The first three chapters in this volume identify and explicate religious themes which prevailed during the Founding Period but which are of scant interest to today's scholars. These themes are: the conviction that the doctrine of a "future state of rewards and punishments" provided religion with the means of producing social and political benefits; the assumption that the civil magistrate should play the role of "nursing father" to religious institutions; and the belief that rights were moral powers, grounded in religion.
These themes are related, in one way or another, to the widespread conviction during the Founding Period that, since religion produced public policy benefits, government should enlist it as a partner and support it vigorously, even with tax revenues if possible...
... Just as [William] Penn did not confuse the disestablishment of religion with secularism, so were his intellectual heirs in the new republic not reluctant to acknowledge that the social and political benefits of religion would and should continue after disestablishment. Many of the most ardent advocates of disestablishment during the Founding Period -- Isaac Backus, for example -- saw no contradiction between opposing state-sponsored religion and in considering magistrates as nursing fathers and in commending a system of divine rewards and punishments as a means of promoting the public welfare.
The most radical church-state idea during the Founding Period was James Madison's view that religion produced no social or political benefits, a conclusion 75 years in advance of a similar argument offered by John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century. Madison's view, as the sixth chapter shows, was so far outside the Founding Era consensus (as many of his other religious ideas also were) that he prudently declined to acknowledge it publicly.