This Thursday marks the annual observance of the National Day of Prayer.  It is a day when we celebrate the First Amendment to the Constitution protecting the free exercise of religion and prohibiting the establishment of any religion as privileged under our national laws.  It is a day when religious people from the rich diversity of expressions of faiths in our nation can come together in a spirit of tolerance and pluralism to pray from the deep wells of our various traditions.  It is a day to recall our nation to its highest ideals and to ask divine blessings upon us in the many names by which God is invoked.

This is not a Christian nation.  It is a nation of religious freedom.  Although a majority of Americans identify themselves as Christian, Christians cannot therefore claim place of privilege under the laws of the United States.  Christians have no more standing or privilege in this country than do Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarian Universalists, "Other" or "None." 

For the first 150 years of our nation's beginnings, we tried established religion.  It didn't work.  In the Southern colonies, my denomination, the American version of the Church of England, was the official or semiofficial religion.  In New England the congregational churches (the Puritans) ran things, and in Pennsylvania, the Quakers. 

Colonial Massachusetts became rather notorious for its religious persecution, particularly of Quakers.  In his recent study Founding Faith, journalist Steven Waldman recovers the story of Mary Dyer, an upstanding, churchgoing woman who hosted Bible studies in her home.  Returning after repeated banishments, she was sentenced to death along with two other Quakers.  She was whipped and forced to watch her two colleagues hanged.  Then she was released to go and change her ways.  She returned, and on June 1, 1660, was hanged on an oak tree in Boston Commons while drummers played loud enough so any last words would be drowned.

Most of us know the story of Roger Williams, a Puritan minister who had a tolerant streak for religious dissenters like Quakers, Baptists and Jews.  He was banished from Massachusetts.  Williams fled south to found a new settlement which in 1644 became Rhode Island, the first colony in the New World to allow freedom of conscience, a place of refuge for people like Anne Hutchinson, whose reviews of Puritan sermons earned her excommunication and banishment.  Roger Williams is usually credited with originating either the first or second Baptist church in America.  Baptists had a hard time nearly everywhere except Rhode Island.

In some colonies, anyone holding public office had to be a member of the established religion.  In northern Virginia where the ancestors of my own Episcopal Church held the state privilege, there was a significant period of persecution.  As a young man James Madison saw Baptists being thrown in jail for preaching their own gospel.  That experience may have influenced his role as a champion of the form of separation of church and state which was enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

In fact, 18-century Evangelicals were the strongest proponents of the separation of church and state.  Not only were Evangelicals without an established colony, so disestablishment was in their interests, but they also promoted a theology that valued a personal relationship with God, without the need of mediation from an institution, clergy or church.  Their spirit of individual liberty was consistent with the Founders' approach not only to church hierarchy, but also to political hierarchy.  "Give me liberty," in politics and religion.

It took several more generations for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights to be adopted by the states.  Massachusetts was the last state to become disestablished in 1833, and religious discrimination still happened legally until after the Civil War and the 14th Amendment began to apply the First Amendment to the states.  But the Founders' vision prevailed.

The Founders looked on the failed experiment of colonial religious establishment and chose to create a nation without an established religion and with a guarantee of freedom for religious practice.  They could have said this was a Christian nation.  They chose not to.  On May 1 we are invited to embody that freedom by welcoming people of every religion to pray for our nation, its leaders and its continued faithfulness to the liberty our ancestors fought for.