Divided, We Stand
America's long struggle to balance church and state isn't getting any easier
Name any number of the hot-button issues of our time--abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research--and the question of religion's place in American politics and public life looms large. Indeed, no line in public life is more hotly disputed or subject to more relentless negotiation than the one dividing church and state.
To many religious Americans--and America is the most religious of the advanced nations--faith has a legitimate role in shaping the laws of the nation. The First Amendment, they insist, was not written to exclude religion from the public sphere. But many of the Americans who claim to have no religion--and whose numbers, by one survey, doubled from 14 million to 29 million between 1990 and 2000--disagree. They hold that this public sphere should rightly be a secular space, not favoring or even representing the views of any religious orientation. Even many devout Americans feel that religion's entry into the public sphere violates the Founding Fathers' intent.
But the knotty question is discerning just what the founders really intended. Militant secularists argue that the founders meant religion to be strictly a matter of private conviction, never to impinge on public life. Militant religionists counter that they intended to create an explicitly Christian nation. But both overlook the fact that America, as a country and as a concept, was truly founded by two different generations of leaders who had quite different views about church and state. Indeed, argues Purdue University historian Frank Lambert in his book The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, America really had two sets of spiritual fathers.
Generation gap. The Planting Fathers, as Lambert calls them, included the leaders of the Puritans of New England and others who came to America both to practice their own kind of Christianity and to found Christian states. They established tax-supported churches and passed laws in accordance with "the rule of the word of God."
More than a century and a half later--after the spread of the skeptical scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment among colonial elites and after the Great Awakening challenged the authority of the established religious sects--a different group of national leaders, the Founding Fathers, came together to forge a new national compact. When these founders gathered in Philadelphia, most not only acknowledged the futility of imposing a national church on such a diverse people but abhorred the idea of doing so. In fact, James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution, thought that the religious diversity of Americans was so thoroughly entrenched that it was unnecessary for the national charter to guarantee religious freedom. But when it became clear that Madison's own fellow Virginians (particularly Baptists) wanted such an explicit guarantee, Madison helped draft the famous religion clauses of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . ..."
But Madison and the other founders never imagined they were banishing religion from the public sphere. In the words they spoke, the symbols they embraced, the rituals they established--from days of thanksgiving to prayers at the start of Congress--the founders made clear that acknowledgment of divine providence was not only acceptable but essential. This "civic" religion was distinctly nonsectarian, though many of its elements reflected the reality that 95 percent of citizens belonged to one Protestant sect or another. Whether they were Calvinists or liberal deists, writes James Hutson in Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, the founders believed divine will legitimized their laws and made citizens more willing to respect them.
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