Mention Catholicism within the context of early America, and one colony immediately springs to mind: Maryland. Susan Juster expands our gaze in her meticulous history, arguing that we must add not only the Calverts and their followers, but also Jesuit missionaries, Irish immigrants, Native peoples, and enslaved Africans to the mix. Doing so allows Juster to reshape both the scope and importance of Catholicism in early North America and the Caribbean, moving well beyond the tired tropes of anti-popery that colonists themselves constantly employed. Rather, Juster argues that historians must recognize and account for the widespread creolization of religious practice on the ground between Catholics and Protestants. Examining topics as diverse as communion, baptism, and burial practices (through wide-ranging textual and archaeological sources), Juster documents processes of “spiritual hybridization.” Catholics learned to use “ordinary bread in their communion services,” while Protestants often expressed a desire to hold communion and perform marriages in the confines of their own private abodes—practices often pioneered by Catholics as a means to escape detection in their wider communities. In a word, Juster rightly compels her readers to dismantle long-held historical assumptions which place Catholic and Protestant worldviews into Manichean conflict in the early-modern era. To be sure, strife did occur—sometimes often, and sometimes violent—but focusing only on colonists' rhetorical expressions of anger blinds scholars to the many ways in which the formation of both religious traditions in the rough-and-tumble, contingent, environment of Britain's overseas dominions so often charted similar paths in acts and rituals of worship, if not their overarching theologies.
Samuel Wells (Mon,) studied this question.