Story of Christianity, Volume 2 by Justo L. Gonzalez

Author:Justo L. Gonzalez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

THE MID-ATLANTIC COLONIES

The colonies founded between New England and Maryland—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware—did not initially serve as a refuge for any particular religious group. We have already spoken of Penn’s “experiment” in Pennsylvania. Although the basic inspiration for founding the colony was Quaker, from the very beginning its people of varied confessions comprised its population. The same was true of Delaware, which Penn bought from the duke of York, and which was part of Pennsylvania until 1701.

The political and religious history of New Jersey is complex. In general, however, east New Jersey followed the pattern of the strict New England Puritans, while in the west it was the Quakers who set the tone for the emerging society, and there was religious tolerance. Eventually, however, many of the Quakers of New Jersey became a slaveholding aristocracy whose relations with other Quakers were increasingly strained.

What later became New York was colonized by the Dutch, whose East India Company established its local headquarters in Manhattan, and whose Reformed Church came with them. In 1655, they conquered a rival colony that the Swedes had founded on the Delaware River, then they were conquered by the British in 1664, and what had been New Netherland became New York, while the earlier Dutch inhabitants, who in any case were not entirely satisfied with the previous regime, became British subjects. The British brought with them the Church of England, whose only members were the governor and his household and troops. But with increased British immigration, the religious composition of the colony approached that of Great Britain.

In short, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Great Britain founded and expanded a chain of colonies in North America. (In 1759, the British also took the French lands north of the St. Lawrence, but the history of that colony followed a different course.) Religious motivations played an important role in the founding of several of these colonies. Although at first some of them were intolerant of religious diversity, with the passage of time all tended to follow the example of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, where religious freedom had existed from the beginning and was shown to be a viable option to the religious tensions that had repeatedly bled Europe. At the same time, the practice of slavery, social inequity based on the existence of vast plantations, the exploitation of the Indians and the expropriation of their land, and many similar factors, had dimmed the religious fervor and the hopes for a holy commonwealth that had sparked many of the early settlers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.