Sarah Palin thinks of the founding age of the United States as an era of “Christian Roots.” That’s true in a way, but not in the way that Palin means it. In rejecting the principle that God should be separated in any way from the state, she disrespects the unique genius of our country.
First, we have to consider why the majority of Europeans settled here in the 17th and early 18th Centuries.
The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens. Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of the concept, denounced by Roger Williams as “inforced uniformity of religion,” meant majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst.
But these settlers were not so different in outlook from the culture from which they fled. The colonies tended to be outposts of uniformity. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was Congregationalist. Pennsylvania was Quaker. Virginia was Anglican, and so on. You could even look at these early settlements as akin in some ways to what has been attempted in Israel. These people had tried practicing their religion in Europe, but had found it too dangerous. They wanted a place where they could worship without harassment and persecution. In this sense, the early settlers were very much Christian in their outlook.
But two things happened during the 18th-Century that changed things. First, more and more people began coming for cheap land and other non-religious motivations as new land began to open up in the interior of the country. Second, Europe came up with their own solution to the problem of constant sectarian strife. It was called the Enlightenment. I am not going to try to explain the Enlightenment in this piece, but our Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by it and used its principles to meld together the 13 colonies into one religiously tolerant country.
The reason our Constitution says right at the outset of the Bill of Rights that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ is because the colonies had been doing just that. And if the Congress passed a law saying that Congregationalism is the one true religion, then all the states outside of New England would have revolted. To see how true what I’m telling you is, consider the following:
The First Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly forbids the U.S. federal government from enacting any law respecting a religious establishment, and thus forbids either designating an official church for the United States, or interfering with State and local official churches — which were common when the First Amendment was enacted. It did not prevent state governments from establishing official churches. Connecticut continued to do so until it replaced its colonial Charter with the Connecticut Constitution of 1818; Massachusetts retained an establishment of religion in general until 1833. (The Massachusetts system required every man to belong to some church, and pay taxes towards it; while it was formally neutral between denominations, in practice the indifferent would be counted as belonging to the majority denomination, and in some cases religious minorities had trouble being recognized at all.)
And lest you think that we now live a country of perfect religious liberty:
All current U.S. state constitutions include guarantees of religious liberty parallel to the First Amendment, but eight (Arkansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas) also contain clauses that prohibit atheists from holding public office.
Since 1961, the (evil) Supreme Court has held those laws unenforceable. So, even to this day, the Massachusetts Constitution says that an atheist cannot serve in public office. And the only reason that an atheist can serve in the socialist utopia of Massachusetts is because of the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s eventual insistence that it applied to the states as well as to Congress.
But all of this might lead you to think that our Christian Roots are still as strong as the day this country was founded. That is, unless, of course, you consider that the whole originality of the American experiment was the idea that a nation of people could exist without conformity in their religious beliefs. To illustrate my point, I want to use two quotes from the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson:
“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
Now you know why the Palinites on the Texas Board of Education have replaced Thomas Jefferson with John Calvin in the approved curriculum.
I believe Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) was the first Christian (non-trinity denying Deist) president of the United States. However, he didn’t join a church until a year after he left office. That’s a lot of our history where our leaders were more inspired by Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, and Hume than they were by the New Testament. Long after we had the Second Great Awakening most of our presidents expressed little to no affinity for the dogmas of any sect of Christianity. As recent an example as President William Howard Taft was a non-believer:
Before becoming president, Taft was offered the presidency of Yale University, at that time affiliated with the Congregationalist Church; Taft turned the post down, saying, “I do not believe in the divinity of Christ.”
Of course, it’s hard to come to grips with this history in our current environment where we have only one avowed atheist in all of Congress. It makes one wonder who really lost the America that once sparkled so brightly as a beacon of freethinking and tolerance.
