Founding Faith

Another book report on another timely subject: Separation of Church and State in the U.S.

I will be absent for at least a week as we leave for Milwaukee on Sunday so Linda can be admitted to Elmbrook Hospital at 5:30 A.M. Monday for an abdominal anuerism operation. All prayers appreciated.

Steven Waldman, “Founding Faith” (Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America), Random House, Co., 2008

Summary of Main Points:
Pg. 194: America was settled to be a Protestant Christian nation. Inhabitants of most of the colonies prior to the Revolution were not interested in religious pluralism or tolerance. They wanted a society based on Protestant principles, with a strong mingling of church and state and vigilant antagonism toward Catholicism.  Almost all of the colonies tried some variant on state-supported religion, and every one of those experiments failed. Perhaps the most important flare-ups of persecution came in a few Virginia counties, where they were witnessed by a thoroughly disgusted young James Madison. He and several other Founders looked at the wreckage of these experiments and concluded that official state religions led to oppression of minority religions and lethargy among the majority religions. Meanwhile, the Great Awakening created vibrant new denominations independent of and hostile to the official religions. These religious revivals also spawned a generation of Americans accustomed to fighting authority in search of higher principles.

Pg. 156: The Constitution along with the First Amendment was a grand declaration that the federal government couldn’t support or regulate religion—but it was also a grand declaration that states absolutely could, that was part of the compromise that enabled the First Amendment to gain widespread support. The deliberations on the First Amendment didn’t really end until 1866 when, in the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment prohibiting states from enacting laws that infringed on citizens’ liberties. Over the subsequent 130-plus years, the courts interpreted this to mean that the Bill of Rights applied to the states—a doctrine called incorporation.

Pg. xi: Some common myths of America's founding dispelled in the book:
· America was settled as a bastion of religious freedom. Actually, it was settled primarily by people who wanted the rule of one religious denomination over others.

· The Founding Fathers were mostly rebelling against the religious tyranny in Europe. Actually, they were rebelling as much against the religious tyranny they saw among their colonial neighbors.

· The Founding Fathers wanted religious freedom because they were Deists. Few of them were true Deists—people who believed that God had created the universe and then receded from action. Most of the Founding Fathers at one point believed in a God who intervened in the lives of Americans.
·
 The Founding Fathers wanted religious freedom because they were devout Christians. Most of them disliked much about organized Christianity, the clerical class, and its theology, especially the common Calvinist doctrine that salvation came only from expressed faith in Jesus—or from being among God’s select—rather than through good works.

· Evangelical Christians invariably want more government support for religion and less separation of church and state. In fact, separation of church and state could not exist if not for the efforts of eighteenth-century evangelicals.

· The American Revolution was fought solely over economic and philosophical issues. One of the most important factors was religion.

· The United States was founded as a Christian nation. North America was settled as a Christian realm, and many states did promote Christianity even after the nation’s founding, but the United States of America was not established as a “Christian nation.”

· The First Amendment was designed to separate church and state throughout the land. Actually, the Founders only intended it to apply to the federal government, not the local governments that regulate schools, local courthouses, and town squares. It was the 14th amendment in 1868 that extended federal dictates to the states.

Pg. xiii: Book has four main characters: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Basically, the founding fathers helped create a radical new three-part creed:
· Religion is essential to the flourishing of a republic
· To thrive, religion needs less help, not more, from the state.
· God gave all humans the right to full religious freedom.

The Founding Faith, then, was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty—a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.

Pg. 3: The New World Was Settled To Promote Christianity. For more than 150 years, colonial governments actively supported the dominant faith. Less acknowledged today is a point well understood by the Founding Fathers: Nearly all of these experiment in state encouragement of religion failed.

Pg. 31: Most of the colonies had imported the idea that an official “established” church was an absolute necessity for promoting religion. In the South, it was the Anglican Church, while in the North, the Puritan-influenced Congregational Church was dominant. In both cases, colonial elites mostly accepted that established churches were traditional and sensible. But evangelicals of the Great Awakening viewed these official and semi-official churches as the ones keeping them from worshipping as they saw fit.

Pg. 44: To modern eyes, colonial America might seem uniform. Except for an inconsequential smattering of Jews, everyone was Christian. But to the colonists, the influx of exotic new faiths and the schisms of old meant a highly fragmented religious landscape. It would take a while to sink in, but Patriot leaders came to understand the new facts on the ground: there was no dominant faith by the time of the revolution, and there likely never would be one.

