A very common misconception. They actually came here to escape religious tolerance. Oh, they were persecuted in England, this is true. And so they took to their ships and sailed to… the Netherlands. Which, at the time, had religious freedom, and so they were allowed to practice their faith freely. But so was everyone else. And they found it intolerable to be surrounded by other people who were allowed to be different from them, and so they set sail again, this time for the New World, where they could set their own rules without any pesky heathens to bother them.
Never mind, of course, that without the generous intervention of people who were even more “heathen” than the Dutch, they would all have died there within a year. They were still on top, and could set their own rules, that everyone else had to follow.
“You don’t like the Goths?"
“No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!”
“Persecution?”
“Religious persecution. We won’t stand for it forever.”
“I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.”
"That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t persecution, I’d like to know what is!”
L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall
Well, to the extent that even that is true, one has to look back at their roots in English Reformation where the agitated for more radical changes to the Church of England that even the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and the Hampton court Conference advanced because of both the trappings and concessions to English Catholics. They eventually became strident opponents of the ‘royal prerogative’, fomenting the English Civil War and supporting the Parliamentarians backing Oliver Cromwell, which tells you a lot about how much they valued actual freedom.
Of course, the supposed Roman persecution of Christian martyrs was also largely a myth. While some early Christians were doubtless persecuted for various offenses, the pre-Constantine widespread persecution of Christians was largely limited to the reign of Marcus Aurelius; prior to that it was mostly an issue for local governors who had a variety of attitudes toward Christian sects. Of course, as soon as Christianity became the state-sponsored sect, there was broad and often fanatical persecution of other faiths and religious practices which continued on well past the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire and resulted in countless destructive wars, purges, genocides, inquisitions, often upon other Christians.
The Puritans who came to the ‘New World’ were quite dogmatic about their beliefs and attempts to proselytize the natives as well as getting into internal arguments between themselves. They were the opposite of ‘tolerant’ in essentially every possible way unless it served them, and save for the Quakers and a few other groups embraced chattel slavery and involuntary servitude just as much as the other European colonizers.
True, though in the greater context the point stands, insofar as the “seeking religious freedom” tale is supposed to be one of the foundational myths of the American identity, inculcated into every generation…
Yet as in the case of the Pilgrims/Puritans right from the start, successive generations have followed suit in reading that as freedom to be the RIGHT religion.