Separation of church and state in the United States


"Separation of church and state" is a metaphor paraphrased from Thomas Jefferson and used by others in discussions of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".
The principle is paraphrased from Jefferson's "separation between Church & State". It has been used to express the understanding of the intent and function of this amendment, which allows freedom of religion. It is generally traced to a January 1, 1802, letter by Jefferson, addressed to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, and published in a Massachusetts newspaper.
Jefferson wrote:
Jefferson reflects other thinkers, including Roger Williams, a Baptist Dissenter and founder of Providence, Rhode Island. He wrote:
In keeping with the lack of an established state religion in the United States, unlike in many European nations at the time, Article Six of the United States Constitution specifies that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States", meaning that no official state religion will be established.
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly cited Jefferson's metaphor of a wall of separation. In Reynolds v. United States, the Court wrote that Jefferson's comments "may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the Amendment." In Everson v. Board of Education, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state."
In contrast to this emphasis on separation, the Supreme Court in Zorach v. Clauson upheld accommodationism, holding that the nation's "institutions presuppose a Supreme Being" and governmental recognition of God does not constitute the establishment of a state church the Constitution's authors intended to prohibit.
The extent of separation between government and religion in the U.S. continues to be debated.

Early history

Many early immigrants traveled to North America to avoid religious persecution in their homelands, whether based on a different denomination, religion or sect. Some immigrants came from England after the English Civil War and the rise of Protestant dissenting sects in England. Others fled Protestant-Catholic religious conflicts in France and Germany. Immigrants included nonconformists such as the Puritans, who were Protestant Christians fleeing religious persecution from the Anglican King of England, and later Dissenters, such as Baptists.
The groups had a variety of attitudes on religious toleration; the Puritans, for instance, initially wanted a totally Puritan society. While some leaders, such as Roger Williams of Rhode Island and Quaker William Penn of Pennsylvania, ensured the protection of religious minorities within their colonies, the Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England established Congregational churches, initially Puritan. The Dutch colony of New Netherland established its state Dutch Reformed Church and outlawed all other worship, though enforcement was sparse in what was essentially a trading, mercantile colony. In some cases, jurisdictions wanted religious conformity for financial reasons: the established Church was responsible for poor relief, putting dissenting churches at a significant disadvantage.

State churches in British North America prior to the Revolution

Catholic colonies

  • The Colony of Maryland was founded by a charter granted in 1632 to George Calvert, secretary of state to Charles I, and his son Cecil, both recent converts to Catholicism. Under their leadership allowing the practice of this denomination, many English Catholic gentry families settled in Maryland. The colonial government was officially neutral in religious affairs, granting toleration to all Christian groups and enjoining them to avoid actions that antagonized the others. On several occasions, "low-church" dissenters among Protestants led insurrections that temporarily overthrew the Calvert rule. In 1689, when William and Mary came to the English throne, they acceded to Protestant demands to revoke the original royal charter. In 1701 the Church of England was "established" as the state church in Maryland. Through the course of the eighteenth century, Protestants barred Catholics from public office in the colony, and then prohibited them from voting, disenfranchising them. Not all of the laws passed against Catholic were enforced, and some Catholics continued to hold public office.
  • When New France was transferred to Great Britain in 1763 after it defeated France in the Seven Years' War, it practiced a policy of tolerating the Catholic Church in the colony. No Catholic people in Quebec or other parts of New France were forced to convert to the Anglican Church. The British did open the colony to Protestant Huguenots, who had been banned from settlement by previous French colonial authorities - a continuation of discrimination that existed in France.
  • Spanish Florida was ceded to Great Britain in 1763, in exchange for it giving up other claims. The British divided Florida into two colonies, East and West Florida. Both colonies had a policy of toleration for Catholic residents, as Catholicism had been the established religion of the Spanish colonies, but established the Church of England as the state church.

    Protestant colonies

The colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, New Haven, and New Hampshire were founded by Puritan Calvinist Protestants, and had Congregational established churches.
  • Plymouth Colony was founded by Pilgrims, English Dissenters or Separatists, who were Calvinists.
  • Massachusetts Bay Colony, New Haven Colony, and the New Hampshire were founded by Puritans, Anglican but Calvinist Protestants.
  • The colonies of New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia officially maintained the Church of England as the established church, but the Anglican Church operated as an established church in the southern colonies. Absorbing the Dutch Calvinists and other Protestant immigrants, New York had a more diverse population.
There were also two non-British Protestant-dominated colonies that were later incorporated into British North America:
The following table lists all North American colonies administered by the United Kingdom at the commencement of the U.S. revolution, including states now incorporated in the U.S. and current provinces of Canada.
ColonyDenominationDisestablished
ConnecticutCongregational1818
GeorgiaChurch of England1789
MarylandCatholic1701
MarylandChurch of England1776
MassachusettsCongregational1780
New BrunswickChurch of England
New HampshireCongregational1790
NewfoundlandChurch of England
North CarolinaChurch of England1776
Nova ScotiaChurch of England1850
Prince Edward IslandChurch of England
South CarolinaChurch of England1790
Canada WestChurch of England1854
West FloridaChurch of England,
East FloridaChurch of England,
VirginiaChurch of England1786
West IndiesChurch of England1868
BarbadosChurch of England1969

In several colonies, the establishment ceased to exist in practice at the Revolution, about 1776. Some states' laws treat 1776 as the presumptive date of permanent legal abolition; other states' constitutions and/or laws either explicitly disestablished the state's established church or forbade establishment of any religion. Some Canadian provinces have disestablished the Church of England, but some of the pre-U.S.-revolutionary provinces retain it.
See History of the Connecticut Constitution.
In 1789, the Georgia Constitution was amended as follows: "Article IV. Section 10. No person within this state shall, upon any pretense, be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshipping God in any manner agreeable to his own conscience, nor be compelled to attend any place of worship contrary to his own faith and judgment; nor shall he ever be obliged to pay tithes, taxes, or any other rate, for the building or repairing any place of worship, or for the maintenance of any minister or ministry, contrary to what he believes to be right, or hath voluntarily engaged to do. No one religious society shall ever be established in this state, in preference to another; nor shall any person be denied the enjoyment of any civil right merely on account of his religious principles."
From 1780 to 1824, Massachusetts required every resident to belong to and attend a parish church, and permitted each church to tax its members, but forbade any law requiring that it be of any particular denomination. But in practice, the denomination of the local church was chosen by majority vote of town residents, which de facto established Congregationalism as the state religion. This was objected to, and was abolished in 1833. For details see Constitution of Massachusetts.
Until 1877 the New Hampshire Constitution required members of the state legislature to be of the Protestant religion. Until 1968 the Constitution allowed for state funding of Protestant classrooms but not Catholic classrooms.
The North Carolina Constitution of 1776 disestablished the Anglican church, but until 1835 it allowed only Protestants to hold public office. From 1835 to 1876 it allowed only Christians to hold public office. Article VI, Section 8 of the current state constitution forbids only atheists from holding public office. The United States Supreme Court held such clauses to be unenforceable in the 1961 case Torcaso v. Watkins, when ruling unanimously that such clauses constitute a "religious test" forbidden by the First Amendment prohibiting federal religious tests and the protections in the Fourteenth Amendment, which apply to the states as well as the federal government under the doctrine of incorporation.
Religious tolerance for Catholics with an established Church of England was the policy in the former Spanish Colonies of East and West Florida while under British rule.
In the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War, the British ceded both East and West Florida back to Spain.
Tithes for the support of the Anglican Church in Virginia were suspended in 1776 and never restored. 1786 is the date of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which prohibited any coercion to support any religious body.