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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2013

Tim Verhoeven
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 293 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2013 

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References

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