The last paragraph is the most provocative…

“The paradox of the First Amendment is that a measure first conceived as a liberation for authentic Christianity has becom, in this century, a tool of anti-religious sentiment, weakening the participation of the church in society and depriving it of access to resources for its social role. The orthodox dissenters who framed it had, of course, no grounds to anticipate such an outcome. The situations they knew best, and expected to maintain, were those in which local religious hegemonies prevailed and shaped the communities they dominated. They had no idea of religious pluralism. They expected atheists, ant-trinitarians and even Roman Catholics to be legally exlcuded from public office. But they did not like their influence within the communities to be hamstrung by religious policies maintained by government, especially colonial government exercised from a great distance. They wished to overthrow the legal tie between the Crown and the church that existed in England. In this respect the First Ammendment was no afterthough to the American Revolution; it simply articluated one of its dominant concerns. (On this see J.C.D. Clark, The Language of Liberty.)

The reasons for rejecting Anglican establishment begin with the brutal fact that Protestant Christianity was divided. This made any attempt on the part of government to promote Christian worship and mission appear arbitrary to those outside the hegemonic confession. Cuius regio religio was a policy nobody wanted in principle, generated as a necessary second-best by unnegotiably stubborn theological divisions. But there were other factors which made the general situation worse in this case. ONes was the positivist understanding of the role of the Crown which had developed in Stuart and Whig political theory. The Crown’s privilege of determining the normative public form of Christianity was not defended in terms of obligation to obey Christ and the apostolic testimony, but on the basis of divine providence which had set the crown mysteriously on this and not some other head. Positivism invites counter-positivism. It was understandable enough that dissenting groups, when in sufficient strength, should ask themselves what further mysterious twists divine provide might execute if put courageously to the test.

In the third place, there were feature of the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century which weakened the Christian understanding of salvation-history, and replaced it with an open-ended concept of historical development, shapted by human action ventured, perhaps, in imitation of Christ but not in obedient faith directed back to his accomplished work. The shift from salvation history to an unfolding providence undermined the intelligibility of the doctrine of the Trinity itself, leaving it hight and dry on the austere sands of the Quicunque vult without its necessary point of reference in the Paschal triumph. A Deist religion of divine fatherhood seemed sufficient to support the authority which government needed; while in evangelical religon worship of Christ could not unsuitably be seen as the prerogative of the converted few, the church within the church. Meanwhile the Puritan emphasis on the Holy Spirit had nourished a religion of private conscience. All these factors coincided to support the disestablishment thesis. Deists and evangelicals could agree that the state hardly knew enough about God to make a trinitarian Christianity normative. It suited them both to maintain revealed Christianity as a mystery for initiates.

But this convergence only amounted to a negative strategy of denial. Much damage was to be done in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by anti-ecumenical strategies of this type: social institutions, notably schools, were lost to Christian influence as minority Christian communities, which could not control them, preferred anything to their falling under the control of the larger churches; while hegemonic churches disdained to give the smaller denominations any stake in them. And so it was in this case, too. By denying any church established status in principle, the the framers of the First Amendment gave away more than they knew. They effectively declared that political authorities were incapable of evangelical obedience. And with this the damage was done. It did not need the anti-religious line of interpretation pursued by twentieth-century courts to make this formula, from a theological point of view, quite strictly heretical. The creed asserts: cuius regni non erit finis[And of His Kingdom there shall be no end]; and the apostle, that ‘at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow’ (Phil. 2.10). The First Amendment presumes to add: ‘except…’”

Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 245-246.

I think this is an insightful analysis although I would challenge O’Donovan to consider the degree to which the framers of the Ammendment were concerned with spheres of government rather than government qua government. I think that for at least some of them the goal was not to disestablish formal ties between government and the church, but rather to allow those ties to be linked at a more intimate and local level i.e. the states commonwealths and towns. This would make sense given their distaste for the English colonial experience they had just been freed from.