You are wrong about the citizenship laws. Rhode Island was founded on the basis of religious freedom and had the first Jewish synagogue in what would become the US, even ahead of the Sephardic one in Nieuw Amsterdam. South Carolina, of all places, was also a haven of religious liberalism and had a large Jewish population as well as such groups as French Huguenots (the church is still there in Charleston). You are right that most colonies did have restrictions of one sort or another, however. When Thomas Jefferson proposed the Statute of Religious Freedom in Virginia, it was to protect German-speaking Baptists against the established Episcopalians. Jefferson himself is reputed to have been a Unitarian, theologically at least, there being no organized Unitarian Church in the US during his time.
BTW, that was what the liberal Congregationalists such as Emerson became. The elites of Boston split with the Unitarians taking over Harvard and other leading outposts. Later there would be shift back to Episcopalians among the WASP elite, as among the Quakers in Philadelphia. This is all covered well by Digby Baltzell in his book on the WASP elite in the US. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Saturday, February 17, 2001 2:49 AM Subject: Re: spineless pinko's update
>
>> ***** Beyond the Mainline Tale
>>
>> Walter Sundberg
>>
>> Copyright (c) 1993 First Things 34 (June/July 1993): 55-57.
>>
>> The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers In Our
>> Religious Economy. By Roger Finke and Rodney Stark. Rutgers
>> University Press. 325 pp. $22.95.
>
>With all due respect, this is sociology at its silliest, and I say that as
>an accredited sociologist. It's pure datalatry. It reminds me of a book
>by Judith Blau where she proved that high art was actually more popular in
>the United States than football, since data showed that more people have
>visited a museum in the last year than gone to a football game.
>
>Sometimes new data serve to correct the accepted interpretation. And
>sometimes the accepted interpretation alerts us that our data are bonkers.
>This is an example of the latter case. To say that America is more
>religious now that it was at its founding is just wrong on its face.
>It's like saying that we're poorer now than we were then. To give just
>one out of innumerable examples, you couldn't even become a citizen of one
>of the original colonies unless you belonged to one of the prescribed
>faiths. Pennsylvania's citizenship laws were the cutting edge of
>tolerance, not only for America, but also for Europe and perhaps even the
>world at that time. They let anyone become a citizen -- except Catholics,
>Jews, Unitarians, and atheists (which just happens to cover the four
>corners of my own religious heritage).
>
>This book goes wrong every way to Sunday, if we can trust this review.
>But it's not worth deconstructing, IMHO. Better to start from scratch.
>
>Michael
>
>__________________________________________________________________________
>Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
>
>