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Christianity,
War, and America By Thomas G. West
(Print
Version)
Religious Liberty:
The View
from the Founding
By Thomas G.
West
Appeared as a chapter in
On
Faith and Free Government, edited by Daniel C. Palm, with
a Foreword by Dan Quayle, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield), 1997,
pp. 3-27.
In December 1944, American soldiers
were fighting desperately against the last great German offensive
of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge. Men were dying in large
numbers. The counterattack had bogged down in mud and rain. Planes
could not fly because of low clouds. General George Patton,
commander of the Third Army, called his chaplain into his
headquarters and said:
Chaplain, I want you to publish a
prayer for good weather. I'm tired of these soldiers having to
fight mud and floods as well as Germans. See if we can't get God
to work on our side. . . .
Chaplain James O'Neill: May I say,
General, that it usually isn't a customary thing among men of my
profession to pray for clear weather to kill fellow
men.
Patton: Chaplain, are you teaching me
theology or are you the Chaplain of the Third Army? I want a
prayer.
O'Neill: Yes,
sir.
The prayer was printed on a card and
distributed to every soldier of the Third Army. It
read:
Almighty and most merciful God, we
humbly beseech thee, of thy great goodness, to restrain these
immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us
fair weather for battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers
who call upon thee that, armed with thy power, we may advance
from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness
of our enemies, and establish thy justice among men and nations.
Amen.
An editor's footnote in Patton's
memoirs tells what happened next: "The day after the prayer was
issued, the weather cleared and remained perfect for about six
days. Enough to allow the Allies to break the backbone of the
German offensive and turn a temporary setback for the Allies into
a crushing defeat for the enemy."1
Patton's request for a weather prayer
perhaps sounds flippant or even impious. But at bottom Patton was
completely serious. He was convinced that God was on the side of
America, justice, and liberty against Hitler's regime of tyranny,
slavery, and mass murder. The cause of America was the cause of
liberty and God. Therefore it was perfectly reasonable to order
the chaplain, a paid official of the government, to ask for God's
aid in the great war against Hitler.
Or was it?
Many Americans would agree with
Chaplain O'Neill that religion has no business supporting a
political cause, especially not a war. Christianity in particular
seems to call for peace, not war; love of enemies, not their
death; and care for all mankind, not just one's own people. God
does not take sides, it seems, in quarrels among
nations.
In today's view, not only should
religion should keep its distance from government; above all,
government should keep its distance from religion. In 1947, the
Supreme Court ruled, for the first time, that it is
unconstitutional for government "to support any religious
activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or
whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion."2
Although the Court has not always applied that dictum
consistently—military chaplains are still permitted—it has largely
guided government policy ever since.
Today’s view is the opposite of that of
America’s Founders. Like General Patton, they believed that God
was pro-liberty. They also believed that there are many occasions
when government should "teach or practice religion."
Until the Vietnam War in the 1960s,
Americans have never hesitated to issue official prayers for
victory. During the Revolutionary War, Congress prayed for God "to
smile upon us in the prosecution of a just and necessary war for
the defense and establishment of our inalienable rights and
liberties" -- including the right to religious liberty. As we will
see, the Founders' understanding of liberty was consistent with,
and in fact called for, weather prayers and their
equivalents.3
Liberty, License, and
Reason
The victory of relativism has made the
Founders' understanding of religious liberty alien to us. Liberty
today is taken to mean "the right to choose," the right to do
whatever one pleases.
Surprisingly, both liberals and
conservatives agree on this definition. Their disagreement is over
the extent to which government should impose limits on abuses of
liberty. A sign of our shared view of liberty is that we often
speak of balancing liberty with order, with responsibility, or
with community. If we define liberty as the unlimited right of the
irresponsible will, we do have to look to a source outside of
liberty for some restraint on it. But if liberty is
inherently responsible liberty, as the Founders thought, it
does not need to be balanced by anything. It contains within
itself its own balance.
For the Founders, the irresponsible,
irrational will is not free. It is enslaved. James Madison said
that "the tyranny of their own passions" led the Athenians to
condemn Socrates to death. What Madison meant by this phrase was
spelled out by the Reverend Samuel West of Massachusetts in a 1776
sermon: "The most perfect freedom consists in obeying the dictates
of right reason, and submitting to natural law. When
a man goes beyond or contrary to the law of nature and reason, he
becomes the slave of base passions and vile
lusts. . . . Hence we conclude that where
licentiousness begins, liberty ends."4
Intellectuals today no longer believe
in "right reason" and "natural law." For them, freedom is not
obeying the law of reason and nature, but having the right to
break that law, or any law. That is one reason that serious
religious conviction is so much feared and disliked by elites in
our time: if God exists, his law limits our freedom. He, not we,
defines the meaning of existence. In contrast to the Founders'
view, three Justices of the Supreme Court wrote in 1992, "At the
heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of
existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of
human life."5
Since we no longer distinguish between
liberty and license, we no longer understand the Founders'
conception of liberty, including religious liberty. For them, the
freedom to follow one's religion should be protected, in
Washington's words, as an "inherent natural right." No one may be
harmed or punished for his mode of worship. But religious liberty
is not religious license. Government may therefore prohibit
religious practices that are criminal or immoral. And government
may and should promote religious practices and convictions
that accord with reason, which favors individual responsibility
and political liberty.
Jefferson's "Wall of Separation"
Letter and the Declaration of Independence as Violations of
Religious Liberty?
In his famous letter to the Baptists of
Danbury, Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson, quoting the First
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, wrote: "I contemplate with
solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which
declared that their legislature should `make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and
State."
Liberals and libertarians are fond of
this passage. They take it to mean that government should avoid
practicing, teaching, or supporting religious views of any kind.
The Supreme Court has declared that the "wall of separation"
forbids government officials, such as school teachers, from
engaging in or sponsoring public prayer. Yet Jefferson closes this
very same letter, written in his official capacity as president,
with a prayer: "I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection
and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man." If today's
liberals were right, Jefferson would be breaking down the wall of
separation at the very moment he proclaims
it.6
I propose to show that although most of
the Founders wanted a "separation between church and state"—call
it a "wall of separation" if you like—they emphatically rejected a
wall of separation between religion and public life, between God
and politics. The Founders opposed an official state-sponsored
church, but they favored government support of religion through
public laws, in official speeches and proclamations, on ceremonial
occasions, and especially in public schools.
The strangeness of today's approach,
from the point of view of the Founders, can be seen most vividly
in this fact: by the logic of today's view of religious liberty,
it is unconstitutional to teach the Declaration of Independence in
public school. The Declaration contains four distinct references
to God: he is the author of the "laws of . . . God"; the
"Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the
Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." The Supreme
Court has ruled that government may not "teach or practice
religion." It may not exert "subtle coercive pressure" on students
by prayers or religious instruction. If the Declaration were
taught in a public school as the truth, the teacher would
"teach religion." She would be exercising the kind of "subtle
coercive pressure" on students forbidden by the Court. She would
be teaching them that God is our lawgiver, creator, judge, and
providential protector. She would be promoting an establishment of
religion in violation of the First
Amendment.7
But this is absurd. A nation whose
principles are the God-given equal rights of mankind cannot be
obliged by its very principles to forbid public officials to
"teach religion" -- to teach children the theology of the
Declaration, that their rights are given to them by
God.
Of course, teaching the Declaration has
not been declared unconstitutional, but that is only because the
Court has been unwilling to admit the full consequences of its
view of "establishment." To avoid the public outrage that would
follow if the Declaration were banned from the classroom, the
Court falsely asserts that that document is not really religious.
