A closer look at role of faith in America’s founding
A deeper look shows that the role of faith in the Founding was more complicated than this politicized debate suggests. One of the greatest ironies in the Founding period was that the people who pushed hardest for the separation of church and state were evangelical Christians. To them, state support for churches (almost all the colonies had a denomination established by law) led to religious corruption and the persecution of dissenters.
Nowhere was the evangelical attack against state churches more vehement than in Virginia. From the founding of Jamestown in 1607, the Anglican Church (the Church of England) had been the official denomination of the colony, just as it was in the mother country.
For more than a hundred years, this system worked fairly well, as the colony rarely had to contend with dissenting non-Anglicans. The situation changed dramatically in the 1740s, when the Great Awakening began to rumble through Virginia, led first by Presbyterians, then Baptists.
The Great Awakening was a series of massive religious revivals and the greatest social upheaval in colonial American history. Thousands of Americans found their faith renewed, or stirred for the first time, as traveling revivalists spoke of God’s love and mercy for sinners.
In Virginia, the Anglican Church generally did not support the Great Awakening; to church and political authorities the new evangelical movement seemed like a spiritual insurrection. Revivalists criticized Anglican parsons for lifeless preaching, and for failing to recognize the prodigious work of God going on around them. In doing so, they brought the sacrosanct authority of the colony, and its church, into question. In a religious sense, this was the first American Revolution.