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How did the constitutional framers envision the role of religion in American public life? Did they think that the government had the right to advance or support religion and religious activities? Or did they believe that the two realms should remain forever separate? Throughout American history, scholars, Supreme Court justices, and members of the American public have debated these questions. The debate continues to have significance in the present day, especially in regard to public schools, government aid to sectarian education, and the use of public property for religious symbols.In this book, Derek Hamilton Davis offers the first comprehensive examination of the role of religion in the proceedings, theories, ideas, and goals of the Continental Congress. Those who argue that the United States was founded as a "Christian Nation" have made much of the religiosity of the founders, particularly as it was manifested in the ritual invocations of a clearly Christian God as well as in the adoption of practices such as government-sanctioned days of fasting and thanksgiving, prayers and preaching before legislative bodies, and the appointments of chaplains to the Army. Davis looks at the fifteen-year experience of the Continental Congress (1774-1789) and arrives at a contrary conclusion: namely, that the revolutionaries did not seek to entrench religion in the federal state. Congress's religious activities, he shows, expressed a genuine but often unreflective popular piety. Indeed, the whole point of the revolution was to distinguish society, the people in its sovereign majesty, from its government. A religious people would jealously guard its own sovereignty and the sovereignty of God by preventing republican rulers from pretending to any authority over religion. The idea that a modern nation could be premised on expressly theological foundations, Davis argues, was utterly antithetical to the thinking of most revolutionaries.
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RELIGION AND THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS I774-J789 Recent titles in RELIGION IN AMERICA SERIES Harry S. Stout, General Editor Saints in Exile The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture Cheryl J. Sanders Democratic Religion Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900 Gregory A. Wills The Soul of Development Biblical Christianity and Economic Transformation in Guatemala Amy L. Sherman The Viper on the Hearth Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy Terryl L. Givens Sacred Companies Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations Edited by N. J. Demerath III, Peter Dobkin Hall, Terry Schmitt, and Rhys H. Williams Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries Amanda Porterfield Being There Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools Jackson W. Carroll, Barbara G. Wheeler, Daniel O. Aleshire, and Penny Long Marler The Character of God Recovering the Lost Literary Power of American Protestantism Thomas E. Jenkins The Revival of 1857-58 Interpreting an American Religious Awakening Kathryn Teresa Long American Madonna Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture John Gatta Our Lady of the Exile Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami Thomas A. Tweed Taking Heaven by Storm Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America John H. Wigger Encounters With God An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards Michael J. McClymond Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective Edited by David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 Cynthia Lynn Lyerly Princeton in the Nation's Service Religious Ideals and Educational Practice, 1868-1928 P. C. Kemeny Church People in the Struggle The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970 James F. Findlay, Jr. Tenacious of Their Liberties The Congregation