Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Separate Church & State benefits church too

Blogger Frederick Clarkston comments on an article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker about four books of Founding Fathers and their approach to religion. Some thoughts from Clarkston and Lepore:

A lot of people wonder what the Founding Fathers would think about various issues, such as whether "In God We Trust" belongs on our money. According to Thomas Jefferson, it is a ridiculous question.

"This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. . . . Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind."

We are different from our founders and have a different needs from our Constitution. To defer to ancestors without examination is to be a slave to the tyranny of the past.

Our country was founded neither as a Christian nation nor as a secular one.

Many of the founding fathers, including Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Adams, were not Christian. They doubted the divinity of Christ. An example is the Jefferson Bible.

The reason why we have such a vigorous religious society is because we don't have a government established religion. The separation of Church and State is for the benefit of the church as well as for the state. Religion and politics are two different things and each should not be under control of the other. As a result, Americans are more active in their religion. I lived in Germany for a couple years and saw that few of my colleagues paid attention to the state religion.

Clarkston's article is here.

Looking at Lepore's article directly reveals these ideas.

In 1797 Royall Tyler wrote the novel The Algerine Captive about a New England Calvinist enslaved by the Barbary pirates in Algiers. His master agrees to a debate about religions and challenges what good is a religion that you receive unquestioningly from your ancestors? Isn't that essentially worshipping your ancestors and not God? Isn't it better to thoroughly examine, question, and debate your faith and thus deliberately claim it as your own?

Religious freedom in American is traced to four foundation texts:

Jefferson’s 1786 statute (“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”); Madison’s 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (“The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man”); Article VI of the Constitution (“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”); and the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”).

Voltaire said:

"History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead.”

The Founding Fathers played a different sort of trick -- they turned their backs on history. They did not blindly inherit the faith of their fathers.

Though the Constitution has always been controversial, Article VI and the First Amendment have been especially so in the last 60 years since the "wall of separation" between Church and State was named, reaffirmed, and applied to the states by the Supreme Court. That decision rests strongly on the four documents listed above. The whole business of revisionist history is to knock out the supports of that wall of separation by supplying an explanation of why those four documents don't accurately reflect the intent of the Founding Fathers. Thus the claim that Jefferson and the rest were really godly Christians.

Battles in the culture wars -- as in the church -- are fought on both sides by selectively picking historical quotes or biblical verses that promote their agenda or refute their opponents.

James Madison wrote that if you make a religion the official one of the state then those who are not believers become suspicious that followers are too aware of the faith's fallacies to trust it to survive on its own.

Royall Tyler (mentioned above) wrote in 1817 about Connecticut's established religion,

"A State Religion always has, and ever will be intolerant.”

Lepore's article is here.

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