In today’s divided political climate, it is easy to forget that South Carolina was committed to religious tolerance from its very origins. South Carolina began in 1670 as part of a land grant Charles the Second presumptuously made to a group of English men called the Lords Proprietors. At the time, Carolina spread from the Albermarle Sound to the north through to the Savannah River on the south, and westward as far as the English, back then, could imagine the continental landmass extended. Carolina takes its name from the Latin for Charles, after Charles the Second, and was later split into its north and south states. The first head of the Lords Proprietors was Anthony Ashley Cooper, also the first Earl of Shaftesbury. It is from this Earl that the two rivers beside Charleston, then Charles Town, take their names—the Ashley and the Cooper. At the time, a young John Locke was basically apprenticed to the Earl, working as something like the Earl’s and the Lords’ secretary. Later, John would become famous for The Second Treatise of Government (1689), but in 1669, young John helped draft The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, the document that would govern the colony through its early years. In it, Carolina welcomes those who in “any seven or more persons, agreeing in any religion, shall constitute a Church or profession” (§97). In other words, Carolina is committed from its beginning to welcoming people from elsewhere of whatever religious background. Any group of seven would be enough to form a religious profession—“in any religion.” Yes, there are lots of other retrograde and implicitly awful features of the same document, including racialized chattel slavery, and a feudal arrangement then becoming outdated in England. Some of these features are true of the other thirteen colonies, too, all of which had chattel, racialized slavery, of course. But Carolina was an early adopter of religious toleration, more than a decade ahead of Penn’s Woods, Pennsylvania. And The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina were broadly applicable, even to slaves, for whom “it shall be lawful . . . to enter themselves, and be of what Church or profession any of them shall think best” (§107). In seventeenth-century Carolina, that is, even slaves were entitled to whatever religious profession any of them shall think best. And this entitlement was also protected in The Fundamental Constitutions. Paragraph 106 specified that “no man shall use any reproachful, reviling, or abusive language, against the religion of any Church or profession.” In other words, seventeenth-century Carolina created a legal space for religious difference, and no man was legally allowed to be pejorative toward another man’s religion. “Hatred of the professors and that profession” was specifically outlawed in The Fundamental Constitutions.
350 years ago, this state, this colony, was established, to, among other things, welcome arrivals from other places, and to protect what was constructed as their right to believe whatever their religious profession asked of them, and no one was allowed to say anything reproachful, reviling, or abusive about it. That’s more than a century before the US Constitution’s first amendment said that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” but I’m sure you can hear in the US Constitution the long earlier Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. This openness to religious difference, and to the various peoples from elsewhere who bring those religions with them, has long been part of what makes America great. And South Carolina has long played an important part in that pluralist history.
