Competing Liberties: Virginia, New England, and the Battle Over Religion in the Early Republic

Abstract

This thesis looks at the disputed development of religious liberty beginning in colonial America and through the early American republic particularly by comparing the regional ideologies of Virginia and New England. While popular history looks at religious freedom as a shared Enlightenment tradition, this study argues that it emerged instead through a deep ideological conflict between the two colonial worlds. New England society understood liberty as an idea rooted in moral governance coming from Puritan values and religion was foundational for the civic order. In contrast, Virginia’s model emphasized Enlightenment rationalism, and the break of state religion which were influenced by the colony’s Anglican past and elite political culture. This paper looks at sermons, legal texts, state constitutions, political writings, and key thinkers of the period such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams. This study reveals that religious liberty in the United States was not a product of national consensus but of regional competition. Beginning in early colonial America, the disagreements continued to shape American political and religious life into the nineteenth century.