Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State

Traditional understandings of the genesis of the separation of church and state rest on assumptions about "Enlightenment" and the republican ethos of citizenship. In The Religious Roots of the First Amendment, Nicholas P. 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 Biblical interpretation, an outgrowth of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, helped promote religious disestablishment in the early modern West.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Miller, Nicholas Patrick
Published: 06/01/2012
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199858361
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 1.10d