Maryland Toleration Act
In 1649, the colonial assembly of Maryland passed "An Act Concerning Religion," now better known as the Maryland Toleration Act. It guaranteed freedom of conscience to those who professed belief in the Trinity, forbidding the punishment or harassment of such Christians for their faith. It is often cited as one of the earliest colonial laws on religious toleration in English North America, though its protections were far narrower than modern ideas of religious freedom.
Maryland was founded in the 1630s as a proprietary colony under Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, whose father had received the charter from King Charles I. The Calverts were Roman Catholic, and the colony was meant in part to provide a refuge for English Catholics, who faced legal penalties and social suspicion at home. Yet Catholics were a minority among the colonists, and Protestants soon formed the majority. Calvert, who needed the colony to stay peaceful and profitable, had an obvious interest in encouraging civil harmony between the two groups.
Tensions rose in the 1640s as civil war broke out in England between King Charles and Parliament, a conflict in which religion played a central role. Maryland suffered its own upheaval, including a period of disorder sometimes called the Plundering Time, when Protestant opponents of the proprietor seized power for a while. After order was restored, Calvert appointed a Protestant governor, William Stone, and the assembly approved the toleration law in 1649. Historians debate how much credit belongs to Calvert's personal principles and how much to political prudence, since a Catholic proprietor governing a mostly Protestant population had good reason to seek legal safeguards.
The act's limits were significant. It prescribed the death penalty for those who denied the Trinity, which put Jews and Unitarians in danger, and it also punished blasphemy and certain insulting language directed at religious groups. Its toleration was therefore a settlement among Christians, not a broad principle of liberty for all.
Its later history was uneven. Protestants gained control of Maryland in the 1650s and briefly repealed the policy, and after the Glorious Revolution of 1689 Catholics lost political rights in the colony. Even so, the act became an important reference point in American memory, often mentioned alongside Roger Williams's Rhode Island as an early experiment in religious coexistence. Its real legacy lies less in its actual provisions than in showing that a diverse colonial society might keep the peace by limiting the power of government over belief, an idea that would later be developed much further.