Religion and the State - United States - The Ideas Behind A Liberal Polity, Religious Establishment, The National Period: Disestablishment Favoring Religion
arrived american
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.
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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 expressio…
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 …
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…
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 Europea…
The term most citizens, including their legislators, executives, and jurists, have favored for their polity is "separation of church and state," a phrase used by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Connecticut Baptists in 1802. This is accepted as constitutional dogma by many, though it is not mentioned in the Constitution and in practice it has not meant the drawing of a radical line be…
While over eighty percent of the people of the United States identify themselves with what has come to be called the "Judeo-Christian" religion, there have always been inhabitants who did not belong to that tradition. Most notable have been Native Americans or American Indians, many of whom did convert to Christianity, but others, down to the present, have retained their own rituals …
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