Church and State – A View From the Sycamore

In my last blog, supported by the writings of our nation’s Founders, I asserted America was not founded as and is not today a “Christian nation.” I did not identify the founding principles of America or why in the world we should care about them nearly 250 years later. Addressing that means I must digress to provide some crucial historical context, and since our Founders were European, this must be some European history.

(Ugh! History. I know, we all hate it, but stick with me for a few minutes. It’s important.)

In the 15h and 16^th Centuries, leading into our nation’s founding, Europe was emerging from 1,000 years of a social order built on three pillars – hereditary rulers (aristocracy and nobility), Church authority, and brute force.* In various ways each pillar supported the other to maintain power. The state supported the authority of the church, the church sanctified the authority of the state and, should you rebel against either, they could resort to brute force to keep you in line. Your heredity determined your social class and no matter how good or vile a person you were with few exceptions, you and your progeny maintained that class and the privilege or burdens that came with it. The religious authority insisted the aristocracy and nobility had a divine right to rule over commoners and commoners had a divine mandate to submit. The Church also taught that, in a world filled with demons, angels, saints, and witches, we are all in danger of hellfire. Conveniently the Church, via moral instruction and ritual, offered a way to escape damnation, extending or withholding eternal salvation. Your body was owned by the aristocracy and your soul belonged to God who was available only via the Church. Each were intent on expanding their wealth and influence and when negotiation failed, brute force was called to action. Religion became political, and with the force of the state the political became brutal. Religious wars became devastating political wars [see the 30 Years War]. A change of monarch altered the fates of millions based on a monarch’s religious loyalties. Millions died in war’s combat, disease, and starvation. Commoners were the foot-soldiers and cannon fodder of the powerful political and ecclesiastic elite.

In the 14^th Century, the technology of the printing press with moveable type and published translations of the Bible in the common languages eventually germinated the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th Century. This fractured the authority of the Church as Protestants asserted every man had a right to a direct connection to God and the right to study the Bible on their own terms.

Out of this ferment of new technologies and ideas, the Age of Reason emerged in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries and “natural philosophy” of ancient Greek scholars was rediscovered and refined. This was essentially the birth of the mindset of modern science, although the term “scientist” would not be used until the 19^th Century. Inductive and deductive reasoning was used to examine everything, including religious claims. New scientific discoveries demonstrated that much of what had been explained by God or demons could be explained by natural processes. Deism was a theology claiming the nature of God could be determined by the study of his creation rather than divine revelation. And in that creation, it was the nature of every man – we didn’t get to women yet – to have certain inborn, natural, and inalienable rights. This gave rise to the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment thinking deemed all men are created equal (goodbye to aristocracy) and that every man owned his own self (goodbye, hereditary authority) and that his life was his alone. Anything which a man produced by his own labor also became his property (so long, serfs) and he could not be deprived of it without a due, fair process. The church provided opportunities to pause and commune with God – who still had His rules – but it was no longer the sole authority of that access. As these ideas took hold, more commoners began demanding a say in their own destinies.

Our nation’s Founders were educated men who embraced the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson once said that “Bacon, Locke and Newton are the greatest three people who ever lived, without exception.” Enlightenment philosopher John Locke especially influenced our Founders. Locke insisted life, liberty, and property were natural rights that pre-exist any government or religion. While Locke held his own Christian views and his writings were influenced by them, he insisted religious tolerance was necessary to a civil society since a man’s conscience was his own. Likewise, no government should establish a particular religion since it could not verify absolute truth nor command a person to believe what they do not believe. Violating a man’s conscience violates his property and therefore his natural rights.

These are Enlightenment principles on which America was founded. When Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” he did not echo words from the Bible, he stated Enlightenment philosophy. This seed sprouted into both the American and French Revolutions. It also upended hereditary monarchy as a ruling force across Europe. Monarchies acceded to democracy in various forms, giving people a say in their own lives to an extent not seen in 1,000 years.

Across American history our major conflicts have been around Enlightenment principles – the nature and rights of individuals. Sadly, our Founders cultural blinders let them create a nation with gaping contradictions to Enlightenment theory including the rights of enslaved people, the rights of non-European native peoples, and the rights of women. This blunder is our great national sin which abolitionist, suffragette, and union member progressives have continually tried to correct to make “a more perfect union.” We are now in a period where the forces pushing us back are the same old ones. Religious “authority” in the guise of Evangelicals using political power to control the lives of the majority. As our new “aristocracy” the uber-wealthy now own our legislative processes and wish to own us as “human resources.” The Republican Party wants to restrict the power of the common person to vote. These movements are coordinated. They are also as unAmerican and as unenlightened as any tin-pot dictator.

Next time I’ll say more about how our Enlightened Nation is threatened. Until then, as I opened with the words of Langston Hughes, let me also close with them:

“O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.”
Langston Hughes, American poet

Tikkun Olam

(*I am deeply indebted to Seth David Radwell for his concise summary of medieval social order and other definitions in his excellent book American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret for Healing Our Nation. I highly recommend it to those concerned for our country.)

May 23, 2022 Kandiss Taylor, Georgia Republican Gubernatorial Candidate: “We’re going to do a political rally and we’re going to honor Jesus… They’re not going to tell us ‘separation of church and state.’ We are the church. We run this state!… The church runs the state of Georgia.”

