A Great Revolution in Church and State

The untold story of how church and state were remade in Revolutionary America

A Great Revolution in Church and State rewrites the history of American religious freedom in the founding era. In colonial Virginia and Maryland, the established Church of England was a powerful arm of royal authority that enforced the law, collected taxes, amassed considerable wealth, and enslaved men, women, and children. During the American Revolution, reformers began demolishing this regime without a blueprint for replacing it. Because the Anglican establishment had rested on property, legal privilege, and racial slavery, dismantling it became a material struggle as much as an ideological one. While both Maryland and Virginia claimed to have established religious freedom, the two states adopted radically different policies in practice — forging incompatible definitions of what an "establishment of religion" meant just as the First Amendment was being ratified.

Alyssa Penick ultimately shows that disestablishment was neither a foreordained separation of church and state nor a clear-cut triumph of liberty but a fraught, improvised contest over power and property. Americans expanded rights of conscience and replaced orthodoxy with popular sovereignty even while entrenching racial slavery and consolidating state power, marrying the Revolution's most conservative commitments to its most radical promises.