The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestantism and the Separation of Church and State

This dissertation argues that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in matters of Biblical interpretation, an outgrowth of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, helped promote religious liberty and religious disestablishment in the early modern West. This movement climaxed in the disestablishment of religion in the early American colonies and nation. The dissertation describes a continuous strand of this religious thought — as well as the thinkers who spread it — from the Protestant Reformation, across Europe, through the English Reformation, Civil War, and Restoration, into the American colonies and early Republic. We will examine seven key thinkers, as well as a number of other figures, who played a major role in the development of this religious trajectory as it came to fruition in American political and legal history. The seven main figures are William Penn, John Locke, Elisha Williams, Isaac Backus, William Livingston, John Witherspoon, and James Madison. The connections of ideas and beliefs between these figures are traced, either directly or through other background figures who provided these connections. The dissertation aims to show that religion played more than a pragmatic role in contributing to religious disestablishment in America. It argues that religion, specifically one main theme of dissenting Protestant tradition, contributed a major component to the ideology behind disestablishment among both American common people as well as among the educated elite.