One Accident, One Mistake: Evangelicals, Religious Establishment, and American Political Development

Abstract

It is widely conceded that the Supreme Court has struggled to create a coherent, consistent set of principles on which to base its decisions about the relationship between Church and State. This paper argues that what would help bring conceptual clarity to this contentious set of issues is a historically informed theory that can be labeled developmental, or structural. It presents such a theory by examining two sets of facts: First, a fact that most constitutional scholars have overlooked–that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified during a period of relative religious calm in between periods of great evangelical fervor, namely the First and Second Great Awakenings (the “accident”). Second, as is well known, that the framers did not foresee the development of stable political parties (the “mistake”). This essay first briefly summarizes the state of the law in this area, and then examines the ways in which the Second Great Awakening combined this accident and this mistake to transform American culture and politics, including electoral politics, and the implications of that transformation.