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The Religious Roots of the First Amendment - Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State (Hardcover, New)
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The Religious Roots of the First Amendment - Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State (Hardcover, New)
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Traditional understandings of the genesis of the separation of
church and state rest on assumptions about "Enlightenment" and the
republican ethos of citizenship. In The Religious Roots of the
First Amendment, Nicholas P. Miller does not seek to dislodge that
interpretation but to augment and enrich it by recovering its
cultural and discursive religious contexts--specifically the
discourse of Protestant dissent. He argues that commitments by
certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in
matters of Biblical interpretation, an outgrowth of the doctrine of
the priesthood of all believers, helped promote religious
disestablishment in the early modern West.
This movement climaxed in the disestablishment of religion in the
early American colonies and nation. Miller identifies a continuous
strand of this religious thought from the Protestant Reformation,
across Europe, through the English Reformation, Civil War, and
Restoration, into the American colonies. He examines seven key
thinkers who played a major role in the development of this
religious trajectory as it came to fruition in American political
and legal history: William Penn, John Locke, Elisha Williams, Isaac
Backus, William Livingston, John Witherspoon, and James Madison.
Miller shows that the separation of church and state can be read,
most persuasively, as the triumph of a particular strand of
Protestant nonconformity-that which stretched back to the Puritan
separatist and the Restoration sects, rather than to those, like
Presbyterians, who sought to replace the "wrong" church
establishment with their own, "right" one. The Religious Roots of
the First Amendment contributes powerfully to the current trend
among some historians to rescue the eighteenth-century clergymen
and religious controversialists from the enormous condescension of
posterity.
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