Big Lie #3
“The Founders Intended a Secular, Not Christian, Nation”
THE PERILS OF IMMINENT THEOCRACY
Following the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush, a frenzied flurry of books and articles warned unsuspecting Americans of the imminent takeover of their cherished Republic by an all-powerful, implacable theocratic conspiracy.
In American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges breathlessly reported:
All it will take is one more national crisis on the order of September 11 for the Christian Right to make a concerted drive to destroy American democracy. . . . This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote ‘positive’ Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah’s voice.
According to Hedges (a recent—and surprisingly genial—guest on my radio show), it makes no sense to try to reason with the “Christian Fascists” he fears. “All debates with the Christian Right are useless,” he writes, because they “hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution.”
Scores of other releases from major publishers sought to arouse the nation’s slumbering conscience to confront the perils of “the American Taliban.” These titles include the blockbuster best seller American Theocracy plus additional cheery volumes such as Jesus Is Not a Republican: The Religious Right’s War on America; The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us; Why the Christian Right Is Wrong; Liars for Jesus; The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege; The Hijacking of Jesus; and many, many more.
Some worried observers expected Christian conservatives to remake America along the lines of Iran or Nazi Germany, while others suggested that they would follow the genocidal path of Communist China. In reviewing the Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp, Stephen Holden of the New York Times solemnly declared: “It wasn’t so long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, turned the world’s most populous country inside out. Nowadays, the possibility of a right-wing Christian American version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely far-fetched.”
Paul Krugman (yet another acclaimed commentator for the New York Times) argued that the theocrats would seize power through quiet subversion: “The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda—which is very different from simply being people of faith—is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go unreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists. But this conspiracy is no theory.”
Krugman then provided a series of purportedly chilling examples, even asking his no doubt nervous readers: “Did you know that Rachel Paulose, the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota—three of whose deputies recently stepped down, reportedly in protest over her management style—is, according to a local news report, in the habit of quoting Bible verses in the office?”
Of course, another midwestern attorney, Abraham Lincoln, famously indulged the same habit in every office he ever occupied (very much including the White House). He prominently featured scriptural citations (“A house divided against itself cannot stand”) in many of his most celebrated public utterances.
Though Lincoln’s contemporaries found plenty of reasons to criticize or dismiss the cagey politico from Illinois, none of them attacked him for inappropriately inserting religious sentiments into public discourse. Americans of the 1860s understood and accepted the Christian values and vision that had shaped the Republic in the “four score and seven years” of its initial existence.
Contemporary hysterics who try to terrify the public about the Religious Right’s “war against America” base their scare stories on the widely touted lie that our Founders meant to establish a secular nation, not a Christian one.
If nothing else, the alarmists must judge our constitutional Framers as miserable failures, since the nation they launched remains by far the most Christian—and least secular—society in the developed world. Recent polling shows that 73 percent of Americans believe in the existence of hell, 70 percent prefer presidential candidates who are “strongly religious,” and clear majorities refuse to support an atheist for the highest office. Some 80 percent of our fellow citizens currently identify themselves as Christians of one sort or another, so the public rightly sees America a “Christian nation”—in the same sense that India is a Hindu nation and Mexico is a Catholic nation, even though those two countries (like the USA) don’t provide governmental endorsement for a single “official” faith.
In keeping with widely embraced notions about the religious essence of the United States, a September 2007 poll by the nonpartisan First Amendment Center showed that fully 55 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “the Constitution establishes a Christian nation.” When asked about that survey in an interview with Beliefnet, presidential contender John McCain responded, “I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn’t say, ‘I only welcome Christians.’ We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.”
Despite the cautious and qualified tone of McCain’s remarks, enraged partisans leaped at the chance to attack the candidate. The executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, an advocacy group for the Democratic Party, called the senator’s statements “repugnant,” while the general counsel of the mainstream American Jewish Committee declared that “to argue that America is a Christian nation . . . puts the very character of the country at stake.”
Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, made the most sweeping and profoundly misleading comments. Regarding the poll that provoked the McCain dustup in the first place, Haynes noted that its results “suggest that a great many people have deeply misunderstood the Constitution. The framers clearly wanted to establish a secular nation.”