The Court pretends that reciting "official documents such as the
Declaration of Independence which contain references to the Deity"
bears "no true resemblance" to school prayer. Such exercises,
Justice Brennan asserts, "no longer have a religious
purpose or meaning. The reference to divinity in the revised
pledge of allegiance, for example, may merely recognize the
historical fact that our nation was believed to have
been founded `under God.'"
In other words, the Supreme Court will
allow the theology of the Declaration to be taught in the
classroom as long as it is understood that it belongs to "a world
that is dead and gone," that it has nothing to do with the world
that we live in here and now, that it is not a living faith that
holds God to be the source of our rights, the author of the laws
of nature, and the protector and Supreme Judge of America.
Brennan's claim that the words "under God" in the revised Pledge
have no "religious purpose or meaning" is flatly contradicted by
the House Committee on the Judiciary, which explained in its 1954
report that the words were added to affirm "the dependence of our
people and our Government upon the moral directions of the
Creator."8
Conservative Confusion on
Religious Liberty
Conservatives today are unable to
provide any coherent defense of government support of religion.
They argue that liberals have distorted the views of the Founders
and of the earlier tradition. But their argument has been weakened
by its inability to square the historical record with the idea of
religious liberty.
The American tradition is full of
examples of government-sponsored prayers (daily in public schools
and on all kinds of ceremonial occasions), religious music (in
school Christmas programs), religious devotion (in Thanksgiving
and Prayer Day proclamations of presidents), and much more.
Liberals explain these traditions as relics of an earlier era of
religious bigotry, when the separation of religion from politics
was neither understood nor practiced. Conservatives are not quite
sure how to explain them.
Many say that government may promote
religion as long as it does so nonpreferentially. In this
argument, government sees religious diversity or
pluralism as a good thing, and it is free to promote
religion as long as it promotes all religions, and not any
particular belief. Law professor Michael McConnell gives the
ablest scholarly defense of the view that government may promote
"religion in general," but "must not favor one form of religious
belief over another."9
Sometimes conservatives are even
tempted to make use of the liberal view that government must be
completely neutral between religion and "irreligion." In the
Rosenberger case, the University of Virginia funded a
variety of student publications, but it refused to fund a
Christian journal. Michael McConnell argued to the Supreme Court
on behalf of the Christian students that "the state should be
completely indifferent to whether students use those benefits to
participate in religious activity." The Constitution requires
"neutrality between religion and its various competitors in the
marketplace of ideas." The Court agreed. Unfortunately,
McConnell's victory for the Christians was also a victory for
Satanic, sado-masochistic, pedophile, and Nazi publications. They
too are "competitors in the marketplace of ideas." They too have a
right to government funding on an evenhanded
basis.10
Supreme Court liberals have easily
shown that the American tradition of government involvement with
religion cannot be justified in neutralist, nonpreferential, or
pluralist terms. Take the example of legislative chaplains.
Historically, taxes have supported chaplains to offer daily
prayers at legislative sessions. Conservatives on the Supreme
Court won a small victory when that practice was upheld in a 1983
case. But the Court could offer no principled argument in its
favor. The majority admitted that the prayers in question were
not neutral with respect to all religions, but were "in the
Judeo-Christian tradition." Clearly the government was not just
promoting but funding a non-inclusive religious
exercise.
Chaplains' prayers are usually offered
to God, that is, God the Father, thereby excluding such deities as
the "three goddesses (Cali, Quani, and Enna) from Hindu, Buddhist,
and Philippine religions." These three were prayed to at the 1993
Re-Imaging Conference co-sponsored by the Episcopal Church of the
United States, along with "Our Sweet Sophia," to whom these words
were addressed: "we are women in your image. With the nectar of
our thighs, we invited a lover. . . . With our warm
body fluids we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations."
If chaplaincies were truly nonpreferential, these goddesses, and
even the bloodthirsty gods of the Aztecs, would have to be invoked
at least occasionally. All the Court could say in the 1983 case
was that legislative chaplaincies are "deeply embedded in the
history and tradition of this country." That is true. But the
dissenters responded, quite rightly, that long practice does not
make something constitutional.11
Some conservatives have tried to
resolve the seeming contradiction between individual
liberty and the tradition of government support of
monotheistic and Biblical religion either by embracing liberty and
rejecting the tradition of support (libertarians like the Cato
Institute), or by embracing the tradition and rejecting the
Declaration of Independence (traditionalists like Russell
Kirk).
American public life was far
more religious before the 1960s, when Americans thought their
pro-religious policies were consistent with their principles. As
we will see, they believed that what they did was not only
compatible with religious liberty, but a necessary foundation of
that liberty.
Free Exercise of Religion as
Part of the Right to Liberty
The Declaration of Independence calls
liberty an "unalienable" right, meaning that we are born with it
("endowed by our Creator") and can never rightly surrender it to
any person or government. As we are born free in all respects, we
are also born free to worship God. That freedom is
absolute.
The New Hampshire Constitution of 1784
explains: "When men enter into a state of society, they surrender
up some of their natural rights to that society, in order to
insure the protection of others." For example, in a state of
nature, we have the right to punish those who injure us. In a
state of society, we give up that right to the government. We do
so on condition that they protect us better than we can on our own
in a state without government. However, continues New Hampshire,
"Among the natural rights, some are in their very nature
unalienable, because no equivalent can be given or received for
them. Of this kind are the rights of conscience. Every individual
has a natural and unalienable right to worship God according to
the dictates of his own conscience, and
reason."12
Every early state constitution except
Connecticut's contained a guarantee of free exercise of
religion.13
In addition to its foundation in the
natural right to liberty, the Founders advanced four further
reasons in defense of religious liberty.
- First, politically empowered
religion is dangerous.
- Second, religious freedom is good
because under it religion will thrive. That is good because it
enables men to perform their duty to God, the highest obligation
in life.
- Third, religion is a foundation of
morality.
- Fourth, religion is a foundation of
liberty.
Let us briefly consider these
claims.
Freedom of Religion as a Means
to Prevent Majority Tyranny
James Madison wrote in his Memorial
and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (1785),
"Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world by vain
attempts of the secular arm to extinguish religious discord by
proscribing all difference in religious opinion." Madison deplored
the imprisonment of Baptists in Virginia as late as 1774: "There
are at this time in the adjacent county not less than 5 or 6
well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious
sentiments, which in the main are very
orthodox."14
Madison also made the anti-tyranny
argument for religious freedom in The Federalist. "A zeal
for different opinions concerning religion," he wrote,
". . . have in turn divided mankind into parties,
inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more
disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to cooperate for
their common good." The solution: "In a free government, the
security for civil government must be the same as for religious
rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of
interests, and in the other, in the multiplicity of
sects."15
New York's constitution of 1777
explained its guarantee of free exercise in similar
terms:
And whereas we are required, by the
benevolent principles of rational liberty, not only to expel
civil tyranny, but also to guard against that spiritual
oppression and intolerance wherewith the bigotry and ambition of
weak and wicked priests and princes have scourged mankind,
. . . the free exercise and enjoyment of religious
profession and worship, without discrimination or preference,
shall forever hereafter be allowed.
Many of the most ardent supporters of
religious liberty in early America were Baptists, Methodists,
Catholics, Jews, and other minority denominations. They feared
with some justice the persecution by the majority
Congregationalists (in New England) or by Episcopalians (in the
South).
The Transcendent Purpose of
Religious Liberty
The language of the Virginia
Declaration of Rights shows that religious liberty had not only a
secular but a religious purpose:
That religion, or the duty which we
owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be
directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or
violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the
free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of
conscience.16
Virginia is saying that it protects
free exercise of religion not because it is indifferent to
religion, not because religion is a threat, but because
religion, uncoerced "by force or violence," is "the duty which we
owe to our Creator." We need liberty to discharge our duty to
God.
