Here's a reminder that the American colonies - and the early states - were each oriented around their own unique religious identity. One that did not necessarily fit the identities of other states. The federal government prohibited religious tests, established churches and limits on free exercise - as well as not requireing religious oaths to hold office - as a way to be neutral towards religion. To not pick sides between the different denominations in the states.
The author brings this up to draw parallels between the religious parties in the Middle East, and what the US went through two centuries ago:
We should remember that the Thirteen Colonies that made the revolution starting in 1776 were religious societies. They had undergone the Evangelical Great Awakening, and millenarian and anti-papal movements were rife. Religious Americans fought the British for religious as well as material reasons. While the framers of much Federal law and of the Constitution were most often Enlightenment Deists and relatively secular in outlook, the mass of Americans were otherwise. Even the First Amendment to the Constitution, which forbade Congress to designate an official American religion, was considered solely a Federal initiative, and states often had Established religions. Massachusetts had an established church until 1833, and its constitution still mentions requiring state and local institutions to raise money for and support the Protestant church.
The Founding Fathers mostly wanted a separation of religion and state (Thomas Jefferson certainly did), and this aspiration won out in American law and practice over time. The people who deny this separation are being silly. I’m making a different point, that Federal constitutional law covered a relatively small part of society.
So, religious Americans fought for the Revolution, and the post-revolutionary states often used state resources to support Protestantism. Anti-Catholicism was an unfortunate enthusiasm of many of the revolutionaries, and King George III was often seen as having Catholic tendencies, because of the offer of religious freedom to Catholics in Quebec once it was added to Canada, and because high church Anglicanism was hated by American dissidents.
Here are other resources regarding religion in colonial America:
- LOC: Religion and the Founding of the American Republic.
- Religion in Colonial America.
- Religion in Colonial America: Trends, Regulations and Beliefs.
- Religion in the Original 13 Colonies.
