Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman

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A review by Michael Dirda

Founding Faith takes up two central questions about religion in early America. First, what did such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison usually believe? And second, how did it come about that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"? The answers to these questions carry implications for our lives today, since at stake is the flash-point principle of the separation of church and state.

In his opening chapters, Steven Waldman discusses the major faiths of early America -- Puritans, Baptists, Catholics and Quakers -- as each strives to consolidate its political ascendancy in, respectively, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Each also reveals its own particular fanaticisms, though the Salem witch trials gave New England's Puritans a lasting legacy of shame. Yet the Protestant...

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