Religion and the State

One set of leaders who helped make possible the drastic changes were advocates of an American version of the Enlightenment. Another were the new-style religious evangelicals, who were "awakeners" or revivalists, who made direct intuitive appeal to the minds of the public. In the process, they began to under-cut establishments. In contrast to the anticlericalism of much of the European Enlightenment, in America the celebrators of reason and rational religion tended to be friendly to faiths. Many of the advocates—George Washington (1732–1799), John Adams (1735–1826), and others—praised the contribution of religion to the morality and virtue on which the free state depended. Even those who were the most strenuous advocates for disestablishment and religious freedom, among them James Madison (1751–1836) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who could be quite critical of much religious authority in their day, did much to help assure freedom for formerly established as well as dissenting churches and, of course, with them, for individuals.

Before long the revivalists and evangelists attracted followings and these outpaced those in establishment Congregationalism and Anglicanism (Episcopalianism). Their appeal to citizens to make religious choices did much to enhance the concept of individualism.

While the U.S. Constitution in Article 6 demonstrated the influence of the advocates of religious freedom, it also reflected the practical situation of colonists who knew there could not be a national union if Congress arranged for an established church. So that article ruled out all religious tests for holders of office. In the First Amendment (1789) the drafters were more specific and sweeping: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The wording referred only to Congress; the drafters could not have gotten assent to the law had they insisted on disestablishment in the various colonies, now states. But by 1833 the last establishments fell and after 1941 the U.S.. Supreme Court set the precedent for incorporating all the legal terms of religious freedom nationally into the judicial rulings of the states.