Religion and the State

Despite these establishment predilections, within a fifty-year period after 1787 the vast majority of Christians in the United States came to embrace government of the state based at least theoretically and legally in nothing but rational discourse. Religious institutions paradoxically prospered when their advocates had to bid for public attention among people, many of whom did not assent to their sacred dogmas.

Second, not only did the religious leaders accept the concepts of individual freedom that much of Christendom had long inhibited. They began to claim that they had possessed a patent on them and were the main custodians of citizen rights. And while the religiously serious did not all assent to doctrines that made room for or depended upon tolerance, through the many decades after 1787 most people found ways to combine personal conviction and institutional truth claims with at least practical support of toleration in the face of religious diversity.