Important qualifiers need to be added to this statement. I'm going to write more on this subject than I otherwise would because it looks as if even here on Free Republic, too many people have uncritically accepted a liberal narrative of the religious origins of the United States which simply is not in accord with the facts of history. (And no, I'm not primarily referring to Gusty or Robowombat with that statement, but rather the secularists on Free Republic whose idea of “conservative” would have the effect of excluding faith from the public sphere.)
A straight line cannot be drawn between the beliefs of Baptists of the late 1700s and early 1800s and conservative evangelicals today. A good case could be made that Jerry Falwell, Al Mohler, and other modern conservative Baptist leaders might take very different positions from those advocated by America's earliest Baptists, who had more in common with the Anabaptists than with the modern conservative Christian movement.
It's true that in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the Baptists were agitating for disestablishment of the state-supported churches of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire — tax-supported religious establishments which, it needs to be noted, not only predated but continued for a number of years after the adoption of the Constitution. There are reasons the text of the Constitution says the **FEDERAL** government, not the state governments, cannot establish a religion. Most of New England still had tax-supported Congregational churches at the time the Constitution was adopted and most of the Southern states had only recently disestablished their tax-supported Anglican churches. It needs to be added that disestablishment in the South during the time of the American Revolution was connected more to patriotic animosity toward a largely pro-British clergy in the Anglican churches and to rural backwoods Presbyterian animosity toward the wealthy coastal plantation aristocracy than it was to any anti-religious spirit.
Back to the Baptist situation in New England — particularly in Connecticut, where Yale continued to produce conservative ministers well into the 1800s (unlike Harvard, where Unitarians formally took over ministerial training by 1805, and had been producing theological liberals for many years previously), the state churches were definitely orthodox. The people clamoring for their disestablishment were a mix of unbelievers who objected to tax support for churches, Baptists who objected on principle to tax support for churches, and Episcopalians who didn't object in principle to tax support for churches but who in New England had become a refuge for people angry at what they believed was overly conservative preaching in the state churches.
It also simply is **NOT** true that Baptists and Episcopalians were having their rights trampled on by the state churches at the time the Constitution was written. The First Baptist Church of Boston was organized in 1665 and efforts to shut it down ended fifteen years later. It's true that the first president of Harvard had been forced to resign his position due to denial of infant baptism about a half-decade before the organization of First Baptist Church. However, the Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard had been endowed by a wealthy English Baptist in the 1720s, that position was at the time the main professorship training future ministers in New England. The terms of the endowment specifically stated that denial of infant baptism would not disqualify a candidate from holding that professorship, and while all of the early Hollis Professors of Divinity did affirm infant baptism, the acceptance of that stipulation by Harvard pretty clearly indicates toleration for a Baptist position.
The practice by the late 1600s in New England was to allow people who had religious objections to the Calvinist orthodoxy of the established state churches of New England to “sign off” the rolls of the state church if they could prove they were members of another church recognized as legitimate by the civil authorities and were paying tithes to that church. Early on, that meant Presbyterian or Episcopal churches, and eventually Baptists were also allowed to “sign off” the rolls. By the time of the First Great Awakening under Jonathan Edwards when a number of churches split, some forming “Separate Congregational” churches which were quite antithetical to the existing state-supported churches and generally became Baptist, it was a long-accepted principle that people who were more conservative than the established churches could form their own congregation in New England without too much trouble.
The final disestablishment of the state churches in Massachusetts didn't happen until the 1830s, and happened there not because liberals were upset by the orthodoxy of the state church but because many of the large and wealthy churches of the Boston area had been taken over by the Unitarians and orthodox Congregationalists were upset by having to “sign off” the rolls of Unitarian parishes when in the rural churches farther inland, they controlled the parishes.
It probably should be pointed out that even after most of the states had disestablished their state churches, religious tests remained in place for many years in a number of the states requiring various types of doctrinal tests to be a candidate for public office. The most common of such tests was a requirement than candidates not be deniers of the Trinity, which had the effect not only of disqualifying Jews from civil office but also barring Unitarians from civil office; one by one, those state tests were repealed on the state level rather than being struck down by the US Supreme Court. As late as the early 1860s, the founders of the Confederacy were still having arguments over whether the Confederate Congress should be legally barred from enacting laws contrary to the Bible, and a prominent Jewish member of the Confederate government was being criticized on the grounds that non-Christians should not be eligible for office in the national government of the Confederacy.
My reason for going into this level of detail is not because I advocate formal establishment of an American church. I do not, and I firmly believe that Roman Catholics and Jews both can and should hold civil office based on the crystal-clear original intent of the Founding Fathers to accept help during the American Revolution from both Catholics and Jews. My intent, rather, is to make clear how ridiculous it is for liberals to say that some sort of absolute separation of church and state was intended by the Founding Fathers. The intent of the Founders was not in any way whatsoever to separate faith from government, but rather to prevent any of the individual denominations from controlling the federal government the way they controlled several of the state governments at the time the Constitution was written, and had controlled many of the colonial governments just a few years earlier.
I am a firm believer that state establishment of a specific denomination is a bad idea; even a convinced Puritan like Oliver Cromwell was willing to allow religious toleration for other Calvinist groups in England who shared his faith but not his views on church government. However, the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and while liberty was certainly present for dissenting minority groups such as Catholics and Jews, the Founders did not in any way plan to create an anti-religious or secular government.
To deny that is to deny plain historical facts. The Founding Fathers — even the most liberal among them, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin — advocated a civic morality which was considerably more conservative than what quite a few people even on Free Republic seem to think is appropriate.
Facts are stubborn things. Those who think America was founded on atheistic or irreligious principles have confused the American Revolution with the French Revolution. There are important differences between the two revolutions, and I happen to think the American Revolution took the right track and the French Revolution went seriously wrong in its earliest days.
The reason he left the Harvard presidency was that he refused to have his children baptized after becoming convinced of Baptist views, which at that point were being tolerated under Oliver Cromwell in England but were still unacceptable in Massachusetts. Dunster left Massachusetts and accepted a pastorate in one of the churches of the then-separate Plymouth Colony.
Being forced to leave Boston and move to a more friendly colony is not exactly what I'd call serious persecution, especially compared to what was happening in Europe at the same time.
Interesting to compare Mr.Justice Storey’s commentary on the Constitution with what passes as constitutional ,law today. He was a unitarian, but his views, which were similar to those of aristocrats such as John Quincy Adams, take a very different view of the First Amendment than Black does in Everson. As to the Baptists, there is a difference between those influenced by the evangelicalism of the 18th Century and the older, more conservative congregations..
Interesting to compare Mr.Justice Storey’s commentary on the Constitution with what passes as constitutional ,law today. He was a unitarian, but his views, which were similar to those of aristocrats such as John Quincy Adams, take a very different view of the First Amendment than Black does in Everson. As to the Baptists, there is a difference between those influenced by the evangelicalism of the 18th Century and the older, more conservative congregations..