These tensions between American religious groups were temporarily cast aside as political tension between Britain and her American colonies erupted into civil war with the American Revolution. In fact, a major unifying theme between Revolutionaries was their combined opposition and hostility to British attempts to reassert Anglicanism’s privileges in America as a means of consolidating its control of the increasingly lucrative and powerful colonies.
Colonists rallied around slogans such as “No Lords, Temporal or Spiritual” and “No Bishops, No Kings,” succinctly articulating their view that systems of government that fail to separate the sacred and the secular inevitably undermine not just liberty, but security and equity—qualities which, all agreed, were indispensable to commercial, political, and social stability.
Over the course of the Revolution, this perception of church and state became a central component of nascent American ideology and self-image. Both in the United States’ initial governmental system under the Articles of Confederation and it’s more capable successor under the Constitution, both political and religious leaders were emphatic, careful, public, and deliberate in their advocacy for the construction of a state that clearly and permanently prohibited the return of a marriage, even of convenience, between the church and state.
As leaders such as James Madison argued, only with such a clear disconnection between the two could a diverse set of states, communities, and interests be stabilized and unified into a coherent whole. Many who are familiar with these arguments quote Jefferson’s famous invocation to Baptists of a “wall of separation” between governance and religion, but this logic is found repeatedly in our founding documents.
From the Declaration of Independence’s admonition that “governments are instituted among men” and not God, to John Adams’ treaty with Tripoli stating that “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” the founders echoed clearly and repetitively what, for them and almost all Americans, was one of the clearest lessons of European and early American experience: religious and state power are an inherently combustible mix and must be kept separate, with the one never encroaching on the other.
As Madison eloquently put it, “ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption; all of which facilitates the execution of mischievous projects [that end in failure.]”