America’s Colonial Christian Heritage Was a Warning, Not a Blueprint

Executions, heresy trials, and sectarian wars — and why “restoration” is the wrong word

Summary
Christian nationalists say they are not establishing religion but restoring America’s original Christian character. Colonial history answers that claim directly. What Christian public power actually produced was sectarian infighting, state-backed coercion, banishments, heresy trials, and executions. The founders built secular government not despite America’s Christian past but largely because of it.

Restoring what, exactly?

Listen to Christian nationalists long enough and a pattern emerges. They do not say they want to establish a state religion—that sounds too obviously unconstitutional. Instead they say they want to restore America’s Christian identity, return to the nation’s founding values, and stop the secular “takeover” of public life.

The word “restoration” is doing enormous work here. It implies that something real and good once existed, that it was taken away, and that recovering it would be natural and legitimate rather than coercive or sectarian. It sounds like heritage, not power. Like memory, not ambition.

So the right response is a simple historical question: Restoring what, exactly?

Because colonial America—the closest thing to the “Christian order” being gestured at—was not a peaceful moral consensus built on shared faith. It was a patchwork of rival Christian factions using civil authority to enforce orthodoxy, silence dissent, and in some cases kill people who got theology wrong. That history does not support the restoration argument. It is the argument’s most damaging rebuttal.

One Christian nation? Try several warring ones

The first thing to understand about colonial American Christianity is that there was no single “Christian America.” There were competing establishments, each convinced it held the truth and each willing to use state power to prove it.

Puritans ran Massachusetts. Anglicans ran Virginia. Maryland was founded as a Catholic refuge but spent much of its early history caught between Catholic and Protestant factions. Baptists, Quakers, and other dissenters were scattered across the colonies with varying degrees of tolerance—which usually meant varying degrees of persecution depending on who held power locally.

This matters because Christian nationalists speak as if returning to “Christian foundations” means recovering something unified and coherent. The actual colonial record shows that the moment Christians held civil authority, the first question became: which Christians? And the answer was almost always enforced with more than words.

Massachusetts Bay: when Christians ran the government, they hanged people for it

If you want to understand what Christian civil authority looked like at its most unambiguous, start in Massachusetts Bay.

The Puritans who built that colony were not hypocrites or outliers. They were serious, devout Christians who believed God had given them a covenant to build a holy commonwealth. Their intentions were as sincerely Christian as any modern evangelical could claim. And with the power of civil government behind them, they banned Quakers, imprisoned them, mutilated them, and eventually killed them.

Massachusetts law prescribed banishment on pain of death for Quakers who returned after expulsion. Four were executed:

William Robinson – hanged in Boston, October 1659.
Marmaduke Stephenson – hanged in Boston, October 1659.
Mary Dyer – reprieved once, returned to Boston, hanged June 1, 1660.
William Leddra – the last, hanged March 14, 1661, shortly before royal intervention curtailed the executions.

These were not criminals by any secular standard. They were Christians whose theology differed from the Puritan establishment’s. They were killed not in spite of Christian governance but as a direct expression of it.

The Massachusetts state archives record dozens more Quakers jailed, whipped, and otherwise punished before the executions finally ended under royal pressure. Christian rule did not protect conscience. It policed it.

Christians purging Christians: Williams and Hutchinson

The Quaker executions are the most dramatic evidence, but the pattern of Christian coercion started earlier and cut deeper into the community itself.

Roger Williams arrived in Massachusetts as a Puritan minister—a Christian among Christians—and was banished in 1635 for challenging the colony’s fusion of religious and civil authority. He argued that the state had no business enforcing religious conformity and that the land patents used to dispossess Indigenous people were legally and morally corrupt. For those ideas he was expelled into a New England winter.

Anne Hutchinson was banished in 1637 after holding meetings in her home to discuss sermons and challenging the authority of Puritan ministers. She was not a secular critic of Christianity. She was a deeply religious woman whose theological views—including an emphasis on grace over works—threatened clerical control. She was tried before the General Court, convicted of heresy, and driven out.

Both cases show that colonial Christian rule did not simply draw a line between believers and outsiders. It drew lines inside the Christian community, between approved and unapproved doctrine, between ordained clerical authority and anyone who questioned it. The sword of Christian governance was always pointed inward as much as outward.

Maryland: even “toleration” was Christian supremacy on Christian terms

A Christian nationalist might concede Massachusetts was excessive and pivot to Maryland as a counterexample—a colony famous for “religious toleration.” The history of that toleration is worth examining closely.

Maryland’s Act Concerning Religion of 1649—the Toleration Act—is routinely cited as a landmark of early religious liberty. And it was, relative to what surrounded it. But look at what it actually said.

