The Theology and Politics of the Religion Clauses

Abstract

Abstract This chapter summarizes the four major views on religious freedom that dominated the eighteenth-century American founding era. We label these views Puritan, Evangelical, Enlightenment, and Civic Republican. Exponents of these four positions often found common cause and used common language, particularly during the constitutional convention and ratification debates from 1776 to 1791. Yet each group offered its own distinct teachings on religious freedom and had its own preferences for how to implement religious freedom in state and federal laws. Together, these groups held up the four corners of a wide canopy of opinions about religious freedom in eighteenth-century American. The founders’ original intent or understanding of religious freedom cannot be reduced to any one of these four views. It must be sought in the tensions among them and in the general principles of religious freedom that emerged from their interaction.