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Did you know that at the founding of the United States, there was more religious diversity in a single mile of Philadelphia than anywhere else in the nation?

In just a few blocks, one can today pass a church that was the tallest structure in colonial America, a church built before Pennsylvania was founded as an English colony, the first urban Catholic Church in the British colonies, the first fully independent Black denomination in the United States, and the oldest Jewish congregation in North America.

If one were to walk the streets of Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, they might have seen George Whitefield evangelize, arguably the first celebrity in American history. Or they might have heard Richard Allen preach, a former slave who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. One could have entered the print shop that produced the first copies of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or heard freethinker Elihu Palmer reject the divinity of Jesus Christ. Maybe they would have run into Haym Salomon, a Jewish merchant who helped finance the American Revolution. Perhaps they would have listened to Alice of Dunk’s Ferry, a slave and toll-collector who worshiped at Christ Church and became one of the nation’s first oral historians.

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Were there limits to religious freedom in colonial Philadelphia?

Yes and no! From its founding, Pennsylvania stood out among the other British colonies for its commitment to religious freedom, a practice new enough at the time that William Penn, the founder and first proprietor of Pennsylvania, could reasonably call it his “holy experiment.” In practice, the experiment was broader than Christianity, and Penn’s legal guarantee is written in such a way that it theoretically included all monotheists. At one point during the colonial era, Philadelphia was home to the only legally operating Roman Catholic church in the British Empire and the only place in the entire English-speaking world where public mass was permitted. 

However, there were limits to this freedom. Even in a city known for religious freedom, there were many who did not benefit from its promises. Muslims who arrived on slave ships were largely invisible in early Philadelphia and likely felt pressure to convert to Christianity. Practitioners of the English Occult tradition risked imprisonment and fines. Even Black and Native American Christians face pressure to conform to the expectations of the dominant white Christianity. In the 1840s, violence erupted in Philadelphia streets when the Protestant nativists attacked Catholic immigrants. 

What about the freedom not to believe in God or reject the Bible?

Philadelphia became a hotspot for deists and freethinkers. Many of these groups were tolerated and able to start their own deist clubs. However, the public expression of freethinking had limits. In 1791, Christians managed to successfully stop Elihu Palmer from giving a series of public lectures rejecting the divinity of Jesus Christ.

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