In Defense of Civil and Religious Liberty: Anti-Sabbatarianism in the United States before the Civil War

The decades before the Civil War witnessed a series of battles over the meaning and legal status of the American Sabbath. Scholarship has focused on the Sabbatarian movement, a cluster of evangelical churches that sought to institutionalize the Sunday Sabbath. This article takes a new approach by in...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Verhoeven, Tim (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 2013
In: Church history
Year: 2013, Volume: 82, Issue: 2, Pages: 293-316
Online Access: Volltext (JSTOR)
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Parallel Edition:Electronic
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Summary:The decades before the Civil War witnessed a series of battles over the meaning and legal status of the American Sabbath. Scholarship has focused on the Sabbatarian movement, a cluster of evangelical churches that sought to institutionalize the Sunday Sabbath. This article takes a new approach by investigating the anti-Sabbatarian movement. In a series of controversies, from Sunday mail in the Jacksonian era to the running of Sunday streetcars on the eve of the Civil War, anti-Sabbatarians rallied against Sabbath laws as an infringement of civil and religious liberty. Though diverse in orientation, anti-Sabbatarians agreed that religion and politics should be kept apart, and that the United States was not, in constitutional terms, a Christian nation. A study of anti-Sabbatarianism is thus of rich significance for the history of Church-State relations in the United States.
ISSN:1755-2613
Contains:Enthalten in: Church history
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0009640713000097