Religion

West Africans transported to South Carolina as slaves had their own belief system regarding death, burial, and the power of the living and the dead.

The formation of permanent settlements resulted in the establishment of Greek Orthodox churches in the state’s major cities and towns. The church became the center of Greek cultural and religious life for the immigrants as well as for successive generations.

A transdenominational Reformed seminary organized in 1987, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary understands itself to stand in the theological tradition of South Carolinian James Henley Thornwell and emphasizes a strict adherence to the seventeenth-century Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.

In 1912 Hancock became the principal of Seneca Institute, a private coeducational school for African Americans in Oconee County. Stressing vocational education, this facility was modeled closely after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Harby’s journalistic career began with the publication of a short-lived literary magazine, the Quiver (1807), which was probably the first literary journal published by a Jew in the United States.

He was one of the most influential religious, social, and political leaders of the pre–Revolutionary War South.

The society has also broadened its charity program by using its general fund for contributions to local professional agencies that minister to needy cases regardless of race, religion, or nationality.

Hines was committed to racial and social justice and led the Episcopal Church into an era of social activism in the 1960s. He was supportive of ordaining women bishops, priests, and deacons, although that did not happen during his tenure as presiding bishop.

During his tenure as state conference president, Hinton led the exponential expansion of the NAACP in South Carolina, taking the struggle for black civil rights into the cities, towns, cotton fields, and rural county churches of South Carolina.

Holiness spread to South Carolina’s second largest Protestant denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), in the 1870s and 1880s, although denominational leaders opposed the teaching.

On March 29, 1916, after the return to Greenville, the school took the name Holmes Bible and Missionary Institute. For many years it operated on the “faith principle” whereby students did not pay set fees but whatever they could afford.

Holmes began to ponder Pentecostal experience when he read about hundreds receiving the gifts of the spirit at a revival in Los Angeles in 1906, and he began to identify himself as a Pentecostal after attending a revival meeting in West Union in 1907 at the urging of one of the students at his school.

The overall composition lacks the intricate stone sculptural details characteristic of the Gothic architecture of medieval Europe, but blends harmoniously with the color palette and visual textures of Charleston’s built environment.

The Huguenot migration to South Carolina is part of a larger diaspora, traditionally known as le Refuge, which stretches from the late 1670s to the early 1710s.

Hume returned to Charleston in late 1747, convinced of the need to warn her neighbors and others of their erring ways. She spent the rest of her life inspiring others through her religious writings and dedication to the Quaker faith.

These Baptists have a highly exclusivist view of human salvation and for this reason emphasize personal conversion, evangelism, and revivalism.

Every prominent Irish national movement had a South Carolina branch, and future Irish president Eamon De Valera recognized this tradition when he visited Charleston and Columbia in 1920 to speak to supporters of the Irish War of Independence.

Jamestown was the first Huguenot settlement on the Santee River in what became Berkeley County, across the river from the Georgetown/Williamsburg county line.

Jenkins’s greatest contribution to Charleston, however, was the founding of the Jenkins Orphanage.

Following the Revolutionary War, South Carolina’s Jewish population surged. When Columbia became the state capital in 1786, seven Jewish men from Charleston were among the first to buy town lots.