Edwin Scott Gaustad was one of the foremost historians of American religious history. His special interest was the colonial period, in particular the nature of American religious liberty, pluralism, and dissent. His books include The Great Awakening in New England, Historical Atlas of Religion in America, A Religious History of America, Dissent in American Religion, Baptist Piety: Last Will and Testament of Obadiah Holmes, George Berkeley in America, A Documentary History of Religion in America, Faith of the Founders, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson, Church and State in America (for young adults), and Benjamin Franklin. He is also co-author with five others of the textbook Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People.
Quotes
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In 1782 a Frenchman wrote Letters from an American Farmer, in which he raised this question: who then is the American, this new man? In much of the 18th century, that question could be answered, whether in Philadelphia, London, or Paris, simply by pointing to the Philadelphia printer and saying, “Why, there he is!”
“Benjamin Franklin”
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Sometimes the church-state cases reviewed here may look puny and barely worth worrying about: a 10-cent bus fare in New Jersey, a 50-cent peddling permit in Connecticut, a $5.40 annual tax bill in New York, a parade permit here, a schoolbook there. But James Madison noted that the Bostonians’ refusal in 1774 to pay a threepenny-a-pound tax on tea was also just a piddling amount. Yet “the people of the U.S. owe their independence and their liberty,” Madison wrote, “to the wisdom of descrying in the minute Tax . . . the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent.” To adapt a line from Michelangelo, religious liberty is made up of a series of trifles, but religious liberty is no trifle.
“Church and State in America”
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To the spiritual heirs of Roger Williams, to those who agree with him that “having bought truth dear, we must not sell it cheap, not the least grain of it for the whole world.”
Dedication to “Roger Williams: Prophet of Liberty”
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With the lightest possible touch, one places a flower in the barrel of the establishment’s gun, even though the gun is pointed straight at the dissenter’s heart. Or one dances in the protest march, changing it from an angry confrontation to a happy parade, with balloons and candy and streetside theater for all. If religion is a beautiful instrument, then play it; do not use it as a terrestrial weapon or as a celestial threat.
“Dissent in American Religion”
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The book of Samuel speaks of those who are ‘bound in the bundle of the living.’ Americans need to be so bound together, bound by sentiment and hope, by values and civility – bound by something more than a network of interstate highways.
“Sworn on the Altar of God”
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In America, religious dissent is as vital as it is elusive. Like the secretions of the pituitary, the juices of dissent are essential to ongoing life even if we do not always know precisely how, when or where they perform their tasks, and the not knowing – the flimsy, filmy elusiveness – is supremely characteristic of America’s expressions of religious dissent. For in the United States no stalwart orthodoxy stands ever ready to parry the sharp thrust or clever feints of dissent.
“Dissent in American Religion”