Constitution

While theories of the Enlightenment were gaining popularity worldwide, primary sources suggest that the United States constitution was based on Enlightenment ideas.3   According, to secondary sources “America's Founders knew that it takes more than a perfect plan of government to preserve liberty”3, suggesting that America’s founders based the whole constitution on protecting liberty.   However, the founders place more emphasis in protecting certain liberties than others.   The Founders of America placed more emphasis on freedom of religion, protection against abusive authority, and the right to an elected government.3
Why was freedom of religion important to the founders of America?
For many years in Europe, religion remained connected to government; therefore, people were raised to unconditionally accept their religion beliefs.5   However, this created conflict later when the bible became available to anyone and people started to interpret the bible according to their understanding; this lead to the creation of various religions and religion wars.   Imposing a religion after the reformation was almost impossible, since people were using their reasoning to interpret the bible.   Voltaire, who provided the theory of toleration of religion, stressed that toleration of religion was important because we are “children of the same father and creatures of the same God”.5 According to Voltaire “religion was instituted to make us happy in this life and in the other” so not imposing a religion on people would make people happy because they could use has a religion whatever they want.5
The founding fathers knew that one single religion was impossible to imposed and wrong since, most of them came from Europe and were tired of having one religion be imposed on them.3 Therefore, they applied the theory of tolerance and realized that if The United States of America was to succeed it must tolerate religion just like George Washington stated, "ought to be protected in worshipping...