PART ONE

Foundations

CHAPTER ONE

An Enlightenment Settlement

Thomas Jefferson was a man of many obsessions, but none rose to the level of what he called “the holy cause of freedom.” He believed freedom was the tendency of the age, or at least its logical endpoint, and that the United States was its natural locale. Americans breathed the fresh air of a new continent on which they could experiment with original ideas. The country had a material richness, a public-minded people, and a superior form of government that contrasted with the suffocating traditionalism of the Old World. Given the expansive advantages of the nation and its commitment to political liberty, he joined others in affirming that the national experiment, if properly shepherded, would result in a new order of the ages. It would be, in the Latin favored by the Great Seal, a Novus Ordo Seclorum.¹

But Jefferson also had some concerns. As an enlightened man, he entertained a decided skepticism about organized religion, though it is difficult to say what precisely his religious sentiments were. He said very little about them in his letters. He left no diaries to which he revealed his innermost thoughts. He only occasionally pulled back the curtain to his belief. In 1801, the year he became president, he responded to a minister’s query about his religious commitments. Jefferson told the minister that he had “ceased to read or to think” about what he called “the country of spirits.” He had wrestled with the issue when he was younger. But in his maturity he had decided to lay his head on, in his words, “that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent creator has made so soft.”²

One thing he was clear about: it was his decided opinion that religion was a private matter, of no consequence to either society or government. His position was, for the time, revolutionary, a stark rejection of the assumptions of the past. Religious and political authorities had been long connected, dating back to the beginning of European Christendom. Priest and Prince embodied hierarchical realms of rule. Religion supported the political order and vice versa. The arrangement had generated disagreements between rulers, and the Protestant Reformation had made the system fraught. But the presumption throughout the Christian world was always that religious and political authorities relied upon one another. Together they upheld the rule of God.³

Colonial America looked much like Europe. Historically, Christianity had supported the political order in the British colonies. Sometimes that Christianity was Puritan Congregationalism, as in the New England colonies. Other times it was Anglicanism, as in the southern ones. In the sole case of Maryland it was Catholicism. But in all cases the state looked to a religious order to promote societal cohesion.

The socio-religious arrangement often relied upon a series of exclusions. “Jews, Turks, and Infidels,” a phrase that referred to followers of Judaism, Islam, and nontheistic religions, were forbidden from holding office. Officeholders had to swear oaths affirming their belief in the divine origin of the Old and New Testaments, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, or the future state of rewards and punishments. Sometimes Catholics were excluded from office either explicitly or by adding an oath that renounced allegiance to a foreign ruler or prelate (that is, the pope).⁴

Citizenship and subjecthood drew upon these exclusions. Native peoples received a variety of appellations that testified to their place outside of Christian civilization: they were heathens, savages, and infidels who were ignorant, as the 1629 Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company put it, of “the knowledge and obedience of the onlie [sic] true God and Saviour of mankinde.” Christianity likewise supported African slavery. As one colonial court ruled in 1694, “[Negroes] are heathens, and therefore a man may have property in them.” The exclusions turned out to be firm. Although both native Americans and African slaves began to convert to Christianity, white Christians often found their conversions suspect or shifted the justification for slave and Indian subordination to a racial order that they believed was ordained by God.⁵

The American Revolution was a challenge to the hierarchical world and to the system of governance that it supported. In proclaiming, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” the revolutionaries implicitly called into question the system of European Christendom they had inherited. After all, if the king no longer held sway over the political system, then what of the religious arrangements that supported the king?

Jefferson had no doubts. Once the American Revolution began, he thought that any connection of religion to the government was an anachronism. The past was illegitimate precisely because it tended to undercut liberty of mind. And to Jefferson the liberty to think was one of the deepest components of freedom, an outgrowth of the revolutionary commitments that required further elaboration. A person in the new political order ought to be able to work out his own beliefs free of exterior compulsion, Jefferson believed, and without any consequence to his participation in civic life.⁶

But many others in the new nation disagreed. Although the revolutionaries had rejected the king, they were not on the whole ready to renounce the elaborate system of Christian privileges that had existed up until that point. After the Revolution many of the arrangements stayed in place. Six of the thirteen states paid churches out of the public treasury. The great majority of states limited civil rights to Protestants, Christians, or theists. Some states continued requiring officeholders to swear belief in God and a future state of rewards and punishments. Others went so far as to limit office-holding to Christians or Protestants.⁷

