ABSTRACT
Numerous religious groups, all of which considered themselves autonomous spiritually, were placed beside each other and together— rather than independently—they constituted the common life. This differentiation resulted in conviction confronting belief and zeal challenging prejudice. The language of establishment took for granted that there was a uniformity of religious life within society. Even as this idiom continued to be used in the eighteenth-century colonies, however, developments were taking place that would render it wholly obsolete. If the colonies were receiving a population that diversified their religious life, Protestant evangelicalism within the colonies was also working upon the population in such a way as to lead to that same end. Accordingly “religious establishment” could only be an empty phrase signifying little more than financial support and civic preference for a particular institution. The ethnically based religious complexity of the colonies was reinforced and compounded by the effects of evangelical faith, which Samuel Davies equally embodied.
