Why do they call charleston the holy city

The settlers who created the civil government that initially defined this community were mostly English folk who brought with them English customs, beliefs, and laws. As a result of these facts, the legal and political landscape of early South Carolina became an extension of the prejudices and discriminatory practices that characterized English culture of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.

The religious construct we call Christianity arose in the then-Roman province of Judea some two thousand years ago. While it began as an offshoot of the ethnically specific religion of Judaism, which was already an ancient culture at that time, Christianity gradually developed into a more heterogeneous religion that embraced people of different cultures and languages as it spread westward into Africa and across Europe.

Efforts to reform abuses within the institutional apparatus of the catholic or universal Christian Church in the early sixteenth-century led to a number of philosophical fractures that induced many adherents in several nations to diverge from the mother church.

A significant feature of this Protestant Reformation, as it is generally known, was the withdrawal of English churches from the traditional church hierarchy in Rome. In , King Henry VIII declared himself with the help of Parliament to be the supreme ruler of a separate branch of Christianity that was tailor-made for his country, called the Church of England, or the Anglican Church. From that moment onward commenced a long period of conflict and struggle between English-speaking adherents to the new Church of England and the old Church of Rome.

This religious strife dominated English politics during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and it spilled over into the founding of her American colonies as well. By extending the Penal Laws to Ireland, which England began to colonize by force in the late twelfth century, the English government subjugated and discriminated against the vast majority of the Irish population that chose to remain faithful to the Church of Rome. The crowned heads of state in France and Spain, both powerful nations with colonial aspirations in the New World, continued their long-standing affiliations with the Church of Rome.

The lengthy periods of warfare between England and her European neighbors in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries generated an intense national paranoia that English-speaking Catholics might secretly be agents of foreign powers who sought to undermine the authority of the English crown.

This duality created a direct link between the concepts of religious conformity and national security. The question of the day was this: Is it possible to be loyal to the nation while rejecting the Church of England? Or to put it another way, was adherence to the Anglican Religion a civil requirement to be imposed on all members of the English-speaking world? The Restoration of the English monarchy in included a restoration of the legal supremacy of the Church of England, however, and the nation returned to a state of relative stability.

It was this political environment that gave birth to the Carolina Colony. It's important to recognize that the religion clauses included in the Carolina Charters of and should be interpreted in the context of the rising religious tensions in England in the s. Shortly after the Restoration, the English Parliament passed a series of new laws to strengthen the supremacy of the Anglican Church and to limit the civil liberties of non-Anglican Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

In the new Carolina Colony, as in England, the king expected religious worship to conform to the established, prejudicial legal framework. Carolina colonists unwilling to conform to the laws of the Church of England would be tolerated, but, as in England, they would not enjoy the same civil rights and privileges afforded to conforming Protestants. Shortly before the first English colonists came to Charleston, the Lords Proprietors adopted a set of instructions for framing the government of Carolina, called the Fundamental Constitutions.

Article No. These instructions were drafted by Anglican men who clearly intended the Church of England to dominate the religious landscape of their new colony, and who clearly held a limited respect for those who did not conform to their religious preferences. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina were a set of philosophical guidelines written by armchair adventurers, and the colonists who settled Charleston refused to implement them.

The Constitutions were simply too impractical for a frontier settlement starting from scratch. When the English public learned in the s that James, the Duke of York, brother of King Charles II and next in line to the throne, had converted to Catholicism, English politicians scrambled to exclude James and his Catholic heirs from the royal succession and to create further distance between the English crown and the Church of Rome.

Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper , the first Earl of Shaftesbury and one of the principal Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony, was at the vanguard of this virulent anti-Catholic campaign. In spite of efforts to exclude him, James did ascend to the throne in , and even tried to promote increased religious freedom in , but anti-Catholic sentiment forced him to flee to France in late Anti-Catholic sentiment continued to form a significant part of English law during the reign of William and Mary, but in the new monarchs gave their royal assent to a law that extended a modicum of religious freedom to the English-speaking realm.

Membership in the Church of England was required for anyone employed by the government or holding public office, and this limited religious toleration did not extend to Catholics, Unitarians, or atheists.

The point of all of this religious history is to make one fact abundantly clear: The religious prejudices inherent in English law and culture in the late seventeenth century came to South Carolina with the English settlers who populated Charles Town in the early years of the colony.

They, in turn, applied these prejudices to the non-English people who settled here as well. The French Huguenots who began arriving here in the s, fleeing a wave of anti-Protestant violence in staunchly Catholic France, for example, were afforded the same limited religious toleration as other Protestant groups that did not conform to the Church of England. Here the Huguenots could form their own church and worship in peace, but their civil rights were likewise abridged by the ingrained legal prejudice against non-conforming Protestants.

In response to this inequity, many of the early South Carolina Huguenots aligned themselves with the Church of England. France and Spain were the traditional Catholic enemies of the Protestant English nation, and the English viewed the predominantly Catholic island of Ireland with an abundance of suspicion and contempt.

Irish sailors and settlers in the English-speaking colonies were routinely detained and interrogated in case they might be acting as enemy spies. The laws of England and most of her colonies afforded no civil liberties to Catholics.

As a result of such practices, the Irish population of colonial-era South Carolina was miniscule. The first part of this act provides the earliest evidence that a handful of Sephardic Jews were living in Charleston at that time, but the laws of this colony afforded neither legal recognition of nor protection for their religious traditions.

As you can see, the legal playing field of colonial-era South Carolina was skewed by an inherited system of religious discrimination. A law ratified in Charleston in the spring of , and based on English precedent, went so far as to criminalize a variety of beliefs that deviated from the teachings of mainstream Protestant Christianity.

The Lords Proprietors of Carolina rejected the language of version, but the revised law of formally empowered the provincial legislature to apply public tax revenue for the construction and maintenance of Anglican churches in each of the newly created parishes of South Carolina, as well as the salary of all Anglican ministers.

Though known for its many churches and religious history, Charleston has blossomed into a vibrant and diverse destination with so much more to offer. Our expert teams - from development, investment, real estate, and property management - have experienced it all and have the insight to help you along the way.

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Real Estate. Today, the current sanctuary is located in this exact space. Current day Meeting Street is the short name of the street that leads up to the meeting house, which was known as the Meeting House Street at the time.

Today, Charleston's cityscape is dotted with numerous steeples, which serve as a reminder of the impact that religion had on this town. These church steeples also served as useful landmarks that guided ships into Charleston Harbor, one of the most important ports on the East Coast. Our city's beauty can be seen in its culture, architecture, and amazing Charleston Real Estate. Learn more about the many neighborhoods, events and marketing trends with our Charleston Real Estate Guide.

So, how did this great city get the nickname of "the Holy City"? Learn About Things to Do in Charleston.