Religion and the State - United States - The Ideas Behind A Liberal Polity, Religious Establishment, The National Period: Disestablishment Favoring Religion

Citizens of the United States quite properly regard the ideas and practices relating religion to the state in their nation as being sharply distinguished from those that prevailed in Europe at the time of the national founding. The sources of these ideas were European as opposed to African, Asian, or Native American. They arrived in America through literary imports and in the minds of colonists chiefly from the British Isles between 1607, when settlers arrived in Virginia, and 1787, when the U.S. Constitution was written in Philadelphia. The specific forms these ideas took on American soil, however, differed significantly from patterns that originated east of the Atlantic Ocean.