You appeared to counter the idea in my post regarding religious persecution, calling it nonsense. I invited you to share a source which informed your view, and so far you have not. I have shared multiple sources which informed my view that religious persecution was a factor.
It looks like you've already abandoned your original position that "the ancestors/founders of the US were largely English and motivated by a quest for freedom from religious prosecution," and have moved to "religion was a factor," at which point we no longer have a disagreement.
Even your book from the Library of Congress contradicts your original position:
The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were conceived and established "as plantations of religion." Some settlers who arrived in these areas came for secular motives--"to catch fish" as one New Englander put it--but the great majority left Europe to worship God in the way they believed to be correct.
And except for the fact that the author is grossly oversimplifying in the cast of New Jersey, and flat-out wrong in incorporating New Hampshire into the areas he's citing, and just partially wrong in the case of Pennsylvania because Quakers were already a minority by the time the Revolution began, I don't disagree with the above.
Again, five of thirteen do not a majority make.
You may not like the sources I cited but they do include images of primary source documents, which may be taken as "verifiable fact."
The invitation remains open for you to share resources which inform your view(s).
It's a lot easier if you've only read a few books, but I'd basically have to give you source material on every single one of the colonies that I'm aggregating and condensing here for you. My list of sources would be ridiculously long and unwieldy. If you wanted to talk about any particular colony, that would be more manageable. But we're talking about over a century's worth of complicated history over hundreds of thousands of square miles, in a time where lack of communication and fast transit meant that history was very local.
But honestly, you could simply go to Wikipedia and find out why each colony was formed. You could see there that New Jersey was first settled by the Dutch West India Company and the Swedish South Company for profit motives (the Dutch acquired the Swedish section by force, then the British acquired both from the Dutch the same way), and that it was only after the British gained control and its new proprietors began enticing renters that religion became a factor for new settlers - and even then, it's only a factor, because it's literally a single item in an otherwise comprehensive agreement:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nj02.asp
