United States

We start with a paradox – religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has been far more influential on the society and politics of the USA throughout its history than on those of other Western nations like France, the UK or Germany over that same period – and this is especially true in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the same time, the USA has since its founding emphasised freedom of religion and a legal separation between church and state, which is more formally called disestablishment. Indeed, the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which was adopted as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791, formalises these two intimately related commitments. The first two clauses of the First Amendment read: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’. By contrast, many other Western nations have an official state church, or did until far more recently. While most of these nations also have laws protecting religious freedom, religion has become less and less influential on the culture and politics (deeply connected of course) of those countries, and survey data consistently show a significantly higher percentage of the population is atheist than in the USA. The separation of church and state does not require the segregation of religious and moral values from public life – indeed, the legal separation can strengthen the integration of faith values into public life, even politics.

The principal theory that resolves this seeming contradiction revolves around both theological and practical rationales for freedom of conscience with respect to religious conviction. Many of the colonies were founded by Protestant Evangelicals and were heavily influenced by their theology. Prominent among them were Reformational Protestants, Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists and even Anabaptists. One commonality between many of these groups was the idea that to be genuine, faith must be personal, voluntaristic – that is to say, it must be freely chosen by the individual believer. As such, establishing a particular religion or Christian church as the state church with the sanction and support of the government constitutes an unacceptable form of coercion. Or, to think about it another way, the government establishment of religion has the effect of weakening rather than strengthening personal faith and religion.