Reflecting on the American Revolution during her July 1976 address in Philadelphia as part of the bicentennial celebration, Queen Elizabeth II acknowledged that by losing the American colonies Great Britain had “learned the hard way” an important lesson. That lesson was “to respect the right of others to govern themselves in their own way.” “Without that great act in the cause of liberty” two hundred years ago, she observed, “we could never have transformed our Empire into a Commonwealth.”
Surely, then, it behooves Americans during the present semiquincentennial commemoration – a momentous occasion – to ponder anew the very character of “that great act in the cause of liberty.” What made it utterly unique in history? Which is to ask: what were the foundations – enduring foundations – upon which that experiment was founded?
In their important work The Forgotten Fathers on Religion and Public Life, Daniel L. Dreisbach, Mark David Hall, and Jeffry H. Morrison observe two general deficits when one surveys the almost boundless scholarship devoted to America’s founding. One is the (understandable) inclination to focus on the “elite” or more prominent figures, usually a cast of five characters (Washington, Franklin, Adams, Madison, and Jefferson). The flip-side of this approach, of course, is to neglect other important, though less prominent, figures (people such as James Wilson, James Otis, John Dickinson, John Witherspoon, John Jay, George Mason, Edmund Randolph, Benjamin Rush, and Roger Sherman).
Second, one detects in the literature the tendency to discount – or at least downplay – the role that religious faith and religious freedom played in the founders’ thought-world. Indeed, in the words of one cultural historian,
It would seem wildly implausible that American historical scholarship over the years has largely neglected the study of religion. Yet it is sadly true. Aside from a handful of moments in American history . . . , precious little in the story of American history [from its founding] that survives in our standard text books even hints at the strong and abiding religiosity of the American people.
This neglect is perhaps as we might expect, given the increasing secularization of American society over the last 125 years. Where historical scholarship has acknowledged the role of religion among the founders, the focus is often the sheer diversity of their beliefs – for example, orthodox versus heterodox, deist versus Christian, Calvinist versus non-Calvinist, and so on. What is often missing is recognition of the power and depth of these religious beliefs to the extent that they influenced the political culture of the day and helped safeguard the institutions that were designed to protect religious freedom.
RECOVERING RELIGION IN THE FOUNDING
A reframing of the narrative, as the work of scholars such as Dreisbach, Hall, and Morrison demonstrates, recognizes the profound role and influence of Christian faith in the founders’ generation. That does not lead us to conclude that America is or everwas a “Christian nation,” as some might contend in our day. But historical accuracy is honest with the evidence: namely, that Christian conviction was decidedly influential in 17th- and 18th-century colonial thought. It is surely the case, as Michael Novak argues, that several generations of scholarship have “thoroughly misconstrued the high achievements of the founding generation with respect to religious liberty.” Political and social historians are seemingly “bewildered” by “the extensive practical accommodations between religion and state” that the founders strained to realize.
A related tendency of conventional scholarship of the founding era is its relative inability to grasp the unique manner, among religions of the world, in which both Judaism and Christianity presuppose the importance of freedom of conscience. In truth, Judeo-Christian assumptions introduced certain dimensions of social, cultural, and political life that are simply not found in the classical pagan world.
Among these monotheistic elements are the notion of divine providence, human dignity based on the “image of God,” the concern for truth, the unity of private and public virtue, and the sacred rights of conscience. These elements mirror a distinctly classical Judeo-Christian conception of God over against, say, pantheism, deism, or universalism. As it affects human conceptions of society and political life, we may cite Jesus’ well-known teaching “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:15-22). Radically different from most world-views, this conceptualization presents two realms that co-exist. And importantly, these words of our Lord constitute an important barrier to the totalitarian state, irrespective of its ethno-cultural or ideological origin, ancient or modern. The state is hereby desacralized.
These Judeo-Christian presuppositions are very much on display in the American founders’ thinking and writings. In the words of one social historian, one can see in the American founding
the workings of a God who wishes to be worshipped in spirit and truth, in the honesty of conscience within, and in uncoerced exercise in the public square of daily life, among men and women who are free, independent, self-reliant, cooperative with one another in civil society, and responsible for their own destiny.
CHURCH AND STATE
At the most basic level, what is perhaps most “revolutionary” about the founders’ thinking is their understanding of the relationship between church and state. While the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” more familiar to most Americans is the language of “separation of church and state.” Daniel Dreisbach states the matter most succinctly: “No phrase in American letters has more profoundly influenced discourse and policy on church-state relations than Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation.’”
The phrase was often invoked in the 20th century to support “strict separationist” interpretations of the First Amendment. William Lee Miller, along with Dreisbach, reminds us that secularist “non-foundationalist” interpretations of “separation” of the past century are a notable departure from the vision of the founders and framers.
The separating of church and state certainly has not meant – despite some shrill cries that it should – the separating of religion from politics. Far from it. Churches and church-goers have been active in American politics and social policy on explicit religious grounds from the American Revolution through . . . the Civil Rights movements.
But if “separation of church and state” indeed does not mean exclusion of religion from public and political life (which it did not mean to the founders), then what does it mean? What if the “wall” constructed by the modern courts and legal commentators, which cannot be “high” and “impregnable” enough, is different from the “wall” described by Jefferson and thus a wrong construal of religion and public life?