Madison's Memorial and
Remonstrance, commenting on the Virginia provision just
quoted, explains that the free exercise of religion is
an unalienable right . . .
because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the
Creator. . . . Before any man can be considered
as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject
of the Governor of the universe. And . . . every man
who becomes a member of any particular civil society [must] do
it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal
Sovereign.17
In the name of James Madison, Philip
Denenfield of the American Civil Liberties Union objected to the
Catholic view (in the Second Vatican Council, 1966) that religious
freedom enables men to "fulfill their duty to worship God" and
acknowledges that men's obligations to God "transcend by their
very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs."
Denenfield said this understanding violated the spirit of the
Founders' understanding of religious liberty.18 But as
we just saw, what Denenfield calls the "Catholic view" is
identical to Madison's, who would have been astounded to see his
authority used to contradict the very arguments he made on behalf
of religious liberty in his most famous writing on the subject.
Denenfield, and others like him, simply do not understand that the
religious freedom fought for in the American Revolution is not
freedom from religion, as he would like, but freedom to
be religious, to fulfill one's highest purpose.
If "allegiance to the Universal
Sovereign" is as important as Madison says, then why, a believer
might ask, should government not prescribe man's religious
obligations to God? Is not government turning its back on God if
it fails to bring men to the salvation of their immortal souls?
Some conservatives are asking that very question today, implying
that America would be better off if it returned to the coercive
approach of pre-eighteenth century Europe. For example, Kenneth
Craycraft writes, "From a Christian point of view, it simply makes
no sense to say that we have a fundamental human right to
religious freedom, which necessarily entails a right to reject
God's love and grace."19
The Founders gave two answers to
Craycraft's challenge. First, human beings are fallible. Their
selfish passions, and their all-too-human prejudices and
ignorance, make governments bad judges of religious orthodoxy.
Governments too often gravitate to theological doctrines that
justify, says Madison's Memorial, "superstition, bigotry,
and persecution." In Madison's argument, the right to religious
freedom is not "a right to reject God's love and grace," as
Craycraft thinks; it is a right to reject the forcible imposition,
by fallible men, of their views of "God's love and
grace" on other men. Madison never asserts, as do today's Supreme
Court liberals, that there is a human right "to define one's own
concept of existence." Religious freedom is the right to follow
God's concept of our existence, rather than to be compelled to
submit to some man's concept of it. This is so far from a
rejection of God that most Christians during the founding era, and
throughout American history, believed, as Founder Tench Coxe
maintained, that the denial of religious liberty is "impious" and
"a trespass on the Majesty of Heaven."20
Second, from a Christian standpoint we
have a right to religious freedom because the nature of faith
itself is contradicted by compulsion. This is Locke's argument in
his Letter Concerning Toleration. The Virginia Declaration
of Rights says worship "can be directed only by reason and
conviction, not by force or violence." Faith, to be
genuine, must be freely given; if it is compelled, it is no longer
faith. As Jefferson wrote in his draft of the Virginia Bill for
Religious Freedom, "the opinions and belief of men depend not on
their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to
their minds" because "Almighty God hath created the mind
free."
Harry V. Jaffa has written that "The
tragedy of Western civilization has been the unfettered attempt,
by political means, to vindicate claims whose very nature excludes
the possibility that they can be vindicated by political means."
Medieval governments sometimes used force to compel people to be
Christians or Moslems. Marxist governments use force to compel
people to give up their religious faith and accept the authority
of science and reason alone. But force vindicates neither
revelation nor reason. "The unprecedented character of the
American Founding," writes Harry V. Jaffa, "is that it provided
for the coexistence of the claims of reason and of revelation in
all their forms, without requiring or permitting any political
decisions concerning them." Religious liberty is the bow of the
political to the dignity of the
Transcendent.21
The Worldly Purpose of Religion:
God and Morality
The noblest purpose of liberty is to
enable man to do his highest duty to God. But religion also has a
crucial secular purpose in America: securing the moral conditions
of freedom. In the Founders' view, without morality, there can be
no freedom; and, as Founder Benjamin Rush put it, "where there is
no religion, there will be no morals."22
This argument is not well understood
today. As I said earlier, we tend to equate freedom with
individuality, the right to choose, the right to do anything one
pleases. The Founders rejected this view, for two
reasons.
First, they thought a person is not
really free if he is a slave to his irrational passions. We quoted
earlier Madison's statement that the Athenian people were in the
grip of "the tyranny of their passions" when they condemned
Socrates to death.
Second, the Founders believed that a
people enslaved to their passions would be unable to restrain
themselves from injuring each other. That would mean that
government would have to enslave the slavish people politically as
well -- for their own survival. Madison explains: without
sufficient self-control, "nothing less than the chains of
despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one
another" (Federalist no. 55).
I do not want to misstate the Founders'
position. They were hard-headed enough not to rely on citizen
virtue alone. As The Federalist explains, the Constitution
therefore makes prudent use of governing structures and
self-interested motives to prevent the people's passions from
breaking out into injustice. "Ambition must be made to counteract
ambition," wrote Madison. The Constitution's framers placed much
of their trust in checks, balances, and separated powers. But they
also knew that although constitutional devices can supply to some
extent the absence of better motives, there is still some need for
virtue. When Madison wrote, in the tenth Federalist, that
"neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an
adequate control," he implied that these motives do have
some beneficial effect on conduct. In fact, he believed
that "religious motives" were indispensable. In a private letter,
he wrote, "the belief in a God all powerful, wise, and good, is
. . . essential to the moral order of the world."
Religious faith, then, proves to be an important ingredient in the
moral formation of the people.23
To sum up the Founders' consensus, I
quote George Washington's Farewell Address: "Of all the
dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,
religion and morality are indispensable
supports. . . . And let us with caution indulge the
supposition that morality can be maintained without
religion."24
The Worldly Purpose of Religion:
God and Liberty
Jefferson -- the Founder most often
singled out for his supposed indifference to religion -- thought
that the American belief that God is the author of liberty was not
just beneficial but essential to the survival of freedom. In his
Notes on Virginia, he asked, "And can the liberties of a
nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm
basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these
liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated
but with his wrath?"25
That God gives all men the right to
life and liberty, and that he therefore favors the American cause,
was widely believed during the founding era. In Federalist
no. 37, Madison wrote that "the man of pious reflection" could not
fail to perceive in the work of the Constitutional Convention "a
finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and
signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the
revolution." In his First Inaugural Address, Washington said,
"Every step by which they [the American people] have advanced to
the character of an independent nation seems to have been
distinguished by some token of providential
agency."26
Most American Christians in 1776
endorsed the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence. On the
occasion of the commencement of the Massachusetts Constitution of
1780, before an audience including the governor, Senate, and House
of Representatives, The Reverend Samuel Cooper said:
We want not, indeed, a special
revelation from heaven to teach us that men are born equal and
free. . . . These are the plain dictates of that
reason and common sense with which the common parent of men has
informed the human bosom. It is, however, a satisfaction to
observe such everlasting maxims of equity confirmed
. . . by the instructions, precepts, and examples
given us in the sacred oracles [i.e., the Bible];
. . . that they come from him "who hath made of one
blood all nations to dwell upon the face of the
earth."27
Reason and faith both teach the same
lesson: all men are created equal.
