ABSTRACT
In the early modern period, many religious groups that suffered discrimination or persecution in their European homelands saw the English/British colonies in North America as safe havens for their belief systems and religious practices. These groups included English Puritans, Quakers, Huguenots, Moravian brethren, Salzburg Protestants, and many others who hoped to be accommodated and, indeed, to flourish in a New Jerusalem. In British North America, however, they contended with a scarcity of pastors, church buildings, and religious services, and with the great distances separating locales. These factors encouraged the crossing of confessional as well as colonial, “national,” and geographical boundaries and the establishment of transconfessional spaces shared by different religious groups. Huguenots from the South Carolina backcountry, for example, flocked to Anglican churches in Charleston, while Dutch Reformed settlers attended Moravian pastors’ church services in the New York backcountry. This chapter examines the creation, negotiation, and sharing of transconfessional space and how the latter related to geographic and colonial space.
