Church and state at the nation's founding

Steve Waldman, writing in The Washington Monthly, looks at the history of views on the separation of church and state. He notes that although both sides of Our Great Times' cultural divide can find evidence affirming each's position in the writings of the Constitution's Framers, evangelicals of the time were consistent: Church and State should be like oil and water.

It is ironic, then, that evangelicals—so focused on the “true” history—have neglected their own. Indeed, the one group that would almost certainly oppose the views of 21st-century evangelicals are the 18th-century evangelicals. John Leland was no anomaly. In state after state, when colonists and Americans met to debate the relationship between God and government, it was the proto-evangelicals who pushed the more radical view that church and state should be kept far apart. Both secular liberals who sneer at the idea that evangelicals could ever be a positive influence in politics and Christian conservatives who want to knock down the “wall” should take note: It was the 18th-century evangelicals who provided the political shock troops for Jefferson and Madison in their efforts to keep government from strong involvement with religion. Modern evangelicals are certainly free to take a different course, but they should realize that in doing so they have dramatically departed from the tradition of their spiritual forefathers.

It's easy to see why. Congregationalists in the north and Anglicans in the south were the "established" religions of the Colonies. Baptists, upstarts and revolutionaries to the establishment, were shunned by religious leaders and in some cases beaten by law enforcement at the behest of the establishment. These proto-evangelicals knew that only by "rendering unto Ceasar what is Ceasars" could they expect to thrive in the new nation.

But their alignment with Jefferson and Madison was not just about survival, they shared similar views of the individual.

On one level, this little-known alliance between Jefferson, Madison, and the evangelicals was pragmatic; for different reasons, they shared similar goals. But the connection went far deeper. When evangelicals smashed ecclesiastical authority—by, say, meeting in the fields without the permission of the local clergy—they were undermining authority in general. They were saying that on a deep spiritual level, salvation came through a direct relationship with God and that the clerical middleman was relatively unimportant. Jefferson and other enlightenment thinkers were glorifying the power of the individual mind to determine the truth—through evidence rather than merely tradition. As the historian Rhys Isaac put it, “Jefferson's system proclaimed individual judgment as sacred, sacred against the pressure of collective coercions; the evangelicals did the same for private conscience.”

Today's Christian conservatives often note that Jefferson's famous line declaring that the first amendment had created “a wall separating church and state” was not in the Constitution but in a private letter. But in that letter, Jefferson was responding to one sent to him by a group of Baptists in Danbury, Conn. We usually read Jefferson's side of that exchange. It's worth re-reading what the Danbury Baptists had to say because it reminds us that for the 18th-century evangelicals, the separation of church and state was not only required by the practicalities of their minority status, but was also demanded by God. “Religions is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals,” the Baptists wrote, warning that government “dare not assume the prerogatives of Jehova and make Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ.” Government had no business meddling in the affairs of the soul, where there is only one Ruler.

Now that their descendants have a seat at the table of power, they've conveniently forgotten that history, and now welcome the mixing of religion and government. They are certainly all for making "Laws to govern the Kingdom of Christ." There are some exceptions to that lust for power among evangelicals, though.

The popular commentator Cal Thomas and the author Ed Dobson, both former officials of the Moral Majority, wrote a courageous book in 1999 called Blinded by the Might, arguing that proximity to power had prompted religious conservatives to abandon their principles and distracted them from their religious mission: “We have confused political power with God's power.” And the Baptist legacy reappeared after George Bush's election when a number of religious conservatives surprised pundits by suggesting that churches should not accept money from the faith-based initiative. Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said that while he hoped Bush's faith-based plan passed, he personally “would not touch the money with the proverbial 10-foot pole.” The fears expressed by Thomas, Dobson, and Land were the very same ones that Leland or Bachus would have had: that with government involvement will come government interference. Modern religious conservatives have mostly decided to go along anyway because they felt a greater good—the promotion of President Bush and the general encouragement of religion—outweighed the risks.

That moment of nervousness by some religious conservatives about the faith-based initiatives was largely ignored by the mainstream media because it was a minority opinion among contemporary evangelicals and didn't fit the agreed-upon playbook—the Christian right got Bush elected so surely it must like religious aid—but it indicated that this spirit of John Leland and Isaac Bachus is not entirely dead in the evangelical movement.

It will be interesting to see if religious conservatives grow weary of their dance with politics. The movement that helped changed the balance of power in Congress and installed "one of them" in the White House has perhaps gotten a bad taste in its collective mouth watching their leadership's embrace of K Street, "faith-based initiatives" languish, and all in all feeling pretty used by the politicians they supported.

But I digress. It's a fascinating article, depicting a history of the nation's founding that is often easily distorted because it's no longer taught much in school.