God and Money

In the introduction to his book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution Thomas S. Kidd asserts that “at the time of the founding of the United States, deists and evangelicals (and the range of believers in between) united around principles of religious freedom that were key to the success of the [American] Revolution”. Included in these principles, which according to Kidd “connected far-flung and widely varied Americans” are the ideas that churches should not receive financial support from the government and that virtue is necessary to sustain a Republic.

Kidd’s Chapter 9 explores the disestablishment of America’s State churches. Kidd describes the process by which the funding of churches, primarily those of Congregationalist and Anglican denomination, through the assessment of taxes was discontinued. In reading Kidd’s Chapter 9 I was surprised to learn the extent to which churches of particular denominations were supported by taxes prior to the American Revolution and in the early days of the American republic. Kidd describes how the separation of church and state was championed by both evangelical preachers and deist politicians, supporting his assertion that “far-flung and widely varied Americans” during the revolutionary period agreed that churches should not receive financial support from the government. But if religious institutions are so important to maintaining virtue, which in turn is important to upholding a fine-functioning democracy, as Kidd argues throughout the book, then would an imperiled democracy imply some adjustment to the institutional boundaries of religion and government in America?