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the Maryland Assembly passed a Toleration Act offering freedom of conscience to all Christians. The example of guaranteeing religious freedom spread to other colonies as well, with similar charters of religious liberty in New Jersey in 1664, in Carolina in 1665, and in Pennsylvania in 1682. There was increasing momentum in the colonies to end government interference in religious practice and to accept a variety of forms of faith.
The Americans who fought the Revolutionary war were struggling for religious liberty as well as for political liberty. The quest for religious freedom came from both the tradition of dissenting Protestantism and also Enlightenment ideals of religious toleration. Many of the founders of the United States of America were strongly influenced by the European Enlightenment, with its suspicion of Christianity, its critique of the wars of religion, its deist faith, and its doubts about any claims for supernatural revelation. Thomas Jefferson thought that the alliance of clergy and political officials inevitably led to tyranny, and he believed that clergymen should not be allowed to any hold political office. On occasion he excoriated them as “the real Anti-Christ.” In return, some New England preachers attacked Jefferson himself as the Anti-Christ and warned that if he were elected president, he would commandeer all Bibles and establish houses of prostitution in the churches. Jefferson and George Washington, like many of their contemporaries, were deists, for whom the natural religion of humankind provided the ultimate answer to the conflicts among particular religions. For both, religious freedom was indispensable for human progress. As military commander, Washington forbade the celebration of the English anti-Catholic feast, Pope’s Day, on November 5, 1775, at a time when he was seeking support from French-speaking Catholics in Canada. Ben Franklin was deeply influenced by Deism and is often considered a deist; but he shaped his own idiosyncratic view of natural religion, with a plurality of deities under the direction of one supreme deity. Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington would quietly attend Christian church services without believing traditional theology; more radical deists such as Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, and Elihu Palmer, rejected Christianity more thoroughly, criticizing the Bible for its multiple contradictions and substituting a religion of nature for Christian practice.
While many of the founding fathers were deists of one form or another, American Protestants also contributed strongly to the revolution and interpreted the establishment of the new nation in religious terms. Indeed, the evangelical revival movement known as the First Great Awakening in the early eighteenth century did much to foster communication among the colonies, to establish awareness of a new shared American identity in contrast to the British, and also to arouse evangelical Protestant hostility to Anglican and Catholic forms of worship, thereby paving the way for revolt against the British king. The Puritan practice of interpreting the settlement in North America as a fulfillment of promises in the Book of Revelation was influential on supporters of the Revolution.
In Virginia the Church of the England was the established Church, and all other forms of worship were forbidden. The young James Madison was deeply shocked by the imprisonment of traveling Baptist preachers who openly expressed their religious beli