In Virginia, Jefferson’s home state, there was flat-out confusion. The 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights avowed that because religion “can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence . . . all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” It was, on the surface, an expansive declaration that was modified in telling ways. It simultaneously defined religion as “the duty which we owe to our Creator,” and it connected religious freedom with a corresponding obligation “to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.” Conscience and religious duty still sat side by side, even if Christian obligation was tempered by a call to liberality.⁸

The language was the result of a bitter divide, what Jefferson characterized as one of “the severest contests” in which he had taken part. Jefferson wanted, in keeping with his political views, to eliminate any role for Christianity in the postrevolutionary state. During the debate over the 1776 Virginia Constitution he had sought to repeal all laws that interfered with religious worship. His efforts failed. He also sought to do away with the Anglican establishment, in which Virginia declared the Church of England the official religion of the state. His efforts failed there as well. Jefferson did persuade his colleagues to temporarily suspend state payments to Anglican clergy, since it seemed untoward to revolt against England while continuing to support its church. But he had been unable to go any further.⁹

The arrangement had detractors on all sides because it had no integrity as a political position. To uphold an official religion without paying the clergy seemed to undercut the legitimacy of an established church without repudiating it. The Virginia Assembly was bombarded with petitions either to do away with the established religion or to go back to paying the clergy. The sides were unable to break the impasse.

Jefferson monitored the situation, biding his time. Finally, in 1779, when he was elected governor of Virginia, he felt the moment was right. He pushed his allies in the legislature to introduce a measure that he had been working on for several years, a Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. He sought to clarify the lingering uncertainties about religion and the state in Virginia. The bill’s ultimate goal was a decoupling of religion from governance.

The central statement of the bill was clear in its intent. “[Because] our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions,” the bill read, “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and . . . the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”¹⁰

But Jefferson’s idea in the bill was problematic to many legislators. They thought that religion was foundational in a political system that relied on popular consent. Religion upheld a public morality that, if degraded, would damage political life. The immoral masses, freed from religion, could vote into office immoral leaders. Those immoral leaders might lead the government astray. Many feared that the system was already failing. As the Virginia legislator Richard Henry Lee put it, “Refiners may weave as fine a web of reason as they please, but the experience of all times shows Religion to be the guardian of morals—and he must be a very inattentive observer of our Country, who does not see that avarice is accomplishing the destruction of religion.”¹¹

Given the anxiety, Jefferson’s bill proved highly controversial. It made it through two readings, was postponed on the third, and from there was killed for the session. The factions were, it turned out, still deadlocked.

Meanwhile, the Revolutionary War continued. Everyone assumed that when it ended, a new arrangement would become possible. Jefferson’s opponents, led by Patrick Henry, now took the lead in formulating a plan. Once peace was established in 1783 they announced that it was time to reconsider the place of churches in the state as an essential component of the postrevolutionary order.

But they did not call for a wholesale resumption of Anglican authority. The revolution had made that impossible. What they put forward instead was a “general assessment,” or a tax, to support a variety of Christian institutions. In the words of one petition to the assembly that supported the measure, the religious assessment would uphold “the Broad Basis of Gospel Liberty & Christian Charity—Divested of Past Prejudices and Bigotry.” The goal was to produce a broadly Christian establishment in Virginia that would support the teaching of the Christian religion in a postrevolutionary era.¹²

Their efforts looked promising at first, partly because their opponents were in transition. Jefferson, the natural opposition leader, was not going to be around for the debate. He had been appointed as the U.S. minister to France. Jefferson had a natural successor, though, in his friend and ally James Madison. Like Jefferson, Madison was an enlightened gentleman farmer who believed that religion ought to be an entirely private affair. He was also a sophisticated thinker and political theorist who systematized his ideas into a coherent whole. That ability would soon aid him in proposing the essential architecture of the U.S. Constitution, making him, as he is often called, the father of the Constitution.

