Church and State in America

Church and State in America

Author: James H. Hutson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-11-12

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1139467905

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This is an account of the ideas about and public policies relating to the relationship between government and religion from the settlement of Virginia in 1607 to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, 1829–37. This book describes the impact and the relationship of various events, legislative, and judicial actions, including the English Toleration Act of 1689, the First and Second Great Awakenings, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, and Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists. Four principles were paramount in the American approach to government's relation to religion: the importance of religion to public welfare; the resulting desirability of government support of religion (within the limitations of political culture); liberty of conscience and voluntaryism; the requirement that religion be supported by free will offerings, not taxation. Hutson analyzes and describes the development and interplay of these principles, and considers the relevance of the concept of the separation of church and state during this period.


Separation of Church and State

Separation of Church and State

Author: Philip HAMBURGER

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0674038185

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In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Philip Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later. Hamburger shows that separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants (ranging from nineteenth-century Know Nothings to twentieth-century members of the K.K.K.) adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Catholics in public life. Gradually, these Protestants were joined by theologically liberal, anti-Christian secularists, who hoped that separation would limit Christianity and all other distinct religions. Eventually, a wide range of men and women called for separation. Almost all of these Americans feared ecclesiastical authority, particularly that of the Catholic Church, and, in response to their fears, they increasingly perceived religious liberty to require a separation of church from state. American religious liberty was thus redefined and even transformed. In the process, the First Amendment was often used as an instrument of intolerance and discrimination.


Separating Church and State

Separating Church and State

Author: Steven K. Green

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1501762087

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Steven K. Green, renowned for his scholarship on the separation of church and state, charts the career of the concept and helps us understand how it has fallen into disfavor with many Americans. In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson distilled a leading idea in the early American republic and wrote of a wall of separation between church and state. That metaphor has come down from Jefferson to twenty-first-century Americans through a long history of jurisprudence, political contestation, and cultural influence. This book traces the development of the concept of separation of church and state and the Supreme Court's application of it in the law. Green finds that conservative criticisms of a separation of church and state overlook the strong historical and jurisprudential pedigree of the idea. Yet, arguing with liberal advocates of the doctrine, he notes that the idea remains fundamentally vague and thus open to loose interpretation in the courts. As such, the history of a wall of separation is more a variable index of American attitudes toward the forces of religion and state. Indeed, Green argues that the Supreme Court's use of the wall metaphor has never been essential to its rulings. The contemporary battle over the idea of a wall of separation has thus been a distraction from the real jurisprudential issues animating the contemporary courts.


Between Church and State

Between Church and State

Author: Bernard Guenée

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780226310329

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"For the past several decades, French historians have emphasized the writing of history in terms of structures, cultures, and mentalities, an approach exemplified by proponents of the Annales school. With this volume, Bernard Guenée, himself associated with the Annalistes, marks a decisive break with this dominant mode of French historiography. Still recognizing the Annalistes' indispensable contribution, Guenée turns to the genre of biography as a way to attend more closely to chance, to individual events and personalities, and to a sense of time as people actually experienced it, without sacrificing the conceptual rigor made possible by crisply stated problématiques. His engaging and detailed study links in sequence the lives of four French bishops who, because of their office, were intellectuals and politicians as well. These men rose in the hierarchy that was medieval society by dint of talent and ambition, not birth. What Guenée reveals is the career patterns and politics of an era that privileged youth yet granted certain advantages to those, such as Guenée's subjects, who survived to old age. He illustrates not only how these and other medieval men of the church were schooled but also how they learned from life, illuminating medieval and early modern history through their writings."--Jacket.


Church and State in Early Christianity

Church and State in Early Christianity

Author: Hugo Rahner

Publisher: Ignatius Press

Published: 2013-08-12

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1681490994

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Fr. Hugo Rahner, a renowned church historian, presents for the first time in English a very clear and readable study of the relationship of the Church and State during the first eight centuries. From being persecuted, to tolerated, to being mandated as the Empire's official religion, the Church encountered, during those early centuries, in principle all the forms of the Church-State relationship she could face in the future. With unsurpassed knowledge of the historical sources, Rahner brings to light what the Church herself through the bishops, the Pope, and the great theologians came to understand as the proper relationship between the spiritual society of the Church and the temporal society of the State.


The Oxford Handbook of Church and State in the United States

The Oxford Handbook of Church and State in the United States

Author: Derek Davis

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2010-11-18

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 0195326245

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21 essays present a scholarly look at the intricacies and past and current debates that frame the American system of church and state, within 5 main areas: history, politics, sociology theology/philosophy and law.


Evangelizing the South

Evangelizing the South

Author: Monica Najar

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-01-22

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0198042191

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Although many refer to the American South as the "Bible Belt", the region was not always characterized by a powerful religious culture. In the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, religion-in terms both of church membership and personal piety-was virtually absent from southern culture. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, however, witnessed the astonishingly rapid rise of evangelical religion in the Upper South. Within just a few years, evangelicals had spread their beliefs and their fervor, gaining converts and building churches throughout Virginia and North Carolina and into the western regions. But what was it that made evangelicalism so attractive to a region previously uninterested in religion? Monica Najar argues that early evangelicals successfully negotiated the various challenges of the eighteenth-century landscape by creating churches that functioned as civil as well as religious bodies. The evangelical church of the late eighteenth century was the cornerstone of its community, regulating marriages, monitoring prices, arbitrating business, and settling disputes. As the era experienced substantial rifts in the relationship between church and state, the disestablishment of colonial churches paved the way for new formulations of church-state relations. The evangelical churches were well-positioned to provide guidance in uncertain times, and their multiple functions allowed them to reshape many of the central elements of authority in southern society. They assisted in reformulating the lines between the "religious" and "secular" realms, with significant consequences for both religion and the emerging nation-state. Touching on the creation of a distinctive southern culture, the position of women in the private and public arenas, family life in the Old South, the relationship between religion and slavery, and the political culture of the early republic, Najar reveals the history behind a religious heritage that remains a distinguishing mark of American society.