RELIGION AND THE

AMERICAN

CONSTITUTIONAL

EXPERIMENT Chapter 1

The American Experiment in Historical Context

American Founders

The American founders created their

experiment in religious liberty on more than a

century and a half of colonial experience.

The Bible

Martyred prophets of religious liberty in the West

European theologians and philosophers

Historical counterexamples

The First Millennium

In the first three centuries of its existence, the Christian church was largely isolate from official Roman society.

After the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312, the Roman authorities began to tolerate Christian beliefs and practices.

In 380, Trinitarian Christianity was legally established as the official state religion.

The First Millennium

The new form of church-state relations in

Christian Rome gave rise to a variety of new

Christian political theories.

This system of tempered imperial or royal rule

within the church largely continued in the West

after the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century.

The Papal Revolution

Church-state relations were turned upside down after 1050.

Pope Gregory VII and his successors declared the Catholic Church to be an independent and superior legal and political authority of Western Christendom.

The church’s canon law made regular use of the concept of individual and corporate rights.

The Protestant Revolution

The Reformation, inaugurated by Martin

Luther’s famous posting of the Ninety-Five

Theses in 1517, began as a call for religious

freedom.

The Protestant Reformation broke the unity of

Western Christendom and eventually laid the

foundation for the modern Western system of

religious pluralism.

The Protestant Reformation

The Lutheran Reformation territorialized the faith.

The Anglican Reformation nationalized the faith.

The Anabaptist Reformation communalized the

faith.

The Calvinist Reformation congregationalized the

faith.

Religious Establishment versus

Religious Freedom

The Reformation catalyzed both religious warfare and persecution and corresponding movements toward religious freedom.

Each competing religious polity had its own preferred forms and norms of religious governance.

France and England were not able to balance religious establishment with religious toleration.

Colonization and Experimentation

The rival religious and political groups in early

modern Europe were projected in part onto the

New World.

Rulers from various European nations

extended their regimes across the world.

The most prominent colonizers were the

British.

Colonial America

Colonial America was not only a frontier for European establishments but also a haven for European dissenters.

Maryland in 1633 was an experiment in Catholic and Protestant coexistence, founded by the Catholic leader Lord Baltimore.

The “holy experiment” in religious liberty instituted by Quaker leader William Penn in Pennsylvania was inspirational and controversial.

Colonial America

Fifty years after the founding of Pennsylvania, England set up its thirteenth colony in America – Georgia.

Georgia was a home for European religious misfits.

The eighteenth-century American experiment in religious freedom was both very old and very new.