Would the Founders have supported
Christianity if Americans had adhered to the doctrines of the era
called by Washington the "gloomy age of ignorance and
superstition"? Jefferson believed that "monkish ignorance and
superstition" had once taught that the mass of mankind are "born
with saddles on their backs," while "a favored few" are born
"booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace
of God." In that era, said Jefferson, "the human mind ha[d] been
held in vassalage by kings, priests, and
nobles."28
Obviously, the American picture of
earlier Catholicism was exaggerated. Still, it is doubtful that
religion and liberty would have been allies if, for example, the
orthodoxy of seventeenth-century French Canada have prevailed in
the United States in 1776. The goal of the French religious
education, reports historian Francis Parkman, was "to make
obedient servants of the church and king." In practice, that meant
unquestioning submission to "a body of men clothed with arbitrary
and ill-defined powers, ruling with absolute sway an unfortunate
people who had no voice in their own destinies, and unaswerable
only to an apathetic master three thousand miles
away."29
Before the Revolution, Christianity as
Americans understood it had broken with "monkish ignorance and
superstition" in three stages that made it compatible with the
principles of liberty.
First was the Protestant rebellion from
the authority of Rome. David Ramsay, a Founder and early historian
of the American Revolution, explains:
all protestantism is founded on a
strong claim to natural liberty, and the right of private
judgment. . . . Their tenets . . . are
hostile to all interference of authority, in matters of opinion,
and predispose to a jealousy for civil
liberty.30
Second was the American revival of the
teaching that Christians have a duty to cultivate the virtues of
responsible citizenship, especially those that enable them to
fight and kill the enemies of their country. (This had been an
important element in the Catholic theology of Thomas Aquinas.)
When the cause of liberty is threatened, said the Reverend Samuel
Davies of Virginia, "Then the sword is, as it were, consecrated to
God; and the art of war becomes a part of our
religion. . . . Blessed is the brave soldier;
blessed is the defender of his country and the destroyer of his
enemies."31 The religion of French Canada was at odds
with the teaching of "the laws of nature and of nature’s
God."
How, one might ask, can this be
compatible with Christ's "turn the other cheek"? The Reverend
Simeon Howard of Massachusetts answers, in a 1773
sermon:
When our Saviour forbids us to resist
evil, he seems to have had in view only small injuries, for such
are those he mentions in the following words, as an illustration
of the precept; smiting on the cheek, taking away one's coat, or
compelling him to go a mile. . . . But it does
not follow, that because we are forbidden to resist such slight
attacks, we may not defend ourselves when the assault is of a
capital kind. . . . Should a person, for
instance, whose ability and circumstances enable him to do good
in the world, . . . tamely yield up all his interest
and become an absolute slave to some unjust and wicked
oppressor, when he might by a manly resistance have secured his
liberty? [W]ould he not be guilty of great unfaithfulness to
God, and justly liable to his
condemnation?32
The third feature of American-style
Christianity was the conviction that the Bible condemns despotism
and favors political liberty. This argument was stated in sermon
after sermon during the founding era and throughout our tradition.
We gave a brief example earlier in this section.
The belief that liberty is a sacred
cause was by no means limited to Protestants. John Carroll, the
first Catholic bishop of the United States, appealed to the
natural rights of all men—"the luminous principles on which the
rights of conscience and liberty of religion depend"—in his pleas
for full citizen rights for Catholics. The Jewish congregation in
Newport, Rhode Island, addressing President Washington during his
visit in 1790, said that the government of America, protecting
"liberty of conscience" and securing "the blessings of civil and
religious liberty," is "the work of the great
God."33
When Tocqueville visited America in the
1820s, he heard the following Catholic prayer on behalf of the
Polish struggle for liberty. It shows how far American Catholicism
was from the earlier French Canadian teaching of passive obedience
to aristocracy and kingship:
Lord, who hast created all men in the
same image, do not allow despotism to deform thy work and
maintain inequality upon the earth. Almighty God! Watch over the
destiny of the Poles and make them worthy to be free; may thy
wisdom prevail in their councils and Thy strength in their arms;
spread terror among their enemies. . . . We
beseech Thee in the name of thy beloved son, our Lord Jesus
Christ.34
The Limits of Free Exercise:
Injury to Individuals or Society
In his justly celebrated 1790 letter to
the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, President Washington summed up
the American understanding of the right to free exercise of
religion. Washington's generous letter marked the first occasion
that any nation had welcomed Jews as equal citizens since Biblical
days. It also makes clear that there are definite limits to the
right.
The citizens of the United State of
America have the right to applaud themselves for having given to
mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy worthy of
imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and
immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is
spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of people
that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural
rights, for, happily, the government of the United States, which
gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,
requires only that those who live under its protection should
demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions
their effectual support.35
The guarantee of free exercise of
religion is absolute. But that does not mean that everything that
anyone calls an "exercise of religion" is permitted. Those who
refuse to "demean themselves as good citizens" are not exercising
but abusing their "inherent natural rights." Consider the extreme
case of the Aztec religion, in which human beings were sacrificed
in supposed obedience to a divine command. If such a religion had
existed in America, the Founders would have treated it as a
criminal organization to promote the crime of murder. They would
not have hesitated to forbid its free exercise. Religion could not
be used as an excuse to violate the rights of others or to engage
in conduct that would undermine the moral foundations of society.
Jefferson once wrote to Madison, "The declaration, that religious
faith shall be unpunished, does not give impunity to criminal acts
dictated by religious error."36
This reservation against religious
practices that threaten life, liberty, property, or public
morality was made explicit in several of the early state
constitutions. New York's of 1777, for example, provided "That the
liberty of conscience, hereby granted, shall not be construed as
to excuse acts of licentiousness, or justify practices
inconsistent with the peace or safety of the state."
The decision on whether to allow a
free-exercise exemption from obeying an otherwise valid public law
turned on the nature of the religious practice in question. Was it
on balance harmful or not? We can see two opposite reactions to
free exercise claims in the cases of nineteenth-century
Catholicism and Mormonism.
An 1813 New York case confronted a
Catholic practice that directly violated a state law. Does a
Catholic priest have to divulge secrets learned in sacramental
confession? Father Anthony Kohlmann, a Jesuit priest, was called
before the court and asked to reveal the name of a thief who had
confessed his crime to him. He replied: "it would be my duty to
prefer instantaneous death or any temporal misfortune, rather than
disclose the name of the penitent in question. For, were I to act
otherwise, I should become a traitor to my church, to my sacred
ministry, and to God. In fine, I should render myself guilty of
eternal damnation." The court ruled in favor of Father Kohlmann,
saying:
If a religious sect would rise up and
violate the decencies of life, by practicing their religious
rites, in a state of nakedness, by following incest, and a
community of wives; if the Hindoo should attempt to introduce
the burning of widows on the funeral piles of their deceased
husbands, or the Mahometan his plurality of wives, or the pagan
his bacchanalian orgies or human sacrifices; . . .
then the licentious acts and dangerous practices contemplated by
the [New York] constitution would exist, and the hand of the
magistrate would be rightfully raised to chastise the guilty
agents. But until men under pretense of religion act counter to
the fundamental principles of morality, and endanger the
well being of the state, they are to be protected in the free
exercise of their religion.
The case turned in large part, as James
Stoner writes, on the fact that Catholics had a "reputation for
law-abidingness," and that "on the whole confession does much more
good than harm," in spite of the fact that the seal of
confidentiality impedes the normal course of criminal
investigations.37
Quite opposite was the federal
government's treatment of the Mormons in Utah Territory in the
late 1800s, at a time when their church believed that
the practice of polygamy was directly
enjoined upon the male members thereof by the Almighty
God . . . ; that the failing or refusing to
practice polygamy by such male members of said Church, when
circumstances would admit, would be punished, and that the
penalty for such failure and refusal would be damnation in the
life to come.
