Religion and the State

One cluster of ideas in the experience of Christendom colored everything done in its name. This was the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. The division of the Christian Church into Roman and Eastern factions by the eleventh century in no way led to legal disestablishment. For the most part the Reformation of the sixteenth century that issued in Anglicanism and various forms of European Continental Protestantism also did not change this significantly. There were, of course, small dissenting groups such as the Quakers and Anabaptists, just as there had been marginalized groups in medieval Catholic times, but these suffered harassment and persecution.

Establishment meant that only one form of religious faith was given legal status, privilege, and the mandate to support the state. Almost all colonists came from European nations and territories that authorized and depended upon the sanction of only one religious expression—for example, Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, or Presbyterianism. Even most of the dissenters who arrived from the British Isles, notably Puritans, set up established churches when they arrived in New England after the beginnings of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630.

Establishment Christianity did not imply that Christians were enemies of reason. It did prescribe, however, that revealed religion was to be honored. Thus "the divine right of kings" was a typical element of the system that the colonists had to counter when they declared independence from England in 1776. In 1787, however, in nine of the thirteen colonies they still drew upon the Bible and church authority to undergird the state and determine much of their own political argument.

Similarly, while the Constitution assured religious freedom in all colonies as they became states, in the new nation the Christian majority could appeal to many strands of biblical and ecclesiastical thought to legitimate individualism. Yet most Christians assigned priority to community expression. Individualists like Roger Williams (1603?–1683), Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643), and others were dissenters who always had to struggle for their rights.

As for tolerance, establishment Christians were not always poised with the sword to punish dissent in the harshest of terms, yet it was expected that one set of ideas should have a monopoly or at least privilege. Dissent was recognized only grudgingly.