The Necessity of Confronting Christian Nationalists: The Establishment Clause
When the Constitution of the United States was approved there was a contentious debate over its lack of a bill of rights.
The Federalists, who advocated a strong national government argued that the Constitution did not need a bill of rights, because the people and the states kept any powers not given to the federal government. On the other side, the Anti-Federalists, wanted power to remain with state and local governments. They were concerned that the Constitution’s lack of a bill of rights that would place specific limits on government power would lead to a powerful State trampling the rights of citizens. They believed that a bill of rights was necessary to safeguard individual liberties, especially when it came to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the freedom of religion.
James Madison, who wrote the Constitution attempted to address the concerns by modifying the Constitution to include them, but was overruled by those who said that the Congress could not alter the text of the constitution itself, which led him to introduce seventeen amendments that would follow Section Seven. The Senate approved 12 and the States ratified 10. They were strongly influenced by the Virginia Declaration of Rights written by James Mason.
The first section of the First Amendment acted to protect citizens from the power of a government backed established religion, and provide for the the protection of people’s ability to worship as they please without government interference. It stated: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” before going on to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom to petition the government.
The First Amendment went further than the Virginia Declaration of Rights in terms of religion. The Virginia Declaration, written just prior to the Declaration of Independence, addressed religious liberty and no establishment of religion, but not as clearly. This was important as at the time of the Revolution, most of the states retained at least some elements of religious establishments. These included requiring church attendance, collecting tithes, and burdening or curtailing the rights of religious dissenters. In Virginia, Anglicans of the new Protestant Episcopal Church, sought to regain their status as the State Church of Virginia, and even used violence to attack members of other churches, including the Baptists, whom they would attack their meetings and “re-baptize” pastors, deacons, and members in the nearest body of water. In effect they were using torture akin to modern “water-boarding” to coerce Baptists to abandon their faith, occasionally drowning them.
These actions motivated Virginia Baptist leader John Leland to pressure Madison to provide protections in the Bill of Rights. Leland was one of the most outspoken leaders for the Establishment Clause in the nation. This was in part because the absolute separation of Church and State was paramount to the first English Baptists who were a persecuted minority in England. John Smyth anf Thomas Helwys who founded the Baptist denomination believed that the government and the church must remain separate. In his book, The Mystery of Iniquity (1612), Helwys wrote: “For men's religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Jews, Turks or whatever, it pertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”
For Helwys and the early Baptists this was not only about freedom of religion, but freedom of conscience. For them an individual’s freedom of conscience was indispensable to a person's relationship to God. They held that people needed to have the right to choose their religious beliefs "seeing they only must stand before the judgment seat of God to answer for themselves."
King James I of England had no tolerance for such dissent and as a result Baptists were outlawed and their leaders imprisoned, Helwys died in prison as a result of his mistreatment in 1616. English Baptists and other religious minorities in the new North American colonies, especially Quakers, faced discrimination and persecution, so Leland spoke out. He wrote:
“Is conformity of sentiments in matters of religion essential to the happiness of civil government? Not at all. Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics. Let every man speak freely without fear–maintain the principles that he believes–worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in so doing, i.e., see that he meets with no personal abuse or loss of property for his religious opinions. Instead of discouraging him with proscriptions, fines, confiscation or death, let him be encouraged, as a free man, to bring forth his arguments and maintain his points with all boldness; then if his doctrine is false it will be confuted, and if it is true (though ever so novel) let others credit it. When every man has this liberty what can he wish for more? A liberal man asks for nothing more of government.”
However, throughout our history various attempts were made to declare the United States to be a “Christian Nation”. None succeeded, however, despite the evidence that Madison, Adams, Jefferson, and many others admitted that many Americans practiced some form of the Christian faith, all insisted that our government espoused no religion.
In the First Treaty signed by the United States with a foreign power expressly denied that our government was Christian. President John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli with the Pasha of Tripoli and the Dey of Algiers in 1796, and it was ratified by the Senate in 1797. Article 11 expressly stated that the United States was not a Christian nation.
“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religious or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
Madison wrote: “Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”
In 1823, over thirty years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and in light of the remarkable results of the Second Great Awakening which revolutionized religious life in the United States, for good and evil, but which empowered previously marginalized denominations to national institutions, Madison wrote of the success of the radical experiment to divorce the church from the state:
life:
“The settled opinion here is, that religion is essentially distinct from civil Government, and exempt from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to both; that there are causes in the human breast which ensure the perpetuity of religion without the aid of the law; that rival sects, with equal rights, exercise mutual censorships in favor of good morals; that if new sects arise with absurd opinions or over-heated imaginations, the proper remedies lie in time, forbearance, and example; that a legal establishment of religion without a toleration could not be thought of, and with a toleration, is no security for and animosity; and, finally, that these opinions are supported by experience, which has shewn that every relaxation of the alliance between law and religion, from the partial example of Holland to the consummation in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, &c., has been found as safe in practice as it is sound in theory. Prior to the Revolution, the Episcopal Church was established by law in this State. On the Declaration of Independence it was left, with all other sects, to a self-support. And no doubt exists that there is much more of religion among us now than there ever was before the change, and particularly in the sect which enjoyed the legal patronage. This proves rather more than that the law is not necessary to the support of religion” (Letter to Edward Everett, Montpellier, March 18, 1823).