In spite of this sincere religious
belief, the Supreme Court ruled that Mormons were not exempt from
the law forbidding multiple wives. Polygamy was made a crime in
Utah "because of the evil consequences that were supposed to flow
from plural marriages." The Court wrote that a "free,
self-governing commonwealth" presupposes monogamy, upon
which
society may be said to be
built. . . . In fact, according as monogamous or
polygamous marriages are allowed, do we find the principles on
which the government of the people, to a greater or lesser
extent, rests. . . . [P]olygamy leads to the
patriarchal principle, and which, when applied to large
communities, fetters the people in stationary despotism, while
that principle cannot long exist in connection with
monogamy.
The Republican Party platform of 1856
had condemned "those twin relics of barbarism -- Polygamy, and
Slavery." Both were viewed as enemies of liberty. Polygamy was
thought to be the antithesis of the proper equality between man
and wife. The moral message of polygamy is that one woman is not
good enough for a real man. The Supreme Court pointed out,
correctly, that polygamy was practiced elsewhere in the world only
under despotic governments in Asia and
Africa.38
Mormons were permitted to become full
members of the American community only after they repudiated the
practice. The U.S. government viewed the Mormon church in effect
as an organization that promoted the crime of polygamy. In 1890
the Supreme Court upheld the government's right to seize church
property. Threatened with the loss of all that it owned, the
church accepted the authority of the laws forbidding plural
marriages. It had become clear that under the U.S. Constitution,
which Mormons believed to be divinely inspired, "circumstances
would [not] admit" polygamy. In 1896 Congress admitted Utah
as a state. We should note that even before that date most Mormons
led otherwise exemplary lives; afterwards, they became a mainstay
of moral decency and civilized conduct in
America.39
Political scientist Richard Sherlock
believes that this nineteenth-century American intolerance of
Mormonism was based on "hostility to serious communal religion,"
which he traces to James Madison and the American founding.
Sherlock sees no significant difference between the early American
treatment of Mormons and of Catholics. Yet Catholics quickly
overcame the legal disabilities inherited from colonial days,
while Mormons were accepted only after they embraced the moral law
approved by the rest of American society. Sherlock fails to see
that the treatment of Mormons did not arise from hostility to
"serious communal religion," but from hostility to immorality. The
U.S. Constitution guarantees free exercise of religion, but not
for religious practices that, in the words of the Supreme Court in
1890, are "repugnant to our laws and the principles of our
civilization."40
The Early American Consensus in
Favor of Government Support of Religion
We have mentioned three of the
Founders' reasons for regarding religion as a good thing:
because through it men do their duty to God; because it is a
foundation of morality; and because it supports liberty. The
question naturally arises whether government should limit itself
merely to allowing religious liberty, or whether it should
actively foster religion by its encouragement and
support.
Today's prevailing opinion, expressed
frequently by the Supreme Court, is clear: The purpose of the
First Amendment "was to create a complete and permanent separation
of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority by
comprehensively forbidding every form of public aid or support for
religion."41
No one in the Founders' generation
would have agreed. There was, however, considerable disagreement
among the Founders about how far government should go to support
religion.
At one end of American opinion was the
Massachusetts constitution of 1780. The people of each town were
required "to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for
the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support
and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion
and morality."
Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution was
closer to the mainstream. It forbid a religious establishment, but
contained this provision:
Laws for the encouragement of virtue,
and prevention of vice and immorality, shall be made and
constantly kept in force, and provision shall be made for their
due execution: And all religious societies or bodies of men
heretofore united or incorporated for the advancement of
religion and learning, or for other pious and charitable
purposes, shall be encouraged and
protected.
Probably the most obnoxious means by
which religion was supported, from the point of view of many of
the Founders (and of Americans today), was a requirement that some
or all state office holders be Protestant (New Hampshire, New
Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia) or Christian
(Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland). This was done
by means of a required oath. For example, Pennsylvania required
members of the state legislature to swear, "I do believe in one
God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the
good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the
scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine
Inspiration."
However, these tests were soon
abandoned. By 1798, only seven of the then fifteen states still
required religious tests for holding public office. The remaining
state tests were dropped or fell into disuse early in the
nineteenth century. The U.S. Constitution outlaws all religious
tests for federal office.
Congress was forbidden by the First
Amendment "to make any law regarding an establishment of
religion." This amendment was supported both by those like Madison
who totally opposed government establishments of religion, and by
those who favored them. It had no effect whatever on existing
state policies. It kept the federal government out of the business
of either establishing a national religion, or disestablishing a
state religion.42
To see how far we have departed from
the Founders' understanding, consider some of the many ways in
which the federal government promoted religion before the 1960s.
For example:
- Congress and the president have
frequently called for national days of prayer and thanksgiving.
The House of Representatives voted to issue the first such call
on September 24, 1789, the same day that it passed the First
Amendment, stating that "Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion."43
- Every president has invoked God's
name or the equivalent in a prayerful manner in his inaugural
address. Lincoln's Second Inaugural was an interpretation of the
Civil War as a divine punishment of the whole nation for the sin
of slavery. It is the most beautiful, and the most theological,
of all the presidential inaugurals ever
delivered.44
- From 1789 to today, Congress has
authorized chaplains, paid by public funds, to offer prayers in
Congress and in the armed services.
- With Madison's agreement, Congress
required in 1787 that a lot in each township in the Northwest
Territories "be given perpetually for the purposes of
religion."45
- Jefferson signed a treaty into law
in 1803 that provided for a government-funded Catholic
missionary to the Kaskaskia Indians, "who will engage to perform
for said tribe the duties of his office, and also to instruct as
many of their children as possible in the rudiments of
literature." An 1819 law authorized the president to employ
"capable persons of good moral character" to instruct the
Indians. A Protestant missionary, Samuel Worcester, used his
appointment to preach the Gospel. The Supreme Court upheld this
law, and the appointment of Worcester, as a "humane
policy."46
- In 1832 Congress approved a land
grant to Columbian College (later George Washington University),
a Baptist institution in the District of Columbia. In 1833 it
approved a similar grant to Georgetown University, a Jesuit
school for the education of Catholic boys.47
- Inscribed on the wall of the Supreme
Court are the Ten Commandments. Yet the Court ruled in 1980 that
posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is a forbidden
establishment of religion. The Court begins each session with
the prayer: "God save the United States and this Honorable
Court" -- written by an official on the public
payroll.48
- Congress placed the Declaration of
Independence, with its account of God's relation to America, at
the front of the U.S. Code, as the first of the organic laws of
the United States.
From these examples of federal
"sponsorship, financial support, and active involvement
. . . in religious activity," we conclude that the
Founders understood the words "establishment of religion"
(forbidden by the First Amendment) quite narrowly. An
establishment was a designation of a particular sect or sects as
the official religion of the state or nation, or government
funding of the regular worship activities or buildings of a
particular sect.
State governments long engaged in many
similar religious activities, most importantly in the public
schools. States have outlawed blasphemy against Christianity and
required store closings on Sundays. They have given churches
exemptions from property tax and other privileges. Yet almost
every state has a provision in its constitution prohibiting an
establishment of religion.
Is Government Support of
Religion Compatible with Religious Liberty?
We assume today that there is a
conflict -- or at least a tension -- between free exercise
and government support of religion. But millions of
American statesmen and voters supported the policies just listed.
Is it not presumptuous on our part to assume so easily that for
almost two centuries all these Americans were totally ignorant of
the meaning of religious liberty, and that suddenly, around 1960,
our eyes were opened and we saw the matter in its true light? Is
it not more likely that earlier Americans had good reasons to
believe that there is no necessary conflict between religious
liberty and government support?
