I posted an essay today at the Rockridge Institute’s online conference Spiritual Progressives: A Dialogue on Values and Building a Movement. Discussions today focus on such matters as religion and politics and separation of church and state. The conference is ongoing, May 9th-May 20th.
Here is my contribution.
How to deal with the matter of religion and public life was one of the central questions facing the framers of the Constitution as they invented a new nation. (I have written about this on my web site and in my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.)
For 150 years, the colonies had, for the most part, been little theocracies, run by different established churches. The framers knew well the problems posed by religious supremacism, although they certainly did not call it that in those days. They understood what can happen when religions wield state power. And they knew that in order to bind together the potentially fractious new nation they needed to inoculate it against the ravages of religious bigotry and worse — the religious warfare that had wracked Europe for a millennium.
What did they do? Well, in the first place they made no mention of God in the Constitution. What they did do, was to put in Article 6, a key phrase, “…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” (Cornell University historian Issack Kramnick details the history of Article 6 in his book The Godless Constitution.)
What this meant was that for the first time in the history of the world, religious orientation would not be a consideration as to one’s qualifications for office. By logical extension, this also meant that one’s religious identity would be irrelevant to one’s status as a citizen. This clause, set in motion the disestablishment of the churches, by making religious equality the law of the land. It was a radical idea, and it passed overwhelmingly and with little debate. When the Constitution was sent to the state legislatures for ratification, the absence of mention of God and Christianity in the Constitution led the the Christian Right of the day to fight ratification. They lost.
While it was deeply significant that Catholics, atheists, Quakers, and Jews would enjoy equal status as citizens in the United States along with Protestants of various sorts, they key was that people had the right to believe differently. Religious freedom, as we think of it now, is the right of individual conscience. In terms of our role as citizens this is perhaps best framed as religious equality. I believe that when we are grounded in this history and are able to articulate this history and its contemporary meaning, progressives will own the moral and political high ground in the public debate with the theocratic Christian Right.
The First Amendment built on and clarified the implications of Article 6. But what Article 6 did was to establish the right to believe and to think differently without having to answer to a state sponsored religious orthodoxy. The right to believe and therefore to think differently, is a necessary prerequisite for speaking freely and worshipping freely. It is this right to believe differently that is the foundation for every advance in civil and human rights in our history.
It is also the historical fact of our right to believe differently as enshrined in Article 6 that unravels the false claim that the U.S. was founded as a “Christian nation.” Indeed, it was Christians, members of established churches, who wrote the Constitution and who ratified it in the state legislatures. In that sense it was Christian political leaders who believed so deeply in the need for religious equality that they disestablished their own churches.
If religious equality is to survive in our time, I believe it is necessary for us to reclaim our history and stand up to the historical revisionism of today’s theocratic Christian Right.
[Crossposted at Talk to Action]
Mr. Clarkson,
Well done sir, thank you for expressing so eloquently what I have felt within my soul about this issue. I am no scholar but have read my share of history of the constitution and the federalist papers, and in my brief reading of these I could find not a single reference to a christian ethos of the United States of America. The mention of God as a Diety, a supreme power that provided guidance to our founding fathers is mentioned, but nothing to state what the Reichwingers are saying is a christian nation. Thank you for your wonderful research into this on going issue.
Thanks for the kind words, GDW, and you are very welcome.
About ten years ago I kept running into the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. I knew it wasn’t true, but I didn’t have a good explanation. Now, I think I do.
I’ll echo ghostdancers comment. This is the best, simple and concise explanation that should be read by everyone on the right.(although I don’t know if they’d believe it anyway)
for now, I’d settle for everyone on the left;-)
which is far too often ignored by those who wish to argue this is a Christian nation.
The founders had plenty of experience with the division religion could cause. Yes, they were not unanimous on the subject of separation of church and state, as the bitterest opponent of Madison’s efforts to get Jefferson’s Statute of Religious freedom enacted was none other than Patrick Henry.
We far too often ignore some of the history of religious intolerance in our ealry days, whether it was the hanging of Mary Dyer and two other Quakers by the Puritans on Boston Common, or that the Maryland Act of Toleration in theory required capital punishment for anyone who did not suppor the doctrine of the holy trinity.
There have always been those who have (ab)used religion for political purposes — you could explore Jefferson’s experience of attacks by Federalist clergy as one clear early example.
That said, we also have to remember that in many ways it was religion that led to much of our progress. Both the abolition and civil rights movements were driven by church folk — among those who marched with Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were Grek Archbishop Iakovos and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
I often wonder how selectively religious right are when they read scripture, how often they seem to want to ignore or gloss over the clear words of Jesus, whether it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to go through the Needle’s eye, or even more clear, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar and render unto God that which is God’s.
I would, if pushed, point both to the difference between the mote in your borhter’s eye and the beam in one’s own, or perhaps the caution about juding lest we ourselves be judged. In the altter case, I would argue, although I do not consider myself a Christian, that we should combine that cuation with Kant’s categorical imperative — that we not apply a standard that we are unwilling to see applied unviersally at all times and to all people. I would first insist that any standard be applied to the one who wishes to apply it to others. So if you tell me that you are judging according to your religious faith, then I would ask yuou to hold yoruself to account to the teaching of the sacred teexts you wish to interpret literally.
Not that such will listen to me. But then I would leave finish either with “whatsoever you do unto these the least of my brethren” or perhaps how can you say you love God whom you cannot see when yuou hate your brother whom you do see? Or to put it more bluntly, by their fruits shall you know them. And if those fruits be discord, then they are not fruits of God.
Wasn’t all that big a fan of establishments. The debate over the ratification of the 1st Amendment in VA had much more to do with the nature of enumerated powers and southern light manufacturing interests than it did with the good Mr. Henry’s point of view on religion.
There’s a very good retelling and analysis of the VA state legislatures battles over Religion in Leonard W. Levy, The Establishment Clause, (Chapel Hill 1994).