Protection under the Act applied only to Christians, and specifically to Trinitarian Christians. The same law that offered tolerance with one hand imposed the death penalty with the other for anyone who denied the divinity of Christ, denied the Trinity, or used blasphemous language about God or Jesus. Non-Christians—Jews, Muslims, atheists, anyone outside Trinitarian Christianity—were not tolerated. They were outside the law’s protection entirely.

That is not religious freedom. That is Christian supremacy with an internal peace treaty.

Worse still, even that limited arrangement could not hold. In 1654, a Puritan-dominated government repealed the Act, stripping Catholics of the protection it had offered. The argument was that the law was too generous to Catholics. When a Protestant majority concluded that tolerating Catholics was intolerable, the “landmark of liberty” was discarded.

Later, after the Protestant Revolution of 1689–1692, Catholics in Maryland were barred from public office and open Catholic worship was restricted. The most “tolerant” colony in early America had, within a few generations, turned on the very group its founder meant to protect—because that is what sectarian Christian power does when threatened. It decides who belongs and revises the list.

Virginia: the South was no different

It is tempting to read Massachusetts as a Puritan aberration—too cold, too rigid, too New England. Virginia was warmer, Anglican, less theologically intense. Surely the South showed a gentler Christian governance?

It did not. Under Virginia’s Anglican establishment, dissenting Baptist preachers faced arrest, fines, and imprisonment for preaching without an Episcopal license. From the 1760s into the 1770s, Baptist ministers were jailed across Virginia—not for crimes against persons or property, but for preaching the wrong brand of Christianity without official authorization.

It was those conflicts that shaped James Madison’s thinking. Watching Baptist preachers jailed in his home colony was not an abstract concern for Madison; it was a close-up demonstration of what happened when one denomination held the keys to legal religious practice. That experience fed directly into his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785 and his later work on the First Amendment.

Virginia’s establishment did not produce the executions Massachusetts did. But the logic was the same: one Christian sect held civil power, and others paid the price for theological nonconformity.

Disestablishment was a response, not an accident

Christian nationalists sometimes frame the First Amendment as a narrow, technical rule about preventing one Protestant denomination from dominating others—not as a genuine commitment to secular government. That reading conveniently ignores why disestablishment was necessary in the first place.

The founders who built the First Amendment’s religion clauses were not working from abstract Enlightenment theory alone. They were working from living memory of what the colonial models had produced. Madison had seen Baptist preachers jailed in Virginia. Jefferson had watched the Anglican establishment shape Virginia law. Roger Williams’ eventual legacy—Rhode Island’s experiment with genuine liberty of conscience—stood as a contrast case showing what was possible when government stepped back.

A more honest originalism does not cherry-pick a few founders’ private religious sentiments to argue for Christian privilege. It looks at what the founding generation was reacting against—colonial establishments, their punishments, their infighting, their instability—and asks why those framers so deliberately built a government without God in the charter.

The answer is not that they were secret atheists. It is that they had seen enough of Christian civil power to know it needed limits.

Restoration is establishment with better branding

Modern Christian nationalists are careful with their language. They do not say: we want an established church, we want to punish heresy, we want to decide which Christians count. They say: we want to restore America’s Christian heritage, honor its founding values, and stop the marginalization of Christianity in public life.

But watch what the “restoration” agenda actually produces in practice:

Curriculum standards shaped around Christian history and Christian moral framing.
“Religious freedom” arguments used to carve out exemptions from neutral laws that protect others.
Abortion bans grounded in sectarian claims about souls and divine intention.
Public institutions pressed to display Christian symbols and accommodate Christian practice above others.

None of that requires a state church. All of it creates a two-tiered civic order where Christianity gets preferential access to public authority and everyone else navigates around it. That is not meaningfully different from what colonial establishments produced—it is just softer, slower, and dressed in constitutional language.

The founders left us secular government as a hard-won response to exactly this pattern. Calling the dismantlement of that response “restoration” does not make it less dangerous. It just makes it easier to sell.

Key points

Colonial America had no unified Christian culture. It had rival Christian factions competing for state power and using that power to punish theological nonconformity.
Massachusetts Bay executed four Quakers and imprisoned dozens more—not despite Christian governance but as a product of it.
Maryland’s famous Toleration Act protected only Trinitarian Christians and was later repealed by Protestants who believed it protected Catholics too much.
Virginia’s Anglican establishment jailed Baptist preachers, helping shape Madison’s lifelong opposition to religious establishment.
The First Amendment was not an abstract theory. It was a reaction to what Christian civil power had demonstrably produced in the colonies.
“Restoration” is “establishment” with better branding. The historical content of what is being restored should alarm anyone who takes secular freedom seriously.