An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States

1. Boundaries

Chapter 1 Boundaries Writing constitutions and creating governments were among the most important political acts of independence undertaken by citizens in the new United States. Ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 wrought fundamental changes to the scope and power of the country’s federal government, and by the early 1790s, many states had revised or replaced their original constitutions as well. These developments at both the national and state levels had profound implications for the relationship between religious belief and public life in the new nation. Perhaps most significantly, Virginia’s 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom completely disestablished religion and prohibited all religious tests for political office. Theoretically, Virginians of any religious opinion or of none at all could hold political power in the state. The federal Constitution applied similar principles to the national government , through both the First Amendment and Article VI, which banned religious tests for public office. In the decades following independence, constitutional developments trended toward greater religious liberty. Contemporary reactions to this trend were not universally positive. Writing in 1786, Philadelphian John Swanwick warned local clergy that government in Virginia could now be controlled and “administered by men professedly atheists, Mahometans, or of any creed, however unfriendly to liberty or the morals of a free country.” This held true for the national government as well. During North Carolina’s ratification convention, delegate Henry Abbot, an itinerant Baptist minister, noted that opponents of Article VI “supposed that if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain office among us, and that the senators and representatives might all be pagans.” Congregationalist Ezra Stiles feared that citizens of the United States may have actually preferred the outcomes Boundaries 19 described by observers such as Swanwick and Abbott. According to Stiles, growing popular sentiment held that “deists, and men of indifferentism to all religion are the most suitable persons for civil office.” Thus to these observers both in and out of government, legal expansions of religious liberty might actually diminish Christianity’s political power. This view suggested that new religious liberties could not be considered without defining the boundaries of acceptable religious belief for those who governed, and ultimately for the governed themselves. As a result, in the first decades of the nation’s history, traditionally philosophical questions about the nature of religious knowledge were transformed into contentious political questions about the social and cultural limits of tolerable religious expression.1 In this period Americans expressed and debated concerns about Christianity ’s vitality in response to revolutionary political theory that emphasized private conscience and the authority of individual common sense. With private belief sanctified in the new constitutions, public religious expressions became problematic in entirely new ways. Constitutional debates suggested that political independence and republican self-government enhanced the need for nonstate mechanisms to limit religious tolerance. Ordinary Americans defined and enforced these limits as they interacted with those who believed differently, most obviously during conflicts between deists and their opponents. Participants in these conflicts developed a powerful political grammar for debating the practical limits of religious liberty in the new nation.2 Throughout the late eighteenth century, Americans of various beliefs gradually rejected religious toleration in favor of religious liberty as the ideal relationship between belief and public life. Toleration was generally understood throughout the early modern world as a legal indulgence for dissenting beliefs . As state policy, governments exempted certain believers from punishments designed for those who differed from the official church. The state could revoke this exemption at will. Moreover, religious toleration often pertained only to private religious expressions; public religious expressions could still be prohibited under policies of toleration. Religious liberty entailed broad natural rights, both to freedom of conscience and to public expression , the free exercise of belief.3 The shift in American society from toleration to religious liberty accelerated following the Revolution. Constitutional developments emphasize the speed and nature of this change. Nearly every state constitution written Chapter 1 20 between 1776 and 1800 initially expanded religious liberty or did so during subsequent constitutional revisions. By 1800, every state south of New England ended single-church establishments, occasionally after experiments with multiple establishments. In New England, however, multiple establishments prevailed into the nineteenth century. Many states initially limited religious liberty to Christians, and often specifically Protestants. Catholics and non-Christians such as Jews suffered civil debilitations for their beliefs, which state governments lessened by 1800. State governments increasingly offered citizens the free exercise of religion. Eventually during...