The Separation that Defined America: From Europe to America

The separation of church and state enshrined in Europe's Treaty of Westphalia became a defining feature of the new American nation. America was founded, however, as a big tent--not a free-for-all.

The American Spirit Essays #12

(continued from Christian Exceptionalism)

Coming to America

The mid-seventeenth century European recognition that religious tolerance might buy peace necessarily opened parts of society to differences of practice.  When ported to the Americas, the various denominations became even more intertwined.  It became clear to all that the only alternative to an even bloodier reprise of Europe’s still-recent religious wars was an ironclad guarantee of the Westphalian principle. 

As luck would have it, the American founding also happened in a time and place in which religious fervor had cooled (at least compared to what it had been in Europe 150-200 years earlier).  Religion as a way of life, however, had hardly evaporated.  The many Protestants, the fair number of Catholics, and the small number of Jews comprising the population of England’s thirteen colonies lived in a culture deeply rooted in Biblical morality and the behavioral practices of Christian Europe.  Fortunately for the Jews, the dominant strand of American Christianity was an Old Testament Protestantism that saw America as the New Israel—a promised land, a shining city on a hill.  By 1776, the forbearance that Europe’s exhausted rulers were willing to show towards other Christian denominations in 1648 had expanded enough to encompass America’s Jews.

America’s founders thus crafted a lowest-common-denominator “Deist” civic religion, grounded in Biblical morality, broad enough to encompass every denomination of which they were aware and more than a few to which they gave little or no thought.  They then locked their adopted faith in place—as had every other ruler throughout recorded history—with a commitment to avoid “establishing” a church that might add controversial specifics.