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The Maryland Toleration Act, also known as the Act Concerning Religion, was the first law in North America requiring religious tolerance for Christians. It was passed on April 21, 1649, by the assembly of the Maryland colony , in St. Mary's City in St. Mary's County, Maryland.
King James I and Charles I made some efforts to reconcile the Puritan clergy who had been alienated by the lack of change in the Church of England.Puritans embraced Calvinism (Reformed theology) with its opposition to ritual and an emphasis on preaching, a growing sabbatarianism, and preference for a presbyterian system of church polity, as opposed to the episcopal polity of the Church of ...
Some believe that women who were gaining economic or social power, specifically in the form of land inheritance, were at a higher risk of being tried as witches. [85] Others maintain that females were more susceptible to being witches as the Puritans believed that the weak body was a pathway to the soul which both God and the Devil fought for.
Some strong religious beliefs common to Puritans had direct impacts on culture. Puritans believed it was the government's responsibility to enforce moral standards and ensure true religious worship was established and maintained. [98] Education was essential to every person, male and female, so that they could read the Bible for themselves.
This religious rift is commonly called the Antinomian Controversy, and it significantly divided the colony; Winthrop saw the Antinomian beliefs as a particularly unpleasant and dangerous heresy. [84] By December 1636, the dispute reached into colonial politics, and Winthrop attempted to bridge the divide between the two factions.
The diverse colonists from these various regions built colonies of distinctive social, religious, political, and economic style. Over time, non-British colonies East of the Mississippi River were taken over and most of the inhabitants were assimilated. In Nova Scotia, however, the British expelled the French Acadians, and many relocated to ...
Religious faith and language appeared everywhere in the New South. It permeated public speech as well as private emotion. For many people, religion provided the measure of politics, the power behind law and reform, the reason to reach out to the poor and exploited, a pressure to cross racial boundaries.
The colony was further augmented by Presbyterian Scotch-Irish in 1683, but the most important addition was the coming of the French Huguenots upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, who settled on the Cooper River, and were later admitted to the political rights of the colony. In 1697 religious liberty was accorded to all "except Papists".