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Church and State

American Eras

Church and State

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Established Churches. For hundreds of years the official church of western and central Europe was the Roman Catholic Church. After the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s divided Christians into different churches, the nations of Europe had to choose. Countries like France and Spain kept the Roman Catholic Church as the official, or “established,” church of the nation. Other nations became officially Protestant: Scandinavian countries became Lutheran; the Netherlands became Reformed; and England created the Anglican Church, which combined elements of both Catholicism and Protestantism.

Non-English Colonies. The church therefore was actively involved in European expansion in North America. French and Spanish settlements included Catholic churches and various religious orders, and the Reformed Church enjoyed state sanction in Dutch New Netherland. The later American idea of separation of church and state was nowhere to be seen in any of these European colonies. Instead, the church actively participated in governmental affairs.

Confusing Example. But maintaining one official church became difficult. England itself had different established churches at different times. In the 1500s England went back and forth between Catholic and Anglican before becoming permanently Anglican in 1660. This vacillation helps explain why some English colonies became Anglican while others became Congregationalist.

English Colonies. The English settlers also expected to create an established church, and nearly all of the early colonies set up an official church, but it was not always the Church of England. The Anglicans constituted the official church in all the royal colonies, which by the end of the colonial period included all the colonies south of Maryland. The New England colonies, heavily influenced by the zealous Protestants called Puritans, usually made the Congregational Church the official one, as happened in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.

Pluralism. But the mixture of peoples and ethnic groups in America made established churches even more difficult to keep. New York had two established churches after the English conquest in 1664, the Dutch Reformed Church (left over from the days of New Netherland) and the Anglican Church. And other colonies had different ideas about official churches. Many of Rhode Island’s settlers disliked Massachusetts and its tough attitude toward religious dissenters, so Rhode Island had no official church. Pennsylvania was created in part as a refuge for Quakers, who had been persecuted by both Anglicans and Puritans back in England, so Pennsylvania did not establish an official church either. The American traditions of the separation of church and state and the respect for a mixture of religious sentiments was pioneered in colonies such as Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Some officially Anglican colonies such as Georgia and North Carolina had few enough Anglicans that religious pluralism and toleration became the dominant practice, whatever the law might say.

Virginia. Even in colonies where there was little initial opposition to the official church, problems could arise in time. Virginia’s established church faced little opposition until the mid 1700s. But beginning in the 1750s, after the revivals of the Great Awakening, other religious groups grew rapidly, especially the Baptists, even though the ministers of these other groups were not officially recognized by the colony, could not perform marriages, and could be jailed for preaching without a license. After the American Revolution, Virginia became one of the first states to disestablish its church. Massachusetts did not disestablish its church until 1833, making it one of the last of the original thirteen colonies to do so.

Sources

Thomas Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776-1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977);

Thomas Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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