious zeal to see the Church of England wholly de-catholicized. The most devout Puritans, including those who eventually settled New England, believed that only “visible saints” should be admitted to church membership. But the Church of England enrolled all the king’s subjects, which meant that the “saints” had to share pews and communion rails with the “damned.” Appalled by this unholy fraternizing, a tiny group of dedicated Puritans, known as Separatists, vowed to break away entirely from the Church of

England.
They believed in the doctrine of a “calling” to do God’s work on earth. They shared in what was later called the “Protestant ethic,” which involved serious commitment to work and to engagement in worldly pursuits. Puritans in England had suffered too much at the hands of “political” Anglican clergy to permit in the New World another unholy union of religious and government power. Legend to the contrary, they also enjoyed simple pleasures: they ate plentifully, drank heartily, sang songs occasionally, and made love monogamously. Yet to the Puritans, life was serious business, and hellfire was real.
But when Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the royalists and their Church of England allies were once more firmly in the saddle. Puritan hopes of eventually purifying the old English church withered. Worse, Charles II was determined to take an active, aggressive hand in the management of the colonies. His plans ran headlong against the habits that decades of relative independence had bred in the colonists. The Puritans wanted to get rid of practices and rules they thought were wrong. Puritans did not want to separate from the church, instead they wanted to change or purify it. That’s where they got the name “Puritans.” The religious struggle went on for many years in England. However, the leaders of the Church of England began to persecute this group too.