Week 5, Day 2

      During class on tuesday the sixteenth, we began to watch a movie about the different sects of christianity that popped up around the 13 colonies.  These different forms of christianity were mostly protestant and included the Puritans in the New England colonies), Anglicans and some Baptists in the southern colonies, and mixed protestants in the mid-atlantic colonies.  This emergence of baptists in the south created a lot of religious tension, especially since the southern elites held most of their power because of anglicanism.  Nowadays we may not understand why there was so much tension, as we have the Bill of Rights that protects our freedom to worship as we please.  However, this was before even the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, let alone the Bill of Rights.  Fortunately, America was home to one named Thomas Jefferson.  

      Jeremiah Moore, a Baptist pastor, was similar to George Whitfield (talked about in the beginning of the video session before anything about Baptists) in the way they preached and what they believed.  They were both oppressed by Anglicans for unorthodox methods of preaching and because of their different beliefs on how to experience the holy spirit and be a true christian.  Despite Jeremiah's incarceration, he would preach through the bars of his prison to the congregation. Imprisoning minority religions for simply being different angered Thomas Jefferson and he supported Moore's petition to end state-supported religion, the system that was being used where states would only tolerate one religion.  It was because of these feuds that prompted the first congress to propose a Bill of Rights, which is where we left off in the movie.