How Religious Beliefs Affected Colonial Social Structure in America

Colonial America was a diverse hodge-podge of religious communities. The Quakers had been given Pennsylvania by William Penn, whose father had held ties with the King of England (Fantel). The Puritans were in New England. Baptists established themselves in the South. Catholics had been in the Northern territories and in the Southwest well before the Protestant surge, and they also established the first Catholic state in Maryland—before it was later taken over by Protestants who banned Catholicism (Laux). In short, there was little religious unity broadly speaking, but religion nonetheless played an important role in the structuring of society and class when it came to local organization. Hawthorne and Melville—the two premier authors of the 19th century—described this experience of social stratification within a religious context fairly well. But there are numerous signs and examples of how it existed and persisted. This paper will show that religion was used as a means of dividing the social structure into classes and pockets of power so that the religious institutions determined the organization of society from top to bottom.
As Pyle and Davidson point out, “religious adherence was in the allocation of power, privilege, and prestige during the colonial period” (57). Those who wanted to secure for themselves a position of power and privilege in society necessarily had to abide by the rules of the religious institution of the community. The Quakers had rules about swearing, gambling, drinking and theater-going. They also had rules about how true religion should be practiced—and those beliefs were based upon their reading and interpretation of the Bible (Fantel). Quakers were heavily involved in the government of Pennsylvania in the 170ss—however, many Quakers gradually came to feel conflicted about the duties expected of them as politicians and the duties expected of them as Quakers and pacifists. For example, the Quakers initially wanted to respect the human rights of the Native Americans, but as the American colonies were not united in this view. The Virginia House of Burgesses, dominated by Anglicans, wanted to abjure the treaty between the Crown and the Native Americans: Virginia land owners wanted to push further West and expand their territory (Holton). Thus, there was a clear distinction between what the Anglican community viewed as politically correct and what the Quaker community could tolerate.
Quakers had suffered persecution in Europe and so they sought to respect most other religions in Pennsylvania. Catholics for the most part were the only religious community not tolerated by the Protestant communities in the early American colonies. Maryland was founded as a refuge for Catholics, but the Catholic community was always still rather small in the colony as the number of Catholic settlers was actually fewer than the number of Protestant indentured servants (Laux). Maryland was founded to give Catholics persecuted under the Protestant Crown in England a place to go. Lord Baltimore was its governor and Catholics were given positions of authority in society. The structure of the local society was set up so that Catholics were land owners and their servants were Protestants. More and more Protestant settlers came to Baltimore, whose Catholic leaders practiced religious liberty under the Toleration Act—so there was no rule banning other religions from establishing themselves. When by the mid-1600s, the Puritans took over the colony Lord Baltimore temporarily lost his rights to the colony and anti-Catholicism spread for decades. Catholics were denied the same rights they had given to Protestants in prior decades. As Graham notes, Catholics were “virtually excluded from political life and new faces filled important provincial offices” when the Puritans took over the colony (197).
Hawthorne described life in a Puritan New England community in his American masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. He showed how social structure in a Puritan community was based upon the strict and often uncharitable law of the religious leader. Calvin had laid the foundation for this strict form of Puritanism in Europe and its American expression gradually. In this environment, religious virtue was seen as that with which one could thrive on one’s own. To thrive economically, socially, and politically, one had to live according to the letter of the law, since that was what the Puritans valued (Laux). Those ministers who preached a more radical religion were marginalized or sent away. Hawthorne’s novel showed a community that was cruel and unkind to anyone who dared to violate the letter of the law even though at heart many in the community were violating the spirit of Christianity every day. Culture and society in the Puritan community was defined in terms of one’s ability to rise up. This is what Melville would show in Moby-Dick, when the sailor Ishmael is cheated out of his just pay upon the ship by a couple of Puritanical New England ship owners who use Scripture to justify their fleecing of the seaman.
Melville would write in 1876 an epic poem entitled Clarel about a young man from America who visits the Holy Land for the first time and feels unprepared to process the rich, diverse and chaotic environment there because his Puritan community back home has not prepared him for it: “Our New World’s worldly wit so shrewd / Lacks the Semitic reverent mood, / Unworldly—hardly may confer / Fitness for just interpreter / Of Palestine…. / To avoid the deep saves not from storm” (Canto 1, ln. 92-99). Melville’s complaint of his own New England Puritanical social structure was that it rewarded those who demonstrated shrewdness in business but it marginalized those such as himself who demonstrated a keen inquiry into the mystical questions that transcended routine everyday business. As soon as Melville began making deeper inquiries into the nature of man, sin, God, destiny and the afterlife, publishers began refusing his works and he had to find employment in other fields. He had begun as a popular writer of adventure novels—but when he began asking religious questions, he was shunned by the public and the publishing houses of New England (Milder). New England Calvinists had created a religious community in which one’s salvation correlated with the degree to which one was successful in the world. This is why Melville deplored New England society’s lack of a “reverent mood”—the society was not oriented, really, towards purity or sanctity. It was oriented towards worldliness by way of a puritanical adhesion to the “letter of the law.”
