Includes bibliographical references (pages 393-456) and index.
I. The first disestablishment: Revolutionary disestablishment -- Federal disestablishment -- II. The antebellum settlement: Resistance and revisionism -- New England disestablishment -- III. Legal disestablishment: Legal Christianity conceived -- Legal Christianity applied -- Legal Christianity refuted -- IV. The school question: The rise of nonsectarianism -- The secularization of nonsectarianism -- V. The Gilded Age settlement: Reaction -- Reconciliation.
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This book looks at the relationship between church and state in America during the period between the ratification of the Constitution and the 1947 Supreme Court ruling in Everson v. Board of Education, which mandated that the Establishment Clause applied to state and local governments. The author argues that during the 19th century there was a "second disestablishment." By the early 1800s, formal political disestablishment was the rule at the national level, and almost universal among the states. Yet the United States remained a Christian nation, and Protestant beliefs and values dominated American culture and institutions. Evangelical Protestantism rose to cultural dominance through moral reform societies and behavioral laws that were undergirded by a maxim that Christianity formed part of the law. Simultaneously, law became secularized, religious pluralism increased, and the Protestant-oriented public education system was transformed. This latter impulse set the stage for the constitutional disestablishment of the twentieth century.
Church and state in nineteenth-century America
Church and state-- United States-- History-- 19th century.