This contention isn’t just confused and unfocused; it is appallingly, demonstrably, and inarguably wrong.
Militant separationists of the past fifty years embrace the fanciful notion that they alone can discern the true intentions of the Founding generation—intentions that remained miraculously hidden to all scholars, jurists, and politicians in the first century and a half of our nation’s history, and not least to the Founders themselves.
The whole chain of twisted reasoning regarding our allegedly “secular” heritage depends on a series of ludicrous myths and distortions that must give way to a few fundamental but (to religion haters) uncomfortable truths:
• The earliest settlers came to establish, not to escape, devoutly Christian societies.
• The Founders worried about government’s interference with religion far more than they did about religious influence on government; in fact, they viewed fervent faith as an indispensable component of a healthy society.
• Separationist extremists, not Christian conservatives, seek the radical transformation of the nation and its institutions, overturning the long-established constitutional balance in the process.
SEEKING PURITY, NOT TOLERANCE
The myth of America as a secular haven from the faith-based fanaticism of Europe rests on the widespread and erroneous assumption that the first colonists fled to the New World to escape “religious persecution.” Schoolchildren who celebrate the traditional Thanksgiving holiday learn that the Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower in pursuit of the “freedom to practice their faith”—a pretty and politically correct spin that obscures some of the essential elements of the crucial story of the Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims escaped from England in 1608 and then found complete freedom in Holland, twelve years before they set sail for their destiny in Massachusetts. They left the Netherlands not because that nation imposed too many religious restrictions but because the Dutch honored too few. The pluralism and tolerance they found in Amsterdam and Leyden horrified the Pilgrims, separatists who preferred an isolated situation in the wilderness that facilitated the building of a unified, disciplined, strictly devout religious utopia, not some wide-open haven for believers of every stripe. The Pilgrims earn our admiration (and even our love) for their courage and idealism, but their religious outlook hardly qualifies as broad-minded. Like the other stalwart believers who followed, they came to the new world seeking purity, not freedom.
A decade after Plymouth’s founding, the Puritans pursued similar purposes in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Succeeding generations (famously including President Ronald Reagan) have cherished the shipboard sermon of the leader of that settlement, John Winthrop, who exhorted the settlers in biblical terms: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” In addition to the warmer, fuzzier passages of this immortal exhortation (“For this end we must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection”), Winthrop included words to indicate the unabashedly theocratic plans for the new colony: “When God gives a special commission he looks to have it strictly observed in every article.” In no sense did the New England pioneers intend to establish communities for each individual to follow the dictates of his own conscience or the private promptings of the Holy Spirit. Winthrop explained: “The end is to improve our lives, to do more service to the Lord, the comfort and increase of the body of Christ, whereof we are members, that ourselves and posterity may be better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world, to serve the Lord and work out our salvation under the power and purity of his holy ordinances.”
All of the other New England colonies except Rhode Island carved homes out of the wilderness on the same basis. They aimed to establish model religious communities that would be more rigorous and restrictive, not more open and accepting, than the corrupt and politicized Church of England. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and later Vermont and Maine strictly enforced Sabbath rules, mandated attendance at worship services, and used tax money to support religious seminaries (prominently including Harvard and Yale)—all befitting “Christian Commonwealths.”
If anything, the New England colonists distrusted and defied the Church of England for its backsliding and compromises rather than its vigorous imposition of religious standards. They built remarkably successful self-governing settlements, but no one could describe their colonies as living laboratories of religious freedom. Between 1658 and 1660, in fact, Massachusetts authorities hanged four Quaker missionaries (including a woman, Mary Dyer) who defied repeated arrests and banishments to try to spread their heretical ideas in a society that considered them unacceptably sinful.
Of the original thirteen colonies, ten mentioned religious purposes in their founding documents. Even Virginia, where most of the early settlers seemed to care more about finding gold than finding God, received an initial charter from King James that described a mandate for the “propagating of Christian Religion to such People as yet live in Darkness.” Delaware’s charter explicitly commands “further propagation of the Holy Gospel.”
