Escaping persecution - the Church "disestablished"

My first stumbling block was on page 3 – the word “disestablished” re "the Church in New Hampshire".  So I looked it up.  This I found interesting (from First Freedom Center http://www.firstfreedom.org/education/documents/Disestablishment-Plan.pdf):

FREEDOM OF RELIGION: DISESTABLISHMENT

INTRODUCTION:  Many of the colonists who first settled in North America came to this country to escape persecution.  This is true of the Congregationalists of Massachusetts (also known as Puritans) and the Quakers of Pennsylvania.  Soon other colonies also developed strong religious identities.  The Baptists settled in Rhode Island.  The Dutch Reformed located in New York.  The Catholics settled in Maryland.  Colonies that had been settled by the English government, such as Virginia and South Carolina, accepted Anglicanism, the official religion of England, as the official religion of their colonies.  The irony of this settlement process was that, as each colony increasingly became identified with a single religion, the colonists themselves often became the persecutors instead of the persecuted.

After the American Revolution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the newly liberated colonists faced the many issues of building a unified nation.  One of the challenges to unification was how to deal with the question of religious differences, for in many cases, religious affiliation was the central concept of colonial identity.

The solution – religious freedom!  Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the first law of absolute religious freedom enacted in the colonies, was championed into Virginia law through the efforts of James Madison in 1786.  Jefferson, Madison and George Mason then persuaded members at the Constitutional Convention to encode this principle into national law, and freedom of religion was adopted as a constitutional guarantee in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1789 and ratified in 1791.  (This guarantee had limited application, however.  The United States Constitution applied only to the federal government and not to state and local governments.  It was not until the mid Twentieth Century, after the United States Supreme Court extended the interpretation of the word “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause to other freedoms in the Bill of Rights, that the guarantee of religious freedom was expanded to the state and local level.)

The first principle of religious freedom, as stated in the Bill of Rights, was that of disestablishment – the elimination of all official religions.  Under the terms of this law, the government was prohibited from enacting legislation that favored one church over another or that created any official state church.

I found that "the Church" in New Hampshire was disestablished in 1819.  

 

How different were the beginnings of the colony in Australia!

Peel speaks a lot about the state of mind which was New England – a place where thinking was well thought of.  No wonder that the very first page of Eddy's book Science and Health proclaims: “The time for thinkers has come.”  Mrs. Eddy was the thinker of the age and for the ages.

Joyce Voysey