Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives: Free Will Christian Women in Colonial Maryland

3. Religion in the New World

In the wake of the Reformation, Protestants in parts of England found themselves saddled with ancient Roman Catholic stone cathedrals, churches, and chapels. Some English congregations began stripping church interiors of idolatrous statues, stained glass, elaborate stone altars, and monstrous roods, yet the church structure reminded congregants of the dreaded “popish” ways of the past.1 Although congregations dutifully painted over sacred symbols and hid or sold silver chalices, altar stones, and roods, some drew the line at destroying the churches’ elaborate and expensive stained glass, merely knocking out the small faces of saints from the pictures; this reservation leaves us wondering how committed to the ideas of the Reformation they truly were.2 Fortunately, English architecture in the New World offers a clearer picture of congregational commitment to Calvinist theology in the post-Reformation era. Largely unhampered by fears of shifting political and religious ground or substantial ¤nes for noncompliance , English colonists in the New World erected religious buildings, buried their dead, and left us deathbed statements that re®ected their particular theological understandings, free from overt governmental coercion. In order to make clear religion’s impact on the lives of English settlers in the New World it is important to lay out their theology, not only to underscore the fact that doctrine mattered to these people, but also to delineate distinctive differences and similarities amongst religious groups. The various groups that settled in Maryland held theological beliefs that separated or joined them in ways that are signi¤cant for understanding their approach 71 3
Religion in the New World to property ownership, gendered access to power, and the allocation and inheritance of land in the New World. The deeply religious Puritans in seventeenth-century New England, and most likely in Maryland, chose to construct for their churches unpretentious clapboard structures resembling houses that did not in any way approximate Roman Catholic churches.3 These buildings were not placed on consecrated ground and Puritans decided not to bury the dead in or around a meetinghouse during the early years of settlement.4 When congregants entered a simple rectangular Puritan meetinghouse they passed through a door much like any other door in the community. In fact, Puritans consciously chose not to create sacred consecrated space, because they found no scriptural directive to do so. When they passed through the meetinghouse door, congregants merely moved from external space to an internal space whose scant architectural embellishment was intended to avoid any symbolic transition into the space. The meetinghouse, for Puritans, was not a place to personally meet and interact with God. Instead, it was an edi¤ce to contain the entire community of God’s new Israelites. This meetinghouse, then, served both civic and religious functions by helping to de¤ne who the new Israelites were and providing them with a place to worship together as God’s chosen community. Centrally located within the community, the meetinghouse also hosted political and other public meetings, in addition to public school. Puritans chose this multi-functional con¤guration because it re®ected their central tenet that religion and government were intertwining pillars of their commonwealth. A separation of church and state functions was not desirable in the hearts, minds, or architecture of early modern English Puritans. Since the Bible was central in Puritan theology, the pulpit—where the Bible was read and explained—stood as the focal point of the interior space. As communities matured and had more time and money to invest in these buildings, monumental multi-tiered pulpits were added which seemed to be suspended in midair between heaven and earth, just above the heads of congregants. The position of the Bible in the meetinghouse indicated its position in Puritan thought. Strategically centered between the ceiling and®oor, it reminded the new Israelites of its ability to bridge the gap between the temporal and spiritual worlds. Because Puritans insisted that reading and understanding God’s message to His chosen people was crucial, seats were provided for the comfort of the men, women, and children who would listen to several hours of sermons and readings every Sunday morning and afternoon. The unadorned interior walls were often painted white and the plain window-glass allowed the unadulterated sunshine to brighten the 72 common whores, vertuous women, and loveing wives large room. This insistence on austere simplicity re®ected the Puritans’ desire to purify the church, and it encouraged congregants to focus...