The Puritans landed at Plymouth (Massachusetts) in 1620. They were called “Puritan” because they thought that the English Reformation of the previous century had not gone far enough; they wanted to “purify” the English church. As a small religious offshoot sect of Anglicanism, though, they did not have the numbers to be successful and so, after a brief stint in Holland, decided to settle in the Americas. They saw themselves as God’s chosen people, setting up a “New Jerusalem” in a new promised land, directly in parallel to the Israelites in the book of Exodus. Given the importance of this self-understood mission, the Puritans had little tolerance for religious dissent. Almost from the beginning, they exiled those who publicly disagreed with them (example: Anne Hutchinson).
The dominance of the Puritans did not last long, however. More and more European settlers and colonizers brought with them their versions of (mostly) Protestant Christianity. Soon the Atlantic shore of North America was populated by European Congregationalists (descendants of the Puritans) in the northeast, Baptists, Quakers, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and (a few) Catholics in the mid-Atlantic colonies, and mostly Anglicans in the central and southern colonies. Tolerance for religious diversity varied from community to community and colony to colony. As an example: the Church of England was the “established” church in Williamsburg, Virginia, where local taxes funded the church, although they did allow for a small Presbyterian meetinghouse on the outskirts of town.
A century later, the more formal Church of England was feeling threatened by the growing popularity of charismatic movements. These charismatic dissenters petitioned the Virginia legislature to extend religious freedom, but needed an advocate. Thomas Jefferson, a member of the assembly, stepped up. Jefferson was an Enlightenment free-thinking rationalist spiritualist who believed that religious institutions had done more harm than good throughout history, shackling humans with superstition and corruption. His solution, articulated in his Statute for Religious Freedom, included “disestablishing” churches, withdrawing public tax support, and allowing them to all compete in a free marketplace of ideas. (This is what “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” meant at the time—that the government would not have authority to create an “established” church that received taxpayer monies and public support.)
Did the early American colonists intend for America to be a “Christian nation”? Some of them sure did! Of course, different colonists and colonies preferred different versions of Christianity and exiled those who disagreed with them, so there was never a widespread agreement on which kind of Christianity should be America’s official version.
Did the American Founders intend for America not to be a Christian nation, and instead to be secular in its government and politics, with full tolerance for competing religions, Christian or not (or not at all)? Many of them sure did, especially Jefferson and those who shared his views who tried their darnedest to make sure that America’s government would not favor any religion over another or endorse any in its laws and policies.
The bottom line is that early America never came to a widespread agreement on when and how religion should influence government and public policy. People can and do pull out a quote taken out of context from their favorite early American thinker and pretend that it represents what everyone was thinking at the time, but the reality is America’s religious roots were varied and often contradictory.
Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/godinamerica/
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