Introduction
This past summer in my advanced Spanish Conversation class at UNAM here in San Antonio, our profesor, el doctor Mario Melgar, brought us an article called “The Hispanic Challenge” (www.foreignpolicy.com) by Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, famous for having written "The Clash of Civilizations." Now Samuel Huntington was a very interesting writer with very interesting, provocative and worthwhile ideas that I have distant memories of from his pre-Clash days (see Huntington posting soon) so I was startled to read that he felt that Hispanic immigrants of today reperesented a threat to the nation because they rejected “the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.” He went on to say that “America was created by 17th- and 18th-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British and Protestant…. They initially defined America in terms of race, ethnicity, culture and religion.” The religion, says Huntington, was overwhelmingly Protestant.
He goes on to say that this “creed” of Anglo-Protestantism was set forth in the Declaration of Independence in which Thomas Jefferson refers to our rights which we obtain by reason of “The Laws of Nature and of God” and that we are “endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable Rights…”
Huntington continues,
[m]ost Americans see the creed as the crucial element of their national identity. The creed…was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law…; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.’
(This last, the goal of creating a “city on a hill” is a distinctly Calvinist notion.)
I read this in the heat not only of San Antonio summer but of this very bitter 2004 presidential campaign in which I had repeatedly heard Christians from the right assert that this nation was in fact established by its Constitution as a Christian nation and that the Founding Fathers did NOT advocate separation of church and state.
As someone who has embedded in HER version of the American creed that foundational in our identity IS the separation of church and state, I found myself flooded with indignation. But the bases of my belief lurk in shreds and tatters in memory
I started a search for answers and found confirmation of my old certainties, with lots of new information lighting the way.
The Founding of Fathers indeed did deliberately keep God out of the Constitution and did deliberately keep religious belief as any sort of requirement for anything out of the framework of our Federal Government. Unlike the shadowy authors of the Bible, Hamilton and Madison and Jefferson and Adams and the rest left plenty of evidence of their ideas and intentions. It’s worth delving into: letters, speeches, The Federalist Papers, the Constitution itself, state law, and so on and so forth.
I also found one short book, an author-described polemic, entitled, The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore. (You can find a link to the Amazon site for it under the Democracy Matters segment of this blog.) This book is particularly useful for having been written from the perspective of authors who value the role of religion in public life rather than from the point of view of complete secularists.
For those of you who also find your memory of the role of church and state in our Constitutional history fuzzy, I present below a brief synthesis of information mostly derived from The Godless Constitution, but mixed with bits from other sources. I have to apologize: I haven’t done footnotes except for direct quotes from the book and from one web site. Everything I’ve cited as fact is, I believe, easily verified.
Article Six, the only place where religion is mentioned in the Constitution (clause is italicized)
All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
Some demographic points about religious and ethnic identification in 18th Century America
In New England and the Southern Colonies, English heritage dominated.
In the Middle Atlantic colonies, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the presence of the Dutch in New York, Germans in Pennsylvania, Swedes in Delaware, and Irish throughout, diluted the English population to less than half of the total.
Maybe 4/5 of the slave population lived in the South. In the North, most slaves were household slaves. In the northern South, slaves also worked in fields and at the crafts necessary for farm and plantation maintenance. In the Deep South there were large numbers of field slaves, the lowest class, the worst treated, a kind of faceless group in the eyes of the white ruling classes. It should be noted that these Africans came from a broad range of cultures and geographical regions.
Indentured servants, Anglos for the most part, made up a significant part of the population.
I had a hard time easily finding demographic info on Native Americans on the web for the eighteenth century, but certainly they outnumbered Anglos for awhile and were decimated in Anglo-America as they were in Spanish America. It has been estimated that prior to the arrival of Europeans, there were between 1.5 million and 8.0 million Native Americans in a large variety of ethnic groups. The difference in estimates is due partly to the fact that they are estimates and partly to the fact that there was an ebb and flow in population size over the centuries. Apparently, by 1900, there were only roughly 258,000 Native Americans in the U.S. This population has since grown.
Religious affiliation of late 18th century America excluding non-whites
Compared to Spanish America, there was little proselytizing, little interest in carrying religion as an official arm of the expanding governments.
Perhaps 10 to 15% of the population was active as church members, but allegiance to Protestant Christianity was dominant and probably close to universal. This allegiance was not universally a big feature of daily life in much of the country.
In the North, Dissenters were in the majority: those are, for instance, Calvinist sects, Anabaptists and so forth. In the South, the Anglican Church, still officially supervised by the Church of England, dominated. Apparently the Anglican Church in the South was a “lazy” church with difficulty keeping parishioners organized and with finding clergy.
Far more women than men were active participants in Church. The authors of The Godless Constitution suggest this might have been because they were denied access to political participation in their communities.
There were are a sizeable minority of Catholics and a small number of Jews.
It would be fair to say that Protestantism was a part of the cultural identity of most of the Anglos in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
Brief summary of pre-Constitutional relations between Church and State in Europe and in the Colonies
European antecedents to the philosophy underlying the Constitution
We have to remember that the states of Europe were ALL were Christian states with a state religion. Religious struggles in Europe were often political struggles for the control of states, and they were brutal, starting with the Emperor Constantine. Our revolutionaries were struggling, in fact, against an English monarch who sat at the head of a state church and who, though it was no longer much discussed, had his roots in divine kingship. These theocracies wielded power over who had access to offices and jobs large and small and to education. They held sway over social systems that locked people into poverty and that punished them for heresy and infidelity with torture and death. The Inquisition marched on through the 18th and into th 19th century in Spáin.
Religious tyranny joined economic and political tyranny in the oppression of individuals. It’s worth noting that individualism in our country rose as a response to these tyrannies: The Founding Fathers were aiming for freedom of conscience, of thought. They were aiming to free individuals from the oppression of indentured servitude and of having to give away huge quantities of what they made and earned to an oppressive master. Thus, the State as the Fathers had experienced it was something to keep away from people’s lives and livelihoods.
In eighteenth century, religious leaders, be they clergy or politicians, fused the state and religion not only in Europe but in the Thirteen Colonies. As Kramnick and Moore write,
"Th[e] traditional Christian view of the state, which the American founders (i.e. Jefferson, et.al.) rejected and the Christian right is dusting off today, fuses religion and politics by making the state part of God´s design to redeem humanity. Its purpose is the execution of God´s moral laws, the protection of God’s faithful, and the furthering of God’s truth. God has given His creatures a revealed law through scripture, a set of absolute and timeless principles of right and wrong, and enjoined His creatures to live lives of virtue and morality. The state’s mission is to implement this godly order in a particular time and place. Its laws are to proclaim God’s truths and to reward the virtuous life, while punishing sin and immorality. Those who preside in the state – traditionally monarchs, lords and magistrates, and today legislators and presidents – are God’s servants, His agents in this timebound realm for the realization of the moral mission. The Christian commonwealth, be it the Catholic realm for Aquinas or the Protestant realm for an eighteenth-century Anglican bishop, or Christian America for the religious right today, sees religion and politics as forever bound together (p.71).”
"In Christian states, the state church proclaimed “the necessity of deference and subordination to the political rulers” and “the Christian magistrate in turn ensure[d] that proper religious observance [was] enforced and sinner [were] punished by the secular sword that assists in the achievement of a Christian society (p.72)."
American Religious Antecedents
Although, as we all learned, many people came to Anglo-American shores to escape religious persecution, some, as we also learned, turned to persecuting others in our Thirteen Colonies both in an effort to establish that “city on a hill” and because of prejudice.
Roger Williams left Puritan Massachusetts for Rhode Island to escape the rigidities of the Puritan theocracy. Into the discourse in this country, Williams, a very religious man, introduced the notion of a godless state. He did so to protect the purity of his Christian beliefs from attack in Massachusetts. He “grew absolutely convinced that God favored no nation over another and that civil governments had no role to play in the millennial drama. Religious purity and good government were two separate issues (52).” He knew that being a good ruler did not require one to be a good Christian. In fact, our very oldest understanding of law and government comes from non-Christians such as Hammurabi, Solon, Pericles and Julius Caesar. Williams also pointed to counter examples of good Christians who made lousy rulers. Of primary importance to Williams was his observation that when religion and government were mixed, each corrupted the other.
Yet by the time of the Constitution, the seeds of an opposite formative belief had been planted in our country: that this was a redeemer nation, “a Christian nation upon which God had showered great blessings (p. 61).” At the time the Founding Fathers sat down to write the Constitution, eleven of the thirteen states had religious requirements of for holding office, all of them Protestant Christian.
British Liberal (non-religious) influences
Our notions of the value of a laissez-faire economy; of the sanctity, of individual rights given by God and the extremely high premium we put on individualism as opposed to communalism; and the concept that government’s function is purely negative, that is, mainly to protect from conflict and crime, come from the influence of the Enlightenment, particularly as expressed by John Locke. It is important to recognize that these values were articulated against a history of political, economic and religious tyranny experienced at the hands of monarchies. These American values as guiding principles of civic behavior I think have spiraled out of control in the hands of some. They exist in isolation from their context and without the recognition of the need for limits.
The particular rights that Locke most had in mind to protect were property rights, and by extension, protection of life and liberty. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson replaced “property” with “happiness.” In this, he appears to have been influenced by European humanists. The European school of law rising as part of the new humanist thought sought to replace the lost hope that the Church could be an instrument of peace with secular laws to regulate international behavior. These scholars thought much about Natural Law and and about the concept of Just War. Early in this development were the ideas of Francisco de Vitoria, a Spanish Dominican professor of theology of the sixteenth century.
According to Sanderson Beck, Vitoria said that “human societies are established to bear each other’s burdens,…and that a community is needed for mutual assistance, because a single family does not suffice, especially in regard to resisting violence…. States have the authority or right to use public power by governing in order to protect and preserve people…. A prince or good rulers should subordinate both peace and war to the common good of all, but a tyrant directs the government towards his individual good. Thus the government is not legitimate unless a majority agrees with the exercise of power.
“Vitoria suggested that the law of nations derives from natural law and confers rights and obligations. The world as a whole has the power to create international laws that jare just for all persons and no country should be permitted to refuse to be bound by international law that has been so established (www.san.beck.org/GPJ13.InternationalLaw.html).”
Vitoria’s heirs followed his lead in establishing definitions of natural law and its uses in preserving human safety. For instance, Pufendorf in the 17th century “believed in human freedom and equality. Although humans are naturally sociable, their unsocial behaviors need to be regulated by law. Humans often go beyond the nature of other animals in their greed, lusts, vanity and competitiveness. From natural law reason indicates that humans have duties to God, oneself and to others. For mutual advantage and to gain protection from others, humans organize their communities. Pufendorf believed that civil government is more effective in restraining abusive behavior than either God or conscience (www.san.beck.org....).”
Christian Wolff, a German born in 1679, started his scholarly life as a mathematician but became absorbed in issues of philosophy and theology. He upset Pietist theologians by trying to apply scientific methods to theology. He was an advocate of academic freedom and the “unhampered search for truth.” His conflicts with theologians came to a head when he said, citing, yes, Confucius, that “one may attain happiness without revelation (www.san.beck.org...)” He also wrote that it was Natural Law that should be at work in the relationships of human beings.
Emerich de Vattel, a contemporary of Jefferson’s, brought to the fore the idea that after self-preservation, the promotion of and protection of the welfare of others is the next most basic obligation of people. He saw states as under the same constraints but on a larger scale. His expanded ideas of what matters to human life dwarfed the idea of “property.” One of his most striking observations is that the use of war to decide an issue is ridiculous since the winner may be stronger but not right.
It is essentially from these European humanists that Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, declared and justified the right of the colonies to overthrow British rule.
So...
Drawing from all these sources and experiences, the Founding Fathers built into the Constitution a “wall of separation” between Church and State, between secular and religious interests. They were anxious to protect an individual’s rights to his own thoughts and beliefs, her freedom of association, and his ability to participate in civic life. Among many religious groups and people, there was affirmation of this separation because it prevented forced joining of a denomination and permitted the development of one’s own spiritual identity. There was the generally held belief among supporters that faith could not, in any event, be imposed from the outside, and that efforts to do so resulted in corruption of both the political and religious sides of life. Participation in politics and institutions of secular power by religious folks and domination of religious institutions in the name of secular authority also corrupted both groups of participants.
It’s also important to note that our Founding Fathers did not view untrammeled economic activity and individualism as “inalienable rights,” but had a strong sense of the need for individuals to balance their rights with the rights of others. Moreover, they were steeped in philosophy that recognized the importance of ethical participation in community in the protection of individual rights.
In conclusion...
Please do make an effort to find The Godless Constitution by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore for a very effective treatment of the relationship of church and state in the United States, not only in the 18th century but up until the present. The authors trace the long history of opposition to the “wall of separation” as well as the history of efforts to preserve it: the notion of the U.S. as a “redeemer nation,” special in the eyes of God versus the support of the “wall” as essential to our freedom to practice religion or not according to our consciences, to be safe from persecution, and to confine our government to civic affairs. And should you be lucky enough to find the time, delve into both primary and secondary sources about our heritage: The Federalist Papers, as an A-1 primary source, for instance; Founding Brothers for a short, lively and enlightening secondary source as starters.
