Founders, Religion and State

Founders, Religion and State

Generally the term “Church and State” is used when discussing separation thereof. However, referring to “separation,” “Religion and State” is more to the point, because that’s more at what our founders were thinking. It’s my belief of what they intended and that should remain. The distinction is between “Deity” and “Religion.” While it’s impossible for religious people to reconcile religion-belief differences, the vast majority of our nation’s population believes in a Deity (or at least will go along with its inclusiveness), whether or not their God is defined as being one-and-same. I believe it is historically accurate to say: “Our founders, at large, wanted to hold onto “the recognition of God,” but “keep religion out of state.” In bringing these thoughts to mind again, I remembered an article from this past spring by Jon Meacham (Now Editor of Newsweek Magazine), “God and the Founders.” It’s an excerpt from his new book “American Gospel,” which gives a historical basis for the founders concerns. He relates their struggles from the beginning with separation, and in practice, he says, the wall of separation is not a very tall one. At a time when many false rumors and half-truths are circulating the Internet, wrongly lending credence that the founders fully approved of Christianity in political and government processes, I believe you’ll find this historically researched essay very interesting, informative, and a refreshing insight. It’s attached herewith. You may also read it from Newsweek’s website at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12115700/site/newsweek/

As a prime example of religious embroilment and separation’s frustrations and dilemma, I include below my reply to my friend, James’ response, who calls secularism a “religion,” in reply to my last column, Responsible & Irresponsible Evangelicals.
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Thanks James.

Your points are well made, and I can empathize with the feelings that come from both sides of many of the important issues of these times. I don’t know about secularism being a religion. I think of religion as more from the spiritual realm. Of course secularism could, for me at least, be a religion, since I tend to go more with conscientiousness of what I believe to be right or wrong, guided by my interpretation of Christian principles. Does this conscience bearing come more from secular or my religious views, and are they of God’s will? Maybe I can’t separate the two.

However, I don’t feel that anyone is threatening my freedom to live and demonstrate my Christian Faith -------- yet. Neither do I believe I’m intimidating any other’s right to express their secular or religious views through the political process. It’s when the claim so blatantly comes as from God that repulses many people, because their own beliefs, even though different, are felt equally valid as could just as well come from God. The unabashed sounds go in the both directions. How can anyone know that what any of us believe as truth is what God wants? Example:

We know that the tenet of our Christian Faith, as established by the Church’s founding fathers/bishops, is Salvation by Grace. Yet, the Gospels reveal the word “grace” only 4 times: 1 in Luke; 3 in John, neither declaring one is saved by grace or used as a “word” spoken by Jesus. Although, other words possibly could be deduced to “saved by grace.” On the other hand, Matthew 25 reveals, in many words; it's something very explicitly coming from the mouth of Jesus that is required for salvation. Are these (as literal interpretations) Church dogmas kind of an oxymoron, if both are to be taken as a truth? I tend to take them as integral to each other, which brings me to the next point.

Abortion: I’m not for abortion per se. Although, I believe there are circumstances where such may be justified. I do believe in the sanctity of life. (One can get into all kinds of questions as to when life begins.) But what does God expect of us?
· You shall not kill.
· Matthew. 25: 45 Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 46 And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

What’s more important: protecting the stem cell, saving the unborn from destitute and horrendous worldly conditions ---- or “tending the sheep,” feeding and caring for the starving (30,000 die every day; 1-billion live on $1 or less per day.), here and now? What’s more important in God’s Kingdom? Would God want one over the other, profess Him or do what He says to do? If so or not, are we as Christians living up to either, and especially Mathew 25? (I think not, and maybe that’s where grace comes in. Grace could be more abundant than many believe if Phillip Gulley and James Mulholland are correct in their, “If Grace Is True” book.) For Christians, it should be straightforward for all to assert a pro-life stance, whether a claimed to Pro-Choicer or Pro-Lifer, if we put our money, time, and efforts (discipleship) to sincerely take Mathew 25 literally.

Sad to say it’s the extremist elements, left to right, that gets in the way of serious pro-life and other important issues being resolved.

Perhaps if more politicians and elected officials took the attitude of a Chuck Hagel ( http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Chuck+Hagel ), as quoted on the Iraq conflict, common ground could possibly be found on a host of issues. Hagel: “I refuse to demote it to the lowest common denominator for the use of politics.”

The biggest problem our country has is “a broken system:” politically, and principally the legislative branch. Money! Money! Money! The pendulum has swung in past years; however, even as some now foretell, I would not predict if it’s time again. It just might drop straight down, where the hands-of-time implode on it. Pray not! As brothers and sisters we can do better.

