The Maryland Toleration Act, also known as the Act Concerning Religion, was the first law in North America requiring religious tolerance for Christians. It was passed on April 21, 1649, by the assembly of the Colony of Maryland, in St. Mary's City in St. Mary's County, Maryland. It created one of the pioneer statutes passed by the legislative body of an organized colonial government to guarantee any degree of religious liberty. Specifically, the bill, now usually referred to as the Toleration Act, granted freedom of conscience to all Christians. (The colony which became Rhode Island passed a series of laws, the first in 1636, which prohibited religious persecution including against non-Trinitarians; Rhode Island was also the first government to separate church and state.) Historians argue that it helped inspire later legal protections for freedom of religion in the United States. The Calvert family, who founded Maryland partly as a refuge for English Catholics, sought enactment of the law to protect Catholic settlers and those of other religions that did not conform to the dominant Anglicanism of Britain and her colonies.
The Act allowed freedom of worship for all Trinitarian Christians in Maryland, but sentenced to death anyone who denied the divinity of Jesus. It was revoked in 1654 by William Claiborne, a Virginian who had been appointed as a commissioner by Oliver Cromwell; he was an Anglican, a Puritan sympathizer, and strongly hostile to the Catholic Religion. When the Calverts regained control of Maryland, the Act was reinstated, before being repealed permanently in 1692 following the events of the Glorious Revolution, and the Protestant Revolution in Maryland. As the first law on religious tolerance in British North America, it influenced related laws in other colonies and portions of it were echoed in the writing of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which enshrined religious freedom in American law.
Cecil Calvert
thumb|A painting of [[Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore.]]
The Province of Maryland was founded by Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore in 1634. Like his father George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, who had originated the efforts that led to the colony's charter, he was Catholic at a time when the Kingdom of England was dominated by the Church of England. The Calverts intended the colony to function both as a haven for English Catholics fleeing religious persecution and as a source of income for themselves and their descendants. Many of Maryland's first settlers were Catholic, including at least two Catholic priests, one of whom became the earliest chronicler of the colony's history. But whatever Calvert's intentions, Maryland was a colony of an Anglican nation. Its charter had been granted by an Anglican king and seems to have assumed that the Church of England would be its official church. Eventually, Anglican and Puritan newcomers quickly came to outnumber the early Catholic settlers. Thus, by 1649 when the law was passed, the colonial assembly was dominated by Protestants, and the law was in effect an act of Protestant tolerance for Catholics, rather than the reverse. The Ordinance of 1639, Maryland's earliest comprehensive law, expressed a general commitment to the rights of man, but did not specifically detail protections for religious minorities of any kind. Peace prevailed until the English Civil War, which opened religious rifts and threatened Calvert's control of Maryland. In 1647, after the death of Governor Leonard Calvert, Protestants seized control of the colony. Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, quickly regained power, but recognized that religious tolerance not specifically enshrined in law was vulnerable. Partially to confirm the promises he made to them, Calvert wrote the Maryland Toleration Act and encouraged the colonial assembly to pass it. They did so on April 21, 1649.
Description
The Maryland Toleration Act was an act of tolerance, allowing specific religious groups to practice their religion without being punished, but retaining the ability to revoke that right at any time. It also granted tolerance to only Christians who believed in the Trinity.
Settlers who blasphemed by denying the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus Christ could be punished by execution or the seizure of their lands. That meant that Jews, Unitarians, and other dissenters from Trinitarian Christianity who practiced their religions risked their lives. He was held for trial, but the case was later dismissed, and he was given full citizenship as a condition of the restoration of Calvert's rule following the English Civil War.
The law had its detractors, even among those groups protected by it. Puritans were concerned that the act and the proprietary government in general were royalist. They were also concerned that by swearing allegiance to Calvert, who was Catholic, they were being required to submit to the Pope, whom they considered to be the Antichrist. Some Anglicans also opposed the law, believing that the Church of England should be the colony's sole established church. Calvert regained control after making a deal with the colony's Protestants, and in 1657 the Act was again passed by the colonial assembly and remained in effect until 1692. It took until the era of the American Revolution for religious tolerance or freedom to again become the practice in Maryland.