Traditional understandings of the genesis of the separation of church and state rest on assumptions about “Enlightenment" and the republican ethos o f citizenship. The author does not seek to dislodge that interpretation but to augment and enrich it by recovering its cultural and discursive religious contexts, specifically the discourse of Protestant dissent.He argues that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in matters of biblical interpretation, an outgrowth of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, helped promote religious disestablishment in the early modern West.