What was the first religion that came to the US?

Answer 1

Questions about identifying the "first" religions are difficult to answer because religious beginnings are not clearly distinguishable in human history. Religions evolved over time in any culture. People expect that some organized religion in the form it has today was here at the beginning. That is not so. Religion in America took hundreds of years to develop and the religious beliefs and practices in the late 1500s and early 1600s bear little resemblance to the religions of today. The following is a brief survey.

First it should be noted that Indigenous People who had migrated from the north were here for thousands of years before the earliest Europeans. The aboriginal people practiced different forms of shamanism: a belief system whereby human mediators bridge the gap between the spirit world (human and animal spirits) and the human world. It is more commonly known as Paganism.

The first modern religion brought to the New World was vaguely Christian but not in the form that became popular in the 1800s. There were no churches, few bibles and no uniform, over-riding belief system. There were several different groups each with their own version. Many early settlers were deists who believed in a God who created the world had a very limited hand in human existence but they did not practice the Christianity that evolved later. They did not worship the bible as a group and religion took a back seat to hard work and every day human affairs except in settlements that were founded by persons of strong religious backgrounds.

However, early codes of law soon developed and punishment for certain offenses was based in part on the Hebrew Bible in early Massachusetts. (See related link and especially Section 94 of said code.) Puritanism was part of the early Massachusetts history but it died out rather quickly.

The first gathering places were publicly funded meeting houses where local politics were discussed, local festivities took place, trials were conducted, complaints were discussed and punishments were meted out, guest speakers addressed the townspeople and whatever worship was practiced took place. By the early 1800s other religious groups were moving in and starting churches and the early meeting houses were transferred to religious bodies and their names were usually changed to "The First Church". The courts had decided by then that municipal funds could not be used to fund a religious meeting house that benefitted only one particular group.