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There was no predominant religion in colonial South Carolina. The three main religious groups were the French Huguenots, the Anglicans and the dissenters from the Church of England called the non-conformists. Until the early 1700s, there was religious freedom in the colony.
From its first days as an English colony, South Carolina was an economic frontier and a religious haven. Once proclaimed throughout England and Europe, that freedom was as much a beacon for Nonconformist (non-Anglican) Protestant, French Huguenot, and Jewish immigrants as were promises of cheap land and economic opportunity.
As one of the original thirteen colonies, South Carolina has long included an array of religious diversity belying its reputation for rigid conservatism. Historian Walter Edgar notes that South Carolina’s cultural heritage is very different from the other English colonies, being largely influenced in the 1630s by England’s richest colony at ...
The southern colonies of America, including Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, had a diverse religious landscape. Although Anglicanism was prominent as the main church, Catholicism and various schismatic Protestant denominations were also present in the region.
In today’s divided political climate, it is easy to forget that South Carolina was committed to religious tolerance from its very origins. South Carolina began in 1670 as part of a land grant Charles the Second presumptuously made to a group of English men called the Lords Proprietors.
During the colonial period, the Church of England, with 25 parishes by 1778, was the official church of South Carolina. In addition, many South Carolinians were Lutherans, Huguenots, and Quakers. Between the American Revolution and the year 1900, the largest religious groups in the state were Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians.[1]
In 1600 South Carolina was home to perhaps 15,000–20,000 native people, representing three major language groupings: Siouan (spoken by the Catawba and others), Iroquoian (spoken by the Cherokee), and Muskogean (spoken by peoples related to the Creek).
The first Church of England, or Anglican, house of worship in South Carolina was built in Charleston about 1681, with the Reverend Atkin Williamson serving as its first priest. The church was named St. Philip’s but usually was called the English Church.
In the early years of what later became the United States, Christian religious groups played an influential role in each of the British colonies, and most attempted to enforce strict religious observance through both colony governments and local town rules.
Religious Freedom in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), represent a move to correct this lack of appreciation of Carolina's religious history. 7Originally North and South Carolina were a single colony, with a governor based in Charleston.