So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State
Author Rev. Forrest Church
Publisher: Harcourt, Inc.
Did you know:
- George Washington so opposed religious lobbying, that he cursed church interference in government affairs, even when he agreed with those who were trying to reverse national policy;
- John Adams believed Christianity was essential to government and feared that the nation would founder unless its people were guided by Christian teachings, even though he suspected the tenets of Christianity happened to be false;
- Thomas Jefferson, of "wall of separation between church and state" fame, worshipped on Sundays at a chapel set up in the Capitol, and dreamed that one day all Americans would subscribe to a single, "national faith";
- James Madison, who declared four National Fast Days as president, later recommended that the offices of congressional and military chaplain be abolished, and that future governments tightly regulate religious corporations, lest their unchecked wealth and political power undermine the state;
- Virginia’s Baptists, and not James Madison, spearheaded the drive to supplement the Constitution with a Bill of Rights. The Baptist passion for freedom of conscience led directly to the First Amendment;
- In the early Republic, most Baptist comprised the religious left as champions for church-state separation, and the Unitarians were on the religious right, demanding a seat for God in government;
- Most politically active Presbyterians and Congregationalists rejected the Declaration of Independence as subversive to Christian values;
- Congress subcontracted Christian denominations to aid in education Native Americans, the first instance of "faith-based initiatives."
These revelations, and many more, come from Rev. Forrest Church’s latest book, So Help me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State. Church, Minister of Public Theology at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York, provides an engaging, beautifully crafted and meticulously researched history of our nation’s first culture war over what role religion was to play in government. It’s also an object lesson in history repeating itself. In Church’s own words:
Today’s Christian Right claims that the United States was founded explicitly as a Christian nation with a Christian government; they seek only, they say, to restore the faith of the founders. The secular Left claims that the United States was founded on an explicitly secular foundation, as codified in the Constitution. As it turns out, both sides are one hundred percent half-right. As we do today, the early republic divided right down the middle. From the outset of our experiment in government, the founders fought tooth and nail in a contest over American values, a vigorous, sometimes savage, yet nearly forgotten thirty-year conflict to redeem the nation’s soul.
Two very different themes combined to compose the dissonant music of early American politics. The first theme, sounded in New England from the time of the Puritans, posited the ideal of a Christian Commonwealth. Uplifted by the imperatives of Christian morality, the government would be a shining city on a hill, fulfilling God’s mandates and receiving his aid. The second theme, codified in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, arose from Enlightenment France. Rather than that of Christian Commonwealth, it posited the ideal of sacred liberty. Jefferson dreamed of establishing an Empire of Liberty, whose government sacredly would protect each individual’s God-given freedom of conscience.
The book focuses on that thirty-year conflict and the five founding presidents at the heart of it, as well as the array of political preachers on both sides of the debate, who lobbied the White House to enact their particular programs and either demonized or championed each president as either the embodiment of all that was good or evil in American government. The role of religion in government was at the center of every key issue these early presidents faced: Native American rights, slavery, foreign policy, war and peace. And even the Bill of Rights. Each of the presidents saw the relationship between government and religion differently, and each reacted to the competing pressures in ways that didn’t always reflect their private spiritual beliefs.
The book provides a deeper, more nuanced view of the spiritual in our expressly secular Constitution and government that's critical to the understanding the role of religion in shaping of our political life. It’s a fascinating and informative look at how so much of the nation’s history was set by this fundamental opening debate. I conducted an e-mail interview with Forrest to discuss the book. That interview is below the fold.
We're also lucky to have Forrest with us today in the comments to answer your questions. He'll also join David Goldstein and me on Radio Kos tonight, 10:00 EST, streamed at News/Talk 710-KIRO.
Let’s start with the title, So Help Me God. That’s an intrinsic part of American political history, and seemingly an accidental one. Can you talk a little bit about how that phrase happened to find itself in our first President’s oath of office (if indeed it did), and how it shapes the themes of your book?
George Washington appears to have added the religious vow, "So help me God" to the end of the secular oath of office as prescribed in the Constitution. Jefferson dropped the religious addendum (it doesn’t appear again until presidents start modeling their inaugurations after Washington’s in the late 1900s). The difference sums up two radically different views of early American government. Were we going to become a Commonwealth of God or an Empire of Liberty? My tale traces the transition from the former view (grounded in Puritan New England) to the latter. By Monroe’s presidency the United States was a secular state.
