Religion
Numerous churches built bases in Charleston, and expanded into the rural areas, including Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Lutherans. Catholics and Jews built their churches in Charleston. The Baptists and Methodists appeared in the late 18th century, and grew rapidly, attracting many slaves. The Scotch-Irish in the Backcountry were Presbyterians, and the wealthy planters in the Lowcountry were English Anglicans. They had many disputes over politics and economic policy, but seldom fought over religion. The different churches recognized and supported each other, building the colony into a pluralist and tolerant society.
The highly successful preaching tour of evangelist George Whitefield in 1740 ignited a religious revival—called the First Great Awakening—which energized evangelical Protestants. They expanded their membership among the white farmers, as women were especially active in the small Methodist and Baptist churches that were springing up everywhere. The evangelicals worked hard to convert the slaves to Christianity and were especially successful among black women, who played the role of religious specialists in Africa and again in America. Slave women exercised wide-ranging spiritual leadership among Africans in America in healing and medicine, church discipline, and revivalistic enthusiasm.
Read more about this topic: Colonial Period Of South Carolina
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“Culture’s essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.”
—New Yorker (April 23, 1990)
“The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador’s chapel and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, you cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)