Download or read book An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty Against the Oppressions of the Present Day written by Isaac Backus and published by . This book was released on 1773 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Isaac Backus written by Thomas Buford Maston and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Myth of American Religious Freedom written by David Sehat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

Download or read book A History of New England with Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians Called Baptists written by Isaac Backus and published by . This book was released on 1871 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Endowed by Our Creator written by Michael I. Meyerson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debate over the framers' concept of freedom of religion has become heated and divisive. This scrupulously researched book sets aside the half-truths, omissions, and partisan arguments, and instead focuses on the actual writings and actions of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and others. Legal scholar Michael I. Meyerson investigates how the framers of the Constitution envisioned religious freedom and how they intended it to operate in the new republic. Endowed by Our Creator shows that the framers understood that the American government should not acknowledge religion in a way that favors any particular creed or denomination. Nevertheless, the framers believed that religion could instill virtue and help to unify a diverse nation. They created a spiritual public vocabulary, one that could communicate to all—including agnostics and atheists—that they were valued members of the political community. Through their writings and their decisions, the framers affirmed that respect for religious differences is a fundamental American value, Meyerson concludes. Now it is for us to determine whether religion will be used to alienate and divide or to inspire and unify our religiously diverse nation.

Download or read book Liberty for All written by Andrew T. Walker and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christians are often thought of as defending only their own religious interests in the public square. They are viewed as worrying exclusively about the erosion of their freedom to assemble and to follow their convictions, while not seeming as concerned about publicly defending the rights of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and atheists to do the same. Andrew T. Walker, an emerging Southern Baptist public theologian, argues for a robust Christian ethic of religious liberty that helps the church defend religious freedom for everyone in a pluralistic society. Whether explicitly religious or not, says Walker, every person is striving to make sense of his or her life. The Christian foundations of religious freedom provide a framework for how Christians can navigate deep religious difference in a secular age. As we practice religious liberty for our neighbors, we can find civility and commonality amid disagreement, further the church's engagement in the public square, and become the strongest defenders of religious liberty for all. Foreword by noted Princeton scholar Robert P. George.

Download or read book Religion and the Continental Congress 1774 1789 written by Derek Davis and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first comprehensive examination of the role of religion in the proceedings, theories, ideas and goals of the Continental Congress. Those who argue that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian Nation" have made much of the religiosity of the founders, particularly as it was manifested in ritual invocations of a clearly Christian God. Congress's religious activities, Davis shows, expressed an unreflective popular piety, and by no means a determination of the revolutionaries to entrench religion in the federal state.

Download or read book Faith and the Founders of the American Republic written by Daniel L. Dreisbach and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen essays written by leading scholars explore the impact of a rich variety of religious traditions on the political thought of America's founders.

Download or read book The Story of American Dissent written by John Moffatt Mecklin and published by . This book was released on 1934 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Firm of Moses and Aaron -- The legacy of dissent.

Download or read book The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America written by Frank Lambert and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-28 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the United States, founded as colonies with explicitly religious aspirations, come to be the first modern state whose commitment to the separation of church and state was reflected in its constitution? Frank Lambert explains why this happened, offering in the process a synthesis of American history from the first British arrivals through Thomas Jefferson's controversial presidency. Lambert recognizes that two sets of spiritual fathers defined the place of religion in early America: what Lambert calls the Planting Fathers, who brought Old World ideas and dreams of building a "City upon a Hill," and the Founding Fathers, who determined the constitutional arrangement of religion in the new republic. While the former proselytized the "one true faith," the latter emphasized religious freedom over religious purity. Lambert locates this shift in the mid-eighteenth century. In the wake of evangelical revival, immigration by new dissenters, and population expansion, there emerged a marketplace of religion characterized by sectarian competition, pluralism, and widened choice. During the American Revolution, dissenters found sympathetic lawmakers who favored separating church and state, and the free marketplace of religion gained legal status as the Founders began the daunting task of uniting thirteen disparate colonies. To avoid discord in an increasingly pluralistic and contentious society, the Founders left the religious arena free of government intervention save for the guarantee of free exercise for all. Religious people and groups were also free to seek political influence, ensuring that religion's place in America would always be a contested one, but never a state-regulated one. An engaging and highly readable account of early American history, this book shows how religious freedom came to be recognized not merely as toleration of dissent but as a natural right to be enjoyed by all Americans.