But for reasons that are not entirely clear Madison failed to take the General Assessment bill seriously. Momentum built while he focused on other matters. Henry gained more and more adherents to his cause. Once Madison understood the situation, he scrambled to contain the damage. Trying to woo legislators back to his side, he put forward a variety of arguments against the assessment. In the process he offered a set of intellectual innovations that destabilized established categories and began to lay the foundations for a secular order.

Madison first seized upon language in the bill that referred to “teachers of the Christian religion.” He asked the assembly, “What is Christianity?” From its beginning Christianity had been plagued by theological disputes. Christians disagreed about what parts of the Bible were inspired, about what its inspiration meant, about which doctrines within the scriptures were essential and which were peripheral. They even disagreed about the mechanism that could be used to adjudicate the disputes. Someone would have to decide between orthodoxy and heresy in order to ensure the bill’s proper implementation. The task would inevitably fall to the courts of law, which Madison predicted would be a disaster. How, Madison asked, is a court to judge “whether any particular Society is a Christian Society?”¹³

Madison’s second move was even more radical. Rather than arguing about the difficulties the state would face in determining the true Christian religion from a false one, he questioned how an established religion worked. Established religions, it seemed to him, required false adherence because people who were otherwise not inclined toward a religion or a sect would have to support it or conform to it on the outside while not believing it. But that was only one part of the problem. An established religion also created a class of religious leaders, supported by the state, who had financial incentives that might outweigh true religious devotion. You could never be sure what either the leaders or the people believed. Society would be suffused with deception. Taken as a whole the effect was the systematic cultivation of hypocrisy. If both religion and society were damaged, then the maintenance of a religious establishment, even of the broadest sort, would have the opposite effect that supporters of the bill had intended.¹⁴

These were, by the standards of the day, profoundly counterintuitive statements. They upended centuries-long ideas about how and why religion and the state ought to be related. They directly assaulted the assumptions of European Christendom. But their inventiveness did not persuade enough of his colleagues. Madison had to settle for a few parliamentary moves that allowed him to regroup. When it became apparent that the legislators were not quite ready to pass the bill but were also not ready to reject it, he used a Christmas Eve vote to postpone the final reading until the next legislative session.¹⁵

Shortly thereafter Madison wrote Jefferson to explain the situation. The bill, Madison said, rode an upwelling of “pathetic zeal” in favor of “reinstating discrimination.” He was unsure whether it could be held back. “It is chiefly obnoxious,” he said, “on account of its dishonorable principle and dangerous tendency.”¹⁶

To resist the attempt Madison started work on an anonymous petition as soon as the legislature went into recess. His idea was simple and practical. He sought to gin up popular outrage by marshaling all the reasons he could think of against state support for religion. The result was his now-famous Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. It was, in many ways, even more radical than what he had offered the legislature. It constituted a genuine advance in American secular thought.¹⁷

He began by elaborating upon the themes that he first formulated during the assembly debate. But building on these themes, he made explicit what he had only implied before: that approval of the bill would result in religious coercion. To many people today his position seems like common sense. But it was not at all intuitively obvious back then. Partly the problem arose out of the political theory of the day. Many of the revolutionaries drew upon Whig political thought, an intellectual inclination that had developed in Great Britain in advance of the American Revolution. One of the central notions of Whig political theory was that liberty resided with the people. That was why so many revolutionaries referenced “the people” and demanded that they had the right of participation in government. If the people could petition the government in their own interests, Whigs believed, then that government would preserve freedom and a host of other rights.¹⁸

But when considering the religious assessment bill, Madison saw that the people’s access to government could be used as a means of religious tyranny over a minority, as a means to the violation of rights rather than their preservation. So Madison took a step back by introducing a distinction. He created a class of rights in which the government was forbidden to do anything at all, regardless of the desire of a majority within society to petition the government for action. These rights were foundational and so fell into that category that could not be denied. Religious rights were part of the new class of rights. They existed prior to the formation of civil society and prior to the formation of government itself so they could not be abridged.¹⁹

The key to preventing tyranny was the scrupulous separation of government from religious life so that individuals could follow their conscience. In that way religious rights could be preserved. The separation—the stringent secularism—would preserve rights. The General Assessment bill, by contrast, did the exact opposite by blurring churches and government and thereby violating, in his words, “that equality which ought to be the basis of every law . . . by subjecting some to peculiar burdens . . . [and] by granting to others peculiar exemptions.”²⁰

