by Stephen Pate

Created on: December 16, 2009

Was America founded as a Christian nation?  Many Christians and religious conservatives believe so.  They tend to use this argument to defend their political ideals and traditions.  But if you look closely at the long history of our nation, the truth becomes simple even though the road to it is complicated.

The first settlers to come to North America to colonize were religious groups who were oppressed in Europe.  For example, Plymouth Colony, one of the earliest of the British colonies to settle in North America, was founded by a group of the extremely religious Puritans who felt their religious beliefs were too different from the Church of England, the official church.  Suffering from religious repression because of their extreme differences in belief, they moved to the Netherlands to escape it.

However, the Netherlands was not the haven the Puritans thought it was.  They stayed there for 8 years and realized that their children were slowly becoming accustomed to the Dutch culture, which the elders themselves found difficult to understand.  In order to preserve their sense of identity, they made a decision to leave and headed to the New World to make a new colony based on their Puritan ideals.

This colony would be Plymouth Colony, which was founded in 1620.  Without interference from outside governments or other European religious groups, the Puritans were able to form their own community in which their brand of Christianity formed an integral part of their government.  They founded a city on earth that would be the pinnacle of their religion’s teachings.  Plymouth would be the first, but not the last, of the Puritan colonies to be founded in North America.

Maryland was also a colony founded on religion freedom, but it was meant to be a haven for English Catholics who suffered under the restrictions of the Church of England and the British Parliament and Crown.  The division between Protestants and Catholics grew ever since Henry VIII split with the Pope.  Because of how deeply religion and government were entwined with each other, the British Parliament had to pass laws restricting Catholics in order to prevent Papal dissidents from causing acts of terrorism.

So Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, was granted a charter for colonizing the province of Maryland.  British Catholics who refused to convert to Anglicanism fled there to be free of persecutions in England.  However, they were

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