This research examines religion in English colonial life in North America. The research will set forth the context in which colonial religious practice evolved and then discuss the shape that it took prior to the American Revolution.
The fact that English colonial life in North America was in significant part a product of the impulse toward religious freedom unavailable in the mother country is difficult to overstate. The entire period of New World exploration was exactly contemporaneous with a tradition in English history of making religion a determinant of politics and vice versa. To the degree, as Becker says, Protestantism in England "was the result of a middle-class revolt against the existing regime" (81), there was bound to be little sympathy for the outmoded "ideal of a single Christian community" symbolized by the Church of England (Becker 48). Puritanism arose in England in this context, and as its religious comfort level declined in England, it was consistent with the impulse to flourish unmolested by majoritarian culture. This explains why the New World appears to have functioned as something of a safety valve for nonconformist Protestants, as well as Catholics, who for their own reasons did not adhere to the Church of England, the state church of which the monarch was the official head.
Becker's account of the formation of Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was a prototype for other colonies of New England, suggests that it was the product of an impulse, not so much toward religious freedom per se as toward legitimating Puritan ideals and then transforming those who had been dissenters in England into fixtures of the dominant culture in the New World.
[M]any Nonconformists, despairing of success at home, began to look to America as God's appointed refuge "from the generall callamitie"; . . . under the lead of John Winthrop, a gentleman of Suffolk whose estate was becoming inadequate to his customary manner of living,...