Church-State Relations in the Early American Republic, 1787-1846

Defenders of First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution have long been enamored of the wall of separation between church and state that Thomas Jefferson defended in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, especially since Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black declared it a “high and impregnable” divide in Everson v. the Board of Education (1947). Black's decision also elevated the seeming importance of channeling the founders as the essential first step in clarifying the historic relationship between religion and the state in America. James Kabala, however, pushes such traditional guides as Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington to the margins and gives opportunity instead to lesser-known state and local players. The result is a compelling window onto what he claims is the “most important development in church-state relations” in the Early Republic (p. 8). Kabala argues that a “Protestant non-sectarian consensus” guided American church-state relations by the 1840s, with its boundaries hammered out mostly in state-level debate among politicians, their legal counsel, and assorted clergymen. As porous as it was imposing, this new integration of Christianity and culture emerged from confrontations over Sunday mail delivery, the fate of the clerical Standing Order in New England, prayer in legislative assemblies, and the political and legal status of Catholics, Jews, and other dissenters. The consensus weakened institutional church authority but strengthened Christianity's broader influence in the public square. While state-supported churches disappeared in New England by 1833 and Sunday mail delivery survived Protestant protests, chaplains maintained their presence in state legislative halls and such luminaries as Roger Taney and Daniel Webster defended Christian morality's place in American common-law tradition. At the same time, the steady erosion of religious proscriptions on office-holding and courtroom testimony served notice that the new public Christianity was also more tolerant.

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