A Christian nation?: Church-state relations in the early American republic, 1787--1846

This dissertation challenges the assumption that the status of church-state relations in the United States was settled after the passage of the First Amendment. It explores six decades of contentious debate in American civic culture over the premise of the United States as a Christian nation. Between the 1780s and the 1840s, legislators, jurists, clergymen, and pamphleteers debated numerous questions related to this topic. Engaging participants from across denominations, party affiliations, and regions, the question of whether the United States is a "Christian nation" was as divisive two hundred years ago as it is today. Americans debated such issues argued over such issues as whether states should have established churches, whether the mail should be delivered on Sunday, whether the government should fund Christian missionaries among the Indians, whether it was proper for Christians to pledge to vote only for Christian candidates, whether there should be religious restrictions on who could serve in public office or testify in court, whether blasphemy prosecutions were legitimate, whether state legislatures should open each day's session with prayer, and whether public schools could offer a religious curriculum.;By the 1840s, both the advocacy of a formal establishment and the advocacy of a secular nation had become marginalized worldviews. While formal establishments had been abolished, religion had not been purged from public life, but become organized around a non-denominational Protestant Christianity that pushed to the margins both belief in a confessional Christian state and open "infidelity." An emergent consensus privileged a non-sectarian Protestant Christianity as quasi-official while avoiding the creation of an established church.