Religious Culture & Natural Rights: Understanding the "Paradox" of Early America
Analyses of religious liberty in eighteenth-century America often seek to uncover legal principles concerning the relationship between church and state. Many such analyses focus on the Revolutionary-era writings of famous American founders and include among recent works The Founders on God and Gover...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2007
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| In: |
Journal of law and religion
Year: 2007, Volume: 22, Issue: 2, Pages: 353-395 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Analyses of religious liberty in eighteenth-century America often seek to uncover legal principles concerning the relationship between church and state. Many such analyses focus on the Revolutionary-era writings of famous American founders and include among recent works The Founders on God and Government, Jefferson and Madison on the Separation of Church and State, and Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State. Related work on religious liberty in early America examines that liberty in conceptual categories derived from the First Amendment's establishment clause which states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Scholarship in this field includes The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment and The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment.Although such scholarship has yielded important, though conflicting, results, the general search for legal principles concerning the relationship between church and state sometimes obscures important complexities in the historical sources. One such complexity is the combination of a political culture of natural rights and the religious culture of an evangelically rooted Protestantism in much of the public discourse on religious liberty in early America. Consider, for example, the two states at the American founding that scholars usually cite as representing two contrasting legal principles on the relationship between church and state, Massachusetts and Virginia. The new state of Massachusetts maintained a religious establishment supported by public taxes while the new state of Virginia did not. |
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| ISSN: | 2163-3088 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of law and religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0748081400003945 |