History Fun: Separation of Church And State

There are those that argue that same-sex marriage is forbidden by the Bible, and others who will point out that since the United States is a secular nation, it doesn't matter what the Bible says.  And still others maintain that we founded as a Christian nation.

The fact is that our Constitution, the guiding document and supreme law of the United States forbids government - all government - from adopting a state religion in any way, shape, or form.

Let's isolate the part about religion:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

The first part, "shall make no law respecting an establishment of.."  This is something that most Americans do not understand, because we've been separate from England for so long. And let's be honest, history is one of the most tortured and abused subjects in our educational system.  Unless you're an enthusiast, you only know what was briefly covered in your public schooling, which means you really don't know much history at all.

Sorry, but it's true.  History is the class you slept through, and you only liked it when you got to make dioramas of log cabins or teepees.

Partially edible dioramas, preferably

So let's dip our toe in history.  I'll try to keep it brief, I know that you need to get back to cat videos and whatnot.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."

Established a State Religion

The Established State Religion
So to start with, the United Kingdom had an official state religion, the Church of England.  And everyone was expected to be a member of it.  And if you tried to practice another religion - even if it was just a variant of Christianity - you were punished for it.
  
Actually, they didn't start off with the Church of England; they started off with the Roman Catholic Church, like most of Europe.
 

The Church of England was split off from the Catholic Church when Henry VIII was trying to get himself a male heir to the throne. He was married to Ann Boleyn, and she wasn't giving him the son he wanted. None of the sons she bore survived, so Henry wanted to try with another wife, But since she had given birth to a daughter, the church refused to annul the marriage - something they would only do if 1) the marriage had not been consummated or 2) the bride failed to carry a child to term.  Since she'd born a daughter, neither case applied.

Furious at being denied, Henry VIII appointed himself head of the church of England.  He never did get that male heir, but England did get rid of opposition by the Holy Roman Church and their pesky Pope.

As you can imagine, this was a bad time to be a Catholic in England. That one daughter he had was Elizabeth I, or as she was known by Catholics of the day, Bloody Bess.  She had no love of Catholics at all, ordering the execution of 48 priests and 20 laymen, as well as her cousin, Mary ( aka "Bloody Mary, Queen of Scotts"), who held a low regard for Protestants.

That doesn't mean that there were no other religions in the United Kingdom, but the Act of Uniformity of 1662 sort of made that point moot, since all clergy had to be ordained in the Anglican church, and everyone had to follow the rites and ceremonies and doctrines prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer.  And you had to be a member of the church to hold public office.

So the key elements of a state religion are that everyone has to follow it under pain of prosecution, and you need to belong to it to hold positions of authority.

"...or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

The  Pilgrims

You may recall that we celebrate Thanksgiving, and that it has something to do with The Pilgrims.  "Pilgrim" is a word that means "a person who journeys to a sacred place for religious reasons," and in this case, we're talking about people who were fleeing religious persecution in England.  These were the English Dissenters, followers of Robert Browne, also called Brownists.

The Pilgrims were actually supposed to land in Virginia

They opposed state interference with religious matters, and pushed for a reformation of the Church of England.  This movement actually succeeded in overthrowing the government for a time; you may vaguely recall Oliver Cromwell - no?  Well, never mind. Suffice to say that when the the royal family was restored to power, you didn't want to be associated with the Brownists.

They initially emigrated to Holland, but soon realized their children were becoming Dutch, instead of English Dissenters.  So they eventually sought out a place where they could preserve their English heritage, and worship as their conscience dictated.  So, the Pilgrims journeyed to the New World so they could practice their religion as they see fit.

And what practices did they want? Well, to select their own clergy, for one.  To be able to recite prayers and sing hymns of their own choosing, for another.  The basics.

So they founded the Plymouth Bay Colony, where everyone was free to practice their religion, as long as it was consonant with the Puritan philosophies of John Calvin or Robert Browne.

The Catholics

As I noted earlier, after Henry VIII started his own church, it was not a very good time to be a Catholic in England, particularly by the time that Elizabeth I had eliminated her cousin Mary.  George Calvert 1st Baron Baltimore, started lobbying for a charter to start a colony in the New World, initially for commercial purposes, but he eventually realized it could be a haven for Catholics.  Calvert had been raised Catholic, but had converted in order to hold positions in the government.  When he later declared himself Catholic, he was forced to resign, but was created Baron Baltimore in the Irish Peerage.

