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3 results

  • Introduction - English Law about Religious Toleration Prior to the Planting of Colonial America

  • Scott Douglas Gerber, Ohio Northern University
  • Book:
    Law and Religion in Colonial America
    Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023, pp 1-15

  • Summary

    England promulgated more laws of significance about religion than any nation in the Early Modern period in large part because of England’s break from the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII and the inconsistent relationship that Henry VIII’s successors had with that church. The colonies chronicled in this book were planted primarily by English persons with an aversion to English laws that adversely impacted their religious beliefs and practices. Given the book’s emphasis on law, it is appropriate to provide a brief history of the English laws from which the planters of colonial America were fleeing. The Introduction sets the stage for the chapters about colonial America that follow.

Law and Religion in Colonial America
  • The Dissenting Colonies
  • Scott Douglas Gerber
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023
  • Law – charters, statutes, judicial decisions, and traditions – mattered in colonial America, and laws about religion mattered a lot. The legal history of colonial America reveals that America has been devoted to the free exercise of religion since well before the First Amendment was ratified. Indeed, the two colonies originally most opposed to religious liberty for anyone who did not share their views, Connecticut and Massachusetts, eventually became bastions of it. By focusing on law, Scott Douglas Gerber offers new insights about each of the five English American colonies founded for religious reasons – Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts – and challenges the conventional view that colonial America had a unified religious history.