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This chapter summarizes the four major views on religious freedom that dominated the eighteenth-century American founding era. We label these views Puritan, Evangelical, Enlightenment, and Civic Republican. Exponents of these four positions often found common cause and used common language, particularly during the constitutional convention and ratification debates from 1776 to 1791. Yet each group offered its own distinct teachings on religious freedom and had its own preferences for how to implement religious freedom in state and federal laws. Together, these groups held up the four corners of a wide canopy of opinions about religious freedom in eighteenth-century American. The founders’ original intent or understanding of religious freedom cannot be reduced to any one of these four views. It must be sought in the tensions among them and in the general principles of religious freedom that emerged from their interaction.

Some of the hits taken by administrators will be delivered by those faculty members who have forgotten (or never knew) what their job is and spend time trying to form their students’ character or turn them into exemplary citizens. I can’t speak for every academic, but I am not trained to do these things, although I am aware of people who are: preachers, therapists, social workers, political activists, professional gurus, inspirational speakers. Teachers, as I have said repeatedly, teach materials and confer skills, and therefore don’t or shouldn’t do a lot of other things—like produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about political change. Of course a teacher might produce some of these effects—or their opposites—along the way, but they will be, or should be, contingent and not what is aimed at. The question that administrators often ask, “What practices provide students with the knowledge and commitments to be socially responsible citizens?” is not a bad question, but the answers to it should not be the content of a college or university course. No doubt, the practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior should be encouraged in our young adults, but it’s not the business of the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing, and shoddy teaching. Once we cross the line that separates academic work from these other kinds, we are guilty both of practicing without a license and of defaulting on our professional responsibilities. But isn’t it our responsibility both as teachers and as citizens to instill democratic values in our students? Derek Bok thinks so and invokes studies that claim to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between a college education and an active participation in the country’s political life: “researchers have shown that college graduates are much more active civically and politically than those who have not attended college” (Our Underachieving Colleges). But this statistic proves nothing except what everyone knows: college graduates have more access to influential circles than do those without a college education.

This chapter analyzes the development of church-state relations during the Roman Empire, the Papal Revolutionary and medieval period, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment. It traces the gradual and contested emergence of fundamental principles of liberty of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, and separation of church and state. It also portrays the dominant pattern of state establishments of religion – the idea, introduced in the fourth century, that only a single form of Christianity should be allowed in each political community, supported and enforced by the state, with all other faiths either banned as heretical or, at best, tolerated. These ideas of religious freedom and religious establishment were transmitted from Europe to colonial New England and American colonies in the south. But the 17^th and 18^th centuries also saw the first constitutional experiments, in colonial Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, of disestablishing religion and granting religious freedom to all peaceable religions.