Religious Violence and Religious Liberty in the Early National United States

Between the 1770s  and the first decades of the nineteenth century, interreligious conflict was subdued and religious minorities were protected from systematic persecution.  Given that the free, white population was well armed and committed to a wide range of faiths, this may seem like a remarkable achievement.  However, the revolutionary disavowal of religious violence did not so much represent a break with early modern European and colonial British tradition—religious violence was already rare by the early eighteenth century—as it did a conscious repudiation of an even more distant, persecutory past.  The few known examples of revolutionary religious violence were largely neglected.  Instead, the framers of state and federal constitutions worked against a vivid backdrop of violence, occasionally recalled yet safely ensconced in history.  Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was emblematic in famously observing how “[m]illions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned …” but neglecting to cite specific, recent examples.  Nor did Jefferson or his contemporaries pay attention to “sacred violence” (Susan Juster’s term) against African and Native Americans.

I intend to present a socially informed intellectual history of the period that will show how the task of documenting contemporary religious violence was left to later Baptist, Methodist, and Quaker chroniclers.  Relying on mainly published texts and legal documents, I will argue that the post-independence evocation of  religious violence represented a useful polemical strategy for the leading advocates of church disestablishment rather than a depiction of contemporary realities.  The result was that widely supported claims for religious liberty gained legitimacy while significant limits remained on the liberties enjoyed by African Americans, Native Americans, and religiously motivated pacifists—the objects of more recent examples of religious (or sacred) violence.