Since a real understanding of what actually happened is so useful in keeping Black folks sane and centered in the midst of everything from Thug Life to Black Republicans, I thought it might be interesting to apply the same technique to the most widespread delusion amongst white folks...Conservative White Americans, to be specific. That delusion is that America's Founding Fathers built some special reverence for religion into the Constitution.
Let's start with an obvious fact. The North American colonies were a military and economic venture (the two thoroughly interpenetrated each other at the time). Religious colonies were established after the economic and military base was established. Everything built on that base, including the religious colonies.
The National Humanities Center maintains a site called TeacherServe that has a section called Divining America: Religion and the National Culture. (I'm giving you all these links because they're all useful). I want to start with a brief excerpt from The Middle Colonies as the Birthplace of American Religious Pluralism by Patricia U. Bonomi, Professor Emeritus, New York University:
The mid-Atlantic region, unlike either New England or the South, drew many of its initial settlers from European states that had been deeply disrupted by the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars that followed in its wake. Small congregations of Dutch Mennonites, French Huguenots, German Baptists, and Portuguese Jews joined larger communions of Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, Quakers, and Anglicans to create a uniquely diverse religious society. African Americans and the indigenous Indians, with religious traditions of their own, added further variety to the Middle Colony mosaic.
Historians conventionally note that early New England s religious character was shaped primarily by English Puritans, and the religious character of the South by English Anglicans. But no two-word phrase can capture the essence of those who set the mold for Middle Colony religious culture.
People left England for North America to escape religious persecution, just as you were taught in elementary school. But they may not have made note of the fact that all these people didn't build religiously pluralistic colonies. The Mennonites made little Mennonite colonies, the Pilgrims did their Plymouth Rock thing, the Quakers had their Quaker colonies and everyone was as religiously exclusive as the nations they left.
The American Revolution was an economic and military affair. Sound like a fool and argue against that if you like.
And after the war, the Constitution. Capital was protected. Wealth was protected. Slavery was protected...all because the business of America is business, and always has been since before there was an America. And there was an agreement that there would be no official national religion:
Early American churchmen and churchwomen soon discovered that if they wanted to practice their beliefs unmolested in a diverse society, they had to grant the same right to others. This wisdom did not come easily. Yet over time, along with bickering and competition among denominations, there also were bargains, accommodations, and compromises. In realizing that no single doctrine of faith could dominate Middle Colony society, a heterogeneous people learned, not to cherish their differences, but, at least, to tolerate and live with them.
We as a nation have lost this wisdom.
