catholic conversion colonial new england

But despite having the support of the civil government, the power of the Church of England was limited, as its bishops governed from London and it was perennially short on local clergy. Throughout the colonial period, Anglicanism remained influential in the South. The first permanent settlement was at Jamestown in 1607, where the Church of England (or Anglicanism) became the established church.

These were settler societies, and the colonial churches reflected that fact: they transplanted English forms as accurately as possible and typically paid little attention to evangelizing Native Americans or incorporating indigenous converts. Protestant groups that had emerged in the course of the Reformation in England settled along the east coast and played a decisive role in giving shape to what became the United States. With few European settlers and overburdened clergy, the significant numbers of ingenious converts were able to reshape Catholicism to reflect and preserve their own cultures in ways that remain visible today.įrom the perspective of Protestant England, both the Spanish and the French appeared as threatening religious and commercial rivals. Yet the results were distinctly American Christian communities. Inidgenous conversions to Christianity occurred in the context of massive power inequalities. This encounter was frequently violent and marked by suppression and revolt. The first Christian churches in North America were thus characterized by the encounter between Europeans and Native peoples. These settlements followed the conquest of Native American lands, and their purpose was to evangelize idigenous peoples.

Jesuits established French Catholic missions in Canada and the Great Lakes region following the founding of Quebec in 1608. Franciscan friars laid the foundations of New World Catholicism in the Caribbean in 1493, in Mexico in the 1520s, in Florida in 1573, in New Mexico in the 1590s, and in California by the 1760s. From the beginning, Christianity and North American colonization were entwined. Christianity arrived in the western hemisphere with Christopher Columbus in 1492.

Catholic conversion colonial new england