Talk:Meeting house

Redirects
This really shouldn't redirect to Leicester Friends Meeting House... It could use its own entry. --Dirk Gently 17:09, 15 May 2006 (UTC)


 * This shouldn't redirect to Friends meeting house either. There is a very real thing called a meeting house, which existed in the 1600s in America, and in some places still exists. I guess it is most analgous to a modern City Hall, with several differnces, one of which is that it didn't always have the sort of continuous oocupation for government functions that a modern city hall has. Sometimes it was just that they used a church building for this purpose, but in some "large cities" in Colonial North America, E.G. Salem MA, a separate building called a meeting house may actually have been set aside and used primarily for the function of the sheltering meetings of the local govt.John5Russell3Finley 20:00, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Nonconformist in America
The use of "nonconformist" to describe religious bodies in the United States is misleading, as there is no state church for them to refuse conformity with. Perhaps "congregational" or simply "protestant" might work better, though not living in an area with many such meeting houses I am not really conversant with the subject. Even in Colonial Massachusetts "nonconformist" in this context would be a misnomer, since the state church there was Puritan Christianity, viewed as "nonconformist or dissenting" in England but very much not so viewed in the Colony. --Haruo (talk) 15:57, 19 May 2016 (UTC)