ABSTRACT
Religious liberty was one of the principles on which America was founded. This was partly due to the European immigrants’ experience of religious persecution in Europe. There was such a wide diversity of religious groups in Colonial America that the Founding Fathers resisted favoring any particular religion. This resistance was partly due to the fact that no one religious group had enough political power to dominate permanently. It should be noted that the dominant faith was Protestant Christianity. To insure “domestic tranquility” the Founding Fathers wrote into the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
