Forum on Christian Minorities in the Early American Republic

Extract

Editor's Note: This forum offers three case studies that show how Christian minorities pushed for new relationships between church and state, and between piety and politics, in the decades following the American Revolution. The gradual disestablishment of religion, and the religious competition that disestablishment unleashed, stimulated these changes. In ways unanticipated by those who crafted disestablishment, the strategies that Christian minorities pursued to gain public respect and exercise citizenship were creative harbingers of policies that only became fully developed in the twentieth century.