The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State

The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State

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. Miller's tracing of the intellectual threads, strings, and ropes of Protestant dissenting thought demonstrates an impressive familiarity with history and theology, and his book is a valuable historic and intellectual review of the influence of the right of private judgment on separation of church and state. John Ragosta, American Historical Review. It is always a joy to read a book that asserts as one of its major arguments that "ideas and beliefs do matter and that they often explain why people act as they do" and that "religious reasons should be accepted as valid" explanations of choice and behavior. Mark McGarvie, Journal of American History Miller's volume . . . deserves a place on the shelf of all interested in the development of religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition. Andrew Murphy, Journal of American Studies Miller is surely correct that Protestant dissenters, such as the Baptists and the Quakers, have not been duly credited for their intellectual contributions to the development of religious liberty, and he effectively marshals compelling evidence to support his thesis. This volume is a welcome addition to the literature on the pursuit of religious liberty in America. Daniel Dreisbach, The Historian. Associate Professor of Church History at Andrews University Seminary and Director of the Andrews University International Religious Liberty Institute, Dr. Miller has a JD from Columbia University and a PhD in American Religious History from the University of Notre Dame.