The founders of the American Republic built into its polity a fundamental tension. The nation state would have no responsibility to promote religion even though, most of the founders believed, the survival of the new nation depended in part upon its citizens’ morality, which most saw as deriving from religion. In the Northwest Ordinance, Congress proclaimed unequivocally that “Religion, Morality and knowledge” were “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” Yet in it Congress provided financial support for schools but not churches.

The Constitution, written the same year, contained no appeal to God for sanction or guidance, not even to the vague “Nature’s God” or “Creator” of the Declaration of Independence. It did include “in the Year of our Lord” in the date and prohibited counting Sunday in the ten days allowed the president to veto a bill, but neither provision undermined the inescapable conclusion that the writers of the Constitution purposefully left God out, that they intended to create a secular national government, one with no responsibility for religion or morality. The Constitution left both religion and morality to the states. The First Amendment, with its troubling tension between a ban on establishing religion and “prohibiting” its “free exercise” (a confusion that has kept courts occupied into a third century) did nothing to undermine the secular nature of the new federal government. Rather, the Bill of Rights, of which it was a part, affirmed and codified the Revolution’s emphasis on individual liberty. The First Amendment did not apply to the states, of course. Most provided some acknowledgment of God’s guidance in their constitutions, and in all, regulating public morality remained, as one historian concluded, a “crucial obligation.” Even the states, though, disestablished religion. Starting in Virginia in 1785 and ending in Massachusetts in 1833, all the states that had once had established churches separated church and state.

The founders, in sum, created a thoroughly secular national government, which left the regulation of morals to the states and the promotion of morality among its citizens primarily to the churches. What came to be called a voluntary system of religion emerged; even though churches received no aid from the government, they tacitly assumed responsibility for ensuring the moral population most Americans still though necessary to a republic’s survival. After the Civil War, Christian lobbyists would challenge the system created by the founders, and even before the war, not all Americans favored the new voluntary system. Some — especially New England Federalists — sought an acknowledgment by the state of God’s authority as well as a role for the national government in enforcing morality. The first major controversy over the emerging moral polity erupted over the government’s transportation and delivery of the mail on Sunday.

Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920, 9-10.