The “Protestant” Northern Europeans in colonial America were anything but homogenous. New England Puritans not only had laws requiring Quakers to stay away, the

The “Protestant” Northern Europeans in colonial America were anything but homogenous. New England Puritans not only had laws requiring Quakers to stay away, they in fact whipped, mutiliated and even executed those that refused to do so. The four English cultures that settled colonial America were vastly different from one another. The idea that there existed some kind of “US religious identity” upon its founding is profoundly ahistorical, and, in fact, laughable.