Their “city upon a hill” was a theocracy that brooked no dissent, religious or political. But the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not countenance tolerance of opposing religious views. The much-ballyhooed arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England in the early 1600s was indeed a response to persecution that these religious dissenters had experienced in England. In other words, the first encounter between European Christians in America ended in a blood bath. The Spanish commander, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, wrote to the Spanish King Philip II that he had “hanged all those we had found in because.they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these Provinces.” When hundreds of survivors of a shipwrecked French fleet washed up on the beaches of Florida, they were put to the sword, beside a river the Spanish called Matanzas (“slaughters”). Augustine and proceeded to wipe out the Fort Caroline colony. In 1565, they established a forward operating base at St. More than half a century before the Mayflower set sail, French pilgrims had come to America in search of religious freedom. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation.”įirst, a little overlooked history: the initial encounter between Europeans in the future United States came with the establishment of a Huguenot (French Protestant) colony in 1564 at Fort Caroline (near modern Jacksonville, Florida).
And much of the recent conversation about America’s ideal of religious freedom has paid lip service to this comforting tableau.įrom the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”-including the “heathen” natives already here. The real story of religion in America’s past is an often awkward, frequently embarrassing and occasionally bloody tale that most civics books and high-school texts either paper over or shunt to the side. The problem is that this tidy narrative is an American myth.
#When did the pilgrims come to america free#
Ever since these religious dissidents arrived at their shining “city upon a hill,” as their governor John Winthrop called it, millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her own faith. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. In the storybook version most of us learned in school, the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. It was a sentiment George Washington voiced shortly after taking the oath of office just a few blocks from Ground Zero. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are.” In doing so, he paid homage to a vision that politicians and preachers have extolled for more than two centuries-that America historically has been a place of religious tolerance.
And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.
Wading into the controversy surrounding an Islamic center planned for a site near New York City’s Ground Zero memorial this past August, President Obama declared: “This is America.