The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America is a history of the development of church-state law during what may be called the “forgotten century.” Traditional accounts of church and state commonly discuss the events surrounding the drafting of the First Amendment to the Constitution and then shift to the modern era of church-state relations, which began with the involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1940s and incorporation of the Bill of Rights. The events that connect the first disestablishment with twentieth-century incorporation have be ... More

The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America is a history of the development of church-state law during what may be called the “forgotten century.” Traditional accounts of church and state commonly discuss the events surrounding the drafting of the First Amendment to the Constitution and then shift to the modern era of church-state relations, which began with the involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1940s and incorporation of the Bill of Rights. The events that connect the first disestablishment with twentieth-century incorporation have been little studied or understood. The Second Disestablishment fills this gap by describing the dynamic events of the nineteenth century that affected church-state relationships: the rise of evangelical Protestantism to cultural dominance through moral reform societies; the enforcement of sumptuary laws through a maxim that Christianity formed part of the law; the gradual secularization of the law through the adoption of alternative theories; the challenges of an increasing religious pluralism; and the transformation of a Protestant-oriented public education system. The book examines the competing ideologies represented by evangelical Protestants who sought to create a “Christian nation” and other citizens who advocated broader notions of the separation of church and state. The Second Disestablishment demonstrates that, during the nineteenth century, a gradual transformation occurred in legal and popular attitudes toward church-state matters, leading to broader understandings of disestablishment and laying the foundation for modern Supreme Court jurisprudence.