Hello and welcome to a history of the United States,

Episode 196 Theology Cast 4. Theology cast was one of my

favourite bits of the early episodes. When we last really explored the United States back in the

colonial era, we covered the early goings on with the Puritans and the foundation of Quakerism.

We discussed Calvinism and Anglicanism.

It's now time to take a look at how the state of American religion had changed as we

enter the early American Republic.

And it had changed.

But perhaps not in the way you'd expect.

We've been focused mainly on the political aspects of the Enlightenment, and when we've

drifted into conversations about wider society, it's been to explore things like medicine or education. We briefly touched

on religion when discussing the Supreme Court, when we mentioned a Virginian court case involving

the disestablishment of the Anglican Church. Disestablishment, making a church no longer an official religion supported by the government,

was a major part of the Enlightenment and of the revolutions that followed it.

In Europe, this led to a weakening of religious attachment,

while many of the American founding fathers, such as Sam Adams, John Jay, and Patrick Henry,

were devout Christians, many were not. Thomas Jefferson, I am looking at you. It might be expected

that America would follow a similar course. Religion was now voluntary.

So you might expect that people would be less involved than it's.

But no.

Instead, what followed the American Revolution was perhaps the single greatest expression

of Protestant Christianity since the Reformation. This was the

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