I don't believe it...
I just lost an hour's work on a reply...
I'm going to
ing cry...
To sum up...
The Mayflower Compact is NOT an active article of governance in the United States. It was abandoned as an article of governance within a generation of its adoption.
The Pilgrims were Puritan Sepratists who didn't believe that the Reformation was finished. They left England and went to the Netherlands to escape persecution at the hands of the Church of England.
The Pilgrims left Holland to escape economic conditions and the pervasive secular influence of Dutch society on their members.
Once landing on US shores, the Pilgrims quickly went from persecuted to persecutors. No dissent to official religious doctrin was allowed. New England Puritan colonies were, essentially, theocratic societies.
Roger Williams dissented, and was forced out of the colony. He went on to found Rhode Island, where religious tolerance was allowed, one of the big reasons why Rhode Island become one of the earliest settlement points in the Colonies for Jews -- the first active Jewish congregation was formed in, I believe, 1658.
New England religious intolerance, as well as that found in Maryland in the 1600s and early 1700s, goes a LONG way in explaining why the Founding Fathers and the Framers eschewed adopting an official religion in the United States. I THINNK 4 of the original colonies -- Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and I believe Georgia, were officially places where religious tolerance for all faiths (including Jews) was the stated norm.
That changed fairly early in Maryland, where the original Catholic leaders were deposed and strident anti-Catholic provisions were enacted.
The Founding Fathers and the Framers never intended the United States to be a Christian nation. They recognized that it was a nation that was largely comprised of Christian residents, but they established no state religion, and by 1825 I believe that every state had in its constitution an article similar to the First Amendment dealing religious freedoms.
