In The United States
The Puritan-Whig tradition of toleration did have their greatest effect not in England, but in the Thirteen Colonies that would later form the United States. Notable tolerationists were directly involved in the founding of the colonies. Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island, "a haven for persecuted minorities," John Locke drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and William Penn drew up the constitution of Pennsylvania. Voltaire pointed the readers of his Traité sur la Tolérance (1763) specifically to the examples of Carolina and Pennsylvania. People like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams stood self-consciously in the tradition of Milton, Sidney and Locke, and extended their tolerationism further to also apply to Catholics and atheists. Coffey considers it possible to argue, "that the tolerationist tradition of seventeenth-century England reached its fulfilment in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment to the American Constitution."
That the North American colonies and later the United States provided a refuge for religious minorities from Europe partly explains the higher degree of religiosity in the contemporary United States and the "unusual sectarian quality of U.S. Protestantism". Compared to Europe, "the United States has a superabundance of denominations and sects (...) as well as a far higher ratio of churchgoers." Which importance the Christian religion should have in the United States, with its strong strong concept of Separation of church and state, is a contentious question. For Kevin Phillips, who wrote a book with the polemical title American Theocracy, "few questions will be more important to the twenty-first-century United States than whether renascent religion and its accompanying hubris will be carried on the nation's books as an asset or as a liability."
According to a 2008 survey, 65% of US-American Christians believe that many religions can lead to eternal life. 52% of US-American Christians think that at least some non-Christian faiths can lead to eternal life.
(At its surface, the percentages above seem contradictory; the key is in the appellation of the term non-Christian in the second, lesser quantity. For some Christians, different sects of Christianity represent "different religions." These people thus mistake the survey term "many religions" to mean "different sects of Christianity," even though that is not the common intended use of the phrase. What the survey really shows is that more US Christians believe that God can make himself known through multiple Christian sects, than believe that He can make Himself known even through other religions. It is worth noting that a majority of US Christians take the more inclusive stance.)
Read more about this topic: History Of Persecutions By Christians
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