21 - Anglicanism and Its Discontents: Protestant Diversity and Disestablishment in British America

Summary

About fifteen years after embarking in April 1759 on a one-and-a-half-year tour of North America's “middle settlements,” the Anglican minister Andrew Burnaby published an account of his travels. By 1775, political unrest in North America had led the English to wonder if their North American colonies would claim independence, and Burnaby's book attempted to ease anxieties. In his account, Burnaby insisted that his time spent traveling between Virginia and New Hampshire had shown him that England's colonies could not cohere independently of Britain. They simply were too diverse. Noting that the colonies “are composed of people of different nations, different manners, different religions, and different languages,” Burnaby pointed out that “religious zeal too, like a smothered fire, is secretly burning in the hearts of the different sectaries that inhabit them.”

Burnaby was largely right. The peoples of British North America were diverse, and religious differences provided flash points of discord. Immigration to England's colonies had exploded in the decades preceding Burnaby's visit, with large waves of immigrants coming from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. As Burnaby indicated, “different nations” and “different manners” brought with them “different religions,” which almost invariably were strains of Protestantism. With different Protestant loyalties serving as ciphers for other forms of difference, Protestant identities were more distinct and more discordant in eighteenth-century North America than at any time before or after.