Cornell
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Hello Cornell, Thanks for you thoughts and good column. However, I think the desire toseparate religion from government is about the same as a desire to separatepartnership from politics. While laudable it is simply impossible to do.Secularism is certainly a religion and is the dominate religion of a largeportion of those in political leadership. It has been said with greatinsight that "America is a nation that is as religious as India with aleadership in Government, Education and business that is a secular asSweden." I think this is generally true with the vast majority of the educationalestablishment being not just secular but vehemently hostile to people offaith in general and treating evangelicals with a tremendous hatred andvengeance. The same hold true to a lesser extent in many circles ofgovernment with many politicians, while paying very nominal homage to faith,they hold most evangelicals in great contempt. Since millions of churchgoing evangelicals sense this disdain by the there elected leaders, theynaturally seek to find other people to represent them. This deepening shift in the country to the right caused many entrenchedsecular politicians to suddenly find themselves powerless. The ensuingstruggle to hold on this entrenched power has set off the bitter climate ofthe country today. However, I think if more attention and respect had beenpaid to the people and voters earlier they would not have reacted with the"throw the rascals out" mentality that disposed so many left leaningpoliticians about 5 to 10 years ago. However, the arrogance of the currentparty in power is also leading to a counter backlash and I think we may soonsee the pendulum swing back. The current party in power is making the samemistake of believing that power is their right, not a sacred gift from Godto be used for the good of all the people with a strict accounting given ofthat use. I think the current political climate of controversy is aroused by thedichotomy of the leadership being out of touch with the general population.These hard working, God fearing voters are generally wishing for morerespect and consideration for Faith in general and evangelical values inparticular. This leads to this realization on the part of many Evangelicalsthat they can no longer elect people who give nominal assent to their faithbut refuse to state a definite stand on many of the issues that evangelicalsare passionate about. Their given no choice but to impose the so called"litmus test" because those on the other side are imposing the same test inreverse on all politicians who seek election with the support of secularpoliticians. I. E. no matter how qualified, honest or dedicated apolitician who is member of an evangelical church and openly acknowledgesthis will never get the endorsement of those committed to a religioussecularism.I would love to see the country loose political labels and parties as wellas to see Christians lose denominational differences. However, I think weare a long way from that and in the mean time Evangelicals have littleoption but to continue to insist on those who seek there support in vote andmoney to hold the same ideals and to vote with them on the issues ofAbortion, Homosexuality, Etc.Hey, I don't agree with all the conclusions but keep me on your list becauseI love to read your blog!James