We will leave aside the case of state
establishments of particular religious sects, which were
controversial even in the founding era. No state has funded
religious worship or named an official state church since
Massachusetts abandoned her requirement that towns fund "public
Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality" in the
1830s.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 is one
of the organic laws of the United States, printed at the beginning
of the U.S. Code along with the Declaration of Independence and
Constitution. The same Congress of 1789 that passed the First
Amendment voted to reconfirm the Ordinance, which laid out
standards for the government of the territories north of the Ohio
River -- the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois,
and Wisconsin. The Ordinance required "the fundamental principles
of civil and religious liberty [to be] the basis of all laws,
constitutions, and governments, which forever hereafter shall be
formed in the said territory." Article I of the Ordinance
therefore reads: "No person, demeaning himself in a peaceable and
orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of
worship, or religious sentiments, in the said
territory."
However, Article VI says: "Religion,
morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and
the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall
forever be encouraged." To execute this article, Congress
specified that plots of land be reserved throughout the territory
for public schools, within which, of course, religion and morality
would be taught.
Why did Congress see no conflict
between its call for public schools to teach religion and its
guarantee of religious liberty in the Ordinance, not to mention
its First Amendment guarantee of free exercise and prohibition of
a federal "establishment of religion"? The answer lies in the
meaning of free exercise of religion, which is much misunderstood
today. Consider the language of the Northwest Ordinance: "No
person . . . shall ever be molested on account of his
mode of worship, or religious sentiments." (The Massachusetts
constitution said, "no subject shall be hurt, molested, or
restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate" for his mode of
worship.) Religious freedom is freedom from injury because of
one's religion. No one is "molested" or injured when taxed to
support a religious teaching he does not agree with, any more than
he is injured when taxed to support any other government activity
he does not like. Of course, the Founders considered taxation
legitimate only when it serves the common good, in this as in any
other activity of government. That is why the Ordinance justifies
its policy of support by saying that "religion [is] necessary to
good government and the happiness of mankind" (just as
Massachusetts said that towns were required to support religion in
order to "promote their happiness and to secure the good order and
preservation of civil government"). Government support of
religious content in public education is not molestation. There
is no conflict between "free exercise" and "government support,"
as long as the support in question does not penalize individuals
for adopting, or failing to adopt, a particular mode of
worship.
Or course, when government support
benefits a particular religious sect, it unavoidably disappoints
or angers those not funded. It also treats them unequally, as
Madison argued in the Memorial. When public officials offer
prayers, the more sectarian the prayer, the more those who are not
of the same sect are offended.
These considerations have led most
presidents and other leading public officials to speak in as
nonsectarian a manner as possible in their prayers and
proclamations, while avoiding the opposite defect of indifference
or absence of content. Washington set the tone in his First
Inaugural Address, where God was addressed as "that Almighty Being
who rules over the universe," the "Great Author of every public
and private good," and the "benign Parent of the human race."
Washington concluded his letter to the Hebrew Congregation at
Newport with this ecumenical prayer: "May the Father of all
mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us
all in our several vocations useful here and, in His own due time
and way, everlastingly happy."
Government Should Teach
Religious Doctrines that Promote Morality and
Freedom
We have already shown that the right to
free exercise of religion did not excuse, in Jefferson's words,
"criminal acts dictated by religious error." How did Jefferson
know that criminal acts are dictated by "religious error"? Could
they not be dictated by religious truth? Behind Jefferson's remark
lies this argument: Our reason teaches us the difference between
morality and immorality. For example, we know that murder,
stealing, and slavery are wrong because they violate the
self-evident truth that all men possess the natural rights to
life, liberty, and property. We know that adultery is wrong
because it undermines the core institution of civilized society,
the monogamous family. A religion whose teaching violates these
moral truths must therefore be wrong.
Samuel West, the Boston preacher quoted
earlier, agreed: "A revelation, pretending to be from God, that
contradicts any part of the natural law, ought immediately to be
rejected as an imposture."49
This was an understanding that both
believers and unbelievers shared. Believers held that God gives
men access to the truth in two ways: through reason and through
revelation. Unbelievers placed no particular trust in Scripture,
but they too respected the discoveries of reason. The ground
common to both reason and revelation was called the natural
law.
This common ground made it possible for
government not only to reject false religious doctrine (such as
polygamy), but to endorse, without fear of giving offense,
theological doctrines that conform to the "law of nature and of
nature's God." In his official capacity as president, Jefferson
praised America's
benign religion, professed, indeed,
and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating
honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man;
acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all
its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of
man here and his greater happiness
hereafter.
In today's America, this consensus has
broken down. Many believers now view capitalism as a violation of
the "preferential option for the poor" supposedly commanded by the
Bible, while others hold that socialism violates the commandment
"Thou shalt not steal." Some even believe that the traditional
moral law, because it forbids illicit sex and supports the
integrity of the family, is evil. Episcopal Bishop Joseph Spong
calls the Ten Commandments "immoral" because, he says, they
"define women as property."50 More traditional
Christians and Jews see the Ten Commandments as the solution, not
the problem. We can no longer speak as Jefferson did of a single
"benign religion" that teaches a common moral code. If we look at
religion from the Founders' point of view, we cannot speak of the
goodness of "religion in general" when in the name of religion
property rights and marriage are condemned as evil. Therefore we
must state without hesitation that government support of religion
is and ought to be preferential.
For the Founders, government had no
right to compel people to believe, or say they believe, in the
religious truth as it sees it. But government also had no
obligation to be neutral between religious doctrines favoring
despotism or immorality, and those favoring freedom or morality.
Moreover, government should teach and support the theology of
freedom, the theology of the Declaration. That is exactly what was
done by leaders like Washington, Jefferson, and Adams during the
founding era, and by Lincoln in his great Civil War
speeches.
The Theology of the Great Seal
of the United States
The Founders' conception of God's
relation to America was pictured in the Great Seal of the United
States, devised in 1782, and printed today on the dollar bill. The
reverse side of the Seal -- the pyramid -- represents the
theological teaching of the Declaration of
Independence.
Much nonsense has been written on the
Seal's supposed Masonic symbolism. The definitive 1976 history of
the Seal finds no evidence to support the claim of Masonic
inspiration or meaning. The reading of the Seal offered here is
based on what was approved by Congress in 1782, and on what is
obvious to the eye and clearly implied in the
words.51
The reverse of the Seal consists of two
parts: a heavenly eye and an earthly pyramid. Each part is labeled
with a Latin motto.
In the earthly part, a pyramid rises
toward the heaven. Congress adopted co-designer Charles Thomson's
1782 report as part of its law approving the Seal. It explains
that "The pyramid signifies strength and duration." On the base of
the pyramid is the Roman number MDCCLXXVI (1776), the date, as
Thomson remarks, of the Declaration of Independence. The pyramid
has thirteen rows of bricks, signifying the thirteen original
states. (The number of rows is not specified in the law, but there
are thirteen in co-designer William Barton's original drawing, and
on the 1778 fifty-dollar bill from which the pyramid idea was
originally taken.)52 The pyramid is the United States,
a solid structure of freedom, built on the foundation of the
Declaration, in a world hostile to civil and religious liberty. It
is unfinished because America is a work in progress. More states
will be added later.
"In the zenith" above the unfinished
pyramid, the 1782 law calls for "an eye in a triangle, surrounded
with a glory." This design and placement of God's eye suggests
that America is connected to the divine in three ways.
First, the eye keeps watch over
America, protecting her from her enemies. Thomson's report
explains: "The eye over it and the motto allude to the many signal
interventions of providence in favor of the American cause." The
Declaration of Independence had expressed "a firm reliance on the
protection of divine providence."
