Religious Freedom, Catholic Citizenship, and the First U.S. State Constitutions, 1776–1796

Abstract

Abstract: For most of the past century, historical and legal interpretations of religion in the U.S. founding promoted the notion that all remaining British colonial-era religious restrictions were swept away in a comprehensive, nationwide, secular, Enlightenment-inspired embrace of "religious freedom," including the granting of civil rights and the right to participate at every level of government. However, broad analysis of the Revolutionary-era and post-founding U.S. state constitutions reveals that in most states, while freedom of worship did prevail, restrictions upon full political participation by Roman Catholics were either left in place or, more often, rearticulated in different language that reveals a continuous, at least implied, preoccupation with anti-popery's historical and theological themes. This shift in language is significant because it indicates a desire to promote Protestant Christianity as the unique source of civic virtue, while quietly reaffirming Catholicism's exclusion, thereby linking colonial, Revolutionary, and founding-era state constitutions to later debates over Catholic citizenship. The symbolic role of Catholics and Catholicism in the British historical imagination continued to exert a powerful force on the thinking of the state constitutions' framers across the new republic.