Maine History Online

Religion and Community

Churches and taverns were among the first public institutions erected in colonial New England communities.

Churches served as meetinghouses where town business was conducted, as gathering places for other community functions, and as sites of religious services and education. Hymns, sermons, and Bible readings helped to uphold the political, economic, social, and legal expectations of their communities.

Protestants and Catholics vied for the loyalty of Maine residents as soon as colonists began arriving in the area. The French set up missions, mostly in the northern and eastern sections of the state, and converted much of the native population to Roman Catholicism. Later, in the 19th century, Roman Catholic churches were established across the state, serving the needs of immigrants from French Canada, Ireland, Italy, and other parts of the United States.

The Puritan church and its successor, the Congregational Church, dominated much of the southwestern part of Maine, as it did Massachusetts Bay colony, which required towns to support a Congregational church and minister. But Maine's roots of settlement were more entrepreneurial than religious. That fact, along with the frontier nature of Maine, including the many new residents, may have accounted for the multiplicity of religious expressions and the presence of many radical religious groups, especially after the American Revolution.

Revivals were common in Maine at the end of the 18th century. Itinerant preachers brought the Free Will Baptists, the Methodists, the Universalists, and the Shakers all offered messages of hope and salvation in uncertain social and economic times.

The state has drawn some less enduring religious groups as well: Millerites who predicted the second coming of Christ in 1843, Cochranites, founded in Saco in the early 19th century, a form of communal society that believed in polygamy; the Jaffa Colony, a group of people mostly from Washington County who went to the Holy Land in 1886 to wait for Christ's second coming and to set up a colony there; and Shiloh or the Kingdom, founded by Frank Sandford in Durham in 1893, which believed in divine healing.

Most of the more unusual religious communities and beliefs were relatively short-lived. Some were accepted, some adherents were taken to court or otherwise driven away.

Although a handful of Jews were present in the colonial period, most arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries. The synagogues and cemeteries they created remain visible elements in the landscape marking the continued presence of Jewish communities.

Both in Bangor, Beth Israel synagogue was built in 1888, while Beth El was established in 1982, nearly a century later. Biddeford's Etz Chaim synagogue was founded in 1906. Others exist in Lewiston, Old Orchard Beach, Bath, Waterville, Augusta, and of course, Portland.

Albanian and Turkish immigrants who worked in Biddeford's mills formed the first Muslim mosque in the state in 1900. Immigrants to Maine also brought Hinduism and Buddhism, mostly in the 20th century.

The earliest mosque is gone, but some of Maine’s most recent arrivals practice Islam. Many came from east Africa, and immigrated to the United States in part to escape the persistent violence of regional conflict. They concentrated in Maine’s urban areas, forced out of their homes in Somalia and the Sudan, especially, because of late 20th century and 21st century strife in those areas.

With the immigrants and their religion came a culture and community rooted in both religious and secular traditions.

Often marginalized or ignored by dominant society, immigrant and African American communities created separate institutions that both paralleled those of the white communities, and established distinctive cultural identities for their constituencies. Portland, Bangor, Augusta, and Lewiston possess most of the larger churches and civic and service societies that were organized in part to help sustain and celebrate community identity for their members.

All of the religious communities – Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and others – have brought traditions and community based in rituals and celebrations, food, music and other cultural expressions.

Perhaps the best known of the communal religious groups in Maine in the late 18th and 19th centuries is the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing or the Shakers, as they came to be called because of the physicality of their worship.

They arrived in the North American colonies in the 1770s and spread throughout New York, New England, westward into Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio, and southward into Georgia and Florida within a few decades.