Founding fathers supported freedom of religion
By DOMENICK BIZZARRO ,Brick,
NJ
The founding fathers were not pilgrims or puritans.
These groups were two separate, yet similar, sects,
both known as separatists, 100 years prior to the
founding fathers' birth.
The separatists had been at
odds with the Church of England, later called the
Anglican Church and the King's Church.
The pilgrims and puritans
wanted to purify the Catholic and Anglican churches
by breaking away from the king's religion. The
puritans maintained their religious ties to the
Anglican Church with necessary purification of
rituals. Various other Protestant sects established
themselves in the New World. There existed
Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists, Calvinists,
Baptists and a host of other Protestant religions.
The puritanism of the 1600s disintegrated amid the
revivals of The Great Awakening. The Great Awakening
established a period of evangelical enlightenment
and helped encourage the proliferation of
denominations none, of which wanted to be aligned
with the Church of England.
The American
Revolution set in motion a move from religious
tolerance to one of complete freedom from church
doctrine. Dissenters outnumbered Anglicans (King's
Church members) and therefore set the stage for
religious rebellion against the king of England. The
Anglican Church was re-christened the Episcopal
Church. The founding fathers were a conglomeration
of various religious affiliations. Their concern in
establishing the Bill of Rights — the First
Amendment — was to ensure that the king's religion
was not foisted upon the new nation, America. Hence,
the United States was not founded by a group of
irrelevant heretics but by individuals who had a
belief in established religion. The newfound freedom
that was won during the Revolutionary War period was
not one that was anti-Christian or anti-Judaic but
rather one that that was antithetical to the king of
England.
The words of
Thomas Jefferson in 1788 sum up their beliefs
"...all men shall be free to profess and maintain
their opinions in matters of religion" — hardly an
agnostic, anti-religious doctrine. |