How did the Separation of Church and State Occur in the US?

Disestablishment in the American colonies happened over a fifty to sixty-year period--from1774 to the 1830s—when relations between church and state underwent a transformation toward a new and decidedly non-European approach. What was one of the first aspects of establishment to be abolished? The view that the teaching of morality and civic virtue provided by religion required state financial support.

During the first decades of the United States as a nation, the religion market was undergoing a major transformation through abandoning many vestiges of the European Reformation and moving on toward norms shaped by an altogether new American ethos that was caught up in individualism, progress, equality, and frontier expansion. Under those influences and factors such as large-scale immigration, the United States, beginning with the founding fathers, pushed for the decoupling of formal ties between religious institutions and government institutions.

What is unique about disestablishment in the United States, when compared to what occurred in Europe, is that in the US coercive state authority voluntarily limited its control over a sphere of civil society. By contrast, in Europe, the government had to pressure religion to leave the political sphere. So, what we see in Europe over time is a secularization of public space so as to de-sacralize politics. By contrast, in the United States we see a sacralization of public space and secularization of government.