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The founding fathers engineered a compromise in the First Amendment of the US Constitution regarding the freedom of religion. Thomas Jefferson's reference to the "wall of separation" in his correspondence with the Danbury Baptists adequately describes this compromise. It is the most accurate description of the protection that has benefited both religion and government throughout our nation's history.

The colonies that would become the United States began as religious enclaves in the unforgiving wilderness of the North American continent. The planting fathers of these small colonies established their brands of Christianity as the colony's sole religion. The Puritans in Massachusetts believed that both the Holy Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England had lost their way in the world. Their brand of Christianity placed a heavy emphasis on the authority of the Word of God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures. In their minds, the idea of religious freedom was the freedom from error. They believed that their interpretation of the Scriptures was completely free from the errors that seemed to be evident in the Catholic and Anglican churches.
The Anglican Church also had created a colony further south on the North American continent. For them, they were the symbols of both the British Empire and the Anglican Primate on a continent of barbaric tribes and unsettled wilderness. King James I proclaimed the charter of the Virginia Company as "propagating Christian religion to such people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God." (Lambert 46) The idea of religious liberty for Virginians extended to all men who chose the Anglican faith as their sole faith. It was more a referendum on the Anglican Church than any true kind of religious freedom.
With these beginnings, it is hard for one to understand how our nation developed into a nation that valued religious freedom enough to codify it in its founding document. For this, we will have to delve into the history of the dissenting voices that turned the nation from Orthodoxy into a nation of religious pluralism. We begin with the New Lights.
The New Light Evangelicals came upon the American religious scene in the mid-1700s when itinerant preachers like George Whitefield arrived in America. The Evangelicals proclaimed a gospel that did not base itself within a structured church system. Whitefield preached a gospel that placed faith directly into the hands and hearts

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