Another defining theme for you is E pluribus unum, which in this context represent for you on the one hand divine order, and on the other sacred liberty. Each of the founders came down pretty definitively on one side or the other. Can you describe that tension between the founders and how it played out in the Constitution?
New Englanders (Congregationalists and Unitarians) stood on the religious right in the early republic. They couldn’t imagine God not having a seat at the head of government. John Adams (a Unitarian) held this view. The Declaration of Independence, with its emphasis on liberty and equality, was viewed by the Divine Order party (the unum crowd!) as a radical, heretical, pro-French document. Jefferson and Madison (pluribus people) championed "sacred liberty," and argued, with strong support from the Baptists (the religious left of their day) that church and state should remain separate. In a way, the first American culture war was waged by those who placed the emphasis on "One nation under God" against those who championed "Liberty for all."
The Baptists stood in the vanguard of the then political left. They knew the tyranny of church-state collusion first hand and therefore held Freedom of Conscience as the nation’s first principle. One way this plays out in the Constitution is that a group of politically active Virginia Baptists led the charge for a Bill of Rights, forcing James Madison, who was ambivalent on the subject, to promise to introduce a Bill of Rights (with a religious freedom clause) in Congress in exchange for their support in his congressional race against the then more radical James Monroe. More than Madison, (and whether their latter day ancestors take pride from this fact or not) the Baptists deserve top billing for the First Amendment.
You’ve said that the debate between religion and secularism in our founding signaled what you call the birth of the American body politic. How did that happen?
In the 1800 election, the Federalist case against Jefferson was that he was an infidel. If elected (by the "demos"—a four letter word back then in New England) Jefferson, they claimed, would drive God from government and the nation (and churches) would fall, lacking divine aid. Adams declared a national fast day in 1798 that tore the nation apart. The Baptists, Methodists, and other religious outsiders feared the establishment of a state church and turned to Jefferson in droves. When Jefferson won the election, New England Congregationalists (including Abigail Adams) proclaimed the coming of the Apocalypse, Baptists, the advent of the Millennium.
The irony is that 1800 also marks the beginning of the Second Great Awakening. Over the next quarter century, as church and state became more separate, the church doubled in size. Even those who fought to the bitter end to protect established religion (in Connecticut for instance) finally acknowledged that the church was stronger (and morally more independent) once freed from state support.
This divide between the pluribus and the unum over church and state was certainly the most prominent public debate from the founding through the first five presidents’ terms in office. We start with George Washington, not a particularly religious man, setting the stage and even muddying the waters a bit through his choices of political allies. How did his successors, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, view the issue, and how did they deal with the issue as they inherited it from him?
The established clergy were very frustrated by Washington, who refused to confess a faith in Christ. He also strongly disapproved of religious lobbies interfering with the work of government. This pure position was a mixed blessing. The Quakers, for instance, lobbied for Abolition, provoking Washington’s ire. Washington was steadfast in his support of religious liberty. In general, he balanced order and liberty quite well, approximating something like E pluribus unum.
After he left office the two parties (the unum and pluribus factions) broke out into the open. Adams and Jefferson shared the same theology (Jesus not divine, the Bible not the revealed word of God, ethics more important than metaphysics and dogma), but they split on whether the government should be Christian. Adams (from deferential, top-down, order-fixated New England) had serious doubts about innate human goodness, rejected the French revolution, and worried that liberty would lapse into license. Jefferson, an enlightenment priest, rejected the notion of sin and blamed the government church cabal for depriving the people of their God-given liberty.
For almost two decades, competing Fourth of July ceremonies were the order of the day in divided precincts throughout the North and East. The Democrats wore "heretical, anti-religious and anti-American" colors, the hated French "red, white, and blue," and read Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence on July 4. The Federalists wore the black (American) cockade (a hat ribbon). New England preachers would inveigh against the dangers of liberty and democracy. The Divine Order faction, however, was far more likely to oppose slavery than Jefferson Sacred Liberty folks. "Liberty" and slavery walked hand in hand together toward the Civil War.
