Distrust of Ecclesiastical Institutions

Abstract

This chapter deals with two separate developments that caused a loss of trust in established churches in England, Scotland, and America. The first was the long tradition of anticlericalism, which played a pivotal role in England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s and again in the growth of Puritan distrust of the English Church during the archiepiscopate of Archbishop William Laud in the 1630s, leading to the abolition of episcopacy in 1646. After the reestablishment of the Church in 1661, the persecution of Protestant dissenters sowed deep mutual distrust between them and the Church, which a limited grant of toleration in 1689 only partially remedied. The same was true in Scotland, where a reluctant toleration of Episcopalian dissenters in 1712 did little to restore trust in the Presbyterian Church established in 1690. In America, distrust of established churches in some of the colonies led to the separation of church and state in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and the disestablishment of all churches in the individual states by 1818.