The Development of Religious Liberty in ConnecticutGreene, M. Louise (Maria Louise)
History
The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut
Greene, M. Louise (Maria Louise)
Connecticut -- Church history
Examples of such legislation occur frequently in the
religious history of the colonies, especially of Massachusetts and
Connecticut. Such interdependence of the spiritual and temporal power
practically amounted to a union of Church and State. Indeed, in
Massachusetts and New Haven, to be a voter, a man must first be a
member of a church of approved standing.[b] In more liberal Plymouth
and Connecticut, the franchise, at first, was made to depend only upon
conduct, though it was early found necessary to add a property
qualification in order to cut off undesirable voters.[23] In the
Connecticut colony, it was expressly enacted that church censure
should not debar from civil privilege. When advocating this amount of
separation between church and civil power, Thomas Hooker was not moved
by any such religious principle as influenced the Separatists of
Plymouth. On the contrary, it was his political foresight which made
him urge upon the colonists a more representative government[c] than
would be obtainable from a franchise based upon church-membership
where, as in the colonial churches, admission to such membership was
conditioned upon exacting tests. The great Connecticut leader was far
in advance of the statesmen of his time, for they held that the
religion of a prince or government must be the religion of the people;
that every subject must be by birthright a member of the national
church, to leave which was both heretical and disloyal and should be
punished by political and civil disabilities. This union of Church and
State was the theory of the age,--a principle of statecraft throughout
all of Europe as well as in England. Naturally it emigrated to New
England to be a foundation of civil government and a fortress for that
type of nonconformity which the colonists chose to transplant and make
predominant. The type, as we have seen, was Congregationalism, and the
Congregational church became the established church in each of the
four colonies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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