Puritan Influence In The 17th Century

In the early 17th century, the Puritans began populating the northern colonies of New England. Quakers quickly populated the middle colonies after the English seized the Northern colonies. Southern colonies didn’t practice religion with the same enthusiasm as the northern colonies. Southern colonist left their faith in the hands of their plantations. Not all New England colonists were Puritans, but the Puritan religion was a major influence in the seventeenth-century New England way of life. Many New England communities treated Quakers poorly and many Quakers saw acts of violence inflicted on them in the name of God. Many colonists in the middle and southern colonies (such as Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia) relied on their …show more content…
In the British colonies, differences among Puritan and Anglican remained. Between 1680 and 1760 Anglicanism and Congregationalism, an offshoot of the English Puritan movement, established themselves as the main organized denominations in the majority of the colonies. Inhabitants of the middle and southern colonies went to churches whose style and decoration look more familiar to modern Americans than the plain New England meeting houses. Toward the end of the colonial era, churchgoing reached at least 60 percent in all the colonies. In the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland, the Church of England was recognized by law as the state church, and a portion of tax revenues went to support the parish and its priest. After 1750, as Baptist ranks swelled in that colony, the colonial Anglican elite responded to their presence with force. With few limits on the influx of new colonists, Anglican citizens in those colonies needed to accept, however grudgingly, ethnically diverse groups of Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, members of the Dutch Reformed