But Madison went still further. Because he was writing not merely a political treatise but also a petition to the assembly that had to generate popular support, he needed to appeal to the many dissenting Christians—Baptists and Methodists above all—who objected to state support for churches. From the Memorial’s opening passages, Madison defended an essentially religious proposition. He said that an established religion created a hypocritical regime that was displeasing to the Creator. He ended the Memorial by “praying . . . that the Supreme Lawgiver of the Universe” would illuminate the legislators in the assembly so that they could recognize the true religion. When properly illumined, he wrote, they would step back from trampling God’s “holy prerogative” and instead “establish more firmly the liberties, the prosperity, and the happiness of the Commonwealth.”²¹

The somewhat mixed message ran throughout the Memorial. He alternated between rights-based arguments and expansive religious justifications for rejecting the establishment, sometimes giving voice to an enlightened rationalism, sometimes speaking for the many dissenting Christians opposed to the establishment, but in either case winding up in the same place: in support of public secularism.

Once he put the finishing touches on his petition, Madison leaped into action. He had decided to circulate the Memorial around the state to gather signatures. But he also encouraged others to do so as well, thinking that the more petitions there were, the more difficult it would be to pass the bill. Other petitions sprang up, though none as theoretically rich as his.

When the new legislative session opened, as Madison reported to Jefferson, “the table was loaded with petitions & remonstrances from all parts against the interposition of the Legislature in matters of Religion.” Faced with an organized and vocal opposition, the proponents of a general assessment retreated. The bill went down in defeat.²²

But Madison was not content to leave it there. He sensed that the victory had, as he later told Jefferson, “produced all the effect that could have been wished.” He seized the moment and put forward Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. Opponents still objected to parts of the bill that smacked of deism and heresy, especially Jefferson’s pronouncement that “the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.” But the momentum had shifted in Madison’s favor. Once he acceded to a few changes, the opposition caved. The religious freedom bill became law.²³

The episode was a first step. Madison had articulated a compelling justification for the divorce of religious sentiment from the operations of government. And he had proven that such a justification could motivate many groups—from dissenting Christians to enlightened rationalists—within the state. But the Virginia debate left several issues unaddressed. If religion was wholly exempt from interference by the state, did that mean religion was irrelevant to the state? Could the state survive if a large portion of the people did not believe in anything?

The next year, as the delegates gathered at the U.S. Constitutional Convention, those questions were unresolved. Madison, again, proved crucial to laying out the issues by articulating a subtle skepticism toward a public role for religion. In spite of his defense of Christianity in the Memorial, he did not see it as something that could be counted upon to prevent social and political pathology. Prior to the convention, as he was formulating his constitutional theory, Madison noted that religion too often served as “a motive to oppression” rather than the preservation of rights.²⁴

The Constitution followed the basic idea. It barely referenced God apart from a passing mention of “the year of our Lord” in Article VII. It forbade a religious test for office on the federal level. Otherwise it had nothing to say on the subject of religion at all.

The Constitution’s lack of an explicit Christian foundation caused many people discomfort. Thomas Wilson of Virginia was not alone in complaining: “The Constitution is de[i]stical in principle, and in all probability the composers had no thought of God in the consultations.”²⁵

The lack of a religious test for office was troubling. As one critic put it, in an article reprinted all over New England, the Constitution’s indifference to promoting the right religion would allow into office “1st. Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same time deprive us of the means of defence—2ndly. Mahometans [Muslims], who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity—3rdly. Deists, abominable wretches—4thly. Negroes, the seed of Cain—5thly. Beggars, who when set on horseback will ride to the devil—6thly. Jews etc. etc.”²⁶

The solution to the godless Constitution, its critics concluded, was simple. It required an amendment to protect religious rights and to promote Christian religious priorities. Only then would Christian groups be secure in their belief against the hostility of a nonbelieving state.

