2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: North Carolina May Declare Official State Religion Under New Bill * * UPDATED * * [View all]unc70
(6,113 posts)Last edited Fri Apr 5, 2013, 10:42 AM - Edit history (1)
The mythic symbols of religious freedom in the story of the founding of the United States, the Pilgrims and the Puritans, were the most intolerant, fanatical, racist, and hate filled religious groups to come to the colonies. The Roman Church had started it by dragging in all the Old Testament hate and punishment to use religion to help control the Roman Empire. (Hard to justify war, suffering, exploitation of others using just the teaching of Jesus -- all that peace and love and understanding.)
John Calvin was a religious despot of the worst kind, burning those with opposing views on a fire fueled by the books they had written. If you are certain you are God's select, you are unlikely to care what happens to those God scorned.
NC was mostly settled by groups that evolved towards free will and not predestination which dominated New England. Moravians, Quakers, Wesleyan Methodists, Deists/Universalists, Disciples, AntiBaptists/Mennonites, early Baptists,...Mostly opposed to slavery, free will, tolerant. By about 1830 this was changing as the Calvinist North became the de facto National religious identity.
Two of the founding "Methodist" at Oxford came to quite different positions. John Wesley the founder of what is now the United Methodist Church and various related churches in the Wesleyan tradition, was strong a proponent of free will and strongly opposed to slavery. George Whitfield was a Calvinist within the Church of England, believed in predestination and was pro-slavery. Whitfield was the most famous of the preachers during the Great Awakening, particularly in the northeast where his Calvinist pro-slavery message was well received by New England Calvinist whose largest industry at that time was the slave trade. Whitfield later moved to Georgia and was a major force in getting slavery made legal in that colony.