The climax of my story (and the end of the then religious right) was the War of 1812. For good reason, the New England clergy hated "Madison’s war." They also claimed, however, that battling Christian England put us in league with atheistic France, selling our nation’s soul to the devil and forfeiting God’s support. When the U.S. "won" the war (it was more of a draw, but victory was jubilantly celebrated), the Federalist clergy got branded as traitors and withdrew from presidential politics. Church and state, under James Monroe, were basically separate (all Christian ceremony dropped), yet, unlike Jefferson and Madison, Monroe (the most secular president of them all) escaped political attack from the clergy (who decided to redeem the nation from the grassroots up, not the presidency down). The first cycle of religious politics came to a quiet end in what was called the Era of Good Feelings.
There an element of the relationship between the churches and the state that I think is the thread that connects the 21st century debate to the 18th and 19th--who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside. That’s led to sort of an interesting role reversal over the centuries between the Congregationalists, Unitarians, Methodists and the Southern Baptists. Can you talk a bit about their roles in the early debate?
Religious outsiders are always opposed to church-state collusion. To the early state churches (Congregational in New England, Episcopal in Virginia), Baptists, for example, had to pay taxes to support the established clergy and were sometimes jailed for professing their beliefs. When challenged to justify allying themselves with Jefferson (a notorious free thinker), the Baptists bluntly said it didn’t matter what he believed. What mattered was that he would permit them to worship God freely without government interference. Today, the Baptists have become religious insiders; the Unitarians and mainline churches (the old establishment) are more on the outside. Hence, Baptists are less sensitive than they used to be about church-state separation, whereas Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians are much more alert to the dangers inherent to authoritarian sacred politics.
The idea of a wall between church and state is generally attributed to Jefferson, but it didn’t start there.
Roger Williams, the Baptist preacher who was booted from Massachusetts and who founded Rhode Island on the principle of church-state separation was the first to use the term "wall of separation." William Penn and the Quakers also wrote tolerance into the statutes of Pennsylvania. One of the reasons that George Washington opposed established churches is that he couldn’t woo religious émigrés to settle in Virginia and work his lands. They came to America to practice their religion freely and so settled in places like Pennsylvania, which thereby prospered economically. Washington groused that Virginia’s growth was entirely in convicts and slaves. His hope to wean Mt. Vernon of slave labor was frustrated by the presence of the Anglican Church establishment in Virginia.
The key moment in church-state separation is Jefferson’s Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia (with the aid of Virginia’s Baptists, Madison orchestrated the campaign that made it law. Jefferson wasn’t a purist on the subject. Much to the outrage of his religious and political opponents, he often worshiped on Sundays in the Hall of Representatives (in Washington, worship also took place for a time, until churches were built, in the War, Treasury, and Supreme Court buildings). Jefferson did, however, end government fasts and thanksgivings. He privately believed that once everyone was as educated and enlightened as he was, the entire nation would surely embrace his enlightened faith and world view, ending all danger of church interference in government.
Some of the founders believed they were creating a Christian nation, some didn’t. If they were to return in 2007, would they find a Christian nation?
No. We have a secular Constitution, and every attempt to put God and Christ in it through amendment (beginning during the Civil War) has failed. We are, almost by definition, however, a religious nation, in part because of the enlightenment faith Jefferson posited in the Declaration of Independence. We can never be a Christian nation, because essential to that faith is its firm expression of religious liberty (both freedom for and freedom from religion). The religious symbolism ("In God we Trust," "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance) refers back to the Declaration of Independence, not the Bible. Accordingly, it is precisely as a "religious" nation that we are committed to support complete religious freedom. "One nation under God" is permanently tempered by "with liberty and justice for all," and E pluribus unum, if sometimes fitfully, come together.
That said, we were once a more explicitly secular nation than we are today. The book I am working on now (In God We Trust: How the U.S. Government Got Religion, Walker, 2010) tells the story of how the secular government of the early 19th century (with stricter separation of church and state than we have today), found religion during the Civil War. It was then that "In God We Trust" was put on the coinage, Puritan Thanksgiving made a national holiday, etc. Lincoln unabashedly served as the nation’s Theologian-in-Chief. A century later, at the height of the cold war, our religious nationhood was codified. In 1954, "In God We Trust" officially became the national motto, "Under God" was put into the pledge, and annual prayer days were instituted.
That said, the religious dimension implicit to American civil religion (and ceremonial Deism) today, took flight with Lincoln, on the wings of the Declaration of Independence, which is why pluribus (sacred liberty) will always be the default position when the government trespasses too far from the founders’ commitment to church-state separation.
