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you still had to pay a tax to support the Church of England. That had to be done. That's what an established church is. The people who wrote the Constitution were anxious to make sure that this didn't happen.

They were full of religion - all of them. They paid their respects to Almighty God at every point. But they did provide that there should be no establishment of religion. We should not say, “This church is the established church and you have to pay taxes to support this church.” I don't think that in the Constitution they even guaranteed freedom of religion. It's implied in the Bill of Rights, but that's all.

I also come out of New England. The Massachusetts Bay Colony had an established church. It had a theocracy. You couldn't vote unless you belonged to the Congregational Church. You weren't anybody unless you belonged to that church. When a few Baptists were so unwise as to migrate and settle in Massachusetts, they jolly well got the boot right away. They got kicked out and went down and founded Rhode Island. There for the first time you got the springing up of this idea of the freedom of worship in Rhode Island, because these Baptists that had been kicked out had suffered by not being permitted to follow their own lead in religion.