With all the religious activism, it’s easy to forget that while most of the colonial elites were churchgoers, the majority of the population was not. Historian W.W. Sweet estimated that only one in eight were full members of churches; another set of historians placed “religious adherence” rates in 1776 at only 17%. To some extent, this is because transportation difficulties made church attendance far more difficult. And for years, Congregational churches were deliberately set up as exclusive enclaves of the most pious, starkly different from the come-one-come-all approach most houses of worship take today. Non-churchgoing Christians were naturally resistant to a government overly influenced by a particular faith.

The growth of religious pluralism meant that while the Revolution might be a holy war, it couldn’t be one led by one particular denomination or it would alienate rather than energize the populace. This would have to be a holy war like few others—religiously fueled but nonsectarian.

Pg. 64: As the Revolutionary War began, many persisted in seeing Catholics as excellent scapegoats. American clergy, newspapers, and politicians had used anti-Catholic rhetoric to stir opposition to the British. They had declared that the British in passing the Quebec Act (allowing Catholicism in Canada) would lead to a Catholic invasion of the colonies. George Washington, however, rejected the Catholic-bashing, not on philosophical grounds as much as for practical reasons. As commander of the Continental army, he believed that unless he could neutralize Canada, he couldn’t protect New England and New York from British invasions from the north.

Pg. 73: Jefferson edited the bible to create a personal one he could believe in. He transformed the Bible from the revelation of God into a collection of teachings of a brilliant, wise religious reformer-author of “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Jefferson’s editing of the Bible flowed directly from a well-thought-out, long-stewing view that Christianity had been fundamentally corrupted—by the Apostle Paul, by the early church, by great Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, and by nearly the entire clerical class for more than a millennium.

Pg. 98: Part of Congress’s evolution toward pluralism probably resulted from the simple fact that it was the most religiously diverse body most of the delegates had ever encountered. It included Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Universalists, Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, and even a Catholic.

Pg. 110: As Washington and the Continental Congress attempted to chisel a national identity, local governments metamorphosed from colonies into states. However, during the decade after independence was declared, only two of the thirteen colonies adopted religious freedom in a form we might recognize today. New Jersey, Vermont, North Carolina, and Georgia retained their bans on Catholics holding office. Maryland prohibited non-Christians. Delaware required that officeholders subscribe to “Trinitarian” Christianity. Pennsylvania demanded that lawmakers “acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.” In Connecticut and Massachusetts, taxes went to support the Congregational Church. South Carolina’s constitution declared that “the Christian religion is the true religion.” Only Virginia and Rhode Island offered full religious tolerance.

Pg. 129: Constitution Article VI, clause 3: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” This clause was remarkable for the times as eleven of the thirteen states did limit public office to people of particular faiths or beliefs. Of course, most delegates assumed that the Constitution would govern the laws of Congress, not the states. The 14th amendment would change that.

Pg. 144: For the past 200 years and more the issue that has bedeviled scholars and culture warriors has been whether the First Amendment was meant to block only the creation of an official national religion or whether it was intended to more generally restrict government involvement with, and even support of, religion.

Pg. 189: Those who passed the Fourteenth Amendment, and the courts that later interpreted it, concluded, in effect, that it no longer mattered whether Madison—or Adams or Fisher Ames or Patrick Henry—wanted his views on religious freedom applied to the states. The men who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment decided that, with the benefit of hindsight, the basic principles the Founders had envisioned just for the federal government should now be applied to the states. In that sense, those who are angry that God has been “kicked out” of the public schools shouldn’t blame the ACLU or, for that matter, Thomas Jefferson—but Abraham Lincoln and General Grant. The decisive blow against prayer in school came when Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

The second major change resulted from immigration. The religious makeup of the population of the U.S. in 1789 was 99% Protestant. Today, it is 52% Protestant. The largest denomination in America right now is Catholicism.

Another important event was the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Three phenomena—the rise of Darwinism, the growth of religious diversity, and the incorporation of the Bill of Rights via the 14th Amendment—progressed on parallel tracks.

Pg. 193: Three rulings of the US Supreme Court further transformed the church-state battle. In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, the Court ruled that school officials in New York State could not compose a prayer to be recited by students. The next year, in Abington Township School District v. Schempp, the Court ruled that schools could not sponsor or lead Bible reading or recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. These were the decisions that “kicked God out of the schools.” And in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that there was a right to privacy that included the right to an abortion.