The Toleration Act Was Repealed Within Its Own Century

Maryland's 1649 Toleration Act, protecting the worship of any Trinitarian Christian, is usually remembered as a settled achievement of the colony's Catholic founding, but it did not hold even within the lifetime of the people who passed it. A Puritan dominated assembly seized control of the colony's government in 1654 amid the broader upheaval of the English Civil War and promptly repealed the Act, outlawing Catholic worship outright. The Calvert family regained enough authority to restore toleration by 1657, but the reversal proved to be only postponed rather than avoided. After England's 1688 Glorious Revolution stripped the Catholic Calverts of political control for good, Maryland's new royal governor required all officeholders to swear a Protestant oath in 1692, and by 1702 the Church of England had been formally established as the colony's official religion, with Catholics barred from public worship, from voting and from holding office under penal laws that stood until the American Revolution restored religious liberty in the state's 1776 constitution.

Baltimore became the seat of the first Roman Catholic diocese in the United States in 1789, a return achieved only after nearly a full century of legal exclusion the founding generation's own toleration statute had failed to prevent. No single tradition leads Maryland today, Nothing in Particular at nineteen percent of adults per Pew's 2023-24 study, ahead of Evangelical and Historically Black Protestant, tied with each other at fifteen.