By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:
I tried not to write anything about the murder of Charlie Kirk. I did not want to add to the noise, but in one of his recent press conference appearances, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, used the expression “The American Experiment.” As he did, I realized that a good number of people, most especially young people, may have no idea what that expression signifies. It seemed to me that it is rather important for all Americans, and perhaps especially Christians, to understand that expression. Why is America an experiment, and what do we mean by that phrase?The Background
In order to understand how and why Americans speak of the “American experiment,” we need to have some sense of why America is different, what our founders did that other nations had not tried before. Let us focus on two rights that the founders claimed to be universal, God-given, natural rights that were not very often recognized by the state before the establishment of the American Republic. The first of those is the right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience. Before the American experiment, it was universally assumed in Europe and the British Isles that there must be a national religion. It was unthinkable for there not to be a national religion. We can understand why such an assumption might seem to be beyond question. After all, before the American experiment, was there no national religion? So long as they had a nation, the Jews had a national religion. The Ottoman Empire had a religion. The Holy Roman Empire had a church. England had a state church. The French had a state church. The Swiss Cantons had a state church. The Dutch had a state church. Even before Christianity, the Romans had a state religion. Having a national religion and/or a state church was a given for a millennium and a half before Christ among the Jews and for about a millennium and a half after Christ. By any measure, that is an impressive precedent.
By the late eighteenth century, after considerable religious strife in the American colonies, after the American Revolution, and after nearly two centuries of continuous religious warfare in Europe (contrary to popular perception, the fighting in Europe did not end completely in 1648), the founders refused to establish a national church.
As they framed their constitution, the American founders adopted, in 1791, amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment says,
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This is truly experimental. The nation from which the original colonial settlers came, in the early seventeenth century, had an established religion. The American colonies had, to varying degrees, established religions. Massachusetts and Connecticut were Congregational. Virginia established the Church of England in the 1660s. That was true in the Carolinas. “Dissenters in [the New England colonies] were punished harshly with imprisonment or expulsion, and Massachusetts executed four Quakers between 1658 and 1661.”1 The situation in New York was more complicated (as it has always been):
There is some debate over whether there was an established church in the colony of New York, in the sense of an officially designated state church. New York, like the Carolinas, demonstrated the conflict between the unpopular established Church of England and other, more popular religious causes. The colony guaranteed free religious exercise to all Christians but required parishes to select ministers and collect taxes to establish and support churches at the local level. Following the Toleration Act’s adoption in England, New York excluded Catholics from guarantees of the liberty of conscience and adopted the Ministry Act of 1693, which required “the settling of a ministry.” There was debate over whether this act referred only to Anglican ministers, or whether the language was broad enough to allow towns to select other Protestant ministers.2
In Maryland, things were also complicated as Britain sought to impose the Church of England in that state and ultimately prevailed at the turn of the eighteenth century. Pennsylvania was the California of the colonies, with the most religious diversity. That state, along with Delaware, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, never had an established church.
The American Constitution was ratified in May 1790. The Bill of Rights was ratified in December 1791. These dates are important because North Carolina disestablished the church in 1776. New York, according to one source, followed the next year.3 Virginia disestablished the church in 1786, South Carolina in 1790, Georgia in 1798, Maryland in 1810, Connecticut in 1818, and New Hampshire the following year, with Congregationalist Massachusetts lagging behind until 1833. In other words, contrary to the picture painted by those who appeal to the state constitutions to create the impression that America was a pious theocracy until the godless Unitarians overthrew Christianity in the early nineteenth century, there was a fairly steady march beginning from the time of the revolution until the early nineteenth century for those states who had an established church to conform to the federal constitution. Russell Reno explains, “Soon after the nation was founded, elite opinion consolidated around a view that the government should remain at a distance from religion. This consensus had two sources: one focused on the rights of individual conscience and the other on the integrity of the church as an independent institution.”4
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