MORE ARTICLES FROM ‘History Of Religious Liberty’
Thomas Jefferson once called America’s new constitutional protections of religious freedom a “bold” and “novel experiment.” These new state and federal guarantees, Jefferson declared, defied the millennium-old assumptions inherited from Western Europe — that one form of Christianity must be established in a community, and that the state must protect and support it against other [...]
Written for Civitas: A Framework for Civic Education. Copyright
1991, Council for the Advancement of Citizenship and the Center for Civic
Education. Updated and reprinted by permission.
From the Colonial era to the present, religions and religious beliefs have
played a significant role in the political life of the United States. Religion
has been at the heart of some of [...]