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God and the Founders
Battles over faith and freedom may seem never-ending, but a new book, 'American Gospel,' argues that history illuminates how religion can shape the nation without dividing it.
By Jon Meacham http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Jon+Meacham
Newsweek
April 10, 2006 issue - America's first fight was over faith. As the Founding Fathers gathered for the inaugural session of the Continental Congress on Tuesday, September 6, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Thomas Cushing, a lawyer from Boston, moved that the delegates begin with a prayer. Both John Jay of New York and John Rutledge, a rich lawyer-planter from South Carolina, objected. Their reasoning, John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail, was that "because we were so divided in religious sentiments"—the Congress included Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and others—"we could not join in the same act of worship." The objection had the power to set a secular tone in public life at the outset of the American political experience.
Things could have gone either way. Samuel Adams of Boston spoke up. "Mr. S. Adams arose and said he was no bigot, and could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue who was at the same time a friend to his country," wrote John Adams. "He was a stranger in Philadelphia, but had heard that Mr. Duche (Dushay they pronounce it) deserved that character, and therefore he moved that Mr. Duche, an Episcopal clergyman, might be desired to read prayers to the Congress tomorrow morning." Then, in a declarative nine-word sentence, John Adams recorded the birth of what Benjamin Franklin called America's public religion: "The motion was seconded and passed in the affirmative."
The next morning the Reverend Duche appeared, dressed in clerical garb. As it happened, the psalm assigned to be read that day by Episcopalians was the 35th. The delegates had heard rumors—later proved to be unfounded—that the British were storming Boston; everything seemed to be hanging in the balance. In the hall, with the Continental Army under attack from the world's mightiest empire, the priest read from the psalm: " 'Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.'"
Fight against them that fight against me: John Adams was at once stunned and moved. "I never saw a greater effect upon an audience," he told Abigail. "It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that morning." Adams long tingled from the moment—the close quarters of the room, the mental vision in every delegate's head of the patriots supposedly facing fire to the north, and, with Duche's words, the summoning of divine blessing and guidance on what they believed to be the cause of freedom.
As it was in the beginning, so it has been since: an American acknowledgment of God in the public sphere, with men of good will struggling to be reverent yet tolerant and ecumenical. That the Founding Fathers debated whether to open the American saga with prayer is wonderfully fitting, for their conflicts are our conflicts, their dilemmas our dilemmas. Largely faithful, they knew religious wars had long been a destructive force in the lives of nations, and they had no wish to repeat the mistakes of the world they were rebelling against. And yet they bowed their heads.
More than two centuries on, as millions of Americans observe Passover and commemorate Easter next week, the role of faith in public life is a subject of particularly pitched debate. From stem cells and science to the Supreme Court, from foreign policy and the 2008 presidential campaign to evangelical "Justice Sundays," the question of God and politics generates much heat but little light. Some Americans think the country has strayed too far from God; others fear that religious zealots (from the White House to the school board) are waging holy war on American liberty; and many, if not most, seem to believe that we are a nation hopelessly divided between believers and secularists.
History suggests, though, that there is hope, for we have been fighting these battles from our earliest days and yet the American experiment endures.
However dominant in terms of numbers, Christianity is only a thread in the American tapestry—it is not the whole tapestry. The God who is spoken of and called on and prayed to in the public sphere is an essential character in the American drama, but He is not specifically God the Father or the God of Abraham. The right's contention that we are a "Christian nation" that has fallen from pure origins and can achieve redemption by some kind of return to Christian values is based on wishful thinking, not convincing historical argument. Writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, George Washington assured his Jewish countrymen that the American government "gives to bigotry no sanction." In a treaty with the Muslim nation of Tripoli initiated by Washington, completed by John Adams, and ratified by the Senate in 1797, we declared "the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. ... " The Founders also knew the nation would grow ever more diverse; in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson's bill for religious freedom was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination." And thank God—or, if you choose, thank the Founders—that it did indeed.
Understanding the past may help us move forward. When the subject is faith in the public square, secularists reflexively point to the Jeffersonian "wall of separation between church and state" as though the conversation should end there; many conservative Christians defend their forays into the political arena by citing the Founders, as though Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin were cheerful Christian soldiers. Yet to claim that religion has only recently become a political force in the United States is uninformed and unhistorical; in practice, the "wall" of separation is not a very tall one. Equally wrongheaded is the tendency of conservative believers to portray the Founding Fathers as apostles in knee britches.
The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it. Driven by a sense of providence and an acute appreciation of the fallibility of humankind, the Founders made a nation in which faith should not be singled out for special help or particular harm. The balance between the promise of the Declaration of Independence, with its evocation of divine origins and destiny, and the practicalities of the Constitution, with its checks on extremism, remains the most brilliant of American successes.
The Founding Fathers and presidents down the ages have believed in a God who brought forth the heavens and the earth, and who gave humankind the liberty to believe in Him or not, to love Him or not, to obey Him or not. God had created man with free will, for love coerced is no love at all, only submission. That is why the religious should be on the front lines of defending freedom of religion.
Our finest hours—the Revolutionary War, abolition, the expansion of the rights of women, hot and cold wars against terror and tyranny, Martin Luther King Jr.'s battle against Jim Crow—can partly be traced to religious ideas about liberty, justice, and charity. Yet theology and scripture have also been used to justify our worst hours—from enslaving people based on the color of their skin to treating women as second-class citizens.
Still, Jefferson's declaration of independence grounded America's most fundamental human rights in the divine, as the gift of "Nature's God." The most unconventional of believers, Jefferson was no conservative Christian; he once went through the Gospels with a razor to excise the parts he found implausible. ("I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know," he remarked.) And yet he believed that "the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time," and to Jefferson, the "Creator" invested the individual with rights no human power could ever take away. The Founders, however, resolutely refused to evoke sectarian—specifically Christian—imagery: the God of the Declaration is largely the God of Deism, an Enlightenment-era vision of the divine in which the Lord is a Creator figure who works in the world through providence. The Founding Fathers rejected an attempt to rewrite the Preamble of the Constitution to say the nation was dependent on God, and from the Lincoln administration forward presidents and Congresses refused to support a "Christian Amendment" that would have acknowledged Jesus to be the "Ruler among the nations."
At the same time, the early American leaders were not absolute secularists. They wanted God in American public life, but in a way that was unifying, not divisive. They were politicians and philosophers, sages and warriors, churchmen and doubters. While Jefferson edited the Gospels, Franklin rendered the Lord's Prayer into the 18th-century vernacular, but his piety had its limits: he recalled falling asleep in a Quaker meeting house on his first day in Philadelphia. All were devoted to liberty, but most kept slaves. All were devoted to virtue, but many led complex—the religious would say sinful—private lives.
The Founders understood that theocracy was tyranny, but they did not feel they could—or should—try to banish religion from public life altogether. Washington improvised "So help me, God" at the conclusion of the first presidential oath and kissed the Bible on which he had sworn it. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he privately told his cabinet, because he had struck a deal with "my Maker" that he would free the slaves if the Union forces triumphed at Antietam. The only public statement Franklin D. Roosevelt made on D-Day 1944 was to read a prayer he had written drawing on the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. John Kennedy said that "on earth, God's work must truly be our own," and Ronald Reagan was not afraid to say that he saw the world as a struggle between light and dark, calling the Soviet empire "the focus of evil in the modern world." George W. Bush credits Billy Graham with saving him from a life of drift and drink, and once said that Christ was his favorite philosopher.
Sectarian language, however, can be risky. In a sermon preached on the day George Washington left Philadelphia to take command of the Continental Army, an Episcopal priest said: "Religion and liberty must flourish or fall together in America. We pray that both may be perpetual." The battle to preserve faith and freedom has been a long one, and rages still: keeping religion and politics in proper balance requires eternal vigilance.
Our best chance of summoning what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" may lie in recovering the true sense and spirit of the Founding era and its leaders, for they emerged from a time of trial with a moral creed which, while imperfect, averted the worst experiences of other nations. In that history lies our hope.
From AMERICAN GOSPEL by Jon Meacham, to be published by Random House on Tuesday, April 4. © 2006 by Jon Meacham.
For more on "American Gospel," go to JonMeacham.com