26 - Religion and Imperial Conflict

Summary

As war between Britain and France raged around the world in the 1750s, religious writers in colonial British America described the conflict as nothing short of the apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation. The battle between Protestant Britain and Catholic France, as they saw it, represented the death struggle between Christ and the Antichrist, and Britain's triumph would deal a mortal blow to the “beast” of Rome. With British victory in the Seven Years' War assured, sealing the ouster of France from North America in 1763, millennialist prophets anticipated Christ's imminent return and the onset of a thousand-year reign of peace. In the short term, however, Britain was suddenly faced with the practical problem of what to do with the Catholic population it inherited in Canada. Should these French and Indian faithful, some seventy thousand of them, be absorbed into the empire, forced to convert to Protestantism, or banished altogether? In the end, the British adopted a relatively lenient policy of religious toleration and recognition of rights for Catholics. The policy was met with anger in the British colonies, especially in New England, where traditional anti-Catholicism ran deep, and the controversy exacerbated the deteriorating relationship between the colonies and Britain in the early 1770s.

The policy dilemma, and Britain's resolution of it, illustrates two dominant, if countervailing, themes in the relationship between religion and empire in America during the eighteenth century.