The Protestant colonies tended for the most part to see themselves as superior to the Natives. The White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) ethic was the framework by which the Virginia House of Burgesses set its sights on expansion of the Virginia colony at the expense of the Cherokee, who rightly feared losing their hunting ground to the Virginians. Though the British had signed a treaty with the Cherokee that there would be no further expansion west, the Virginians had different ideas. Deists like Thomas Jefferson were more interested in increasing their land holdings and local power than they were in the rights of man, as articulated by Thomas Paine—who actually denounced the institution of slavery as he genuinely believed in freedom and equality, unlike the majority of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson included. The Virginia House of Burgesses killed the treaty between England and the Cherokee and pushed into the Ohio River Valley, prompting a war with the Native Americans. As Deists and Anglicans, promoters of the WASP ethic, their belief was that they were the Elect—God’s own chosen people, who had come to lay claim to the Promised Land. They identified with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, coming into Israel after a long exile. Thus, they saw the Natives as simply inferior and in the way. For them, they were at the top of the social structure, and Native Americans and African slaves occupied a sub-human status (Holton). Patrich Henry, for example, made a purchase of more than 3000 acres of land that the British had guaranteed to the Cherokee under the terms of their treaty. Henry—like many of the other Deists and WASPs of the Virginia territory—saw themselves as the cream of the crop. They had total disregard for anyone or anything that attempted to deny them their “manifest destiny”—as the belief would later come be called as the WASP framework began to be applied to American Expansionism across the board in the following century (Holton).
The religious communities were thus different according to beliefs and the range of differences ran from the evangelical (Fundamentalists) to the completely novel (i.e., Joseph Smith and the Mormons) to the legalistic (Calvinist Puritans) to the practical and political (the Anglicans and Deists). Catholics had done more for the Natives in terms of granting them equal rights in their communities than most of the other Protestant communities, particularly in the West where schools and churches for the Natives were instituted (Laux). However, Colonial America fell by and large to the British, which is why the WASP ethic won out in the end and the Declaration of Independence, which laid the cornerstone for America’s social structure, paid lip service to Enlightenment ideals while in practice only granting “equal rights” to land owning white men.
For that reason, women also had little status in colonial America. It was not until the 19th century that a Women’s Movement began to emerge in opposition to slavery. Women advocates like Angelina Grimke Weld and Sojourner Truth, traveled about the country prior to the Civil War speaking about both women’s rights and the evils of slavery. They couched their rhetoric in religious doctrines, though each used different methods of speaking. Weld was an educated white southern woman of status—i.e., she came from a land-owning family. Truth was a former slave. Weld spoke the language of privilege—but even as a woman she was something of a unique phenomenon in America and most men of the WASP establishment merely tolerated her presence at conventions while others saw her as a pest. Both she and Truth, however, advocated for the abolishment of slavery and helped to lay the foundation for social change that would come about following the Civil War.
In conclusion, religion affected the social structure of colonial America in different ways, depending on the religion of the community. The Quakers in Pennsylvania were pacifists, but their political duties seemed to contradict their religious beliefs, which meant that though they started out with political positions they eventually abandoned those posts. The New England Puritans created a social structure in which shrewdness was rewarded as they linked salvation with worldly success. The Anglicans and Deists saw themselves as the Elect and everyone else as beneath them. The Catholics promoted equality and religious tolerance but were not tolerated in turn by Protestants. Women, blacks and natives were all given a back seat, socially speaking, to the male WASPs who grabbed control of the social, political and economical spheres in colonial America.
Works Cited
Fantel, Hans. William Penn: Apostle of Dissent. NY: William Morrow & Co., 1974.
Graham, Michael. "Posish Plots: Protestant Fears in Early Colonial Maryland, 1676-1689." The Catholic historical review 79.2 (1993): 197-216.
Holton, W. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Laux, John. Church History. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1933.
Melville, Herman. Clarel. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005201424&view=1up&seq=9
Milder, R. Herman Melville. New York: Columbia University Press,1988.
Pyle, Ralph E., and James D. Davidson. "The origins of religious stratification in colonial America." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42.1 (2003): 57-75.