capitalism

Separation of Church and State 459
votes in the Estates General, France’s traditional legislature.
In both France and England, the king’s touch was said,
by the grace of God, to cure scrofula, a skin disease nicknamed
“the king’s evil.” (The double entendre does not,
however, persist in French.)
During the Reformation, Western Europe’s always tenuous
religious unity finally disintegrated, and rulers faced
the question of which religious faction they, and in turn
their governments, should support. For example, from
1491 to 1558, England vacillated from Catholicism, to
Protestantism, to Catholicism, and then to Protestantism
once more during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI,
Mary I, and Elizabeth I. It would endure further disruptions
during the English Civil Wars, the Interregnum, and the
Glorious Revolution of the 17th century.
Yet few contemporaries questioned the idea that civil
peace required religious unity. Paradoxically, almost everyone
imagined that, without state intervention in matters of
faith, constant warfare would result. This belief persisted
despite more than a century of actual religious civil war,
when governments tried in vain to enforce the state’s religion.
Perhaps most surprisingly, religious minorities did not
notably favor the separation of church and state. Instead,
they usually aspired to take over the state apparatus and set
up their own sect as the official, privileged church. Judaism
was one of the few religions to renounce temporal power of
this sort, but the Jews had almost no influence on their
Christian contemporaries in this regard.
Early social contract theorists like Thomas Hobbes and
John Locke were thought controversial not chiefly because
they would have limited state power, but because they
argued that neither spiritual nor temporal governments
were ordained of God, and that humans had created them
both. Locke also argued that the power of churches could
not legitimately include compulsion. Locke’s insights
implied religious toleration and even supported the full disestablishment
of the state church.
Other classical liberals were of like mind. Little appreciated
during its author’s lifetime, Baruch Spinoza’s
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) argued that the state
should have almost no role in religious life. The Tractatus
was outlawed even in the relatively tolerant Dutch
Republic. However, its key political ideas slowly gained
ground. In the next century, Voltaire, David Hume, and
Thomas Jefferson all promoted disestablishment as a pragmatic
compromise among competing faiths and a way of
creating public peace over questions that could not readily
be resolved without supernatural insight.
The 17th century saw the gradual introduction of religious
tolerance in several European states, including
Britain, the Dutch Republic, and, to a limited extent, even
France, beginning with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. No
European state, however, disestablished its church during
this era; toleration took hold well before disestablishment,
and religious tolerance coexisted with special privileges for
members of the officially favored religions. Even in ostensibly
liberal England, Protestants enjoyed considerable
advantages from the state. For example, the Test Act of
1673 barred Roman Catholics from holding office. It was
not repealed until 1829, and the Church of England remains
an established church to this day.
The first practical act of disestablishment came in the
American colonies. In Massachusetts, the Baptist dissident
Roger Williams contended that the civil power had no
authority to try or punish religious crimes and that all people
should enjoy freedom of conscience—what Williams termed
soul liberty. The other colonists disagreed and exiled him. In
1636, Williams and a small group of like-minded settlers
founded the city of Providence in what became the state of
Rhode Island. For years, Williams worked to secure a royal
charter protecting his colony, and when it finally arrived in
1663, it constituted the first formal separation of church and
state in Western history.
The charter proclaimed Rhode Island a “livlie experiment.”
Charles II, no stranger to religious strife, admitted that
inhabitants of the same colonie cannot, in theire private
opinions, conform to the publique exercise of religion ...or
take or subscribe the oaths and articles made and established
in that behalfe, [therefore] our royall will and pleasure is,
that noe person within the sayd colonye . . . shall bee any
wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question,
for any differences in opinione in matters of religion.
Other British colonies followed a range of different
courses, from disestablishment and religious liberty to a fully
established church with compulsory public funding and laws
against religious dissidents, atheists, and blasphemers. This
pattern continued in the states of the early American republic,
although the movement was distinctly toward disestablishment.
For example, one of Thomas Jefferson’s proudest
achievements was his authorship of the 1786 Virginia Statute
for Religious Freedom. The Statute termed established religion
a “dangerous fallacy” and forbade public support for
any church. By contrast, Massachusetts was a relative
latecomer: Following his return to private life, Jefferson’s
friend and sometime political rival John Adams worked to
disestablish his home state’s official church. Yet disestablishment
came only in 1833, 7 years after the long-lived Adams
had died.
On the federal level, the U.S. Constitution protects the
separation of church and state in a variety of ways. Most
explicitly, the 1st Amendment declares that no established
federal Church can ever exist and that no federal law can
abridge the freedom of religion. Further, Article VI section
3 declares that “no religious test shall ever be required as a
qualification to any office or public trust under the United
States.” Given the tumultuous history of England and the
great religious diversity of the early republic, this step may