Second, the complete triangle enclosing
God's eye is a model for the incomplete or imperfect triangular
shape of the pyramid below. The perfect divine shape symbolizes
God's perfection, which we know through his laws, which in turn
guide and govern the construction of the earthly pyramid. The
Declaration says that America, grounded on "the laws of nature and
of nature's God," seeks to secure the rights with which the
Creator endowed all men. America is a work in progress in a deeper
sense than its number of states. No matter how many rows of bricks
(new states) are added to the pyramid, America must always look to
the Supreme Being as, and at, her "zenith," to be true to what she
is and aspires to be. In the spirit of the Seal, Lincoln once
said:
It is said in one of the admonitions
of the Lord, "As your Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also
perfect." The Savior, I suppose, did not expect that any human
creature could be perfect as the Father in
Heaven. . . . He set that up as a standard, and
he who did most towards reaching that standard, attained the
highest degree of moral perfection. So I say that in relation to
the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as
nearly reached as we can.53
Third, the all-seeing eye is not only
America's protector and ruling guide. God is also her judge. This
theme is not as obvious as the first two, but it is implied by the
motto annuit coeptis, "He approves of what has been
started." These words imply that God will no longer approve if
America strays too far from the right path -- if the shape of the
pyramid departs too far from the divine model. In the Declaration,
America "appeal[ed] to the Supreme Judge of the world for the
rectitude of our intentions." Facing the injustice of slavery,
Jefferson therefore trembled for his country when he reflected
"that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep
forever."
In sum, America is a nation "under God"
in three ways. God protects America; God perfects and rules
America; and God judges America.
The Seal has two Latin mottoes, one for
the heavenly and one for the earthly part. The mottoes are taken
from the great Roman poet Vergil.
The pyramid is labeled novus ordo
seclorum, "a new order of the ages" (or "New World Order").
Thomson's report explains, "the words under it signify the
beginning of the New American Era, which commences from that date
[1776]." The phrase is a variant of a line in Vergil's fourth
Eclogue: "a great order of the ages is born anew". This
Eclogue describes the return of the golden age, an age of
peace and plenty. The change of words is significant. America is a
"new order," not just a "great order." Vergil's golden age has
come before and will come again, but nothing like the American
founding has ever happened. No nation has ever grounded itself on
a universal principle, discovered by reason, confirmed by
revelation, and shared by all human beings everywhere: "all men
are created equal."
"Over the eye," says the 1782 law,
"these words, annuit coeptis." Literally translated, they
mean: "he has nodded [or nods] in assent to the things that have
been started" -- namely, to the pyramid under construction, the
"new order of the ages." In Vergil's Aeneid, Aeneas leads a
remnant of men from conquered Troy over the sea to a land far to
the west. After they arrive in Italy, the natives mount a
ferocious attack against them. In the midst of the battle,
Aeneas's son Ascanius prays to "all-powerful Jupiter" to "nod in
assent to the daring things that have been started." Jupiter hears
the prayer; Ascanius shoots, and his arrow pierces the enemy's
head. That small band of Trojan warriors will eventually become
Rome, the greatest empire in world
history.54
The two mottoes point to the founding
of Rome (the Aeneid) and the golden age (Eclogue 4).
Taken together they suggest that America, with divine approval and
support, will become a New Rome, combining the glory of the old
Rome with the freedom, prosperity, and peace of the golden age.
America's foundation, like Rome's, had to be laid in violence. The
enemies of liberty had to be killed, and they will always have to
be killed. But unlike Rome, the new order will not grow to
greatness through warfare and conquest, but through the arts of
peace. (On the front of the Seal, the eagle's head is pointed
toward the olive branch in his right talon, not the arrows of war
in his left.) As Washington wrote to the Newport Jews, in America
"everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and
there shall be none to make him afraid."
We can now see that General Patton's
demand for a weather prayer was well grounded in what we may call
America's non-established civil religion, as taught in the
Declaration of Independence, the Great Seal, and in the last
stanza of the national anthem, the Star-Spangled
Banner:
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen
shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's
desolation,
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the
Heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and
preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause
it is just,
And this be our motto -- "In God is our
trust."
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall
wave,
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the
brave.
Why the Founders' Understanding
of Religious Liberty Matters
Today, large numbers of conservatives
and liberals alike believe that the principle of religious liberty
requires the state to be neutral or even hostile toward
religion.
The view of liberty, which is grounded
in moral relativism, leads people on the left to demand the
expulsion from American public life of the few remaining remnants
of traditional morality and religious expression. The limitation
of marriage to a man and a woman, the lingering presence of
Christmas holidays and songs in public schools, taxpayer support
of legislative and military chaplains—all these holdovers of the
repressive traditions of the past must go.
People on the right, holding the same
view of religious liberty, too often conclude that they should
despise or deny their country's principles. What other course
remains for Christians or Jews who believe that America's
principles are indifferent to, or at war with, their deepest
religious convictions? What other course remains for one who
aspires to the classical ideal of virtue and nobility?
But this is a false dilemma. The
prevailing interpretation of religious liberty is
wrong.
Liberals need to learn that although
the right to free exercise of religion is indeed sacred, it is
both appropriate and necessary for government to limit abuses of
religious liberty, and to support sound religious convictions, in
a nation that means to remain free.
Conservatives need to recover the
Founders' understanding that a "naked public square" -- a public
life that allows no place for the expression of the deepest
foundation and purpose of liberty -- is not fit for human
habitation. They need not be shy about their desire for public
acknowledgment of the importance of God in our lives -- as long as
every individual is protected in his "natural and unalienable
right to worship God according to the dictates of his own
conscience, and reason."
Return to top
Endnotes
1 George S. Patton, Jr.,
War As I Knew It (orig. pub. 1947; New York: Bantam, 1980),
pp. 175-6.
2 Everson v. Board of
Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).
3 Thanksgiving proclamation,
Nov. 1, 1777, authored by Samuel Adams, in Adams, Writings,
ed. Harry A. Cushing (New York: Putnam's, 1904), vol. 3, pp.
414-6.
4 Madison, Federalist
no. 63. Samuel West, On the Right to Rebel against
Governors (1776), in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz,
ed., American Political Writing during the Founding Era
(Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983), p. 415 (my
emphasis).
5 Planned Parenthood v.
Casey, 112 S.Ct. 2791. These relativistic words were written
by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter -- all
Republicans.
6 Letter of January 1, 1802,
in Writings, (New York: Library of America, 1984), p.
510.
7 Everson v. Board of
Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947). Lee v. Weisman, 112 S.Ct.
2649 (1992).
8 Engel v. Vitale,
370 U.S. 421 (1962). Brennan, concurring opinion, Abington
School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), emphasis
added. Charles E. Rice, The Supreme Court and Public Prayer
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1964), pp. 19, 112-3. "A
world that is dead and gone" is from Brennan's Georgetown speech,
October 12, 1985, in Edwin Meese et al., The Great Debate
(Washington: Federalist Society, 1986), pp. 17, 23-25.
9 Michael W. McConnell,
"Accommodation of Religion," in Philip B. Kurland et al., ed.,
The Supreme Court Review: 1985 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 21, 39. McConnell, "The Origins and
Historical Understanding of Free Exercise of Religion," Harvard
Law Review, vol. 103 (May 1990), pp. 1409-1517.
10 Linda Greenhouse,
"Justices Hear Campus Religion Case: University Challenged for
Refusal to Subsidize Christian Magazine," New York Times,
March 2, 1995, p. A11. James R. Stoner, "Religious Liberty and
Common Law: Free Exercise Exemptions and American Courts,"
Polity, vol. 26 (Fall 1993), criticizes McConnell on pp.
9-14.
11 Lee v. Weisman,
112 S. Ct. 2649 (1992) (Souter's concurring opinion shows that
public prayer is necessarily "preferentialist"). Marsh v.
Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983) (permitting chaplains). The
Re-Imaging conference: A Catalog of Concerns: The Episcopal
Church in the U.S. under Edmond Lee Browning (Mobile, AL:
AWAKE, 1995), p. 14.
