Why isn’t there an official religion in the United States?

9 comments

1. Because the US is supposed to be a secular nation, separation of church and state literally written into the constitution.

2. The founders of the US were dubious of having an official religion. Some of them were not very religious at all. Some of them felt that mixing religion and politics was a bad idea.

3. Essentially, a lot of the early settlers here were religious outsiders, and that experience of being persecuted for their religious beliefs, or even being disallowed to practice openly, meant that it was important to them that the government stayed neutral on religious affairs.

4. The Founding Fathers feared that a religious state would be oppressive against those who didn’t follow the official religion, and many of the influential ones came from colonies like Pennsylvania or Maryland that were founded on the principle of religious tolerance or colonies like Virginia, that had laws protecting the right to worship.

   In short, their love of free exercise outweighed any religious beliefs. This has been great for religious minorities. I myself am a Catholic, and while we aren’t hated anymore there was a very strong anti-Catholic sentiment in the late 19th-early 20th centuries that I’m glad no one could institutionalize.

5. I don’t believe we are as religious as we come across. The overly religious are a minority that happens to be very loud. Politicians, like trump, tend to use them to get elected because they tend to vote more than moderates.

6. Both the Founding Father and American settlers as a whole came from different religious backgrounds (nearly all of them Christian, but still). There were numerous denominations, many of whom came to America to avoid religious persecution: Anglicans/Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Catholics, Puritans/Congregationalists, Baptists, Dutch and French Calvinists, Lutherans, Mennonites… you get the point. As a result, the first set of amendments to the fledgling US Constitution added in 1791 starts with the line “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”

   It should be noted that for a long time, this law was exclusively interpreted as applying to Congress and the federal government. Numerous states had churches that they officially endorsed or subsidized, with the last one (New Hampshire’s) being formally abolished in 1877, nearly a century later. Furthermore, many states had openly religious laws on the books, such as barring atheists from holding political office or having oaths of office require swearing to God. It wasn’t until 1947 that the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause applied to states as well.

   It should also be noted that the American idea of secularism is different from secularism in countries like France, which has laws openly restricting displays of religiosity in the public sphere. The idea of banning burqas, or forbidding government employees from wearing religious paraphernalia, would go over *very* poorly here in the states. The current legal standard is that laws must be “neutral laws of general applicability”—the law cannot inherently privilege or disadvantage a religion over another, or treat religious matters differently from comparable secular matters. For example, a city in Florida once tried to ban voodoo animal sacrifice, but left an explicit caveat permitting Jewish kosher slaughter, and the law was overturned by the courts for unfairly targeting a particular religion.

7. It is prohibited by our constitution. The only way I see this changing would be through an overthrow of the government. Our country’s rule of law is based on the constitution, without it we would no longer be America.

   Where are you living now and where is your home country? What is it like to live in a country with an official religion?

8. It’s a secular republic, at least until the revolution by white nationalist Christians turn it into a fascist theocracy in two years….

9. Not having an established religion is the first part of the first amendment.

   “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”