The Conformity Act required that all take Communion in an Anglican manner at least once a month. This was too "Papist" for many of the Dissenters. Some fled to the Netherlands, then as now the most tolerant nation in Europe. The Pilgrims ultimately found the tolerance unacceptable and exiled themselves to the New World.

The came to the New World not for religious freedom as we mean it today but to be religiously intolerant. Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson discovered this to their detriment.

Those who founded the nation were aware of the English experience. Yes Jefferson and Madison were vocally in favor of freedom of conscious. But they also knew that when the state involved itself in religion it was believers not non-believers who really suffered. Non-believers could do what what was necessary to appease the King. Believers would fear for their souls.

The debate over religion currently going on is based on ignorance and is frightening. There was a time when being a "Papist" was worse than being a Communist was in the 1950s. In a country as of as many diverse faiths and non-faiths as ours the only way to avoid implosion is to allow toleration of all faiths and to live up to the terms of the U.S. Constitution which bars all relgious tests for office.