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Two contradictory Protestant truths. Nature of church establishment in England and Scotland. Its non‐existence in Wales and Northern Ireland. A confused archbishop. Prevalence of religious belief in the United Kingdom since 1851. Religion and social policy: variation in social attitudes between religious and non‐religious people in the United Kingdom. Withdrawal of Prime Minister from appointing bishops 2007: de facto disestablishment? Whether religious representatives have a role in a democratic parliament. Religious pluralism and charitable regulation. The theology of Calvinism from Andrew Melvill to the Percy case. Status of the Church of Scotland Act 1921.

The Church of England and the Church of Scotland (a Presbyterian church) are both established churches, and the sovereign enjoys a special relationship with each. She is under a statutory duty to maintain and preserve the two churches, which are national churches. In Wales and Northern Ireland, there is no established church, and there is no established church in any other member state of the Commonwealth. `Establishment’ is not, however, a very precise term, and the sovereign's relations with the established churches in England and Scotland are very different. Disestablishment of the Church of England is once again a lively political issue as it was for much of the nineteenth century.

This chapter reflects on ‘remembrance’ after the Great War — memorials and services. It notes a new modern world and the advent of radio broadcasting. It considers currents of belief and unbelief. Internationally, Christian-Jewish relations, missionary activity and imperialism, and the issues posed by the new Europe come to the fore. The 1926 General Strike is placed in the context of contemporary Church social and economic thinking, but the political limitations are exposed. In England, both the new Church National Assembly and the Revised Prayer Book controversy of 1927-8 reveal church-state tensions. The partition of Ireland, British-Irish church and political relations, and church-state relations in the new Irish structures (Irish Free State and Northern Ireland), are considered. Disestablishment in Wales and post-war change in Scotland place these developments in context. Evidence of social division and political dislocation partly explains renewed interest in church unity, but no rapid change is evident despite the reunification of the Church of Scotland.

Bentley had led the Democratic‐Republican Party to victory, but not all of Salem's Republicans followed along for the reasons he offered. Many, perhaps most, of Salem's Republicans were evangelicals, not rationalists. They supported the party not because of its advocacy of disestablishment—at least that was not an important part of the public rhetoric—but rather because they too were economic republicans, even if of a different sort than Bentley. They brought to the party a social ideology derived from Jonathan Edwards rather than from Rousseau. Even so, both Bentley and the evangelicals—Baptists and Methodists and New Light Congregationalists—stood on the essential common ground of Christian republicanism, and if it was an awkward fit for both factions, such was the nature of oppositionalism in New England's First Party System.

The American Revolution heightened the differences between Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists as the dissenters addressed the political crisis through petitions and met the resultant disestablishment of the Church of England on their own terms. Presbyterians generally embraced the Revolutionary cause, but they maneuvered primarily to achieve their long‐sought goal of gaining parity with the Anglican, now Protestant Episcopal Church, allowing for multiple establishments when the plans included Presbyterians. Baptists faced the matters resolved to maintain their absolute principles, and they were pleasantly surprised when Virginia, prompted by Thomas Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom, seemed to embrace some Baptist truth by striking down establishment. Francis Asbury dreamed that Methodists could stay neutral, truly separating religion from unholy matters, but he suffered when John Wesley rebuked the patriots and when most Methodist leaders fled the troubled colonies. Methodism would recover, but only by transforming into an American denomination and joining the other evangelicals already in contention for their own particular notions of religious liberty.

The rise of the first party competition and the electoral successes of Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic‐Republican party shook the standing order's eighteenth‐century social ideology to its foundations during the dozen years between 1800 and 1812. Congregational ministers were a core element of the Federalist party base, and while they initially responded to the era's political contention with a conservative message that emphasized support for established religion and government in response to the Jeffersonians’ alleged infidelity and anarchy, they soon became frustrated with their counterparts in the civil leadership, who acted more from political expediency than from the clergy's prescribed principles of godly magistracy. At the same time, the outbreak of the Unitarian controversy divided Congregationalists in Massachusetts into Unitarian and orthodox wings, which inhibited them in the competition for adherents. On account of Democratic‐Republican gains, standing‐order ministers also experienced disillusionment with the providential role that they had prophesied for the United States, repudiated the Constitution as a godless document, and spiraled into a mood of apocalyptic doom that reached its height during the War of 1812, when the nation implicitly allied itself with Napoleonic France against Britain. The surging numbers of religious dissenters, meanwhile, gained from the Democratic‐Republicans new electoral coalition partners and more mainstream, Jeffersonian rhetoric, both of which they employed to bring down the standing order, finally achieving the Congregationalists’ disestablishment in Connecticut in 1818.

Evangelical Christianity, and Protestantism more generally, were in decline in the second half of the eighteenth century. After 1800, however, a great boom in numbers and energy of evangelical Christianity occurred. Disestablishment created a religious climate unique to the United States. Denominations with a more traditional, “Old World” structure experienced difficulty in maintaining adherents, while populist groups like the Methodists and Baptists flourished.

This chapter examines the principles of the new Christian realism. It discusses the complexity with the simple recognition of tensions that people must acknowledge in their daily dealings at home, in traffic, at school or work, in politics and in church. It also analyses the question of unity and diversity in the church and highlights the experience of disestablishment in major societies including the US, Canada, and Australia.

During the revolutionary years until 1833, the states undertook what might be described as a “first disestablishment,” where their official religions were eliminated through the political process in state legislatures. Nevertheless, a de facto “Protestant establishment” continued in many of the states through much of the nineteenth century, illustrated perhaps most strongly in a generic Protestant education that was offered in public schools. This chapter rejects the “false choice” in Establishment Clause interpretation that assumes either that the founders intended the Establishment Clause to separate church and state, or that they believed that a generic Protestant religion was consistent with the Constitution. Rather, the nineteenth century witnessed an evolution in Americans’ developing understanding about the appropriate constitutional relationship between church and state with an increasing effort to discontinue favoritism of generic Protestantism and religion. This discontinuation, largely a result of legal challenges to fairness and equality of the Protestant establishment, should understood to be a “second disestablishment.”

There are some moral values which ought to be enforced in law. The legitimacy of using laws to moral ends has been a much disputed point in modern times. This chapter is about the question of whether laws should be used for the enforcement of moral values. The starting-point for discussion of this question is to recognize that it is itself a question of morality, and rather more specifically a question of political morality. For it is a question about the right exercise of the public powers vested in agencies of state — legislatures, governments, judges, police, and prosecutors. In the rest of this chapter, first, the text expounds the best case for the principle of moral disestablishment; secondly, it shows why it seems to be untenable; and finally, it suggests an alternative principle of limited moral establishment.

Taking the landmark case of Everson v. Board of Education as her launching point, Pellegrini shows how the combined effect of the disestablishment and free exercise clause has generated a particular form of Christian secularism in American legal and public culture. Certain religious claims and practices enter the public sphere marked as “secular,” while others do not. Pelligrini examines the ways in which Protestant assumptions underlie secular premises in First Amendment jurisprudence.

Christian groups in America, committed to the cultivation of a feeling of emptiness and a theological program of self-denial, have defined themselves through a process of via negativa in which they attempt to establish collective identities and a rationale for belonging by detailing what they are not. Disestablishment has abetted that process by creating the conditions for the proliferation of religious groups who serve as foils. Viewing the history of Christianity in America as the promotion of the feeling of emptiness turns our attention from historical narratives that recount the progressive enlargement, refinement, alteration, erasure, and reinvention of a certain core set of principles and beliefs thought to comprise the essence of Christianity. It alternatively evokes fluidity, indefiniteness, contradictoriness, paradox, the anxious construction of appearances, the unreliability of language, and preoccupations with failure and loss.

American Christians fear words. Beginning with Puritan colonists, Americans have been deeply concerned about being deceived by empty words and empty doctrines, and consequently by having their dearest ideas exposed as empty belief. American Christians have formed religious communities by decrying the beliefs of their competitors as empty words and presenting their own beliefs as true, although suspicion of the reliability of the words of one’s own group has been common as well. The construction of group identity in an American setting characterized by competition arising from disestablishment has been challenging for most Christian groups. Groups have utilized a method of building and maintaining identity by characterizing the words of their opponents as deceptions and in general relying upon definition via negativa to establish and police group boundaries.

This chapter argues that many modern interpretations of the Constitution have lost sight of its original meaning. The earliest Supreme Court decisions, including Everson v. Board of Education, made no serious effort to understand the history of establishments nor to understand the process of disestablishment. The Establishment Clause was not designed to curtail the influence or prominence of religion in public life, but to make religion free and independent. During the founding period, the Continental Congress, the new federal government, important political leaders, and the states promoted religion and morality through laws and actions.