The alliance between the Jeffersonian liberals and the evangelical pietists that produced the disestablishment of religion in most of the country during the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras fragmented shortly afterward in the election of Jefferson and the ascendancy of liberalism. By the 1820s, these one-time allies engaged in open political warfare over the values of the new nation. In the decades prior to the Civil War, Christian reformers undertook several measures to restructure the United States as a Christian nation. In furtherance of this goal, activist Christians asserted that separation of church and state concerned only those institutions, banning laws requiring membership or monetary contributions to churches, and did not require the divorce of religious beliefs or principles from governing. Yet, to pursue this goal, they aligned with social reformers who sought only a more equitable and communitarian society than that created at the founding. Together these new allies hoped to change the law to express new visions of society.

By the 1830s, religion assumed more forms and embraced a greater range of beliefs than at any earlier period in the history of English America. This variation of religious expression resulted, in part, from the fact that law had made religion a matter of personal choice. Each church or religious organization had equal status as a private voluntary association using the corporate form. As religion conformed to the democratic structure of the society, people defined their own beliefs and formed their own churches, sects, or communities for expressing them. Christianity, while the largest religious expression in Jacksonian America, constituted anything but a united front in its challenge to the secular republic. Yet, as Americans came to battle one another over slavery by the era's end, they also began to come together in an attempt to integrate their religious values with their secular interests, forming a civil religion that would last well into the twentieth century.

As the United States celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1826, it reveled not only in the winning of its independence and the establishment of its constitutional government, but also in its burgeoning economy, the doubling of its geographic size, the growth of its transportation and communication infrastructure, and its growing military and diplomatic power.