Notice how Church Street forms the axis of what Charlestonians have long called the Holy City. Within a few blocks of where you stand, you will find Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Huguenot, and Jewish congregations — many of them among the oldest of their denomination in America. This concentration of historic religious communities is not accidental.
Charleston was founded under the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, drafted in part by philosopher John Locke, which guaranteed religious tolerance to attract settlers. French Huguenots fleeing Catholic persecution, Sephardic Jews expelled from other colonies, dissenting Protestants of every variety — all found in Charleston a place where they could worship without legal persecution. This tolerance had limits, of course: it applied to white Christians and Jews, not to the enslaved African majority who made up more than half of Charleston's population.
Enslaved people created their own spiritual lives in the spaces allowed them — in praise houses, in African Methodist Episcopal churches, in the secret transmission of beliefs that survived the Middle Passage. Walking Church Street today, you walk past the visible legacy of that official tolerance and the invisible legacy of the faith communities that survived without it. Both are part of the Holy City's story.