Madison initially opposed amendments, possibly for obvious reasons. He distrusted who was calling for them. As he explained to Jefferson—who was still in France and not involved in the debate—the amending process was too likely to have a bad outcome given the religious bigotry on display. Those desirous of establishing religion in the new government objected, in Madison’s words, that “Jews Turks & infidels” could take part in governance. The critics came from the New England states, with their Christian religious establishments. Given their motivation, any amendment addressing religion that was supported by New England would narrow, not broaden, the secularism that had already been achieved by not mentioning God at all.²⁷

But as the controversy over amendments continued, Madison started to think he might be able to use the process to his advantage. Even though the Constitution was godless, some states still paid churches out of the public treasury. And almost all religious questions were still decided on the state level. If the Constitution was changed so that federal law became controlling over the states, true church–state separation might spread throughout the land, and a genuine secular order might be achieved. So once Madison was elected to the House of Representatives he began to craft language that would work out his vision.²⁸

Madison proposed two amendments to that end. His first, which he wanted to insert between the third and fourth clauses of Article I, section 9, read, “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.” The amendment would have made it difficult to discriminate against anyone for his belief or nonbelief.²⁹

Madison’s second amendment went further. He wanted to insert it between the first and second clauses of Article I, section 10. It read, “No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases.” This amendment would have potentially invalidated all state religious establishments and forbidden any state from declaring an official religion.³⁰

But because Madison’s amendments did not protect the social role of Christianity in government, as many people had wanted, his fellow legislators resisted his formulations. Once his proposals were referred to committee, they began to make changes. His first amendment was modified to read more simply, “No religion shall be established by law, nor shall the equal rights of conscience be infringed.”³¹

When the modified amendment came up for debate on the floor even the less expansive wording proved controversial. Elbridge Gerry, a representative from Massachusetts, fretted that the amendment could prohibit the rights of states to have a state religion (as Massachusetts did until 1833). Peter Sylvester of New York, which did not have a state establishment but still discriminated against non-Protestants, fretted that the amendment would “have a tendency to abolish religion altogether.” Benjamin Huntington of Connecticut, which had a Congregationalist establishment, wanted the amendment “to secure the rights of conscience, and a free exercise of the rights of religion,” while not protecting “those who professed no religion at all.”³²

To answer the objections, the House changed the wording again. This time the representatives went with the following: “Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.” That wording became the final version from the House.³³

The Senate was working on another track entirely. The senators did not share Madison’s impulse to guard the individual. They wanted to protect religious groups. Unfortunately, there is no record of the Senate debate until 1794, so we do not know exactly how they got to their version. But when the religion amendment emerged from the upper house, it read, “Congress shall make no law establishing articles of faith, or a mode of worship, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion.” The wording would have allowed Congress to pay churches on a nondiscriminatory basis. It did not in any explicit way protect the rights of conscience. It did not offer any protection to nonbelief. Its main purpose seemed to be to prevent Congress from supporting one religious group over another. At the same time, the Senate rejected Madison’s second amendment that sought to regulate the states. Madison was unable to get them to consider it.³⁴

During the conference between the House and Senate to resolve the disagreements in their bills, the committee dispensed with the Senate version and focused instead on the House’s, changing it to make it closer to the Senate’s. The committee struck off the clause “or to infringe the rights of conscience,” which could have been used to affirm nontraditional or even nonreligious rights. It rewrote the rest of the amendment in order to finesse the remaining disagreements between the two chambers. The rewritten, final version read, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That version became the first part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.³⁵

But what did it mean?

Take the first clause, the establishment clause. The committee used the gerundial construction “respecting an establishment of religion,” presumably to maintain parallelism with the second clause, “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The phrasing raised questions. How would Congress respect an establishment? Did it mean that Congress should make no law holding an establishment in esteem? Did it signify that Congress should not make a law touching upon any facet of an establishment (in the same way that we might use the phrase “in respect to”)? Did it primarily indicate that Congress should not interfere with state-level establishments that might exist then or in the future? It was unclear.

Or take the second clause, the free-exercise clause. Whose rights were being protected? Madison had wanted to protect the individual rights of conscience. Did this amendment protect individual rights? Or did it guard the right of religious groups, as the Senate seemed to desire? Or did it uphold the right of states? Again, it was unclear.

