America as a Religious Refuge: The 17th Century
Many of the British North American Colonies that joined in 1776 to form the United States of America were settled in the 17th century for religious purposes by men and women who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and risked the perilous crossing of the Atlantic to practice their religion as they believed the Scriptures commanded.

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The Hanging of Absalom, a needlework with painted details, was created soon after the Boston Massacre and is an excellent example of the way in which Colonists understood political events in terms of familiar biblical stories. In this tableau, Absalom is seen as a patriot, King David as George III (playing his harp and oblivious to the suffering of his "children") and the murderer Joab is dressed as a British redcoat.

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The New England Colonies and New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland were conceived and established "as plantations of religion." Some who arrived in these areas came, of course, for secular motives -- "to catch fish" as one New Englander put it -- but the great majority of settlers left Europe to worship God as they wished and enthusiastically supported the efforts of their leaders to turn individual Colonies into "a city on a hill" or a "holy experiment," whose success would prove to European enemies that God's plan for his churches could be successfully realized in the American wilderness.

Even Colonies such as Virginia, which were planned as commercial ventures, were led by entrepreneurs who considered themselves "militant Protestants" and who worked diligently to promote the prosperity of the church. The faith in which the Colonies were founded gave them a religious orientation that remained strong when the government of the United States was created in the years after 1776. Boosted by the "golden age" of evangelicalism, religion thrived in 19th century America. Its impact remained so conspicuous in the early decades of this century that in 1922 a British observer called the United States "a nation with the soul of a church."

European Persecution
The religious persecution in Europe that filled the British North American Colonies with settlers was motivated by the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that a uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in their jurisdictions in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens. Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of the concept, denounced by Roger Williams as "inforced uniformity of religion," meant that in 17th century Europe (and in New England and Virginia as well) majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst.

The Puritans
Puritans were English Protestants who wished to reform -- to purify -- the Church of England of what they considered to be unacceptable residues of Roman Catholicism. In the 1620s leaders of the English state and church grew increasingly unsympathetic to Puritan demands and insisted that they conform to religious practices that they abhorred, removing their ministers from office and threatening them with "extirpation from the earth" if they did not fall in line. Zealous Puritan laymen received savage punishments; one, for example, in 1630 was sentenced to life imprisonment, had his property confiscated, his nose slit, an ear cut off and his forehead branded "S.S." (sower of sedition).

Beginning in 1630, as many as 20,000 Puritans emigrated to America from England to gain religious freedom. Most settled in New England but some went as far as the West Indies. Theologically, the Puritans were "non-separating Congregationalists." Unlike the Pilgrims, who came to Massachusetts from Holland in 1620, the Puritans believed that the Church of England was a true church, though in need of major reforms. Every New England Congregational church was considered an independent entity, beholden to no hierarchy. The membership was composed, at least initially, of men and women who had undergone a conversion experience and could prove it to other members. Puritan leaders hoped (futilely, as it turned out) that, once their experiment was successful, England would imitate it by instituting a church order modeled after the New England Way.

Persecution, American-style
Although victims of religious persecution in Europe, the Puritans supported the Old World theory that sanctioned it, that of the necessity of a uniformity of religion in the state. The Puritan procedure was to expel dissenters from their colonies, a fate that in 1636 befell Roger Williams and in 1638 Anne Hutchinson, America's first major female religious leader. Those who defied the Puritans by persistently returning to their jurisdictions risked capital punishment, a penalty imposed on four Quakers between 1659 and 1661. Reflecting on the 17th century's intolerance, Thomas Jefferson was unwilling to concede to Virginians any moral superiority to the Puritans.

The Quakers
The Quakers (or Religious Society of Friends) coalesced in England in 1652 around a charismatic leader, George Fox (1624-1691). Many scholars today consider Quakers as radical Puritans because they carried to extremes many Puritan convictions. Theologically, they expanded the Puritan concept of a church of individuals regenerated by the Holy Spirit to the idea of the indwelling of the Spirit or the "Light of Christ" in every person.