Other denominations (Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland) founded their colonies not to create secular or diverse environments but to provide denominational havens for their coreligionists. Even in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (which became New York in 1665), director-general Peter Stuyvesant, the son of a minister, attempted to impose the dictates of his Calvinist faith, ruthlessly driving out Quakers and only reluctantly accepting a boatload of Jews. Among the original colonies, only Roger Williams’s quirky Rhode Island made a consistent priority of religious tolerance and openness to dissenters.
FIGHTING FOR SANCTITY, NOT “SEPARATION”
Those who maintain that our Founding Fathers fought their Revolution in part to ensure “separation of church and state” must somehow explain the favorite marching song of the Continental Army. The much better-known “Yankee Doodle” became widely popular after the war, but in the midst of the fighting George Washington’s men more commonly sang “Chester,” an unforgettably stirring 1770 hymn by Boston composer William Billings. The lyrics (apparently written by Billings himself) placed the bloody conflict in a frankly religious perspective:
Let tyrants shake their iron rod,
And Slav’ry clank her galling chains
We fear them not, we trust in God
New England’s God forever reigns. . . .
The song goes on to note that “God inspir’d us for the fight” against the redcoats’ “infernal league,” before concluding with this verse:
What grateful Off ’ring shall we bring?
What shall we render to the Lord?
Loud Hallelujahs let us Sing,
And praise his name on ev’ry Chord.
HBO’s superb 2008 miniseries John Adams appropriately shows John and Abigail (Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney) singing part of this hymn in church in the early days of the struggle.
John’s cousin Samuel Adams also embraced the sentiments of the song as one of the most radical and, simultaneously, one of the most ardently religious of all the Revolutionary leaders. His colleague in the Continental Congress, Dr. Benjamin Rush, wrote of Sam Adams: “He considered national happiness and the public patronage of religion as inseparably connected; and so great was his regard for public worship, as the means of promoting religion, that he constantly attended divine service in the German church in York town while the Congress sat there . . . although he was ignorant of the German language.”
This same combination of fierce religiosity and fearless commitment to the independence cause occurred again and again among the American patriots: to a great extent, they represented the controversial and impassioned “Religious Right” of their time. Those who held more moderate, tolerant, relaxed religious views, or embraced the conventional, “mainstream” Church of England, more likely took their place among the Tories who supported the crown, or else joined that one-third of colonists (according to the famous estimate of John Adams) who remained neutral or undecided in the great struggle.
The independence fighters had been disproportionately touched by the fervor of the Great Awakening, that explosion of Christian enthusiasm and revival inspired in the previous generation by visiting British evangelists such as George Whitefield and the Wesley brothers. During the Revolutionary War fighting pastors became so numerous that the British derided them (with reference to their dark robes) as the “Black Regiment.”
In The Light and the Glory, Peter Marshall and David Manuel tell the story of Peter Muhlenberg, the thirty-year-old pastor of a German American Lutheran church in Virginia’s picturesque Shenandoah Valley. On a Sunday morning after the fighting had begun in Massachusetts in 1775, Reverend Muhlenberg took as the text for his sermon the celebrated line from Ecclesiastes 3:1: “For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven.” He concluded his presentation with a solemn prayer, then raised his voice and continued to speak: “In the language of the Holy Writ, there is a time for all things. There is a time to preach and a time to fight.” He paused for maximum impact, then shocked the congregation by throwing off his pulpit robe to reveal the freshly made uniform of a colonel in the Continental Army. “And now is the time to fight!” he roared. “Roll the drums for recruits!” That same afternoon Pastor Muhlenberg marched off toward Boston at the head of a column of three hundred men. This regiment became the celebrated Eighth Virginia, with the pastor himself reaching general’s rank as commander of Washington’s first light infantry brigade.
The American Revolutionaries saw their battlefield and political opponents not only as enemies of liberty but as enemies of God Himself, and they emphasized religious revival as an essential component of potential victory. Dr. John Witherspoon, esteemed religious scholar and president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), wrote a widely distributed 1776 pamphlet declaring that “he is the best friend to American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down on profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy of his country.”