The amendment meant too much; it had a plenitude of meanings. The committee of people who designed it had wanted incompatible things. Madison’s original proposal was changed and reduced, but still they were unable to agree. So the legislators resorted to what the historian Sidney Mead has described as the amendment’s “laconic brevity and consequent vagueness.” Far from solving the debate, the passage of the First Amendment revealed how little clarity had been achieved.³⁶

But events soon overtook the legislators. By the end of 1791, when the First Amendment was ratified, those paying attention would have noticed signs of change all across the religious landscape that would upend the debate. The fervent Baptists and Methodists, already multiplying after the American Revolution, would soon explode in numbers. Itinerant preachers and enthusiasts began moving throughout Appalachia, the southeastern seaboard, Pennsylvania, New York, and eventually the Deep South of Alabama and Mississippi. Urban church construction began rapidly accelerating. In both city and country religious teachers brought a new brand of Christianity that stressed individual conversion in response to God, deep feeling as a test of sincerity, and strict attention to a moral code that governed all aspects of life.³⁷

The expansion of what became known as evangelicalism was a profound social development in the new nation. Historians now see this movement as the beginning of the Second Great Awakening. Evangelical groups overran the more established Anglican, Congregationalist, and Presbyterian churches. The number of churches, ministers, and members grew at several times the rate of the population. The evangelicals were organizationally creative, direct in their approach, and relentless in their drive to convert the nation. Their massive mobilization and their exponential growth over a short period of time made them into a powerful political force in the United States.³⁸

And yet calculating their exact political significance is not straightforward. The early effects of the evangelical expansion look, at first blush, to be an advance in public secularism of the sort that Madison and Jefferson promoted. Even as they expanded, evangelicals remained hostile to supporting churches out of the public treasury or to declaring an official state religion. Such arrangements had often been used against them. One of their earliest labors was to overthrow religious establishments in state after state. By 1833, when Massachusetts became the last state to end its institutional establishment, evangelicals had helped achieve, in part, the kind of church–state separation that Madison and Jefferson supported.³⁹

Jefferson had noticed early on the hostility that evangelicals bore toward state payments for churches, which is why he began to cultivate an alliance with them in the 1790s as he worked toward higher office. It became clear to him that the best way forward might be to unite Enlightenment rationalists like himself with the Baptists and Methodists who had worked with Madison. He eventually rode the coalition into victory, winning the election of 1800 to become the third president of the United States.⁴⁰

But their support for his candidacy and their hostility to religious establishments perhaps deluded him about the true nature of their goals. In 1802, when the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut sent Jefferson a letter commending him for his work, Jefferson responded with an enormous compliment. He saw in the Baptists exactly the kind of political outlook that had led to the creation of the First Amendment. They shared with him, he thought, the belief that religion is a private matter between a man and his God. The First Amendment was, in his view, the expression of that idea. It built out, he wrote in response to their letter, “a wall of separation between Church & State.” As the First Amendment idea spread, he told the Danbury Baptists, he looked forward to an expansion of the wall and a corresponding restoration of natural rights to mankind.⁴¹

But evangelicals did not share his view that religion was a matter between a man and his God. Evangelical expansion involved an enlargement of the role of religion in public life. Almost immediately with the start of the Second Great Awakening, evangelicals began to form voluntary associations—what we would today call civil society groups—to impose Christian moral authority on American culture and government. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (founded in 1810), the American Bible Society (founded in 1816), and the American Sunday School Union (founded in 1824), to name some of the largest associations, connected large groups of evangelicals and leveraged their organizational power to access the machinery of governance.⁴²

In making their way into the public realm, evangelicals had a clear sense of political mission. As the evangelical preacher Lyman Beecher put it, they sought to create a moral reformation and political reconstruction all at the same time. In their public efforts a voluntary association served an indispensable function. It allowed large groups of people to band together across denominations to combat what evangelicals considered the atheistic tendencies within American life. Church and state might be formally separate, but through organized pressure Christian religious norms could become dominant. As Beecher put it, once properly developed a voluntary association would act as a “sort of disciplined moral militia” that would “repel every encroachment upon the liberties and morals of the state.”⁴³

Evangelical associations soon became the central vehicle for the official Christian tone of public life. A few years after Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, they could be found in nearly every state of the union working toward a characteristic set of moral interests: the prohibition of alcohol, the suppression of vice and obscenity, the promotion of Christian Sabbath enforcement, and so on. What the historian Charles I. Foster has called “the Evangelical United Front” used its organizational power to order the nation within a fundamentally religious framework. Evangelicals infused their values into American culture so thoroughly that their vision of Christianity created a conceptual and normative structure that operated in the background for much of the nineteenth century. Those who opposed that structure—and there were many—had to work around it or through it. The result was not a wall of separation between church and government, as Jefferson understood it, but its opposite, a mutual penetration between religion and governing authority in a way that made the state a mechanism of religious power.⁴⁴