But in spite of the vast historical evidence, many Evangelical, Fundamentalist, and Charismatic Christians and leaders continue to insist that this is the case and through the Republican Party push laws that are expressly designed to impose the will of their interpretation of the Christian faith on others, even Christians who do not hold those beliefs, Jews, and a host of others.
When the late Senator Barry Goldwater, who cannot be considered a liberal, and who supported beliefs that harmed civil rights in the 1960s, saw the rise of powerful politically motivated Evangelical preachers including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the Republican Party he sounded the alarm on the floor of the Senate on September 19th, 1981:
“There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’ ” Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona) Source: Congressional Record, September 16, 1981
Goldwater correctly divined the future of the GOP and in 1994 said:
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.” November, 1994, in John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience.
Others warned us too. Robert Ingersoll, a decorated Union hero of the American Civil War, as well as one of our most prominent skeptics and atheists wrote something quite profound in understanding the nature of what our founders intended and why there were protections both for and from religion in the Constitution:
“They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping or in the keeping of her God the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship or not to worship that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all to prevent the few from governing the many and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.”
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Robert Jackson who served as the Chief American prosecutor for the International Military Tribunal which prosecuted the major Nazi War Criminals at Nuremberg wrote in American Communications Association v. Douds:
“[I]n our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds — that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.” — Justice Robert H Jackson, American Communications Assn. v. Douds, 339 US 382, 438; 70 SCt. 674, 704 (1950)
That is especially true today. Christian Nationalists live in a world of cosmic dualism where to paraphrase Jackson, they believe that their own thoughts mirror God’s and those that don’t, even other Christians trying to uphold orthodox Christian beliefs are not only false and dangerous, but serving Satan. Until you have been that Christian on the receiving end of their threats you really don’t understand.
The dualism of these people makes them easy prey for conspiracy theories and manipulation by unscrupulous political leaders, some who clothe themselves in the language of Christianity while denying the essence of the Gospel, and others, like former President Trump who play to their fears and present themselves as a savior from their earthly enemies. The late Richard Hofstadter wrote about the dualism and lack of ability to compromise embodied by such people:
“As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated–if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”
George Truett, the great Southern Baptist Pastor who served as President of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary wrote in his book Baptists and Religious Liberty in 1920 about the decidedly negative effect of when the Church became the State religion:
“Constantine, the Emperor, saw something in the religion of Christ’s people which awakened his interest, and now we see him uniting religion to the state and marching up the marble steps of the Emperor’s palace, with the church robed in purple. Thus and there was begun the most baneful misalliance that ever fettered and cursed a suffering world…. When … Constantine crowned the union of church and state, the church was stamped with the spirit of the Caesars…. The long blighting record of the medieval ages is simply the working out of that idea.”
The late Senator Mark Hatfield a strongly committed Evangelical Christian before it became popular in Washington, made this comment concerning those that are now driving this spurious and poisonous debate:
“As a Christian, there is no other part of the New Right ideology that concerns me more than its self-serving misuse of religious faith. What is at stake here is the very integrity of biblical truth. The New Right, in many cases, is doing nothing less than placing a heretical claim on Christian faith that distorts, confuses, and destroys the opportunity for a biblical understanding of Jesus Christ and of his gospel for millions of people.”
When Donald Trump said on March 5th at the Conservative Political Action Committee, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice, Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,” it was not just political hyperbole, it was an appeal to a heavily conservative Christian base, that has been condition to believe that they are perpetual victims, despite controlling the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and a large number of State legislatures and Governorships that are implementing their agenda every day in almost every aspect of life. But they are believe that they believe that they are the victims. No partial victory or lack of complete control is enough, their unrealistic expectations cause them even more frustration and feelings of powerlessness than they had at the beginning.
I will finish this essay on why we must confront Christian Nationalists at every turn. Judge Learned Hand, probably the most qualified American Jurist never to sit on the Supreme Court served as a federal judge for over 50 years, most of the time on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. He spoke these words in his speech on May 19th, 1944 two weeks before D-Day in New York’s Central Park. 150,000 people were gathered to take their oaths as new citizens of the United States as part of the I am an American Day. Many were refugees from Nazi occupied Europe, including Jews who had escaped Hitler’s genocide, in spite of my desire for brevity his remarks are worth quoting in full:
“We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.”
Eight years later, after the Nazis were vanquished he made a speech entitled A Plea for the Open Mind and Free Discussion.” It was given at the University of the State of New York on October 24th 1952, at the height of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare and witch hunts. It is a warning now to those who would use their interpretation of the Christian faith to silence and deprive others of civil, voting, and religious rights, even going so far as to ban books, to punish educators with criminal convictions up to felonies for teaching subjects that make them uncomfortable, especially those dealing with systemic racism and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people. Judge Hand spoke:
“That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.”
This is not a fight that can be avoided. Christian Nationalism in not Christian at all. It is a poisonous variety of nationalism that speaks fear, distrust, and hatred of the other in the name of God. Its proponents, be they politicians or preachers might quote from the Bible to justify their actions, but use it only to gain power over all as they use the police power of the government to punish their victims and advance their nefarious and disturbing agenda.
That is all.
Thank you for reading my work here. I appreciate all who take their time in our often hectic and busy world to read my thoughts. I appreciate each person who does, especially those who take the time to comment and share.
If you want to see much more of my work on religion in American life and politics please read my book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Religion and the Politics of Race in the Civil War Era and Beyond, published by Potomac Books an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, October 2022. It is available online and in many brick and mortar bookstores. You can obtain an inscribed copy from me by subscribing as a Founding Member. Thank you again.