Unit 4: Religion in the United States

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Worship by Early Protestant Settlers

From Chapter 1, we came to know that American mainstream culture was developed from what is known as "WASP" culture and that people who settled in the 13 North American colonies that would become the United States were mostly Protestant believers.

Religious Liberty

A Puritan Girl

By the middle of the 18th century, many different kinds of Protestants lived in America. Lutherans had come to America from Germany. The Dutch Reformed Church flourished in New York and New Jersey. Presbyterians came from Scotland and Huguenots from France. Congregationalists, as the Puritans came to be called, still dominated in Massachusetts and the neighboring colonies, an area which came to be known as New England.
Although the Church of England was an established church in several colonies, Protestants lived side by side in relative harmony, and they influenced each other. The Great Awakening of the 1740s, a "revival" movement that sought to breathe new feeling and strength into religion, cut across the lines of Protestant religious groups, or denominations.

At the same time the works of John Locke were becoming known in America. John Locke reasoned that the right to govern comes from an agreement or "social contract" voluntarily entered into by free people. The Puritan experience in forming congregations made this idea seem natural to many Americans. Taking it out of the realm of social theory, they made it a reality and formed a nation.
It was politics and not religion that most occupied Americans' minds during the War of Independence and for years afterward. A few Americans were so influenced by the new science and new ideas of the Enlightenment in Europe that they became deists, believing that reason teaches that God exists but leaves man free to settle his own affairs.
Many traditional Protestants and deists could agree, however, that, as The Declaration of Independence states, "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," and that "the laws of Nature and Nature's God" entitled them to form a new nation. Among the rights that the new nation guaranteed, as a political necessity in a religiously diverse society, was freedom of religion.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States forbade the new federal government to give special favors to any religion or to hinder the free practice, or exercise, of religion. The Unites States would have no state-supported religion. In this way, those men who formulated the principal tenets of the newly established political system hoped to insure that diversity of religious belief would never become the source of social or political injustice or disaffection. But Protestant churches kept a privileged position in a few of the states. Not until 1833 did Massachusetts cut the last ties between church and state.
The First Amendment insured that American government would not meddle in religious affairs or require any religious beliefs of its citizens. But did it mean that the American government would have nothing at all to do with religion? Or did it mean that government would be religiously neutral, treating all religions alike?

A Priest in the Army

In some ways, the government supports all religions. Religious groups do not pay taxes in the United States. The armed forces pay chaplains of all faiths. Presidents and other political leaders often call on God to bless the American nation and people. Those people whose religion forbids them to fight can perform other services instead of becoming soldiers.
But government does not pay ministers' salaries or require any belief—not even a belief in God—as a condition of holding public office. Oaths are administered, but those who, like Quakers, object to them, can make a solemn affirmation, or declaration, instead.

The Supreme Court Justices

The truth is that for some purposes government ignores religion and for other purposes it treats all religions alike—at least as far as is practical. When disputes about the relationship between government and religion arise, American courts must settle them.

American courts have become more sensitive in recent years to the rights of people who do not believe in any God or religion. But in many ways what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1952 is still true. "We are a religious people," he declared, "whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."
In the early years of the American nation, Americans were confident that God supported their experiment in republican government. They had just defeated Great Britain—probably the most powerful nation in the world at that time. Protestant religion and republican forms of government, they felt, went hand in hand.

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