Such teaching struck many of the Quakers' contemporaries as the most dangerous sort of heresy and they were cruelly persecuted in England. By 1680, 10,000 Quakers had been imprisoned in England and 243 had died from torture and mistreatment in the king's jails. This reign of terror impelled Friends to seek refuge in New Jersey in the 1670s, where they soon became well entrenched. By 1685, as many as 8,000 Quakers had come to live in Pennsylvania. Although the Quakers may have resembled the Puritans in some religious beliefs and practices, they differed with them over the necessity of compelling religious uniformity in society. The Quakers, as represented by their great leader William Penn, believed in religious liberty.

The Catholics
Although the Stuart kings of England were not haters of the Church of Rome, many of their subjects were, with the result that Catholics were harassed and persecuted in England throughout the 17th century. Driven by "the sacred duty of finding a refuge for his Roman Catholic brethren,"George Calvert (1580-1632), a principal lieutenant of James I until his religion cost him his job, obtained a charter from Charles I in 1632 for the territory between Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Maryland charter offered no guidelines on religion, although it was assumed that Catholics would not be molested in the new Colony.

Catholic fortunes fluctuated in Maryland during the rest of the 17th century, as they became an increasingly smaller minority of the population. After the Glorious Revolution of 1689 in England, the Church of England was legally established in the Colony and English penal laws that deprived Catholics of the right to vote, hold office or worship publicly were enforced. Until the American Revolution, Catholics in Maryland were dissenters in their own country, living at times under a state of siege, but keeping loyal to their convictions, a faithful remnant, awaiting better times.

The Great Awakening (1735-1745)
Toward mid-century the country's first major religious revival, the Great Awakening, occurred. The Awakening swept the English-speaking world, as religious energy vibrated between England, Wales, Scotland and the American Colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The Awakening, which signaled the advent of an encompassing evangelicalism in American life, invigorated even as it divided churches. The supporters of the Awakening and its evangelical thrust -- Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists -- became the largest American Protestant denominations by the first decades of the 19th century; opponents of the Awakening or those split by it -- Anglicans, Quakers and Congregationalists -- were left behind.

Evangelicalism is difficult to date and define. In 1531, at the beginning of the Reformation, Sir Thomas More referred to religious adversaries as "Evaungelicalles." Scholars have argued that, as a self-conscious movement, evangelicalism did not arise until the mid-17th century, perhaps not until the Great Awakening itself. According to experts, the fundamental aspect of evangelicalism is the conversion of individuals from a state of sin to the "new birth" by the preaching of the Word. The first generation of New England Puritans required that church members undergo a conversion experience that they could describe publicly. Their successors were not as successful in reaping harvests of redeemed souls. During the first decades of the 18th century, a series of local "awakenings" began in the Connecticut River Valley that broadened by the 1730s into what was interpreted as a general outpouring of the Spirit that bathed the American Colonies, England, Wales and Scotland and produced mass open-air revivals in which preachers like George Whitefield brought thousands of souls to the new birth. The Great Awakening, which spent its force in New England by the mid-1740s, continued in subsequent decades in the South.

Religion and the American Revolution
A debate about the role of religion in the American Revolution began while the war between Britain and the Colonies still raged. Opponents of the Revolution, the Tories, claimed that "republican sectaries," specifically, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, had caused the conflict. In the 1960s, a scholar argued that evangelical Christians, converted during the Great Awakening, were responsible for the war. Although neither of these views has been widely accepted, there can be no doubt that religion played a major role in the Revolution by offering, through the sermons, pamphlets and actions of the American clergy, a moral sanction for opposition to the British, an assurance to the average American that opposition to the mother country was justified in the sight of God.

Religion and the Congress of Confederation (1771-1789)
The Continental-Confederation Congress, a legislative body that also exercised executive power, governed the United States from 1774 to 1789 and left an impressive list of accomplishments, not the least of which was winning the war with Great Britain, the greatest military power of the age. Congress, as it was always called, contained an extraordinary number of deeply religious men, some of whom -- John Dickinson, Elias Boudinot and Charles Thomson, for example -- retired from public life to write religious tracts and commentaries and publish new translations of the Bible.

