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The volume opens with three essays contrasting the Adamsonian/New England perspective to the Jeffersonian/ Virginia perspective. Though hardly a cultural monolith, Colonial New England came as close to a closed corporate and Reformed Protestant state as any in Anglo-American history. In cultural and legislative terms, Boston was closer to Calvin's Geneva than Revolutionary Philadelphia or Virginia.
By the time of the Revolution, Puritan sensibilities had liberalized, but strong collective memories of a coercively established religion prevailed so that even a more deistic John Adams would reflect their prejudices and predilections. Though aghast at earlier Puritan intolerance and infringements upon liberty of conscience, Adams never took the next step of advocating a complete severance of public support from any and all religious or moral institutions. Nor could he imagine public office-holding without a religious test of legitimacy (meaning belief in the Christian God). A successful republic, Adams argued, required not only "virtue" in the Classical and Enlightenment senses of the term, but a more particular virtue grounded in "Christian" (i.e. Protestant) orthodoxy.
Adams was not alone in New England. While dissenting Baptists and Quakers railed loudly against the "tyranny" of tax-supported "establishments," they were in the minority. In the famous Article III of the Massachusetts State Constitution, citizens embraced a tax for the establishment of religion: "the legislature hath, therefore, a right, and ought to provide, at the expense of the subject, if necessary, a suitable support for the public worship of GOD, and of the teachers of religion and morals." Long after the Federal Constitution mandated a national separation between church and state, Massachusetts and New England Federalists generally supported an on going religious test oath for public office, mandated ecclesiastical taxes at the state level, and issued national proclamations of days of fasting and thanksgiving.
In "The Use and Abuse of Jefferson's Statute: Separating Church and State in Virginia," Thomas E. Buckley, SJ, describes a very different cultural and religious ethos prevalent in Colonial Virginia. Unlike New England's established Congregational church, Virginia's established Anglicans were destined to be losers in the Revolution and thoroughly compromised by their loyalty to the crown. Try as they might, Virginia Anglicans—later Episcopalians—would never be able to re cover their lost Colonial legacy. The religious future lay with the evangelicals. Radical theorists like Jefferson wanted a religion that was thoroughly defanged in the public square, and took the necessary legislative steps to insure that it happened.
Yet even in Jefferson's Virginia, the extent of separation would fall short of what some contemporary separationists advocate in Jefferson's name. Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom did not avoid significant overlaps between religion and politics that led to unceasing litigation. In many ways, Buckley points out, Virginians in the early Republic were hardly "Jeffersonian" by today's strictly separationist positions; they wrangled frequently in court over such issues as clerical office-holding (clerics, like women, were forbidden to hold political office in Virginia), the legal incorporation of churches (until the Civil War, churches were denied corporate status, and in legal terms were treated as a nonentity), and public education (theology represented a required subject under the heading of "moral philosophy"). In all of these areas, church and state were hopelessly interlocked, prompting Buckley to conclude that "instead of separating church and state in any modern American sense, these restrictions on religious groups continually entangled the legislature and the courts in the churches' temporal affairs and provided numerous occasions for legislation and litigation."
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