Although Jefferson was slow to recognize what was happening, by 1809 when James Madison became president evangelicals had begun to use their newfound sway. Madison was unable to hold back the religious energies. He even acceded to the wishes of Congress and proclaimed “a day of public humiliation and prayer” at the start of the War of 1812. George Washington and John Adams had issued such proclamations with regularity. Jefferson had not. Madison’s proclamation accepted the new political realities. A set-aside day would invite denominations to ask God, in Madison’s words, to “take the American people under His peculiar care and protection.”⁴⁵

Christian sentiments also began to pervade judicial rulings. Religious judges started declaring that Christianity was part of the law of the United States. Blasphemy against God and taking the Lord’s name in vain were now prosecutable, even if a state had not passed an actual statute prohibiting either offense. Other judges upheld Sunday laws against the objections of Jewish and non-Christian business owners. As the Pennsylvania Supreme Court put it in 1817, the Christian Sabbath was enforceable so that people would “be reminded of their religious duties at stated periods.”⁴⁶

Jefferson, who finally awoke to the dynamic, could only fulminate against the usurpation of the Founders’ intentions. To no avail.

Soon Jefferson and Madison were dead, and the trend intensified. By 1845, with the Second Great Awakening reaching saturation point, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment (like the entire Bill of Rights) did not apply to states. That meant that the amendment, regardless of its vagueness, could not be used to protect the rights of citizens within the states, which were free to have whatever religious arrangements they wished.⁴⁷

The result was obvious and predictable. For much of the nineteenth century, state laws recognized the Christian religion in a variety of ways. They favored churches by not requiring them to pay taxes, which created in effect a quasi-establishment because the tax burden was shifted to everyone else. Some states made it difficult to create charitable organizations separate from a religious body, if not a Christian one. Protestant religious groups had a dominant place in American schools, often creating the first schools and then controlling the common school system (or as we would say today, the public-school system) thereafter.⁴⁸

The treatment of churches reinforced a comprehensive public favoritism in defense of Christian morals. Every state had blue laws, which restricted what business or recreational activities could take place on Sunday. Statutory laws drew upon Christian and often Protestant ideas about public morality, marriage, race, and sex. The Anglo-American ideal of coverture, in which a married woman’s public existence was suspended after marriage and the husband represented her before the state, drew upon the patriarchy of the Christian scriptures. In the South proslavery advocates invoked the Bible to justify the slave institution, just as some antislavery activists quoted the Bible to oppose it. Both sides marched to war in 1861 laying claim to Christianity and God for their side alone.⁴⁹

Christian religious ceremonies honeycombed American government. State executives tended to call for days of prayer and fasting. Religious oaths were required for officeholders. There was an almost universal reliance on theistic oaths in courts and in other places where citizens encountered the state. Many laws required a witness to swear that he or she believed in God and a future state of rewards and punishments. The agnostic Robert Ingersoll pointed out, bitterly, that even though he was a lawyer admitted to the bar in both Illinois and New York, in many states he could not give testimony because his agnosticism (and his integrity) prevented him from swearing by a god whose existence he questioned.⁵⁰

State and municipal courts were especially solicitous to Christian prerogatives and Christian normative demands, though without ever acknowledging the quasi-Christian establishment that the laws upheld. In a blasphemy law case in 1824, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld that state’s blasphemy laws because a person’s criticism of God undermined the foundation of morals, which was Christianity. That logic meant that nearly any dispute over morality became, by default, a religious issue, and in those contests Christianity usually came out on top.⁵¹

The First Amendment constrained none of these things.

As Lyman Beecher had predicted, the power of evangelical voluntary associations meant that a biblical ethos soon pervaded American society and government, in spite of the godless Constitution. The Protestant Christian Establishment, operating through a myriad of moral laws on the state level, remained firmly in place for much of the nineteenth century. For secularists, the political moment had closed.