Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [125]
Puritanism was only one of many denominations in early America. Between 1607 and 1732 the English “planted” thirteen colonies in North America. Because colonization was largely financed by private entrepreneurs, the religious character of the colonies varied, depending on the predilections of the financiers and the composition of the original settlers. Thus, while New England was largely Puritan Congregationalist, Pennsylvania was dominated by Quakers, New York had a significant Dutch Reformed populace, Maryland had a fair number of Catholics, and Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas were mostly Anglican. At the same time, Presbyterians and Baptists could also be found, along with tiny Jewish communities in some of the large cities.
Nevertheless, despite this geographical religious diversity, religious freedom in colonial America operated on the stingy principle of “if you don't like our religion, you're free to go somewhere else.” As the Massachusetts pastor Nathaniel Ward put it, “[All non-Congregationalists] shall have free Liberty to keepe away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better.” With the exception of Rhode Islanders, colonial Americans had little compunction about establishing the majority's religion and denying basic rights to nonbelievers. By 1732, when the era of the founding of new English colonies came to an end, some 85 percent of Americans lived in towns or states with established churches. Typically, dissenters could not vote or hold public office. Sometimes they were run out of town. Any Quakers who happened to arrive in Anglican Virginia, for example, were immediately “imprisoned without baile” until they “with all speed” departed the colony, “not to returne again.”3
But great changes were looming. Even while men like Nathaniel Ward were defending religious “purity” and “simplicity,” America was undergoing a chaotic transformation. In the 1700s and 1800s, the population soared as immigrants from all over Europe flooded in, fueling a commercial explosion and bringing with them heterodox ideas and new religious denominations. Suddenly, alongside Congregationalists and Anglicans were German Pietists, Swedish Lutherans, French Huguenots, and Ulster Presbyterians.
Commerce was a powerful catalyst of religious toleration. Influential merchants championed religious freedom because exclusion was bad for business. After all, their agents, customers, suppliers, financiers, and trading partners included people of all faiths—even non-Christians. This was precisely the thinking of the English parliament when in 1740 it passed a general act enabling the naturalization of Jews in the American colonies. As Lord Chancellor Philip Hardwicke explained, “Even with respect to the Jews, the discouraging of them to go and settle in our American colonies would be a great loss, if not the ruin of, the trade of every one [of the colonies].”
Around the same time, a “consumer revolution” in religion— better known as the Great Awakening—swept the colonies. Led by charismatic men like George Whitefield, dozens of itinerant evangelical preachers began hawking their own new “brands” of gospel, ignoring parish lines and defying the orthodoxy of the established churches. Like today's “teievangelists,” these itinerants were mass-market entrepreneurs. They aggressively advertised their “product,” offering messages of hope and stressing individual choice. Salvation, they taught, could be achieved only through personal experience, not church dogma.