10 - Law and Religion in Colonial America

Summary

English religious conflict influenced law in the early British colonies; so too, however, did commercial ambition and English legal traditionalism. That inherently unstable combination produced significant reconfigurations in the eighteenth century, when religion became less obviously formative and public in relation to law, but no less intermeshed with legal culture and political conflict. Protestants in America reenacted many Old World religious conflicts as they struggled to integrate commercial gain, the coercions of law, and the promise of Christian freedom – or, put differently, as they sought the right relation between the City on Earth and the City of God. Their various solutions to that Augustinian dilemma took widely different forms.

In England Tudor political skill had, for a time, muted religious tension. Church and commonwealth became a single all-enveloping unity. That unity, however, masked both Catholic resentment and mounting Calvinist pressure to distinguish the church from the realm – to “gather out” and purify the true church of the redeemed. Early Stuarts exacerbated these tensions exactly when England was extending commercial ventures into America. Protestants feared the Catholic leanings of the Stuart kings, and Archbishop Laud’s persecution of dissenters coupled the Church of England with Stuart assertion of unlimited prerogative. Puritans, viewing Christ (and the free consent of believers) as the only true source of church authority, denounced a hierarchical Anglican episcopacy rooted in Crown prerogative. Meanwhile, lower ecclesiastical courts, charged with enforcing morality, veered from laxness to corrupt and discretionary intrusiveness. Their disrepute was almost matched by that of English law, with its capriciously enforced multitude of capital crimes.