This post is self-explanatory with regard to religious tolerance. Catholics and America were condemned by the author for extending religious tolerance to Protestants, and for accommodating Protestant culture. The authoritarianism and dogmatism that characterized Catholicism of that day were inconsistent with founding a nation on a frontier, in which people needed to make judgment calls and respond to raw forces of nature.
Protestantism, with its emphasis on reading the scriptures and relating to one’s own conscience and the Holy Spirit for guidance instead of confessing to a priest, was better suited to a sociopolitical revolution. A highly ritualized religion that regulated people’s lives via a priesthood may have worked in the smaller geographic regions and congested towns of Europe. But such dependence on authority simply wasn’t as able to thrive with the large migrations and open frontier living in the huge new continent. Self-government required persons whose consciences were built gradually alongside their families and cabins and farmlands rather than received whole through catechism.
Good analysis.
America is seen to be somewhat unique in the degree of moral foundation which was it founded upon, with a strong Biblically based influence, which was strengthened as a result of religious revivals, and which affected a strong union of faith and civil life in the new Republic. French historian Alexis de Tocqueville commented,
“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.[25] ”
The Puritans in New England, and later, other Christian groups were instrumental in forming a country with a distinctive Christian character. Noted evangelical author and commentary Os Guinness comments that,
“while America has never officially been a “Christian Republic,” for much of its history the Christian faith has been a leading contribution to its unofficial civil religion.”
To the degree that a society obeys the light innately given them (Rm. 2:12-14), and is influenced of the Bible and it’s evangelical gospel, it will be both restrained from doing evil, and inspired to do good, so that man’s universal lust for pleasure, possessions and power does not bring an early end to it, nor bring it to be overtly suppressed by government, or subdued into being mere functionaries of man or earthly religion. This is especially critical for a free country that seeks to work with a minimum of Government, while tremendous natural resources lay waiting to be both discovered and used by a wealth of mankind out of of virtually every kindred and tongue. These factors would normally work toward either dictatorships or anarchy if not for the preaching of the cross, and the hidden influence of the Holy Spirit of God working in the hearts and lives of man.
Those who are not sufficiently controlled from within, by God and a sound conscience, must sooner or later be controlled from without, necessitating the growth of civil government. Robert Winthrop (May 12, 1809 – November 16, 1894), and Speaker of the House from 1838 to 1840, and later president of the Massachusetts Bible Society, explained that, “Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or the bayonet. The commission of the born – again Church is to bring souls into submission to the Lord Jesus by spiritual means, “By pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned, By the word of truth, by the power of God, by the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left” (2Cor. 6:6, 7; cf. Eph. 6:10-19) — and not by physical arms.
In contrast, the commission of the State enables it to use the sword of men to constrain obedience on those who are not sufficiently controlled by the former means (Rm. 13:1-7). It thus follows that the weaker the church is, the more powerful the State must become. “For the transgression of a land many are the princes thereof” (Prv. 28:2a). And if the Government itself becomes less governed by Biblical precepts and principles, calling evil good, and good evil (Is. 5:20), and contrary to it’s charter, punishes those who do good and praises them that do evil (contra. 1 Pet. 2:14), then “the wicked shall do wickedly,” and persecute those who would actually preserve the State by calling it to be instructed by Christ (Ps. 2).
And while in such persecution, the Christ - believing remnant “shall be purified, and made white, and tried” (Dan., 12:10), yet both willful hypocrites and the church that sought to save it’s life by compromising truth and placating sin will lose what they sought to save, for some even their eternal souls (Mt. 7:21-23)!
The fallacy of your argument is that the colonies revolted against Protestant England and had to enact the First Amendment as a prerequisite to ratification to keep the the various Protestant groups from killing, subjugating and oppressing one another.
The Catholic principles of Natural Law, Individual Freedom of Conscience and a requirement to act as opposed to merely professing good will towards one another left a deeper, albeit unacknowledged, fingerprint on the American character and form of government, than many would like to admit.