Rev. Dr. Forrest Church
"It is in our lives and not in our words that our religion must be read."
The Role of Religion in American Democracy
By the Reverend Dr. Forrest ChurchAccording to a recent Beliefnet poll (September 2007), 55% of the American people believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. In fact, the Constitution is mum on the subject. The only mention of religion appears in the anti-discrimination clause respecting candidates for federal office. Article 6 includes the stipulation, "no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public trust under the United States."
During the debate over ratification of the Constitution, many mainline Christians howled at its silence on religion. The Presbytery of Massachusetts and New Hampshire groused to George Washington, "we should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some explicit acknowledgment of THE TRUE ONLY GOD, AND JESUS CHRIST whom he has sent, inserted somewhere in the Magna Charta of our country." Washington demurred. "I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction," he said. "To this consideration we ought to ascribe the absence of any regulation respecting religion from the Magna Charta of our country."
Reflected in this debate, two competing 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 individual freedom. Jefferson dreamed of establishing an Empire of Liberty, whose government sacredly would protect each individual's God–given freedom of conscience.
Both visions had religious dimensions—call them divine order and sacred liberty. Cast in terms of the nation's motto, "E pluribus unum" ("out of many, one"), the unum people believed that, in order to uphold "one nation under God," the secular and sacred realms must rest on a single foundation. Without a united sense of purpose and clear moral vision, they argued, liberty would lapse into license.
Champions of sacred liberty, pluribus people as it were, believed that, to promote "liberty and justice for all," the secular and religious realms must be kept autonomous. Government attempts to impose religious (or moral) values suppress religion instead, they claimed, by violating individual freedom of conscience. In the early Republic, the Baptist Church stood alongside Jefferson in the vanguard of those championing freedom of conscience and strict church-state separation.
The gathering consensus (from early in our history to now) unites aspects of both traditions, combining state protection of freedom of conscience with a strong tradition of moral politics. While church and state are separate under the Constitution, religion and politics mix freely in our national life.
Religion will always have a place in our politics. Religious values are, or should be, moral values. They instruct both our activism and our votes. Yet, religion has thrived in America in large measure because the Government was prevented from corrupting its franchise. In England, for instance, where the Anglican Church fed at the government's trough for centuries, next to nobody attends worship. The United States of America is the most religious western industrialized nation precisely because our religious institutions have maintained their moral independence and therefore their moral authority.
If church and state operate independently under U.S. charter, American democracy is nonetheless founded on a moral pediment. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence holds us (as it did him) under moral judgment: to guarantee liberty and justice for all.
So defined, there may be too little religion in today's politics, not too much. Too little of the religion prescribed by the prophet Micah: "to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God." Too little of the religion taught by Rabbi Jesus, who summed up all the law and the prophets in two great commandments: "to love God with all your heart and mind and soul and your neighbor as yourself." Too little of the religion as defined by Thomas Jefferson, who said, "It is in our lives and not in our words that our religion must be read."
30 years minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan, Forrest Church has written many books on church–state separation, most recently So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State (Harcourt, 2007). Dr. Church is featured in the current issue of UU World magazine ("America's Founding Faiths").
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Last updated on Friday, April 18, 2008.
