The Religious Roots of the First Amendment - Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State - Hardback - 2012

Traditional understandings of the genesis of the separation of church and state rest on assumptions about Enlightenment and the republican ethos of citizenship. Nicholas Miller does not seek to dislodge that interpretation but to augment and enrich it by recovering its cultural and discursive religious contexts specifically the discourse of Protestant dissent. He argues that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in matters of Biblicalinterpretation, an outgrowth of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, helped promote religious disestablishment in the early modern West.

Year of publication: 2012
Pagination: 272 pages, Illustrations
Format: Hardback