The amount of energy that Congress invested in encouraging the practice of religion throughout the new nation exceeded that expended by any subsequent American national government.

Congress appointed chaplains to minister to itself and to the armed forces; it sponsored the publication of a Bible; it imposed Christian morality on the armed forces; and it granted public lands to promote Christianity among the Indians. Most conspicuous were the national days of thanksgiving and of "humiliation, fasting and prayer" that Congress proclaimed at least twice a year throughout the war. These proclamations were always accompanied by sermonettes in which Congress urged the American populace to confess and repent its sins as a way of moving God to grant national prosperity.

Scholars have recognized that Congress was guided by "covenant theology," a Reformation doctrine especially dear to New England Puritans, which held that God had bound himself in an agreement with a nation and its people, stipulating that they "should be prosperous or afflicted, according as their general Obedience or Disobedience thereto appears." Wars and revolutions were, accordingly, considered afflictions, as divine punishments for sin, from which a nation could rescue itself by repentance and reformation. Year in and year out, therefore, Congress urged its fellow citizens to repent "of their manifold sins" and strive that "pure undefiled religion, may universally prevail."

The Continental-Confederation Congress, the first national government of the United States, was convinced that the "public prosperity" of a society depended on the vitality of its religion. Nothing less than a "spirit of universal reformation among all ranks and degrees of our citizens," Congress declared to the American people on March 19, 1782, would "make us a holy, that so we may be a happy, people."

Religion and the State Governments
That religion was necessary for "public prosperity" was an opinion that found expression not only in Congress but in the state legislatures of the new American republic as well. The connection between religion and the public welfare seemed so obvious to the public at large that it was articulated by its representatives at every level of government.

Massachusets Church-State Debate
After independence the American Colonies, now states, were obliged to write constitutions, spelling out how they would be governed. In no place was constitution- making more difficult than in Massachusetts. That state's Constitutional Convention included in the draft constitution submitted to the voters the famous Article Three, which authorized the levying of a general religious tax to be directed to the church of a taxpayers' choice. Despite substantial doubt that Article Three had been approved by the required two-thirds of the voters, in 1780 state authorities declared it and the rest of the Constitution to have been duly adopted.

Virginia Church-State Debate
The debate in Virginia over the relation of government to religion produced an outcome very much at odds with the results in the New England states and in Maryland and Georgia, challenging the frequently made assumption that Virginia set the pattern for church-state relations in the Revolutionary period.

In 1776 the Virginia Assembly moved toward the disestablishment of the Church of England, taking the decisive step in 1779 by depriving the Church's ministers of tax support. Church-state relations were not settled, however, as an attempt in 1779 to pass a general religious tax demonstrated. Patrick Henry, the great orator of the American revolution, revived and pressed for a general religious assessment in 1784 and appeared to be on the verge of securing its passage, when his opponents neutralized his political influence by electing him governor. As a result, legislative consideration of Henry's bill was postponed until the fall of 1785, giving its adversaries an opportunity to mobilize public opposition to it.

James Madison, the leading adversary of government-supported religion, rallied opponents in his celebrated Memorial and Remonstrance and in the fall of 1785 marshaled sufficient legislative support to administer a decisive defeat to the effort to lay religious taxes. In place of Henry's bill, Madison and his allies passed in January 1786 Thomas Jefferson's famous Act for Establishing Religious Freedom which brought the debate in Virginia to a close by severing, once and for all, the links between government and religion.

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The Dunking of David Barrow and Edward Mintz in the Nansemond River, Sidney E. King, 1778. Barrow was the pastor of the Mill Swamp Baptist Church in Portsmouth, Va. Baptists opposed Patrick Henry's general assessment bill and suffered physical persecution from supporters of the Church of England.

