I think a lot of those crises in Europe were just continuations of the Reformation in many respects.
For instance the lot of many faiths in the UK started improving with the toleration act of 1668. Why were Catholics excluded? Because there had been actual attempts to kill English kings (most famously the Gunpowder plot) and the Pope kept the stance that Catholics should try to overthrow England's government. The Catholic church maintained that position until 1766. In response, England started treating Catholics better. First in various colonies, and then for England itself with the 1778 Papists Act. Something much closer to equality arrived as you noted in 1829.
Atheists got worse treatment. For example they could not testify in UK courts until 1870. And even though atheist Charles Bradlaugh started getting regularly elected in 1880, and he was not allowed to be a member of the House of Commons until 1886.
The US was fundamentally no better, and in practice worse despite the Bill of Rights. For example it was not until 1961 that the Supreme Court ruled that atheists could not be barred by their non-belief from things like being a notary public.
But for all that we can legitimately criticize about the way these ideas were put in practice, they are worlds better than when Henry VIII took land from Catholics for not recognizing his marriage, his daughter Mary killed Protestants for not recognizing the Pope, the Pope in return tried to convince Catholics to try to kill Elizabeth I, and James 1. Both then passed various laws penalizing Catholics in retaliation.
Remember the Bloody Question? "If the Pope should invade England, which would you support? The Queen or the Pope?" Killing people who said, "the Pope" was pretty brutal, but reflected political reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement
The whole thing is still, to quote Doug Stanhope, "some dungeons and dragons bullshit", but at least its not immutable even today.
We've since moved to immutable trade agreements.
End digression!
I was born in California.
You also have to remember that until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, the Bill of Rights only applied to acts of Congress ("Congress shall make no law...") and not to state legislatures.
See http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2012/03/12/the-14th-amendmen... for a detailed (and admittedly somewhat opinionated) history of this topic. And see http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment14.html to start digging in on exactly how complex the current interpretation of the 14th amendment actually is.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
I was just placing a hard earliest point where the Bill of Rights could apply to the states, not saying that it was immediately interpreted as such as soon as it was ratified.
That specific language only appears in the First Amendment. Other amendments were taken to apply to the states well before the Fourteenth; for example, there is case law from state courts from the first half of the 19th century dealing with how states interpret the Second Amendment, which would be meaningless if that Amendment were not held to apply to the states.
By contrast in the early years after the 14th was passed, the Supreme Court stated in both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Cruikshank and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presser_v._Illinois that the 2nd amendment was only a restriction on what the federal government could do. State and local regulation was unaffected.
Yes. One of the arguments against adding the Bill of Rights to the Constitution was that the states already had similar clauses. That was the reason why they're amendments and not part of the original Constitution, in fact. The argument went something like this:
"Here's your new Constitution! Please ratify it."
"Um, there's no Bill of Rights."
"Well, the states already have Bills of Rights."
"Yeah, that sounds like a loophole waiting to happen. Add a Bill of Rights or I'm not ratifying it."
"Fine, fine. I promise that if you ratify it, we'll amend it with a Bill of Rights the first chance we get."
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
It beautifully highlights the modern historian's crisis.
You cannot distill history into a framework because any unique set of events seem to be reproduced somewhere else in history with different outcomes.
You must distill history into a framework otherwise it's impossible to reason about and understand.