One of the favorite themes of the chattering classes today is that politics, and specifically the "values" debate, has gotten too nasty, too divisive, and too partisan. But reading your book, it’s obvious that that’s another of our inheritances from our founders. How does the vitriol in public debate today compare?
The religious political rhetoric in the early republic would make a modern day talk show host blush! Politics is a fierce business to begin with. Mix in religion and it quickly becomes toxic. That said, if Jefferson and Jackson had had their way (with no "values" discussion allowed to interfere with government, and no "legislating of morality"), abolition would have remained on the back burner of American discourse. For church and state alike, the "Sacred Libertarians" did us a great service by establishing the nation on a pediment of church-state separation, but to remove religion from politics (Jefferson accused clergy who preached on political matters of a "breach of contract") would have silenced many of the most persuasive voices in favor of abolition. One reason perhaps that so few scholars have recognized the extent to which Lincoln tore down Jefferson’s wall (if in Jefferson’s name, while waving the Declaration of Independence), is that he did it in such a good cause.
You’ve been all over the country talking about your book. Do you see the kind of division over the separation of church and state that the traditional media would have us believe is raging on the ground in America?
Exit polls at the end of the last presidential election suggested that 3/4s of those who went to church every week voted Republican and 3/4s of those who didn’t attend worship at all voted Democratic. We were in danger of dividing into a secular (unum) party and religious (pluribus) party. Given the gulf separating them, whichever one, in a sense, the American people might very well lose. Today, the top candidates on the Democratic side are strong people of faith, one leading Republican doesn’t attend mass and thinks that religion and politics should be kept completely separate, and the evangelical vote splits almost down the middle between Democrats and Republicans. This is far healthier, I believe. At least there remains a larger swath of common ground.
I do fret about one thing this year. Gov. Huckabee appears to have, at best, only a rudimentary appreciation for the importance of keeping Christ out of American government. The last thing this nation needs is another president who feels personally called by Christ to save America. In the 19th century, 13 states, mostly in the South, had laws against clergymen running for office. The last of these laws (in Tennessee) was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1978 as unconstitutional. Those laws were written both to keep clergy free from political pollution and the state free from clerical direction. Chief Justice Warren Berger was doubtless right when he dismissed such statues as denying clergy their full first amendment rights, but no candidate who says that his only client in Christ should be elected to an office where he or she, under law, must answer to all the people, regardless of faith.
You are uniquely qualified to comment on religion and politics, being both a theologian and the grandson of a governor and son of one the nation’s greatest modern Senators. How have the two strains of religion and politics intersected in your life to bring you to write this book?
In 1957, when my father was sworn in to the Senate, the Sergeant at Arms, if I remember correctly, presented him with a Jefferson Bible. Evidently this had been done for years (it stopped, I think, in 1958), the Government Printing Office having printed 5,000 facsimile copies in 1904 (almost none of which sold). The irony of Jefferson’s Bible (which he religiously kept private) being handed out to senators, especially given Jefferson’s commitment to church-state separation, is considerable. I was nine at the time. Jefferson’s Bible, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" (no virgin birth, no resurrection, no miracles) was the first Bible I ever read from cover to cover. Though my own faith is less rationally driven than Jefferson’s, he built my first bridge toward becoming a religious scholar and then a Unitarian Universalist minister.
So Help Me God, too, grew out of my interest in Jefferson’s Bible. Beacon Press published the first modern edition of The Jefferson Bible, which I introduced, more than a decade ago. My interest rekindled and seeking a higher patriotism, I wrote a post-9/11 book on the Declaration of Independence (The American Creed, St. Martins, 2002) and compiled and introduced the founders’ writings on religious liberty (The Separation of Church and State, Beacon, 2004). In doing research for those books, I discovered that a chapter of early American politics had been almost completely overlooked, the first great culture war fought between the neo-Puritan devotees of Divine Order and the Francophile champions of Sacred Liberty. It struck me that insights from this early struggle—pitting a Commonwealth of God against Jefferson’s "Empire of Liberty"—might well illuminate today’s debate. One source of illumination is this: Both sides back then had blind spots and each had something important to offer. If we remember that today, pluribus and unum folks may be tempted to engage each other more civilly and E pluribus unum, that grand old aspiration, may yet become something more than a pipe dream.