|
|
Product Description
How did the United States, founded as colonies with explicitly religious aspirations, come to be the first modern state whose commitment to the separation of church and state was reflected in its constitution? Frank Lambert explains why this happened, offering in the process a synthesis of American history from the first British arrivals through Thomas Jefferson's controversial presidency.
Lambert recognizes that two sets of spiritual fathers defined the place of religion in early America: what Lambert calls the Planting Fathers, who brought Old World ideas and dreams of building a "City upon a Hill," and the Founding Fathers, who determined the constitutional arrangement of religion in the new republic. While the former proselytized the "one true faith," the latter emphasized religious freedom over religious purity.
Lambert locates this shift in the mid-eighteenth century. In the wake of evangelical revival, immigration by new dissenters, and population expansion, there emerged a marketplace of religion characterized by sectarian competition, pluralism, and widened choice. During the American Revolution, dissenters found sympathetic lawmakers who favored separating church and state, and the free marketplace of religion gained legal status as the Founders began the daunting task of uniting thirteen disparate colonies. To avoid discord in an increasingly pluralistic and contentious society, the Founders left the religious arena free of government intervention save for the guarantee of free exercise for all. Religious people and groups were also free to seek political influence, ensuring that religion's place in America would always be a contested one, but never a state-regulated one.
An engaging and highly readable account of early American history, this book shows how religious freedom came to be recognized not merely as toleration of dissent but as a natural right to be enjoyed by all Americans.
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era)
- Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England
- Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Early American Studies)
- The Burden of Black Religion
- Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830
- Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (Published by the Omohundro Institute of ... and the University of North Carolina Press)
- The Democratization of American Christianity
- Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics
- The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950
- Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal
*If this is not the "The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link
.
Details were last updated on Nov 10, 2024 21:04 +08.
