ABSTRACT
In 1650, when the first permanent settlements within the boundaries of what was to become the United States and Canada were still less than a century old, a perspicacious traveller to the New World would already have been able to discern in their infancy many of the later distinctive features of Christianity in North America. By that date five European nations had established colonies there and had carried their national churches with them. To the south, Spanish efforts to secure a base in Florida had established a settlement at St Augustine in 1565 from which other Spanish colonies and Catholic missions to the Indians spread over the next century along the southern and south-western edge of the later United States. To the north, the early seventeenth century saw the beginnings of settlement in New France: the founding of the trading station of Quebec in 1608 encouraged a vision of a vast French Catholic empire that would, through mass conversion of the Huron Indians, extend far beyond the Great Lakes. Between the two Catholic powers, along the eastern seaboard stood the colonies of the Protestant English, principally those of Virginia (1607) and the New England settlements of Plymouth (1620), Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut and New Haven, in all of which at the outset the non-Separatist Puritan element of the Church of England held sway. Each of the small and relatively short-lived colonies of New Netherland (centred on Manhattan Island) and New Sweden (Delaware) saw the transplanting of the established religion of the mother country, Reformed and Lutheran respectively.
