Christianity & America Episode 1 - GoodNewsTV3
Channel: GoodNewsTV3
Date: 2010-07-04

http://www.amazingfacts.org - FREE BIBLE LESSONS 
 
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10 FREE BIBLE DOWNLOAD


Christianity in America

In 1630 King Charles I favored the middle path to reforming the English church and began to persecute the Calvinists within it severely. As a result, several tens of thousands of them fled to New England from 1630 to 1640, founding Boston and its surrounding towns, and eventually the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. In order to assure themselves a reliable supply of ministers, one of the first things the Puritans did was to establish Harvard College (1636).


Because there was no national church on this continent Puritan Calvinism soon became the dominant form of Christianity in British North America. This is in sharp contrast to Europe, where the Calvinists usually were in the minority. In New England almost everyone was initially a member of a Puritan church; the churches constituted a kind of "national church" especially in Massachusetts; and in the early 1600s one could not vote in local and state elections unless one was a "saint," that is, had undergone a conversion experience and had been admitted into a Puritan church.


The Church of England also came to America, but before the Revolutionary War its power was nonexistent in New England and it was weak in the Middle Colonies. In Virginia and south, where colonization initially was sponsored by London-based investment companies, the Church of England was the only recognized church; but priests didn't want to leave warm and comfortable England to settle in the swamps and Indian-infested woods of Virginia. As a result, there was about one priest for every four or five churches in the American south, and the priests were often of low quality. The Church of England is an episcopal church, that is, power resides in bishops. The bishops appoint and direct the priests, and traditionally the lay people had very little to do with the running of a local church. But in the South there was no bishop at all and few priests, so the laymen ran the churches and often administered communion or performed baptisms, which was against church law. Because of the shortage of priests, even in the south the congregational form of church organization became the dominant one.


In the Middle Colonies, many different groups settled and the area acquired enormous religious diversity. William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania, was a Quaker, and he settled many Quakers there. Because there weren't enough Quakers willing to move to the New World, Penn invited many persecuted German sects to settle in Pennsylvania, such as the "Pennsylvania Dutch" (Mennonites and Amish). Often the sects were part of Germany's radical Reformation, just as the Quakers were part of England's; thus the groups often felt an affinity with the Quakers. Other Germans came over to settle near their countrymen; they established the Lutheran church in America and the German Reformed (Calvinist) church.

Full article: http://bahai-library.com/unpubl.articles/america.html


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