Editor's Note: This forum offers three case studies that show how Christian minorities pushed for new relationships between church and state, and between piety and politics, in the decades following the American Revolution. The gradual disestablishment of religion, and the religious competition that disestablishment unleashed, stimulated these changes. In ways unanticipated by those who crafted disestablishment, the strategies that Christian minorities pursued to gain public respect and exercise citizenship were creative harbingers of policies that only became fully developed in the twentieth century.

As Tara Strauch shows, Quakers wanted recognition as citizens whose religion separated religion from citizenship, and they achieved some of this recognition in the 1790s through debate and compromise with Americans who linked piety and patriotism more closely. As Jennifer Dorsey shows, Shaker refusal to serve in the War of 1812 involved not just pacifism, but also an argument for organized charity as an alternative to military service. Finally, Spencer McBride points to Joseph Smith's plea for restitution for damages due to religious persecution in the 1830s as an argument for federal protection of religious liberty that would not be endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court until the 1940s. In all three of these early cases—Quaker arguments for separating piety from politics, the Shaker proposal for alternative civilian service, and Joseph Smith's plea for federal protection of religious freedom—Christian minorities in the early American republic were ahead of their time.