A common myth about American history is the one in which a handful of so-called “founding fathers” in the 1780s declared that America would create a “wall of separation” between religious institutions and government institutions. After that, the First Amendment to the US constitution was instrumental in ensuring that religious institutions would be totally separate from American political institutions. Or so the story goes.
Much of this myth is premised on the idea that the spread of religious freedom in America was a top-down process. In this narrative, the process was guided by non-Christian secularists like Thomas Jefferson who were especially influenced by the ideology of the French Enlightenment.
This historical narrative is wrong in nearly every way. For example, it is not at all the case that the First Amendment was central to the process of disestablishment—the process of abolishing the “official” churches who held favored positions within most state governments. Rather, this process was carried out overwhelmingly in the state legislatures—and some of this was done before the First Amendment was even written. Nor is it true that the process of disestablishment was guided primarily by the thinking of the so-called “Enlightenment.” Rather, it was mostly Christian activists who sought to end disestablishment as a means of clearing the way for the non-established Christian groups who had not benefited from taxpayer funding or regulatory favoritism. Disestablishment was, in other words, a means of privatizing the churches and creating a “free market” in religious practice. Most who favored disestablishment thought it would lead to the spread of religious practice, not its abolition or restriction.
It was not until the twentieth century, when most American jurists and policymakers had thoroughly adopted truly secularist views, that the First Amendment came to be seen as a legal tool to dictate to state and local governments how they ought to regulate the relationship between church and state.....
