RELIGION AND THE

AMERICAN

CONSTITUTIONAL

EXPERIMENT Chapter 2

The Theology and Politics of the Religion Clauses

The American Experiment

The American Experiment in religious liberty

cannot be reduced to the First Amendment

religion clauses alone.

Nor can the framers’ understanding be

determined simply by studying the debates on

these clauses in the First Session of Congress

in 1789.

The American Experiment

Within the ample eighteenth-century sources

at hand, four views on religious liberty were

critical to constitutional formation:

Puritan

Evangelical

Enlightenment

Civic Republican

Puritan Views

The Puritans of the New England states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine were heirs of the theology of religious liberty taught by the Reformed or Calvinist tradition.

In the New England communities, the Puritans adopted a variety of rules designed to foster this basic separation of the institutions and operations of the church and state.

Puritan Views

Initially the New England leadership left little room for individual religious experimentation.

Quakers remained unwelcome, although Baptists, Episcopalians, and other Protestant groups came to be tolerated in the New England colonies.

Over time, the growing presence of religious nonconformists in New England shifted the Puritan understanding of liberty of conscience.

Evangelical Views

The eighteenth-century American Evangelical

tradition of religious liberty has its roots in

sixteenth-century European Anabaptism.

Evangelicals did not emerge as a strong

political force in America until after the Great

Awakening of 1720-1780.

Evangelical Views

In the place of religious establishment,

religious voluntarism lay at the heart of the

Evangelical view.

It was for God, not the state, to decide which

religions would flourish and which would fade.

Autonomy of religious governance also lay at

the heart of this Evangelical view.

Evangelical Views

Evangelicals advocated the institutional separation of church and state.

Evangelicals argued that all religious bodies should be free from:

state control of their assembly and worship

State regulation of their property and polity

State incorporation of their society and clergy

State interference in their discipline and government

State collection of religious tithes and taxes.

Enlightenment Views

The Enlightenment movement in America

provided a political theory that complemented

the Evangelical theology of religious liberty.

The Enlightenment movement was not a

single, unified movement but rather a series of

diverse ideological movements in various

academic disciplines and social circles

throughout Europe and North America.

Enlightenment Views

John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) – provide ample inspiration for the movement.

Locke’s Letter presupposed a magistracy and community committed to a common Christianity.

A century later, American Enlightenment writers pressed Locke’s theory of religious toleration further, and into more concrete legal and political forms.

Enlightenment Views

The state should not give special aid, support, privilege, or protection to religious doctrines or groups.

A contractarian view of society believed that religion was one of the natural and unalienable rights that God had given to each person.

Neither the state nor the church could take away this natural right of religion, nor could a person transfer it to someone else.

Republican Views

The Civic Republican movement provided a

sturdy political philosophy to complement the

Puritan theology of religious liberty.

By the later eighteenth century, Republican

leaders had found their most natural

theological allies among the Puritans.

However, they still shared much common ground

with Evangelical and Enlightenment exponents.

Republican Views

The “Publick Religion” or “civil religion” of America taught a creed of honesty, diligence, devotion, public spiritedness, patriotism, obedience, love of God, neighbor and self.

Icons: the Bible

The Declaration of Independence

The bells of liberty

The Constitution

Summary

These four views helped inform the early

American experiment in religious rights and

liberties.

The common point of departure for all four

views was their rejection of the traditional

Anglican establishment that had been the

formal law of the American colonies until the

American Revolution.