Religious Freedom: A Driving Force in Settling American Colonies

The American colonies were settled and made successful not only by the multitude of leaders who we remember even to this day, but also by thousands of families and individuals who took the risk of crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and were determined to survive and prosper. Settlers had many different reasons for coming. A common one was the desire to enjoy religious freedom in the New World. The colonies offered a haven for many believers, which was rare of that day. Religion was of utmost importance in the colonies. Faith in God defined the nature and practice of the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland and Pennsylvania colonies and had a strong influence in all of the early English settlements. Most of the people who came to the New World brought

What people believed in, depended on where they lived. The New England colonists were largely Puritans, who led very strict lives. They sought to distance their practices from Catholicism, rejected the hierarchical structure of the Anglican Church and instead desired to implement a Congregationalist structure in which each church or congregation would be less dependent and more self-governing. The Middle colonists were a mixture of religions including Quakers, Catholics, Lutherans, Jews and others. The wider toleration in the middle colonies promoted the free expression of a variety of religious and nonreligious beliefs and practices, a social order thought to be impossible among Europeans who were used to centuries of religious warfare. This toleration encouraged both ethnic and religious

The Southern colonists had a mixture of religions as well, including Baptists and Anglicans. The original laws of the colonies had forced people to attend a specific type of church and to pay taxes that helped fund the churches. Later, colonists decided to become more religiously tolerant and to separate church from state. The idea of the "separation of church and state" first appeared when Baptists in Virginia wanted to have religious tolerance from the Anglicans living in the area. Today, our society seems to be uncomfortable when perspectives of faith are included in the consideration of public policy. For most colonists, however, the idea of faith being separated from community and governmental activities would have been a strange thing. They believed that community life and government were precisely where faith needed to be practiced if church members were going to be faithful to God’s covenant with them as His people. Religion played a huge role in the shaping of the original thirteen colonies. The part that religion and the church plays in today’s society has become quite different from the role it played in the early