Download or read book Baptist Theology written by James Leo Garrett and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title offers a comprehensive analysis of Baptist theology. Embracing in one common trajectory the major Baptist confessions of faith, the major Baptist theologians, and the principal Baptist theological movements and controversies, this book spans four centuries of Baptist doctrinal history. Acknowledging first the pre-1609 roots (patristic, medieval, and Reformational) of Baptist theology, it examines the Arminian versus Calvinist issues that were first expressed by the General Baptists and the Particular Baptists; that dominated English and American Baptist theology during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Helwys and Smyth and from Bunyan and Kiffin to Gill, Fuller, Backus, and Boyce; and, that were quickened by the 'awakenings' and the missionary movement. Concurrently there were the Baptist defense of the Baptist distinctives vis-a-vis the pedobaptist world and the unfolding of a strong Baptist confessional tradition. Then during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the liberal versus evangelical issues became dominant with Hovey, Strong, Rauschenbusch, and Henry in the North and Mullins, Conner, Hobbs, and Criswell in the South even as a distinctive Baptist Landmarkism developed, the discipline of biblical theology was practiced and a structured ecumenism was pursued. Missiology both impacted Baptist theology and took it to all the continents, where it became increasingly indigenous. Conscious that Baptists belong to the free churches and to the believers' churches, a new generation of Baptist theologians at the advent of the twenty-first century appears somewhat more Calvinist than Arminian and decidedly more evangelical than liberal.

Download or read book The Religious Roots of the First Amendment written by Nicholas P. Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional understandings of the genesis of the separation of church and state rest on assumptions about "Enlightenment" and the republican ethos of citizenship. In The Religious Roots of the First Amendment, Nicholas P. Miller does not seek to dislodge that interpretation but to augment and enrich it by recovering its cultural and discursive religious contexts--specifically the discourse of Protestant dissent. He argues that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in matters of Biblical interpretation, an outgrowth of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, helped promote religious disestablishment in the early modern West. This movement climaxed in the disestablishment of religion in the early American colonies and nation. Miller identifies a continuous strand of this religious thought from the Protestant Reformation, across Europe, through the English Reformation, Civil War, and Restoration, into the American colonies. He examines seven key thinkers who played a major role in the development of this religious trajectory as it came to fruition in American political and legal history: William Penn, John Locke, Elisha Williams, Isaac Backus, William Livingston, John Witherspoon, and James Madison. Miller shows that the separation of church and state can be read, most persuasively, as the triumph of a particular strand of Protestant nonconformity-that which stretched back to the Puritan separatist and the Restoration sects, rather than to those, like Presbyterians, who sought to replace the "wrong" church establishment with their own, "right" one. The Religious Roots of the First Amendment contributes powerfully to the current trend among some historians to rescue the eighteenth-century clergymen and religious controversialists from the enormous condescension of posterity.

Download or read book The Baptist Heritage written by H. Leon McBeth and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 1987-01-29 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Baptist Heritage: Four Century of Baptist Witness H. Leon McBeth's 'The Baptist heritage' is a definitive, fresh interpretation of Baptist history. Based on primary source research, the book combines the best features of chronological and topical history to bring alive the story of Baptists around the world.

Download or read book The Diary of Isaac Backus 1741 1764 written by Isaac Backus and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "American historians have long realized that the Baptist minister Isaac Backus (1724-1806) played a signal role in the separation of church and state in New England, but his diary, here published for the first time, makes clear as well his importance as a leader and spokesman of the small dissenting sect that would become after 1800 the largest Protestant denomination in the nation. The diary, covering the sixty-year span from the First to the Second Great Awakening, describes the campaigns he and his colleagues waged for religious liberty and for the propagation of their religious principles." (p. xv) Isaac was a direct descendant in the fifth generation of English immigrant William Backus Sr., who settled in Saybrook, Connecticut in 1637. Issac died before New England abandoned religious taxation (Connecticut in 1818, Massachusetts in 1833), but before his death he was certain New England would eventually switch to Thomas Jefferson's position of separation of church and state.

Download or read book Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts written by Carla Gardina Pestana and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative study of the Quaker meeting in Salem and the Baptist church in Boston.

Download or read book First Freedom written by Randall Herbert Balmer and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Companion book to the PBS documentary."

Download or read book Baptists in America written by Bill J. Leonard and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baptist churches and their members have encompassed a range of theological interpretations and a variety of social and political viewpoints. At first glance, Baptist theology seems classically Protestant in its emphasis on the Trinity, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the authority of Scripture, salvation by faith alone, and baptism by immersion. Yet the interpretation and implementation of these beliefs have made Baptists one of the most fragmented denominations in the United States, often characterized as a people who "multiply by dividing." In Baptists in America, Bill J. Leonard traces the history of Baptists, beginning with their origins in seventeenth-century Holland and England. He examines the development of Baptist beliefs and practices, offering an overview of the various denominations and fellowships within Baptism, and considers the disputes surrounding the question of biblical authority, the ordinances (baptism and the Lord's Supper), congregational forms of church governance, and religious liberty. Leonard also examines the role of Baptists in the Fundamentalist and Social Gospel movements of the early twentieth century, the Civil Rights movement, and the growth of the Religious Right. Leonard explores the social and religious issues currently dividing Baptists, including race, the ordination of women, the separation of church and state, and sexuality. He concludes with a discussion of the future of Baptist identity in America.