A judicious reading of the founders makes it quite clear that in the late 18th century there was no single model of understanding relations between church and state. Americans of the founding era were divided. For all their profundity and status, Washington, Madison, and Jefferson themselves disagreed. And by the time of independence this disagreement had not abated. In fact, the very definition of “establishment” varied from region to region in the colonies, with each of the colonies possessing its own religious character and history, whether that character and history were Congregational, Presbyterian, Anglican, Baptist, Quaker, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Methodist, Catholic, Moravian, Mennonite, or Jewish.
But what the founders did share in common, their disagreements notwithstanding, was the consensual view that moral foundations are just that – underpinnings that are foundational to the health and vibrancy of American polity. “Laws of nature,” “self-evident truths,” “unalienable rights,” and “endowment by the Creator,” alas, are not mere theoretical constructs invented by the more analytical or rationalistic of the founders and framers. To the contrary, they express metaphysical realities that bear on the very essence of an ordered republic. Hence, religion could never be anything but foundational to the American experiment. In the words of the Continental Congress, “true religion and good morals are the only foundation of public liberty and happiness.”
The founders’ and framers’ affirmation in the First Amendment – disestablishment and free exercise of religion – in important ways defied centuries of thinking about church and state that were inherited from the European experience. Their wisdom can be seen in their refusal to either prescribe or proscribe religion; the two convictions and clauses are of one piece. In the end, we might argue that a more accurate metaphor for “separation” is a “fence” and not a “wall”; the former, in its design, at least facilitates interaction.
MORAL ORDER AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT
During this season of national commemoration and celebration, we do well, 250 years removed from our beginnings, to reflect on the basic assumptions that informed the founders’ generation and make religious freedom possible. The Judeo-Christian heritage, alongside human experience, taught the founders a moral realism as it concerns human nature. They well understood that human nature is a mixture of dignity and depravity. Therefore, on the one hand, to concentrate power in the hands of too few is dangerous and, on the other hand, virtue is an absolute necessity for a “civil” society, without which laws degenerate and society collapses. “Tyranny,” thus, can result from either a minority or a majority.
Alongside this moral realism, the founders understood that the rights of sacred conscience and religious freedom are pre-political, a gift of “nature and nature’s God.” Consequently, they realized that government, if it is just, protects what is “sacred” and thus what is a “natural right.” And it was in this light that they understood the nature of “tolerance.” In the 18th century, tolerance would have been understood as a foremost political virtue, thereby contributing to the common good. It was by no means understood as believing that any proposition, any claim, is as true as another. Truth and error co-exist.
The founders further realized that the “establishment” of religion by the state is not needed for support, as Christianity itself teaches. It flourishes on its own. Of course, ever on their minds was the fact that King George III was the head of the Church of England. And though we forget that John Locke, whose writings on religious toleration were freshly arriving in the America colonies, was forced to flee England for the Netherlands in the religious and political convulsions of the 1680s, the founders did not forget; they were acutely aware. By the late 18th century, almost thirteen centuries of Western history, quarrelsome and controversy-laden as they had been, provided evidence of two realms or “offices” that co-mingle yet are distinct, whether depicted as “two cities,” “two swords,” or “two kingdoms.”
As it applied to public life, the founders operated under the assumption that just laws and just relations proceed from an awareness of the natural moral law. Moral law, as they realized, is foundational to a “self-governed” people; a democratic republic simply cannot survive without virtuous and self-governed citizens. In our own time, we have been reminded of this sobering reality by witnesses such as Pope John Paul II. Notably in the encyclicals Veritatis Splendor (1993) and Evangelium Vitae (1995), John Paul observed a profound confusion between good and evil resulting in the corruption of conscience that has been taking place in our “culture of death” – a culture that, in the view of some, is becoming, if it has not already become, repaganized. From his vantage-point, having contributed to the extraordinary events in Eastern Europe of 1989 and 1990, John Paul directed his warnings to those living in Western democracies:
Today, when many countries have seen the fall of ideologies which bound politics to a totalitarian conception of the world – Marxism being the foremost of these – there is no less grave a danger that the fundamental rights of the human person will be denied and that religious yearnings which arise in the heart of every human being will be absorbed once again into politics. This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from the political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible.
Do we grasp the depth of that warning – a warning that all professing Christians, irrespective of theological orientation, can acknowledge? “The acknowledgement of truth,” alas, can be made “impossible.” Let us be very clear: religious freedom, both here at home and around the globe, is in trouble – very serious trouble. The founders would never have imagined excluding religion and the “first principle” – religious freedom – from public life. Quite the opposite.
Paying tribute to America’s founding fathers, John Paul again cautioned us: “the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation . . . makes as its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic.” There is a reason Thomas Jefferson made George Washington’s “Farewell Address” required reading at the University of Virginia: Washington was setting forth the “pillars” of a free society. His argument was very simple: “Religion and morality are indispensable supports.” He does not say “optional”; he uses the word “indispensable.”
In seasons of cultural difficulty, it is wise – and necessary – that we reflect on our beginnings. For American citizens, that means rethinking the deepest causes and consequences of the American founding. To do so offers us a much-needed wake-up call.