George Washington similarly viewed Christian commitment as an indispensable means for rallying the troops and securing “the blessings of Providence.” The day after he took command of the Continental Army outside of Boston in 1775 he issued a general order proclaiming that “the General most earnestly . . . requires and expects of all officers and soldiers not engaged in actual duty, a punctual attendance of divine services, to implore the blessing of Heaven for the means used for our safety and defense.” Throughout the war, he seemed virtually obsessed with organizing his men in prayer and suppressing “profane cursing, swearing and drunkenness,” in part by ordering regular days of fasting or thanksgiving. In 1778, a typical general order announced: “The commander in chief directs that Divine service be performed every Sunday at 11 o’clock in each brigade which has a Chaplain. . . . While we are duly performing the duty of good soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of a patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of a Christian.”
DEFENDING UNITY, NOT SECULARISM
None of the religious proclamations or commands by Washington or by the Continental Congress proved in the least bit controversial—no eighteenth-century equivalent of the ACLU popped up at Valley Forge to threaten the commander in chief with a nasty lawsuit unless he dropped his habit of ordering his beleaguered troops to fast and pray. Military and political leaders of the Revolutionary conflict never expressed a desire to disentangle government or the military from religious associations; if anything, they sought a more fervently, sincerely Christian society—a nation of “undefiled religion,” in Witherspoon’s phrase—in contrast to the corrupt ways of the mother country.
Why, then, the strict avoidance of religious references in the Constitution? The Declaration of Independence included a half-dozen mentions of “Providence” or “the Creator,” but our “charter of liberty” some eleven years later contains only the briefest, innocuous identification of the signing date as “the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven.”
Today’s secularists predictably point to this absence of explicitly Christian content as the surest sign that the Founders never meant to establish a religious nation. The Freedom from Religion Foundation offers a brochure entitled “Is America a Christian Nation?” that declares: “The U.S. Constitution is a secular document. It begins ‘We the people’ and contains no mention of ‘God’ or ‘Christianity.’ Its only references to religion are exclusionary, such as ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust’ (Article VI) and ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ’ (First Amendment).”
In advancing such arguments, secular activists fail to recognize (or at least acknowledge) that the Framers, with their constitutional approach, meant to protect unity, not secularism. The Founders certainly encouraged biblical faith in the broadest sense, but they understood the need to discourage squabbling or discrimination among the various religious denominations to be found within the new nation.
The states took pains to continue the cooperation that had prevailed in the Revolution. During the war, Connecticut Congregationalists, Virginia Anglicans, New Jersey Presbyterians, and North Carolina Methodists had all managed to fight side by side and to participate jointly in the “Divine service” ordered by General Washington. Soldiers from New York and Massachusetts had even served uncomplainingly under a Quaker from Rhode Island—the courageous and gifted General Nathanael Greene—despite the fact that their ancestors had ruthlessly persecuted (and even executed) unwanted Quaker interlopers. On the battlefield, Americans of every denomination (including a disproportionate number of soldiers in the Continental Army from the tiny Jewish minority) managed to follow the exhortation of Benjamin Franklin’s famous “Join or Die” cartoon, depicting a snake chopped into several regional slices.
After the war, then, the states tried to avoid battles over doctrine and practice, but they sustained their determination to encourage Christianity in the more general sense. Weeks before the Constitutional Convention convened in 1787, Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, which stated: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” These words (reenacted by the First Congress under the Constitution) made clear that to the Founders, the propagation of “religion” and “morality” represented the prime (and necessary) purpose of schooling.
In other words, with the Revolution concluded, the leaders of the struggling new nation didn’t suddenly jettison the Christian fervor with which they had won the war. Contrary to claims by today’s separationists, they didn’t instantly transform themselves into skeptical nonbelievers who hoped to drive organized faith out of the public square.
A proper understanding of the First Amendment reflects the importance of religion to the new republic. The Freedom from Religion Foundation characterizes the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause as “exclusionary,” but the clause actually protected established churches in the states. At the time of the Constitution, the governments of six of the thirteen states (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia) endorsed specific denominations and provided public money for church construction and maintenance. With its entry into the union in 1791, Vermont joined them with yet another established church. “In most of the other states,” veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans noted of “unabashedly Christian” America at the time of its founding, “there remained a network of religious requirements for public office, reflecting the pervasive, taken-for-granted Christian nature of the people being represented. These requirements usually mandated that a candidate for office had to be a Christian, in some instances quite specifically a Trinitarian, and in numerous cases a Protestant in the bargain.”