July 26, 2022 Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican member of Congress “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk. It was not in the Constitution; it was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.”

Boebert and Kandiss are the most recent politicians to claim the United States of America was founded as a “Christian nation” and suggest separation of church and state is a subversive concept. Current advocates of this view appear less interested in Christian doctrine and more determined to use the Bible as a political weapon. They hope to impose into our nation’s policies their interpretation of Biblical morality while also using religious fervor to raise money and motivate voting. Their intent is to grasp power to advance unChristian and anti-democracy agendas. As an American citizen holding advanced degrees in theology and policy, I find this revolting.

So let’s be clear. America is not now, nor has it even been, a Christian nation. Moreover, our Founders never intended it to be.

Saying this is neither anti-American nor anti-Christian; only a matter of history and from much more than “a stinking letter.” In 1797, the U.S. Senate, a body more than 50% composed of original signers of the U.S. Constitution, unanimously affirmed a Treaty with Tripoli clearly stating:

[Article 11] 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, [Muslims] -and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan [Mohammedan] 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.”

Obviously, time has altered this relationship but it clearly demonstrates at our nation’s founding neither Christian dogma nor identity played any role in how our government was constructed or operated. Separating political power while carving out a cultural space for each person to follow the dictates of their own conscience was a clear goal of our nation’s Founders and one of their crowning achievements. In their time, this was considered radical, so why did they do it?

Our nation’s founders knew first-hand from European history how the mingling of political power and religious dogma was a toxic brew leading to bigotry, social divisions, bloodshed, and repeated religious wars. In 1785 James Madison, the Father of the US Constitution, published a letter to the Virginia legislature as it worked out the State’s constitution where some wanted a tax to support a state church. In opposition Madison wrote, “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?” ( in Memorial & Remonstrance)

in other words, Southern Baptists would rebel against a government mandate to live by Catholic doctrine and vice versa. In 1803 Madison again pressed this point stating:“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”

Nearly 20 years later on July 10, 1822 Madison wrote to Edward Livingston still insisting, “Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Gov will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

Distancing church from state protects both, a belief held by many of our Founders. Despite biographies published after his death portraying George Washington as a fervent Christian, his own letters and diaries portray a different person. In one such letter he assures a Hebrew [Jewish] Congregation of their status as equal citizens in this new nation. As an adult, Washington only occasionally attended worship services, was never a church communicant, and on his deathbed no minister or priest was called into attendance. Academic study by known historians has debunked fabricated stories and misattributed quotes intending to portray him otherwise.

When someone asked Alexander Hamilton why the U.S. Constitution makes no reference to God, he famously quipped, “We forgot.” The Founders did not, of course, merely forget; it was a conscious decision based on both their principles and their experience. The writings of our nation’s Founders never refer to the Bible as an authoritative source for governing or policy. Neither Christianity nor the Bible are quoted as a basis for their political views. Our Founding documents do not cite Jesus Christ and rarely reference God in more than general terms such as “Providence” or “Creator” or “Nature’s God.” To read even those statements with 21^st Century Evangelical lenses is to misunderstand profoundly, even dangerously, what they intended. While some of the Founders were church members most viewed religion, broadly defined, as a source for moral guidance, not absolute or spiritual truth.

For example, while Thomas Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of independence, viewed Jesus as an excellent moral example to which one could aspire – a view he called “Christianism”—he rejected Jesus’ divinity, resurrection, and miracles. I could continue with similar documentation about Benjamin Franklin, or Thomas Paine (who called the Bible “the pretended word of God”) but you can explore these links for yourself. There is ample, written documentation the nation’s Founders deplored the idea of the United States ever establishing one religion over another, including Christianity. Moreover, for those Founders who were observant Christians, their beliefs would fail the current litmus test of being “true” Christians by today’s Christian Nationalists, Evangelicals, and Fundamentalists.

The Founders’ chief interest in religion was not its dogma but its usefulness in providing a common moral code within which a democratic society could function. Yet in the 21^st Century large portions of American Christianity have abandoned that moral code, supporting highly immoral individuals and political tactics. Moreover, parts of that religious segment have become arrogant, autocratic, punitive, and more lately, violent. All of these are traits inherent in religion that our Founders feared and sought to uncouple from the power of the state.

Intermingling state and church is becoming coercive and dangerous to our democracy and to the free exercise of religion. Their wisdom is once more revealed by a violent Christian presence in the January 6^th insurrection, an eye-opening moment for many of us. Boebert’s shockingly ignorant comment that the church is supposed to direct the government, coming from a sitting member of Congress, reveals how far we have strayed. The most recent ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade protecting access to abortion was made by a predominantly conservative, Catholic Supreme Court and supported by Evangelical Fundamentalists. It is not the will of the larger American public. These are the latest examples of intermingling church and state. Christian dogma must never be the source of national policy. Our Founders would applaud our resistance to it.

Tikkun Olam

[A following article explains the principles upon which our nation was founded and why our forgetting them is costing us so dearly.]

Tag: Church and State

Enlightened America, Part 1

Is America a Christian Nation?