Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World

Introduction

introduction The expansion of Europe from its peninsula into other parts of the globe was one of the most significant events to shape the modern world. Among the many effects of this cataclysmic movement of people and institutions was the intermixture of cultures that occurred in the colonies that Europeans created. Europeans crossed oceans, encountered native inhabitants, and interacted with them in a myriad of ways. What emerged from these encounters was, as historians James H. Merrell and Colin G. Calloway have pointed out, a new world for everyone involved.1 Central to the creation of this new world was a clash of religious beliefs and practices. As a result of cultural encounters, all religions were changed—European Christianity no less than Native American spirituality. When Europeans moved out into the Atlantic basin, they brought together the diverse religious traditions and experiences of people from three continents. By 1800 Christianity had reached into sub-Saharan Africa, both in the Kongo, where Portuguese Catholics had introduced Catholicism centuries before, and more recently in Sierra Leone, a new colony under British authority peopled by Protestant settlers of African descent who were strongly committed to the Christian faith. Native religions had been reshaped by the introduction of Christianity in vast areas of North and South America. Roman Catholicism had become an indigenous religion over centuries of adaptation in Latin America to the south and in Quebec to the north, while Protestant Christianity had made serious inroads in some communities in the broad central swath of North America. The movement of peoples with their beliefs and practices had spread not just Christianity generally but competing versions of that faith, so that in Anglophone areas of the Atlantic world a variety of Christian faiths were flourishing and vying for adherents, from Baptists and Methodists to Moravians and Quakers, by 1800. Though Christianity was dominant among the new religions, the other Old World Map 1. Atlantic World Map 2. Atlantic Africa Map 3. Atlantic Europe Introduction 5 Map 4. West Indies monotheistic faiths—Judaism and Islam—were also represented in the Atlantic world of 1800, while the traditions of many nonmonotheists continued to be practiced, whether by enslaved Africans or by native peoples of the Americas. Although it made a late and unpromising start in the bid for colonies, England contributed profoundly to the religious history of the North Atlantic . As one of the principal sources of Protestant colonization in the Americas (along with the Dutch), England was often at odds with the Roman Catholic empires of Spain, France, and Portugal. In the British colonies, a diverse array of Protestant groups, along with a smattering of Catholics, participated —from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the northern reaches of Western Europe. Native Americans in the mainland colonies and Africans everywhere further complicated the religious assortment. The mixing of peoples that occurred in the English and British colonies was arguably more complicated than in any other colonial setting, with the possible exception 6 introduction of that of the Dutch. The English failed almost completely in asserting the level of control over religious practice that the Spanish achieved in New Spain. Only weakly establishing the Church of England, they oversaw an increasingly diverse religious landscape. Yet, despite this failure to create a uniformly Anglican Atlantic world under English purview, expansion established a broadly shared culture that united believers from different Protestant churches (and different ethnic and racial backgrounds) into a common Anglophone spiritual orientation. Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century would split the British Atlantic politically but the ties that bound it religiously would remain, shaping faith in western Europe, parts of West Africa, northern North America, and the Caribbean. More than any other cultural practice, religion had a far-reaching impact on the very process of colonization and the world that resulted. Religion fueled expansion, justifying conquest and the authority that was established in the wake of those conquests. To a great extent, it sorted people into migration streams, so that Protestants generally went to the colonies of specific countries, Catholics largely to others. Given the variety of spiritual options available in Protestant Europe, diversity came quickly to those colonies opened to migration from England and the United Provinces. That variety would become their most startling feature and would prompt the eventual separation of church and state in the United...