Syncretism, Tolerance and the Great Awakening in the Colonial Americas

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The blending of two different religious traditions into one shared form of belief and practice — seen in the fusion of indigenous and Catholic worship in Spanish/Portuguese America.

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She reportedly appeared to an indigenous man, Juan Diego, in 1531 at a site already sacred to the Aztec mother-goddess Tonantzin — linking old and new belief in one figure.

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Indigenous religious brotherhoods, nominally Catholic, that organised community worship and let local communities keep some control over religious life.

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Massachusetts Bay (Puritan) enforced strict conformity and banished dissenters like Roger Williams; Pennsylvania (Quaker, William Penn) built genuine tolerance into its 1681 founding charter, welcoming diverse faiths.

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Maryland's 1649 Act of Toleration protected Christian worship, but a Protestant political takeover soon reversed those protections for Catholics.

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The Anglican Church was the official, tax-supported church of Virginia, so Baptists, Presbyterians and other dissenters lacked equal legal standing.

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A wave of emotional, revivalist religious preaching across the British colonies, roughly c1720–c1760, led by figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.

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New Lights embraced the Great Awakening's emotional revivalist style; Old Lights defended calmer, traditional worship — the split weakened established church authority.

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By encouraging ordinary colonists to question religious authority for themselves, it helped normalise questioning authority more broadly, which some historians connect to pre-Revolutionary attitudes.

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The Jesuits, nicknamed Black Robes by indigenous peoples because of their long black cassocks; they lived among nations like the Huron/Wendat and recorded their work in the Jesuit Relations.

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Jesuits (Black Robes), Recollects (a Franciscan order, active from 1615), and Sulpicians (based mainly around Montréal).

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In Spanish America conversion often followed military conquest and forced labour systems; in New France, missionaries relied more on alliance and cooperation because French settlement depended on the fur trade with indigenous nations.