The Supreme Court wrestled with defining “religion” long before public displays of Satanism started.
Thomas Jefferson
Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founding Fathers
Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson all gravely doubted the future of the nation they created.
Was America Ever Christian? A Reply to Desiring God
Was the early American republic really marked by deism, the Enlightenment, and secularity?
Free Church in a Free State: Philip Schaff on Disestablishment
In his 1888 Church and State in the United States Philip Schaff argued that what made Christianity in the American republic unique was that it was a “FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE, or a SELF-SUPPORTING AND SELF-GOVERNING CHRISTIANITY IN INDEPENDENT BUT FRIENDLY RELATION...
American Disestablishment: The Conclusion
While the Commonwealth was not the cartoonish inquisition its detractors make it out to be, the Cromwellian regime by no means approached what eventually became the understanding of toleration in the American republic.
The Promise and Peril of Disestablishment: Baptist and Reformed Political Theology in the New Republic
What were the differences between over church and state betwen Baptists and the Reformed in the early US republic?