12 Francis N. Thorpe, ed.,
The Federal and State Constitutions (Washington: Government
Printing Office, 1909), pp. 2453-4.
13 South Carolina's free
exercise guarantee did not come until 1790.
14 Madison, Memorial and
Remonstrance, in Hyneman and Lutz, American Political
Writing during the Founding Era, p. 636. Madison, letter to
Bradford, January 24, 1774, in Robert S. Alley, ed., James
Madison on Religious Liberty (Buffalo: Prometheus Books,
1985), p. 48.
15 The Federalist,
no. 10 and 51.
16 Virginia Declaration of
Rights (1776), in Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, ed., The
Founders' Constitution: Major Themes (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), p. 7.
17 Hyneman and Lutz,
American Political Writing, p. 632. Cf. Eva Brann,
"Madison's `Memorial and Remonstrance,'" in Glen Thurow and
Jeffrey D. Wallin, ed., Rhetoric and American Statesmanship
(Durham: Carolina Academic Press and The Claremont Institute,
1984), pp. 9-46, and Peter A. Lawler, "James Madison and the
Metaphysics of Modern Politics," Review of Politics, vol.
48 (1986), pp. 92-115.
18 Philip S. Denenfield,
"The Conciliar Declaration and the American Declaration," in John
Courtnay Murray, ed., Religious Liberty (New York:
Macmillan, 1966), p. 120, quoted by Tim Burns, "The Declaration on
Religious Liberty: Synthesizing Traditions" (xerox).
19 Craycraft, "Virtue among
the Ruins," The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1991, p.
34.
20 Memorial, in
Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing, pp. 634-5.
Tench Coxe, "An American Citizen IV," October 21, 1787, in John P.
Kaminski et al., ed., Commentaries on the Constitution
(Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1981-), vol. 1,
p. 432.
21 Madison, Memorial and
Remonstrance, in Hyneman and Lutz, American Political
Writing, pp. 634-5. Jaffa, The American Founding as the
Best Regime: The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty
(Claremont: Claremont Institute, 1990), p. 15.
22 Rush, speech in
Pennsylvania ratifying convention, December 12, 1787, Merrill
Jensen, ed., Documentary History of the Ratification of the
Constitution, vol. 2: Ratification of the Constitution by
States: Pennsylvania (Madison: State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, 1976), p. 595.
23 Federalist no. 51.
Letter to Beasley, November 20, 1825, in Alley, James
Madison, p. 85.
24 Washington, A
Collection, pp. 469, 521.
25 Jefferson, Notes on
the State of Virginia, Query 18, in Writings, p. 289
(my emphasis).
26 Madison,
Federalist no. 37. Washington, A Collection, p.
461.
27 Cooper, A Sermon
(1780), in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the Founding
Era, 1730-1805 (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), p. 637,
quoting Acts 17:26.
28 Washington, "Circular to
the States" (1783), in A Collection, p. 240. Jefferson to
Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Writings, p. 1517. Jefferson
to Madison, December 16, 1787, in James M. Smith, ed., The
Republic of Letters (New York: Norton, 1995), vol. 1, p.
458.
29 Parkman, France and
England in North America (New York: Library of America, 1983),
vol. 1, p. 1354; vol.2, p. 1216.
30 Ramsay, The History of
the American Revolution, 2 vols. (orig. pub. 1789;
Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990), vol. 1, p. 28. Ramsay is
paraphrasing Edmund Burke, "Speech on Conciliation with the
Colonies" (1775).
31 Samuel Davies, The
Curse of Cowardice (1758), in The Annals of America
(Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968), vol. 2, pp.
23-24.
32 Howard, A Sermon
Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in
Boston (1773), in Hyneman and Lutz, American Political
Writing, pp. 193-4, 201.
33 Carroll, "To John Fenno
of the Gazette of the U.S.," June 10, 1789, in Thomas O. Hanley,
ed., The John Carroll Papers (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame, 1976), vol. 1, p. 365. Anson P. Stokes, Church and
State in the United States (New York: Harper, 1950), p.
862.
34 Democracy in
America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City: Doubleday
Anchor, 1969), pp. 289-90.
35 Washington, letter to the
Hebrew Congregation of Newport, in Stokes, Church and State in
the United States, p. 862.
36 Letter of July 31, 1788,
in Adrienne Koch et al., The Life and Selected Writings of
Thomas Jefferson (New York: Modern Library, 1944), p.
451.
37 Stokes, Church and
State in the United States, vol. 1, pp. 848-9 (emphasis
added). Stoner, "Religious Liberty and Common Law," p. 23. Gerard
V. Bradley, "Beguiled: Free Exercise Exemptions and the Siren Song
of Liberalism," Hofstra Law Review, vol. 20 (Winter 1991),
pp. 245-319, shows that this municipal court case had no force as
precedent; as in other states, the confidentiality of the
confessional was secured by a law passed by the state
legislature.
38 Reynolds v. U.S.,
998 U.S. 244 (1879) (emphasis added). Arthur S. Schlesinger, Jr.,
ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (New York: Chelsea
House, 1973), vol. 2, p. 1204.
39 The relevant documents
are in John T. Noonan, ed., The Believer and the Powers that
Are: Cases, History, and Other Data Bearing on the Relation of
Religion and Government (New York: Macmillan, 1987), pp.
194-207. The quotation is from Late Corporation of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints v. U.S., 136 U.S. 1
(1890).
40 Richard Sherlock,
"Liberalism at a Dead End," Crisis, April 1995, p. 19.
Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (1890).
41 Dissent of Rutledge in
Everson v. Board, 330 U.S. 1 (1947), cited with approval in
Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203
(1963).
42 Gary D. Glenn, "Forgotten
Purposes of the First Amendment Religion Clause," Review of
Politics, vol. 49 (Summer 1987), pp. 340-367.
43 Noonan, Believer and
the Powers That Are, pp. 127-8.
44 Rice, The Supreme
Court, pp. 177-93, quotes the relevant passages from the
addresses from 1789-1961.
45 Noonan, Believer,
p. 138. Rice, Supreme Court, p. 65.
46 Rice, Supreme
Court, p. 64. Noonan, Believer, p. 138.
47 Noonan, Believer,
p. 138.
48 Rice, Supreme
Court, p. 4. Justice Douglas cites other examples in his
concurring opinion in Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962),
all of which he says should be ruled unconstitutional. Stone v.
Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980) (Ten Commandments case).
49 On the Right to Rebel
against Governors (1776), in Hyneman and Lutz, American
Political Writing, p. 414.
50 Spong made this statement
at a homosexuality symposium at President Clinton's Foundry United
Methodist Church in Washington, according to Mark Tooley, "St.
Jack's Gospel," Foundations (Newsletter of the Episcopal
Synod of America), January 1996, p. 8.
51 Richard S. Patterson and
Richardson Dougall, The Eagle and the Shield: A History of the
Great Seal of the United States (Washington: Government
Printing Office, 1976), pp. 83-91, 529-32.
52 Patterson, Eagle and
Shield, pp. 66-8.
53 Lincoln, speech at
Chicago, July 10, 1858, in Roy T. Basler, ed., Collected Works
of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1953), vol. 2, p. 501.
54 Eclogues 4.5;
Aeneid 9.625. The line reads Juppiter omnipotens,
audacibus adnue coeptis (literally, "All-powerful Jupiter, nod
to the daring things that have been started"). The same phrase
also occurs in Vergil's Georgics, 1.40, in a prayer to
Caesar; I can think of no plausible connection to the teaching of
the American Seal.
Thomas G. West is a Senior Fellow of
The Claremont Institute and Professor of Politics at the
University of Dallas.
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