Religion and the State

What emerged in the United States in connection with these ideas was a form of liberal polity and practice. Whatever else this style of liberalism includes, it depends on reason, which means that participants are expected to argue their political cases on rational grounds without privileging religious warrants. Second, such a liberal state encourages or at least allows for a considerable expression of individual freedom. A third feature is the recognition that such a state cannot thrive if the majority of its citizens do not practice considerable degrees of tolerance in respect to the religious and philosophical commitments of others.

In the longer history of the West, religion had been a force that in many ways militated against these three expressions. In almost all cases, the founders came with preconceptions that related specifically to Christendom, which was the political realization of Christianity as a set of both ideas and institutions.

Judaism was the ancestor of such Christianity, and in respect to thought about the state, most Christian founders at the time when the Constitution was being written drew as much on the Hebrew Scriptures as they did on the New Testament. Their "Old Testament" included many provisions for government, including the Decalogue, which remained highly influential in official European Christianity. The New Testament texts, while they included celebrations of government in several instances, were much more colored by apocalyptic thinking. When these were written, the world was expected to end soon, so there were not many reasons for believers to be concerned with how to govern the state.