I thoroughly enjoy history. I remember the first time someone tried to convince me that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were “born again Christians.” That phrase has a fairly specific meaning in today’s America, and I knew that neither Jefferson, nor Washington were “born again” as I understood the term 20 years ago. People can believe what they will or what they want, but when you screw with history, you are no friend of mine. I remember when all the church schools started teaching kids (mine included) that our “Founders” were all Bible toting Christians who made sure America was founded as a Christian nation based on Christian principles. I didn’t have the time, nor the desire, to refute this malarky.
Finally, someone has written the book that I needed back then, “Founding Faith”, by Steve Waldman. Waldman is the Founder of beliefnet.com, the largest spiritual web site, dedicated to helping people in their spiritual walk whether it be Christian, Islam, Buddhist, Hindu or whatever. In this interview Steve explains the impossibility of referring to the faith of our Founding Fathers as if they were one homogenous group who believed just alike. They were anything but. Just as people today cannot agree on matters of religion and faith, our Founding Fathers, and the colonies from which they came, were all over the place. Don’t you remember? Puritans had their state, while Quakers had theirs, Catholics theirs, and they sent all the debtors to Georgia.
So what does this have to do with today? As Steve points out, there are those today who invoke the “faith of our fathers” to argue that these ancestors never intended for their to be a separation of church and state. If you repeat this a thousand times, it still will not be true.
Steve’s purpose in writing the book is probably a little more altruistic than my purpose in interviewing him. His desire is for each of us to have a better understanding, historically and practically, about the relationship between religion and government, separation of church and state. My purpose is much more sinister: to squish underfoot the idea that church and state should not be separated.
Actually, if there were a consensus among the Washingtons, Jeffersons, etc., it was that the federal government should stay the heck away from religion, while the states could put you in jail if you didn’t attend church on Sunday. You have to remember the guys that came up with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended it to apply to the federal government, only. So back in those days if the State wanted everyone to attend church, nothing in the constitution prohibited them from passing such a law. They had some pretty weird laws back then. By today’s standards they were harsh, cruel laws which would shock most of us by today’s standards. Things change! Thank the Lord!
It took the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment for the “freedom of religion” of the First Amendment to apply to the States. Of course, the States didn’t give up their monopoly on religion just because the Fourteenth Amendment was passed and that is why ever since 1868 the courts have had to deal with a progression of cases which emphasize the tension between the original intent of the First Amendment and the restrictive intent of the Fourteenth Amendmant.
Maybe this explains why all (at least as far as I can recall right now) the laws that try to make us do religious things (like pray in school and at graduation) are state laws, not federal. It’s that old state power trying to exert dominance over the freedom granted to the individual under the First Amendment. If we could understand and appreciate that this supposed controversy over separation of church and state, is really a battle between us (as free individuals) and the state (that stupid entity that can’t get the garbage picked up on Monday), we might realize that this is a battle I (us) (we) (the individual) am supposed to win!
I think our Founding Fathers understood this, much, much better than we do. They prized individual freedom over everything else. They fought a losing battle and won against all odds because they preferred freedom to tyranny.
Tell me again. Why do you want to pass a law that makes me listen to you pray?
If you want to have some fun and find out more about the religion of Jefferson or Washington or Madison, just go to Steve’s archive about our Founding Fathers. You will be amazed at what those crazy guys were thinking!
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