Our founders were not fond of state religions. Catholicism is the original state religion.
Interesting statement. I thought that 11 out of the original 13 colonies had Calvinist state religions and drove Catholics, Baptists and Quakers out (or killed them).
All of the colonies had state religions, which were maintained, for the most part, into the 19th century. (Pennsylvania was the first state to disestablish, in 1790, New Hampshire the last in 1877). It was argued that the 14th amendment did away with state religions, but at that point they were only left in two states, so it wasn’t that big a deal. They were not against a state religion so long as it was their religion.
That's a strange claim to make. Anglicanism was unquestionably a state religion, down to bishops being appointed by Parliament. That's the "establishment of religion" most of the Protestant dissenters who founded the U.S. were rebelling against.
But Anglicanism was explicitly established by the state against Catholicism, which was viewed as a supranational religion hostile to the (English) state. And most of the medieval history of the Catholic church consists of fights of various kinds with secular rulers ... Canossa, Philip the Fair, the "lay investiture" controversy, etc.
Orthodoxy, too, was far more of a "state religion," after the schism, than Catholicism was before or since. In Tsarist Russia, the church was explicitly run by a state agency headed by a layman called the "Procurator of the Holy Synod".
Lutheranism in Scandinavia (Germany is a different and more complex case) was also more of a state religion than Catholicism has ever been, anywhere outside central Italy.