>
> On Mar 18, 2010, at 9:08 AM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> lol
>>
>> yes.
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 6:31 AM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I think it is a safe bet that the Americans fighting in the Revolutionary
>>> War were 95% not Deists. ;)
>>>
>>
> So does anyone know the history of the anti-establishment clause? Was this
> an elitist imposition on a religious mass or a widely held opinion?
>
>
In short, I think it was kind of both. The thing about current efforts to
make the US "a Christian nation" is that everyone thinks it will be *their*
Christianity. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people lived with state
churches in, for example, Virginia and Connecticut, but they got rid of
them, in no small part because not everyone belongs to the same church.
Jefferson's famous Danbury Letter is written to a Baptist congregation in
Connecticut where they had to apply for an exemption from a state tax
supporting congregationalist churches. Madison's Remonstrance is written
against a similar law in Virginia, where they were going to distribute the
tax receipts proportionally to the clergy of various churches, but of course
Quakers and Mennonites had no clergy, so they would be paying the tax and
receiving none of it, while others (like, iirc, Presbyterians in VA) opposed
the tax on principle.
Certainly it was a fight, but I think at the end of the day, disestablishment won because it also won at the state level, and that had to do with people recognizing and resisting the unfairness of a state church.
It occurs to me also that disestablishment winning first at the federal level probably (and here I am surmising) had to do as much with states wanting their own churches (not pushed down from the federal level) as with anything else. But then essentially the same thing happens in the states.