The Last of New England's State Churches Fell in Stages

New England disestablished its Congregationalist state churches one colony at a time over more than two decades, and the sequence itself tells a story the individual dates alone do not. Vermont ended public support for churches first, in 1807. Connecticut followed in 1818, after Congregationalists lost their political dominance in the state to a coalition of Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists who had every reason to end an arrangement that taxed them to support a rival denomination. New Hampshire disestablished the following year, in 1819, its own Toleration Act ending mandatory town parish support for Congregationalist ministers after the colony had maintained that establishment since its 1620s founding. Massachusetts held out longest of all, not repealing its own religious tax support until 1833, nearly three decades after Vermont had already ended the practice, making it the last formal religious establishment anywhere in the United States to fall.

Canterbury Shaker Village, founded in 1792 while New Hampshire's establishment was still fully intact, continued as an active religious community for another two centuries, outlasting the church tax system entirely and not closing until its last members died in the 1990s. New Hampshire today has one of the highest rates of religious non affiliation in the country, Nothing in Particular leading at twenty nine percent of adults per Pew's 2023-24 study, a striking distance from the state's strict Puritan founding.