J.S. MARCUS
JUL 25, 2022
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
It wasn't just Protestants seeking a place to freely practice their faiths.
The story of religion in America’s original 13 colonies often focuses on Puritans, Quakers and other Protestants fleeing persecution in Europe, looking to build a community of like-minded believers. Protestants were indeed in the majority, but the reality was far more diverse. Colonial America attracted true believers from a wide array of backgrounds and beliefs, include Judaism, Catholicism and more.
And that’s just the European émigrés. Myriad groups of Indigenous Americans who already lived along the Eastern seaboard had their own beliefs, many of which forged connections between the living, the departed and the natural world, according to Yale emeritus professor Jon Butler in his book New World Faiths: Religion in Colonial America. And African people transported to the colonies as part of the transatlantic slave trade brought their own multiplicity of spiritual practices, which included polytheistic, animist and Islamic beliefs, before merging into new variants of Protestantism.
In 1630, English Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, invoked the phrase “the city on the hill” to describe the new Christian religious community he and his fellow colonists should aspire to build in service to “God Almighty." But the various believers drawn to, or brought to, the colonies built many proverbial cities, on many hills. Five generations later, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence without mentioning the word “Christ,” and neither the word “God” nor “Christ” appears in the U.S. Constitution, written and ratified a decade later. Both documents have come to enshrine the ideals of a new nation that had a religious foundation—but developed a secular soul.