Congressional leaders who debated the First Amendment expressed no intention of interfering with the states that openly promoted and funded religious institutions; in fact, they struggled to find language that would prohibit “Congress from legislating either to establish a national religion or to disestablish state religion,” according to Louisiana State University law professor John Baker in the indispensable Heritage Guide to the Constitution. Even Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, the most esteemed liberal legal scholar of his generation, has acknowledged: “A growing body of evidence suggests that the Framers principally intended the Establishment of Religion Clause to perform two functions: to protect state religious establishments from national displacement, and to prevent the national government from aiding some, but not all, religions.”
In fact, less than twenty-four hours after Congress approved the First Amendment, they clearly indicated the way they understood its language by passing the following resolution: “Resolved, that a joint committee of both Houses be directed to wait upon the President of the United States, to request that he would recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution for their safety and happiness.” In the proclamation duly announcing the “day of public thanksgiving and prayer” that Congress had requested, President Washington declared November 26 “to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”
It never occurred to this First Congress that their call for public prayer would conflict with the amendment they had adopted a day earlier prohibiting “an establishment of religion.”
JEFFERSON’S “FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES”
Even Thomas Jefferson, author of the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state,” felt generally comfortable with a governmental role in encouraging a faith-based perspective. His fateful 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association that first suggested the “wall of separation” idea concluded with a distinctly religious phrase: “I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man.” The presidential letter expressed earnest agreement with Jefferson’s Connecticut correspondents that “no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account [of] his religious opinions.”
The Supreme Court’s 1947 ruling in Everson v. Board of Education appropriated the language of Jefferson’s letter to justify an unprecedented restrictive view of governmental entanglement with religion. The Court did so despite the fact that the presidential missive, a ceremonial document with no official standing, followed adoption of the First Amendment by some thirteen years and emphasized Jefferson’s concern with potential government harassment of minority faiths rather than worries over the state’s ongoing promotion of religious principles and institutions. In fact, in 1803, the year after his famous letter, Jefferson recommended to Congress the approval of a treaty that provided government funds to support a Catholic priest in ministering to the Kaskaskia Indians. Three times he signed extensions of another measure described as “an Act regulating the grants of land appropriated for Military services and for the Society of the United Brethren for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.”
In other words, George W. Bush hardly counted as the first president to promote the use of governmental resources for “faith-based initiatives.”
Jefferson also paved the way for his successors in his ostentatious participation in church services. As president, he participated weekly in Christian worship in the Capitol building; until 1866, in fact, the Capitol hosted worship every Sunday and intermittently conducted a Sunday school. No one challenged these seventy-one years of Christian prayer at the very seat of federal power—least of all the many living participants in the congressional sessions who had drafted the First Amendment itself.
Nor did these firsthand witnesses to “original intent” challenge the seven states with established churches. In Ten Tortured Words, an invaluable book on the Establishment Clause, Stephen Mansfield writes: “For all of that generation, the understanding was certain that the states were permitted to establish religion or support religion as aggressively as the people allowed.” President Jefferson explicitly shared that viewpoint, expressed in a public address of March 1805: “In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the constitution independent of the powers of the general [federal] government. I have therefore undertaken, on no occasion, to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it, but have left them, as the constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of State or Church authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies.”
PRO-FAITH JUDGES
In that spirit, established “official” churches survived in several states well into the nineteenth century. Connecticut disestablished its favored Congregational denomination only in 1818, New Hampshire in 1819, and Massachusetts in 1833—some forty-five years after the adoption of the First Amendment. The changes reflected the religious “quickening” of the time (viewed by some as a second Great Awakening), with new sects and philosophies clamoring for recognition and fresh adherents. In any event, public opinion and legislative decisions, not judicial dictate, brought disestablishment.
