Puritan Pilgrim Colonist icon is Reformed but America historically painted Protestant?

  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Jomini

General
6 Badges
Mar 28, 2004
2.105
2.233
  • Europa Universalis III
  • Europa Universalis IV
  • 500k Club
  • Europa Universalis IV: Pre-order
  • Europa Universalis IV: Rule Britannia
  • Europa Universalis IV: Golden Century
The base game of EUIV confounds Lutheranism and Anglicanism (mainly because Anglicanism would be, by definition, confined to England/Great Britain.) All of the state churches in the 13 colonies outside of New England had Anglican state-churches, or no state church at all, such as in Pennsylvania. Historically, much of the back country of the 13 colonies has Reformed, but "Protestantism" would probably constitute a majority anywhere outside of New England and the Hudson valley.
New Jersey was congregational territory with Princeton being founded specifically to teach Reformed theology. They had established Congregationalism, a large Dutch Reformed population in the North and a large Presbyterian population throughout.

Colonial Georgia was likely majority Reformed, particularly anything not on the coast.

Delaware was also majority Reformed for most of game period (though it oscillated between Protestant under Sweden to Reformed with the Dutch to a really hard to track hodge-podge while it ping ponged between the Calverts and Penns).

And this would be a common thing. Depending on how you classify the Baptists and the Methodists (which historically could have been categorized either way) the late game period would see a lot of places (arguably NJ, for instance) flip to majority Protestant over Reformed.

Differentiating Anglicanism from Protestantism would result in a lot of no-majority areas and a massive headache to actually quantify, particularly given things like indentures (often counted in multiple denominations), slaves (rarely counted), and how to classify the aforementioned groups (particularly as Denominations merged and split throughout the period).

Without doing scholarly research, most likely the Reformed area should be most of hills and mountainous terrain, and pretty much everything North or East of Philadelphia. Anglicanism should dominate in the flat tidewater areas in the South with generic Protestantism in Philadelphia and North Eastern Maryland. A province or two around Baltimore/Annapolis should be Catholic.

The Midwest would also have some odd religious contours depending on when you counted (e.g. Detroit was Catholic up to until the end of the Revolution, but then became overwhelmingly Protestant quite quickly).