Analysis: The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants.

When a religious revival known as the First Great Awakening swept through Europe and North America beginning in the 1730s, many colonies passed laws to restrict outside ministers from preaching to their parishes without an explicit invitation. These traveling ministers viewed religion as a personal and emotional experience, which contradicted the colonies’ more traditional rules-and-order style of worship, and many leaders were concerned this could cause social and political instability. Elisha Williams, one of the great political preachers of the pre-Revolutionary era in the American colonies, spoke out against these laws by anonymously publishing the pamphlet The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants in 1744, which both criticized the establishment of penal laws for religious matters and encouraged tolerance.