The leading judges of the early Republic outspokenly endorsed governmental support for religious institutions. John Marshall, the father of American jurisprudence and for thirty-four epochal years (1801–35) the chief justice of the United States, wrote a revealing letter to Jasper Adams on May 9, 1833, declaring: “The American population is entirely Christian, and with us Christianity and Religion are identified. It would be strange indeed, if with such a people, our institutions did not presuppose Christianity, and did not often refer to it, and exhibit relations with it.”
His colleague on the Court (1796–1811), Justice Samuel Chase, wrote a 1799 opinion (Runkel v. Winemill) that held: “Religion is of general and public concern, and on its support depend, in great measure, the pace and good order of government, the safety and happiness of the people. By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion, and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed upon the same equal footing, and are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.”
The most authoritative explanation of the First Amendment came from Joseph Story, a Supreme Court justice from 1811 to 1845 (appointed by President Madison, the father of the Constitution) and, as a longtime Harvard professor, the leading early commentator on the Constitution. He observed:
The general if not universal sentiment in America was that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation. The real object of the First Amendment . . . was to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.
None of today’s Christian conservative organizations seek to institute the “national ecclesiastical establishment” clearly prohibited by the Establishment Clause. The leading organizations on the Religious Right—Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, the American Family Association, the Traditional Values Coalition, and so forth—all represent interdenominational coalitions, drawing Catholics and Mormons, Episcopalians and evangelicals of every sort. Meanwhile, those who worry over Christian conservative influence clearly favor the folly described by Justice Story: a “state policy” to hold all religions “in utter indifference.” This effort to sever ties between faith and state—including the absurd efforts to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance or the motto “In God we trust” from our coinage—produces precisely the sort of “universal indignation” Justice Story predicted nearly two hundred years ago.
“In God We Trust”
During the darkest years of the War Between the States, Christians appealed to the Treasury Department to place the word God on our coins. In one typical letter, the Reverend M. L. Watkinson of Ridley Township, Pennsylvania, worried that “antiquaries of succeeding generations” would sort through the relics of 1860s America and assume that its citizens lived in a godless society. If, however, the nation invoked the Almighty on its coinage, it “would relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism.” The director of the Mint suggested the words “Our God, our country” or “God, our trust,” but it was treasury secretary (and later chief justice) Salmon P. Chase who came up with the alternative “In God We Trust.” This choice echoed the concluding verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’”
Coins continued to carry these words despite strong disapproval from President Theodore Roosevelt, a devout Christian who in 1907 wrote, “It seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins, just as it would be to cheapen it by use on postage stamps, or in advertisements.” Despite such objections, the words remained a cherished tradition on coins (and later paper money) and became the official national motto by act of Congress on July 30, 1956. In the same era, the legislators added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, hoping to overcome “imperialistic and materialistic Communism” and “to remind all of us of this self-evident truth” that “as long as this country trusts in God, it will prevail.”
STRUGGLING FOR FAITH,
NOT CELEBRATING DOUBT
Advocates of strict separation find so little support from the Founders in state papers or legal opinions that they often turn to intimate examinations of the personal faith (or lack of faith) of the extraordinary individuals who launched the Republic. Jefferson and Franklin in particular never embraced the conventional Christian faith of their day and spent their long lives probing and arguing over the nature of God and the meaning of the Bible. Their well-known explorations have led to false assumptions and misleading statements about the Founders in general, such as the widely repeated lie that they counted as “deists, not Christians.”
Deists, according to the standard definition (Webster’s New World Dictionary), believe “that God exists and created the world but thereafter assumed no control of it or the lives of people.” But the Founders—very much including Jefferson and Franklin—almost obsessively cited God’s unceasing control of the world and of the great events in which they participated. The Revolutionary generation regularly searched for a supernatural hand in their affairs and made every effort to discern the Divine will. In a letter to his friend Thomas Jefferson on July 20, 1776, patriot John Page observed: “We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?”
Far more prominently, in his First Inaugural Address, George Washington declared as his “first official act” his “fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe” that He might bless the new government. Washington went on to reflect that “no people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.” In other words, the first president, in his first official act, explicitly rejected the deist idea that God plays no constant or present role in our affairs.
