A Government that Favors one Religion over Another Could also Exclude "any particular sect of Christians"

The Smithsonian magazine has an very informative article about the history of religious persecution in the U.S. that debunks the fuzzy nostalgia for a culture of religious tolerance that has never really been.  The themes and facts of this article could be tremendously useful in making us better participants in the contemporary struggle to make religious tolerance and equality far more real.

[James] Madison also made a point that any believer of any religion should understand: that the government sanction of a religion was, in essence, a threat to religion. "Who does not see," he wrote, "that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?" Madison was writing from his memory of Baptist ministers being arrested in his native Virginia.   Source