The charter was granted, but Sir George died before it was stamped and approved. His oldest son Cecil, 2nd Baron Baltimore, oversaw the settlement in 1632, while his second son Leonard became the first governor.

In case you're wondering why a hated Catholic would be granted a charter at all, consider that it meant a lot of them would be leaving England.  And the charter wasn't a very good one; early on, the crown realized that part of it was already actually Virginia and lopped off the western extent, and then it promised some of the same area to William Penn to the north, which wasn't resolved until the famous Mason-Dixon line was established - in Penn's favor.

What practices did they want?  To be able to practice without being burned at the stake, having priests ordained by the Vatican, masses in Latin: again, nothing shocking.

Not the Oatmeal Guy

The Quakers

The founder of Pennsylvania was William Penn.  His father was an admiral and a knight, and it was expected that William would become a clergyman.  But in his twenties, William joined the Society of Friends (the Quakers), and rejected the Church of England.  For this, he was jailed several times.  He was eventually given a charter in the New World to repay a debt owed to his father, and set out to create a place where people could practice any religion they chose, free from interference.

And what interference? Well, the Quakers reject the notion of a clergy; no one person oversees the service, they file in and basically wait for the spirit to move them.  Having to have a state selected minister on hand when your services don't actually allow for a minister to run things starts things off on the wrong foot, and then having to follow a prescribed method of worship with prayers and hymns and so on is the antithesis of what they believe.

Here's an interesting fact for you: before Pennsylvania, the Quakers established the colony of West Jersey.  Not only did they practice separation of church and state, allowing anyone to follow any religion they chose, they also allowed women to vote.  Women lost this right when the colony was combined with East Jersey in 1702.

Sadly, he was less successful in Philadelphia; while professing freedom of religion, it was limited to those who those who believed in "the one Almighty and eternal God," and all public officials were required to be "such as possess faith in Jesus Christ."

The Baptists

Didn't expect to see them here, did you?  Believe me, you're in for some revelations if you're not a student of history. 

Not the pianist

We start with Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island.

Roger Williams was born in London, around 1603. He was ordained into the Church of England, but soon became disillusioned, finding the church "corrupt and false."  He declared himself a Puritan and more or less ruined his chances for a career in the Clergy anywhere in England.  He went to Boston in 1631.
  

Once there, he was offered a chance to become Teacher minister at the Boston church, but refused on the grounds that it was "an unseparated church."  He meant two things; first, even though the Calvinists were selecting and ordaining their own clergy, it was still basically the same old religion with a fresh coat of paint, and second, that it was too connected to the local government.  Williams maintained that the civil magistrate should not be punishing anyone who violated the precepts of the church, and that a church shouldn't need a government to back up their teachings. He felt that individuals should be free to follow their own convictions in religious matters, whatever they were.

After all, how can you choose salvation when you can't choose anything else?
  

Ultimately, he thought that to completely separate a church from the "irredeemably corrupt" Church of England, a new church would have to separate itself not only from the Anglican church, but also from the other forms of Protestantism and even from civil government.  His stance was that liberty and freedom of conscience were gifts from God, that Freedom of Religion was a natural right, and that demanded that church and state be separated.
So anyway, Salem offered him a position (presumably nothing to do with burning witches), but withdrew when Boston protested the "theft."  He then took a position at Plymouth Bay, but when he challenged the legality of the colony's charters (the land having been seized from its inhabitants without compensation), he was summoned to court back in Boston.  By 1635, he was convicted of sedition and heresy and banished. 

In 1636, he arrives in Rhode Island, where he purchased a tract of land from the Narragansett tribe.  he named the settlement he built there "Providence." 

He wanted this to be a haven for those "distressed of conscience", and created a government that looks very familiar to us today:  it was governed by a majority vote of the heads of households, new comers could be admitted to full citizenship by a majority vote, and the government would be restricted to "civil things," and "to hold forth liberty of conscience.

He founded the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1638.  It was the first Baptist church in America.

  

And its founder was the father of Separation of Church and State.

It is the will and command of God that (since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God's Spirit, the Word of God.
-- Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience, 1644

The Founders and Separation of Church and State

It's apparent that the lessons of Roger Williams were well known to the framers of the Constitution.  After all, he rigorously applied it to his own colony. The idea was not new to the framers of the Constitution.

