Antiques.(the Puritans)

 
But such as we were, high and low, good and bad, refined and illiterate, 
barbarian and civilized, negro and white, the old meeting-house united 
us all on one day of the week, and its solemn services formed an 
insensible but strong bond of neighborhood charity.... The man or woman 
cannot utterly sink who on every seventh day is obliged to appear in 
decent apparel, and to join with all the standing and respectability of 
the community in a united act of worship. 
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, 1869 

In drafting their first state constitutions in the 1770s, the founding fathers succeeded in "building a wall of separation between church and State" wrote Thomas Jefferson, and the ratification of the federal Constitution in 1788 constituted the first bold acceptance of the principle that a man's religion was irrelevant to government by forbidding all religious tests for office holding. No previous nation had been willing to forgo the reinforcement of its authority by an official religion, and never before had the church been set adrift without the support of the state. But the American separation of church and state was not in the least antireligious: our presidents invoke the Diety and offer prayers; our armies and legislatures maintain chaplains, rabbis, and other religious leaders; and our state and federal governments encourage religion through the remission of taxes.

The story of religion in America, however, starts with the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who lived in a strict theocracy with the conviction that they had made a covenant with an inscrutable God. As Governor John Winthrop noted, their duty was set before them and, if they neglected it, "the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us [and] be revenged of such a perjured people and make us knowe the price of the breache of such a Convenant." That stern warning would be repeated over and ...