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, author of American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, notes that even the most religiously adventurous of the Framers resorted to scriptural imagery when suggesting a national seal to the Continental Congress on the fateful day of July 4, 1776. “Franklin’s vision was biblical, as was Jefferson’s,” he writes. “Franklin wanted an image along these lines: ‘Moses standing on the shore and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in His Hand. Rays from the Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity. Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.’”
In his portraits, Meacham makes clear the God-haunted nature of the men who made a Revolution. They all “delved and dabbled in religion; while Jefferson edited the Gospels, Benjamin Franklin rephrased and rearranged the Book of Common Prayer . . . John Adams considered the ministry but chose law instead; for the rest of his life he was a Unitarian who privately confessed a weakness for the beauty of Episcopal liturgy. . . . Samuel Adams, a fierce advocate of independence, was a Puritan who looked askance at other faiths, but knew that faith and political warfare were a deadly combination.”
Even the most radical of the Founders, pamphleteer Thomas Paine, would fit more comfortably with today’s religious conservatives than with the secular militants who claim him as one of their own. At the time, the restless revolutionary’s attack on traditional Christian doctrine in The Age of Reason alienated virtually all of his American comrades. Nevertheless, in a 1797 speech to a learned French society, he maintained that schools must concentrate on the study of God, presenting his arguments with an eloquent insistence on recognizing the Almighty that would delight James Dobson of Focus on the Family but mortally offend the secular purists of the ACLU:
It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of Divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles. He can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author. . . . When we study the elements of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of Newton. How then is it, that when we study the works of God in the creation, we stop short, and do not think of God? It is from the error of the schools in having taught those subjects as accomplishments only, and thereby separated the study of them from the Being who is the author of them.
RELIGION’S BENEFITS AS IMPORTANT AS ITS TRUTHS
Despite Tom Paine’s reverence for the “Author” of nature, his former American colleagues still denounced him for his rejection of Christianity. In a diary notation of July 26, 1776, John Adams asserted: “The Christian religion is above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity, let the blackguard Paine say what he will, it is resignation to God, it is goodness itself to man.”
Like Adams, the other Founders looked beyond Christianity’s truths (even when they generally accepted them) and passionately affirmed its benefits. They unanimously agreed on the importance of fervent faith in protecting and nourishing the Republic they had launched. Washington’s Farewell Address provided the most famous formulation of this belief: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”
Adams, his successor in the White House, wrote to his cousin Zabdiel Adams in 1776: “Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.”
Whatever their theological disagreements or doubts, those who created this new nation in the eighteenth century shared a unanimous faith in the positive impact of vital religious institutions. For more than 150 years, the national leaders who followed them echoed their confidence in the importance of religiosity to the health of society and the stability of government.
In sharpest contrast to today’s secular militants who fear the increased influence of religious faith, the Founders worried over the potential impact of its diminished status. While separationists today sound the alarm over “theocracy,” the Revolutionary generation felt dread and horror (particularly after the French Revolution) at the rule of “unbelief.”
By the time Tocqueville visited the flourishing Republic in the early 1830s, he noted the universal conviction that Christian enthusiasm played a powerful role in the nation’s success. “In the United States,” he wrote, “Christian sects are infinitely diversified and perpetually modified but Christianity itself is an established and irresistible fact which no one undertakes either to attack or defend.”
REJECTING THE NATIONAL HYMNAL
The blending of faith and nationalism became an additional “irresistible fact” more than two centuries ago, reinforcing the American idea that religion serves the cause of the nation just as the nation, ultimately, serves the cause of religion. In the emotional days after the September 11 attacks, secular activists objected to performances of “God Bless America” or “God Bless the USA” in public schools, but their inability to suggest faith-free alternatives highlighted their alienation from the American mainstream. All our most revered nationalist songs emphasize the Republic’s special connection to the Almighty.
Our national anthem indicates that the idea of this relationship preceded today’s Religious Right by at least two hundred years. “The Star-Spangled Banner” includes Francis Scott Key’s incontrovertibly religious sentiments in its final verse:
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heaven-rescued land Praise the Power 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.”
