Intrepid Lutherans: When the Government Forbids Orthodox Pastors to Christian Congregations: The Sad Story of America’s First Lutheran Colonists:
Last year, our Fourth of July post, The Lutheran Conception of a Christian Commonwealth according to King Gustavus Adolphus, and its Mighty Impact on the Formation of our Great Republic, and on the State of Pennsylvania in particular, recounted the happy history of Swedish Lutheran colonists who originally settled New Sweden – an area that is now Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Wilmington, Delaware – under a Charter devised by the beloved Swedish King, Gustavus Adolphus, prior to his grizzly death at theBattle of Lützen in 1632, and later carried out by his successor, Axel Ostenstiern. A pious Lutheran aggrieved by the plight of Christians in the face of State sponsored religious persecution, who fought gallantly in the name of Religious Liberty, and died as a victorious leader in its cause, his plan for a colony in the New World, which would guarantee and protect the Fundamental Rights of the people, was defended by him for almost a decade as
- “a Free State, where the laborer should reap the fruit of his toil, where the Rights of Conscience should be inviolate, and which should be open to the whole Protestant world... [where] all should be secure in their persons, their property, and their Rights of Conscience... [and] should be an asylum for the persecuted of all nations.”
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