The Framers and the Faithful

The Washington Monthly has outdone itself this month with a series of great articles focusing on various aspects of evangelical religion. Yesterday I commented on the article about moderate evangelicals who are abandoning Bush. Today I want to call attention to the article by Steve Waldman, editor of Beliefnet, on the founders and religious freedom.

It is a great article. Read it all. But the gist of it is that both religious conservatives and religious and secular liberals argue about the founders intent regarding the separation of church and state. Conservatives argue that the founders were simply concerned to legislate against religious establishment; liberals argue that the founders wanted a high "wall" that would keep religion out of the public sphere. Waldman points out that the reason it is possible to look at the founders and argue both positions is because the founders themselves disagreed about what the intent was:

John Adams, Patrick Henry, and others believed the First Amendment really was meant to block the formal establishment of an official church, but allowed much mixing of church and state. For instance, Adams endorsed national days of fasting and prayer and appointment of congressional chaplains. Jefferson and Madison were on the other end of the spectrum, demanding the clearest separation of church and state. As president, Jefferson reversed the practice initiated by Washington and Adams, and refused to have a national day of prayer. Madison agreed. He cited the appointment of chaplains as being a direct violation of the “pure principle of religious freedom,” especially given how “strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Government in the Constitution of the United States.”

But Waldman also points out there was one religious group that consistently sided with Jefferson and Madison - evangelicals:

Just as the Founding Fathers disagreed, so too did people of faith. Congregationalists and Episcopalians were the chief defenders of state-supported religion and more aligned with the views of Adams and Henry. It was the evangelicals who backed the more radical views of Jefferson and Madison. Leland (J: Baptist minister who sent Jefferson a 1200 lb. block of cheese in thanks for Jefferson's fight for disestablishment), for instance, agreed with Jefferson's opposition to congressional chaplains. “If legislatures choose to have a chaplain, for Heaven's sake, let them pay him by contributions, and not out of the public chest,” he once wrote. Indeed, as Rabbi James Rudin notes in his new book The Baptizing of America, “Leland was even against the Sunday closings of U.S. post offices, feeling this represented government favoritism by officially recognizing the Christian Sabbath.”

In other words, the Founding Fathers were divided on separation of church and state—but most of the evangelicals weren't. They overwhelmingly sided with Jefferson and Madison.

On one level, this little-known alliance between Jefferson, Madison, and the evangelicals was pragmatic; for different reasons, they shared similar goals. But the connection went far deeper. When evangelicals smashed ecclesiastical authority—by, say, meeting in the fields without the permission of the local clergy—they were undermining authority in general. They were saying that on a deep spiritual level, salvation came through a direct relationship with God and that the clerical middleman was relatively unimportant. Jefferson and other enlightenment thinkers were glorifying the power of the individual mind to determine the truth—through evidence rather than merely tradition. As the historian Rhys Isaac put it, “Jefferson's system proclaimed individual judgment as sacred, sacred against the pressure of collective coercions; the evangelicals did the same for private conscience.”

Today's Christian conservatives often note that Jefferson's famous line declaring that the first amendment had created “a wall separating church and state” was not in the Constitution but in a private letter. But in that letter, Jefferson was responding to one sent to him by a group of Baptists in Danbury, Conn. We usually read Jefferson's side of that exchange. It's worth re-reading what the Danbury Baptists had to say because it reminds us that for the 18th-century evangelicals, the separation of church and state was not only required by the practicalities of their minority status, but was also demanded by God. “Religions is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals,” the Baptists wrote, warning that government “dare not assume the prerogatives of Jehova and make Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ.” Government had no business meddling in the affairs of the soul, where there is only one Ruler.

Today's evangelicals are free, Waldman says, to argue for the tearing down of the wall between church and state, but they are straying far from the roots of the evangelicals who worked so hard to build it up.