ABSTRACT

“Church and State” were explicitly coordinated with the exception of Rhode Island, and that exception—as will be evident in the readings— was articulated in the language of the day. Otherwise the means and degrees of correlation between civil and religious life varied among the colonies. A New Haven Colony was early projected as an improvement upon the Massachusetts experiment, and its founders hoped to clarify some of the “problems” that were becoming apparent. As the colonial establishment sought to clarify the relationships between church and state, they faced occasional protest or opposition from religious dissenters. The seventeenth-century language of establishment is often overlooked by those who are concerned to locate instances of official toleration or allowance of religious liberty in colonial affairs. The Articles of Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland, for instance, are cited because Clause 8 allowed the Dutch the “liberty of their consciences in Divine Worship and Church Discipline.”