Separating Church and State

Government support of churches largely ended with the establishment of the United States. Anglican churches had long benefited from British support and collected taxes to support their ministry during the Revolution. Then in 1786 the Virginia Assembly approved the Statute of Religious Freedom, which was drafted earlier by Thomas Jefferson and made church attendance and support voluntary and eliminated many Anglican privileges. Other states soon followed suit, affecting all churches that had previously counted on government support.

Most states did require that officeholders be Christians, or even Protestants. But by the 1780s, that designation included a wide array of denominations. Especially in frontier areas, Baptists and Methodists, the latter of which broke off from the Anglican Church in 1784, gained thousands of converts. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, and the Presbyterians also gained new adherents in this period, while Catholics and Jews experienced greater tolerance than in the colonial era. In fact, in 1790 the Vatican appointed John Carroll the first Roman Catholic bishop of the United States. As a result of this diversity, no single religious voice or perspective dominated in the new nation. Instead, all denominations competed for members, money, and political influence.

Many Protestant churches were also challenged from within by free blacks who sought a greater role in church governance. In 1794 Richard Allen, a preacher who had been born a slave, led a small group of Philadelphia blacks who founded the first African American church in the United States. The Bethel African-American Methodist Church initially remained within the larger Methodist fold. By the early 1800s, however, Allen’s church would serve as the basis for the first independent black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.