“One of the prime causes for early migration to America,” writes A. P. Stokes in Church and State in the United States, “was the desire for religious freedom.” People were tired of the harassment. Baptists, Quakers, Roman Catholics, Huguenots, Puritans, Mennonites, and others all were willing to put up with the rigors of the voyage and to take a plunge into the unknown. Stokes quotes one as saying: “I yearned for a country where I could be free to worship God according to what the Bible taught me.” The measure of intolerance these emigrants left behind can be judged by the hardships they were willing to endure. According to historian David Hawke in The Colonial Experience, a heartbreaking departure from the home country was likely to be followed by “two, three, or four months spent with daily expectation of swallowing waves and cruel pirates.” Thereafter, the weather-beaten traveler would be “landed among barbarous Indians, famous for nothing but cruelty . . . [and would remain] in a famishing condition for a long space.”

Individuals reached out for freedom, the colonial powers for wealth. Regardless of motive, settlers took with them their own religion. Germany, Holland, and Britain made North America a Protestant stronghold. Particularly the British government wanted “to prevent Roman Catholicism . . . from getting the upper hand in North America.” Canada came under the influence of both France and Britain. The policy of the French government was that of “keeping New France in the Roman Catholic faith,” even refusing to allow Huguenots to immigrate to Quebec.

Britain and the United States, firmly in the hands of Protestant secular leaders, together formed the seventh world power of Bible history, taking hold of the rudder in the 18th century.