Were the founding fathers Christians?  Most of them were, of course. The breakdown of the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 goes like this: 28 Episcopalians, 8 Presbyterians, 7 Congregationalists, 2 Roman Catholics, 2 Methodists, 2 Dutch Reformed, and 2 Lutherans.  Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were "anti-clerics"; and the rest were deists, who reject religion as guiding force for enlightenment.

The Constitutional Convention, 1787

So yes, most of these men had religious convictions, and many of them had strong religious convictions.  As did Roger Williams himself, who basically invented separation of church and state.

These men absolutely intended for the first amendment to install a separation between church and state.  They went so far in this that the word "God" doesn't appear once in the entire document.  Neither does "Jesus Christ", or even the word "Bible."

Why? Because they wanted freedom of religion to mean that you would not be excluded from participating fully in society simply because your faith was different than the majority of citizens around you.  And participation included not only the right to vote, but the right to hold office.

And because the state had no laws dictating what you should believe or how you should believe it,  a variety of religious institutions have thrived in the United States.  The Founding Fathers may be Christians one and all, but the government they created was a nation of laws, applied equally (mostly) to all its inhabitants.

And as for proving that the United States was never intended to be a Christian nation?  The founders said so.  Literally.

The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli was signed by the men who signed the Constitution.  And one of its key statements is:

 “....the government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian Religion...”

As I mentioned, this was signed by the same men who signed off on the Constitution, and it seems to me that nobody knows better what they intended with the Constitution than the men who actually created the document.
 
This is actually from Article 11 of the Treaty, and in its entirety it reads:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Not good enough?  Fair enough, I've heard arguments that perhaps they didn't read the document, or that it was written in Arabic, so they wouldn't have understood that this phrase was in there. 

John Adams certified that he and Congress read it and understood; but what did HE know?.

Not that I accept that argument for a second, mind you; it's just that I also have the words of various founding fathers on other occasions, and all of them are consonant with the idea that the first amendment intended that
Well, I'll offer a random sampling of those statements from our founding fathers; I'll leave out Jefferson, because come on, you HAVE to know his stand on it by now, even if you were educated in Kentucky.

John Adams, driving force of the Declaration of Independence, 2nd President of the United States

"Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."

-- “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America” 1787-1788

George Washington, First President of the United States

 

“If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.”

-- Letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia, May 1789

Benjamin Franklin, signer of the Declaration and Constitution

“When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

-- Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,  1728

James Madison, Author of the Constitution, 4th President of the United States.

 

“[T]he number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, & the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State.”

-- Letter to Robert Walsh, March 2, 1819

 

“The civil government … functions with complete success … by the total separation of the Church from the State.”

-- Writings, 1819

Oh yeah, and Article VI
But lest we forget, the first amendment is not the only place where the Constitution limits the application of religion to the application of government: we must not ignore Article Six:

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.

I hope this gives you some understanding of how the framers of the Constitution came to exclude religion from government.

They felt - strongly - that the only way to have freedom OF religion was to also have freedom FROM religion, as far as government was concerned.

Their intent was to give as many people as many rights as possible.  And the reason the Supreme Court rejected all the laws that banned same-sex marriage comes down to one thing: they were all designed to take rights away, and not one of them expanded an existing right, or even protected existing any  rights.  The only argument for these laws was that some people had religious beliefs regarding who should be married to whom.  And what does the First amendment say about applying religious doctrine to matters of state?  It says "no."

The courts ruled that the laws didn't protect anyone, and that allowing people of the same sex to marry doesn't actually infringe on anyone else's rights.  Oh, Ms. Davis and Mr. Huckabee may not like it, but no one says they have to marry a person of the same gender, or the same faith, or the same race.  Just as they could before, they can marry who they choose.  Only now, other people can do that, too.

Ms. Davis doesn't have to agree with that, but she does have to file the paperwork, and certify that it was filed correctly, without any personal regard of the parties being married, just like she does for everyone else, and just as she swore an oath to do.  And if Ms. Davis wants to remarry, she can do that, even if the Catholics still think she should have her prior marriage annulled first.

Here's a final word from James Madison, that echoes the philosophy of Roger Williams: