Faith in America

0 Comments | Saturday Evening Post, Nov-Dec, 2009 | by Jack Feerick

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Thomas Jefferson didn't mince words when he gave his view on religious freedom: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God," he once wrote. "It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Jefferson's no-skin-off-my-nose attitude is so thoroughly modern that it's hard to remember just how radical his view was in its day. Despite the fact that America was colonized partly by settlers looking to practice their beliefs without discrimination, the Founders still lived in a world where government-sanctioned and supported religion was the norm, where differences of faith and conscience could lead to seizure of property, bodily harm, and worse. By guaranteeing freedom of worship as a basic Constitutional right for all Americans, Jefferson and the rest of the Framers were attempting something entirely new. Almost miraculous, in fact.

Consider that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written and ratified by a group composed exclusively of white, male landowners (many of them slaveowners), most with ties to just one specific religion more than 50 percent of the Founding Fathers were affiliated with the Episcopal church, according to some historians. Not exactly the diverse dream team you or I might have chosen to safeguard the religious freedom of a new nation.

But that's exactly what they did, and in the first lines of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..." Known forever after as the Establishment Clause, this pronouncement and the entire amendment--has over time proven to be a versatile tool that does more than separate church and state. It protects America's faithful and faithless alike, providing both freedom of religion and freedom from it, as appropriate.

To be sure, the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee how their efforts would one day help to make America the most religiously diverse nation in the world, nor anticipate how the Establishment Clause would come into play on future issues, from the teaching of evolutionary theory in schools, to the displaying of the Ten Commandments in public buildings, to the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance.

For more than 200 years, the balance between religious liberty and the rule of law has been constantly renegotiated. To understand how that balance has been maintained both then and now, we need to look back at the influences that shaped the Founders and the documents they created to serve their country and--ultimately--us.

Founding Faith

The traditional idea of the Founding Fathers as conventionally pious Christian gentlemen is a myth, of course. But neither were they actively hostile to religion. John Adams, to pick one, remained a regular churchgoer throughout his long life. Jefferson, meanwhile, was skeptical of religion, yet revered Jesus as a great moral philosopher, even assembling a personal edition of the New Testament with scissors and a glue-pot, retaining the ethical teachings of Christ while editing out the miracles. (You can see the Jefferson Bible today at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.)

The time was ripe for change. This was the Age of Enlightenment, when advances in the sciences forced philosophers to reconsider humanity's place in the universe. Educated men of the day, including Jefferson and other Founding Fathers, were attracted to Enlightenment ideals and beliefs, including Deism: the notion of a Creator whose existence could be deduced from His handiwork, but who took no active part in human affairs--God as absentee landlord.

Another Enlightenment ideal that exerted a powerful influence over the Framers was the social contract. "Social contract theory holds that government doesn't descend from on high, but from voluntary agreements among ordinary citizens," says Gary Kowalski, author of Revolutionary Spirits, an account of the philosophical foundations of the Constitution. This all but flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which held that government derived its authority from God, from the top down.

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As if that wasn't enough to lay the ground for revolutionary change, there was also an upswell of religious devotion among the colonial populace, with Evangelicals preaching that all men are created equal, and that each person's value is determined not by social class, but by moral behavior. Sound familiar?

The Declaration of Independence, then, served not just as the founding document of the American Revolution, but as a balance of the influences of the Founders and the average citizen. It asserted our unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator. But this truth was not handed down in a mystical vision; rather it was self-evident, revealed by rational observation.

The declaration makes no further mention of God. The Founders strove to emphasize that separation from England was an expression of human rights, rather than Divine Right. "The Founders believed that religion could be a healthy force in society--if it were exercised within a zone of personal autonomy," says Kowalski.