This chapter investigates the two non-establishment clauses in the U.S. Constitution: the no-religious-test clause in Article VI, and the no-establishment-of-religion clause in the First Amendment. Since religious tests were the clearest manifestation of state sovereignty over religion, their prohibition in Article VI elided any notion of a “Church of the United States” even before the First Amendment. The federal oath-Congress’s first act-no longer required a denial of Catholic beliefs as previous oaths had, yet loyalty remained a prerequisite to securing religious liberty. The chapter then contends that the First Amendment establishment clause was based on what Congress had stated in 1783: that powers in “purely spiritual” matters were “reserved to the several States, individually.” Congress had declared this principle in response to the Holy See’s request for it to approve a Catholic bishop, and had thus renounced one of the rights of patronage that governments traditionally held over ecclesiastical affairs. This context adds to the original meaning of the establishment clause, for simply prohibiting a national church did not necessarily forbid this right of patronage.

This chapter investigates debates around the First Amendment in the nineteenth century. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” Although not central to interpreting the First Amendment in the nineteenth century, Jefferson’s metaphor became the dominant interpretation in twentieth-century jurisprudence. This chapter examines whether citizens, public figures, and the courts endorsed a theory similar to Jefferson’s, and it finds they did not. Instead, the national practice endorsed public Christianity, building upon that faith’s majority status. At the same time, three groups posed definite challenges to this consensus. Freethinkers raised doubts about both Christianity and its socially privileged status. Roman Catholics had to defend their rights to religious practice. Mormon practice of plural marriage, however, went beyond the population’s willingness to tolerate and so was opposed by the power of the federal government.

The meaning and value of religious liberty in the United States is changing dramatically, under the weight of both short-term legal pressures and long-term cultural shifts. Over the last few years, a sharply escalating solicitude for “sexual minorities” has confronted and diminished religious liberty in the law for the millions of Americans who adhere to traditional views about the nature of marriage and the morality of sexual activity. Over the last several decades, Americans have come to understand their own religious convictions through the mediating lenses of subjective experience and individual spirituality, so much so that “religion” has come to be an aspect of personal “identity.” Now it seems that “religious liberty” is one subset among many of an encompassing right of self-definition, which also includes sexual identity. And where these two sides of the “identity” coin come into conflict, “religious liberty” is more often than not the loser. This development is potentially momentous, for what was long described as Americans’ “first freedom” has, in fact, been an axiom of the political culture and a strategic linchpin of the whole of constitutional civil liberties.

This essay argues that religion is a distinctive form of human activity, and offers a philosophical account of what religion fundamentally is (and what it is not), within the context of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. The first section promotes religion as an action-theoretic concept. The second section presents the claim that atheism can be regarded as a religion. It rejects this claim on the basis that religion cannot be defined as a set of propositional beliefs concerning metaphysics and morality. The third section defends a paradigmatic account of religion as a kind of activity ordered to a concept of transcendence or superior nature, and argues that morally excellent human actions can be identified as religious, but only in a secondary or derivative way. The final section contends with the problem of including act-omissions as instantiations of religious exercise, and proposes a solution with reference to recent arguments implicating two-way powers.

One winter evening in Somerset, in the early months of 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth observes ‘the moon and two planets; sharp and frosty … The sea very black, and making a loud noise as we came through the wood, loud as if disturbed, and the wind was silent’ (DWJ 147). In between these descriptions of natural phenomena she records, as if in parentheses: ‘Met a razor-grinder with a soldier’s jacket on, a Knapsack upon his back, and a boy to drag his wheel’ (DWJ 147). Unlike the lyrically suggestive accounts of sea, wind and sky, this human encounter is pared to a sequence of bare facts and, while we may deduce that the man is an army veteran now making a living as an itinerant laborer, no attempt is made to derive any further significance from the incident. In the Alfoxden Journal this entry marks the only meeting with a stranger encountered on the roads. By contrast, in the 1800–1803 Grasmere Journal Dorothy records numerous meetings with men, women and children on the public highway and, more often than not, these meetings yield insights into the consequences for the rural poor of the British involvement in the war against revolutionary France, and of the Pitt government’s relentless pursuit of socio-economic ‘improvements’ to support this involvement. Many of these meetings were subsequently developed in poems written by Wordsworth. But, whether written as poetry or in prose, the stories of these outcast and denuded figures, striking in their mundanity, were to cast a searching light on the iniquities of the times.

This chapter introduces the major philosophical concepts, historical interpretations, and political, legal, and economic issues concerning the First Amendment, church-state relations, and religious liberty in the United States. It will address philosophical concepts such as natural religion, the nature of religious exercise, and the special status of religious liberty in the philosophy of law. It will then present historical developments from colonial America to modern Supreme Court cases concerning church establishments, religious toleration, religious dissent and minorities, religious tests, and the historical and jurisprudential meanings of “free exercise” and “establishment.” It will conclude with reflections on natural rights and religious liberty exemptions, originalist constitutional interpretations, corporate religious liberty, the economic origins of religious liberty, the separation of church and state, and contemporary challenges to religious liberty.

This chapter focuses on James Humphreys, the publisher of the 1802 Philadelphia edition of Lyrical Ballads, and examines many aspects of the text itself, such as the book’s material form, price, date and place of issue. It considers how Humphreys’ involvement in the American Revolution affected the political charge of the poems and how he used the Ballads and other works published by his press to critique and alter the course of the new nation. Humphreys was as concerned with people being disenfranchised during Jefferson’s tenure as president as Wordsworth and Coleridge were with people being disenfranchised during George III’s reign as king.

Founders of the earliest American colonies considered religious piety an essential civic virtue and therefore continued the tradition of religious establishment found in Britain and other Protestant countries. New sects and denominations (especially Quakers and Baptists) contended against Congregationalist and Anglican establishments throughout the colonies. Though prominent dissenters Roger Williams and William Penn founded colonies respecting religious liberty, the decline of religious establishment elsewhere was owed primarily to changes in British law, commercial and political expediencies necessary for increasingly diverse immigrant populations, and, in the case of Anglican establishments, the difficulty of securing ordination and a self-sustaining parish. Though Roman Catholics enjoyed some degree of toleration, enthusiastic Protestant identity on both sides of the Atlantic further reduced Catholic rights and liberties. Jews enjoyed some limited degree of toleration, but only in a handful of colonies.