The nation’s other most beloved patriotic hymn, “America the Beautiful,” features a chorus with the cherished line, “America! America! God shed His grace on thee.” Katharine Lee Bates began writing the words after reaching the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado in 1893 and entering a state of near-religious ecstasy upon contemplation of the Great Plains to the east. She included verses that repeatedly ask assistance from the Almighty (“America! America! God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self control / Thy liberty in law”).
Meanwhile, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the stirring marching song of the War Between the States, isn’t merely religious (with its chorus invoking the biblical word hallelujah) but is also specifically Christian. The final, moving verse—most often sung in a reverent hush—poetically declares:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.
Finally, “America” (also known as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”) provides no safe haven for those who yearn to disentangle religious and patriotic messages, not with its inescapably churchy concluding verse:
Our fathers’ God to Thee
Author of liberty
To Thee we sing
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light
Protect us by Thy might
Great God, our King.
The most recent of the popular patriotic melodies first appeared on the eve of World War II as a love letter to the nation from an immigrant boy who became the leading Broadway composer. Irving Berlin donated all proceeds from “God Bless America” to the Boy Scouts (another politically incorrect institution) and implored the Almighty to “stand beside her and guide her / Through the night with the light from above.”
Some contemporary Americans clearly feel uncomfortable with our long history of weaving together a sense of national identity with claims of divine mission, our consistent assumption that the Almighty has selected this nation for His purposes. These alarmed opponents of “theocracy” have every right to argue that we will enjoy a brighter, better future by severing the old association between faith and nationalism, but they shouldn’t mischaracterize the past—or suggest a return to an era of absolute church-state separation that never existed.
DEMANDING RADICAL TRANSFORMATION
A candid review of the nation’s religious heritage demonstrates that it is today’s aggressive secularists, not religious conservatives, who seek radical change in the social contract. From the first settlers through the end of World War II, virtually all elements of society accepted and even celebrated the deeply Christian nature of our government and culture.
Christian conservatives seek to restore America far more than they hope to change America. Their most controversial goals—banning abortion, limiting marriage to male-female unions, returning prayer to schools, educating kids for self-control rather than condoms, displaying religious symbols on public property, restricting obscenity on the public airwaves—hardly count as daring innovations or revolutionary transformations.
As recently as the years of my own childhood, the United States cheerfully, even proudly embraced all the rules and norms now considered radical and theocratic by critics of the Christian Right. In Pennsylvania, the state of my birth, the old law required that “at least ten verses from the Holy Bible [be] read, without comment, at the opening of each public school on each school day.” Four other states enforced similar legislation requiring mandatory Bible readings every morning before class, and twenty-five more states had laws on the books explicitly authorizing “optional” Bible readings, before the Supreme Court struck down all such statutes in the Abington decision of 1963.
Does that mean Eisenhower’s America constituted some dictatorial theocracy? Did we only throw off the crushing yoke of religious tyranny with the sweeping church-state Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s?
Recent skirmishes over religious displays on public property highlight the fact that it’s secular militants who want to remake America in a style unrecognizable to citizens of an earlier era. Only on rare occasions do people of faith attempt to insert Christian symbols in new venues—as did the controversial judge Roy Moore with his (ultimately banished) Ten Commandments monument in Alabama. For the most part, the symbolic disputes involve memorial crosses, Ten Commandments, displays, or nativity scenes that appeared without challenge for fifty or a hundred years until the ACLU brought suit to cleanse the landscape of such “unconstitutional” pollution.
In the past fifty years the separationists have enjoyed remarkable success in stripping away signs of religious influence, but it’s at best arguable that they have shaped a better country in the process. The majority resists the march forward to some religion-free utopia and yearns rather for a more relaxed, more balanced relationship between faith and state, and for the spirit of the beloved old songs.
If it’s true that the Founders actually intended to create a secular society rather than a Christian one, then it’s obvious that they failed miserably. And to most citizens, America doesn’t feel like a failure.
Even the most avid religious activists intend no theocratic coup, but pray rather for further blessings from the Creator:
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success
be nobleness
And ev’ry gain divine.