A Great Revolution in Church and State: Religion, Government, and Property in the Chesapeake, 1700-1830 (The Revolutionary Age)

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