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Religion and the Federal Government
In response to widespread sentiment that, to survive, the United States needed a stronger federal government, a convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 and on Sept. 17, 1787, adopted the Constitution of the United States. Aside from Article VI, which prohibited religious tests for federal office holders, the Constitution said little about religion. Its reserve troubled those Americans who wanted the new instrument of government to give faith a larger role and those who feared that it would do so. This latter group, worried that the Constitution did not prohibit the kind of state-supported religion that had flourished in some Colonies, exerted so much pressure on the members of the First Federal Congress that they adopted in September 1789 the First Amendment to the Constitution, which, when ratified by the required number of states in December 1791, forbade Congress to make any law "respecting an establishment of religion."

The first two Presidents of the United States were patrons of religion -- Washington was an Episcopal vestryman and Adams described himself as "a church going animal." Both offered strong rhetorical support for religion. In his Farewell Address (September 1796) Washington called religion, as the source of morality, "a necessary spring of popular government," while Adams claimed that statesmen "may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand."

The first two Presidents of the United States were patrons of religion -- Washington was an Episcopal vestryman and Adams described himself as "a church going animal." Both offered strong rhetorical support for religion. In his Farewell Address (September 1796) Washington called religion, as the source of morality, "a necessary spring of popular government," while Adams claimed that statesmen "may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand." Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the third and fourth presidents, are generally considered less hospitable to religion than their predecessors, but evidence shows that, while in office, both offered religion powerful symbolic support. During his two administrations (1801-1809), Jefferson was a "most regular attendant" at church services in the House of Representatives at which, surviving records show, evangelical Christianity was forcefully preached. Madison followed Jefferson's example, although unlike Jefferson, who road on horseback to church in the Capitol, Madison came in a coach and four. Jefferson permitted church services to be conducted by various denominations in government buildings, such as the Treasury and the War Department. During his administration, the Gospel was also preached in the Supreme Court chambers. It is, in fact, accurate to say that on Sundays in Washington during the Jefferson and Madison administrations the state became the church.

Recently, scholars have contended that Jefferson adopted a more positive view of Christianity in the 1790s as a result of reading Joseph Priestly's arguments that many of the miraculous features of Christianity to which Jefferson objected were not authentic, having been added at a later time by a self-interested priesthood. Whatever the reason, after becoming president in 1801, Jefferson began making statements about the social value of Christianity.

Religion and the Constitution
When the Constitution was submitted to the American public, "many pious people" complained that the document had slighted God, for it contained "no recognition of his mercies to us ... or even of his existence." The Constitution was reticent about religion for two reasons: many delegates were committed federalists who believed that the power to legislate on religion, if it existed at all, lay within the domain of the state, not the national, governments. Second, the delegates believed that it would be a tactical mistake to insert such a politically controversial issue as religion in the Constitution. The only "religious clause" in the document -- the proscription of religious tests as qualifications for federal office in Article Six -- was, in fact, intended to defuse controversy by disarming potential critics who might claim religious discrimination in eligibility for public office.

Religion and the Bill of Rights
Although there were proposals for making the ratification of the Constitution contingent on the prior adoption of a bill of rights, supporters of a bill of rights acquiesced with the understanding that the first Congress under the new government would attempt to add to it a bill of rights.

James Madison took the lead in steering a bill of rights through the First Federal Congress, which convened in the spring of 1789. The Virginia Ratifying Convention and Madison's constituents, among whom there were large numbers of Baptists who wanted freedom of religion secured, expected him to push for a bill of rights. There was considerable opposition in Congress to a bill of rights of any sort on the grounds that it was "unnecessary and dangerous." The persistence of Madison and his allies nevertheless carried the day and on Sept. 28, 1789, both houses of Congress voted to send 12 amendments to the states. Those ratified by the requisite three fourths of the states became in December 1791 the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Religion was addressed in the First Amendment in the following familiar words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." In notes for his speech, June 8, 1789, introducing the bill of rights, Madison indicated that a "national" religion was what he wanted to prevent and it is clear that most Americans joined him in considering that the major goal was to forestall any possibility that the federal government could act as several Colonies had done by choosing one religion and making it an official "national" religion that enjoyed exclusive financial and legal support. The establishment clause of the First Amendment meant at least this: that no one religion would be officially preferred above its competitors. What ever else it may -- or may not -- have meant is obscured by a lack of documentary evidence and is still a matter of dispute.