Reclaiming the Blessings of Religious Liberty: Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment

Abstract

Thomas Jefferson once described America's new religious freedom guarantees as a ‘fair’ and ‘novel experiment’.1 These guarantees, set out in the new American state and federal constitutions of 1776 to 1791, defied the millennium-old assumptions inherited from Western Europe: that one form of Christianity must be established in a community and that the state must protect and support it against all other forms of faith. America would no longer suffer such governmental prescriptions and proscriptions of religion, Jefferson declared. All forms of Christianity had to stand on their own feet and on an equal footing with all other religions. Their survival and growth had to turn on the cogency of their word, not the coercion of the sword, and on the faith of their members, not the force of the law.