Religious Pluralism and America’s
Christian Nation Debate
Revisiting the Intentions of America’s
Constitutional Founders
By Gregory W. Hamilton, President[1]
Northwest
Religious Liberty Association
The constitutional system
of the United States of America remains
the envy of the world—or so we Americans
like to think! Ideally and practically speaking—no matter how many flaws and
shortcomings some seem to find—America’s constitutional
system is what has inspired most of the nations on this increasingly free trade
global planet of ours to aspire to freedom and equality and to share in the
democratic and economic successes that follow in the train of borrowing from
its constitutional and economic model. While this has not been without some
apprehension due to America's
occasional cowboy swagger and arrogance, success over a 220-year period has
proven its value to the nations of the world.[2]
In his book Diplomacy, which continues to be used as
one of the standard textbooks in many university graduate programs in
diplomatic history and political science, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger describes America’s global
reach and influence this way: “Almost
as if according to some natural law, in every century there seems to emerge a
country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to
shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values.... In
the twentieth century, no country has influenced international relations as
decisively as the United States. No society has...more passionately asserted
that its own values were universally applicable.”[3]
Kissinger’s magisterial description of the global reach and
influence of the United States confirms the genius of America’s
constitutional Founders. With its three co-equal but separate branches of
governmental power—executive, congressional, and judicial—and more checks and
balances than even our brightest constitutional scholars can keep up with, America’s
constitutional system continues to be the governmental model most sought after
among foreign countries choosing to embark on the path toward representative
government.
With the addition of a Bill of Rights to compliment our
Constitution, Thomas Jefferson was right when he eloquently wrote that "It
can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential
right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves
united." But in the next sentence, Jefferson
also warned that America's
constitutional experiment in freedom and republican forms of government could
either "revive
or expire in a convulsion" depending on how long the memories of the
people were in remembering and cherishing the bold experiment the Founders were
bequeathing to them and to us.[4]
It can be said that how a nation interprets
its own historical development—or tells its national story in the minds and
hearts of its people—will determine its ultimate success or failure. This is
how nations are sustained and often how revolutionary convulsions are born.
Indeed, as George Santayana once
wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”[5]
This is no less true in the United States
today where the greatest threat to our constitutional system comes from the
temptation of a few overzealous souls to reinterpret our nation's
constitutional history in a way that suits their own desire for political power.
For example, encouraged by their popular
following on radio and television, there has been a plethora of politically and
religiously motivated individuals challenging America’s
well-researched and articulated constitutional history. Since the late 1980’s,
beginning with the widely sold video and DVD productions by David Barton of
Wallbuilders, Inc.—and advocated by very powerful and persuasive spin doctors
like Newt Gingrich, Dr. D. James
Kennedy, Judge Roy Moore, and Attorney
Jay Sekulow—there has been an enormous
amount of money, time, and energy put into blurring the distinction between the
Puritan and Constitutional founding periods. This has caused many unwary American citizens to believe that the United States Government was specifically intended by our nation’s
Founders to be constituted on the basis of
Christianity and literal Scriptural commands.
However, at the heart of this revolutionary tactic is the
desire for extraordinary political power, not an objective pursuit of truth. An honest examination of history will not advance
their interests. Instead, they are subtly, and quite successfully, rewriting America's constitutional history in the minds and
hearts of the people, particularly among evangelical
Christians who are the most vulnerable. They hope by reinterpreting and
rewriting the Constitution, to establish the Christian Constitution and
Christian State, or Government, they
have always cherished. Recognizing that they may end up falling short of
rewriting the Constitution, they have even contemplated what it would take to
influence “We the people” to abolish it altogether in a special edition of
Richard John Neuhaus’ First Things
journal (a leading Catholic journal) back in 1996.
One of the means that has been employed has
been the proposal of so-called Constitution Reform Acts
at the state level, including a Pledge of Allegiance
Act at the federal level. These acts
are specifically worded in a way that would bar state courts, and the U.S.
Supreme Court, from hearing cases involving acts of religious expression in the
public square that are sponsored by the government, thus giving state
legislative bodies and the U.S. Congress a blank check to pass whatever the
popular will of the people wanted. This in turn would effectively limit courts
from interpreting the Constitution over an entire realm of jurisprudence—namely
church-state and religious liberty case law. This would represent a dangerous
precedent and a major constitutional revolution with potentially devastating
consequences to our country's constitutional separation of powers, its system
of checks and balances, and the constitutional separation of church and state
based on the no establishment provision of the First Amendment.
That is the path that historical revisionists seek to take America.
The
Christian Nation Debate
According
to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 71%
percent of Americans consider the
United States a “Christian nation.”[6]
But in what manner is the United States a Christian nation? According to the same Pew Research poll, secularism
and atheism are on the decline while 82% percent of Americans
claim to be Christian. Of this 82% percent cited by the Pew Research Center,
25% percent are conservative evangelical Catholics and 29% percent are
evangelical Protestants. This means that 54% percent are conservative
evangelical Christians, leaving approximately 28% percent in the mainline
liberal Protestant churches. All
other people of faith make up 9% percent (i.e., Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc.).
The remaining 8 to 9% percent range from secularists with no particular
antagonism to institutional forms of religion, to atheists, who make up less
than 2% percent of the American
population.[7]
From this, one could reasonably conclude that
demographically and culturally America
remains a predominantly Christian nation in the midst of a competitive and
diverse religious landscape. But it also represents a cultural divide where
today, pitched struggles over the proper place of religion in the public
square—whether it be over the celebration of Christmas in public venues, God in the Pledge of Allegiance,
prayer in public schools, the legality and propriety of same-sex marriage,
courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments, and the status of biological
evolution in education (i.e., the teaching of Creationism or Intelligent Design
along side evolution)—spill rivers of ink and spawn endless litigation. But
this is not all: abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research are hotly
debated. Popular TV and radio talk show host Bill O’Reilly is a frequent
agitator of these conflicts, encouraging America’s
Christian traditionalists—whom he calls “cultural warriors”—to fight against
secular liberalism.
This culture war in America
does not surprise any of us. Secular liberals have been seeking to deface
religion in the public square, making it void of religious expression. On the
other side of the divide, evangelical Christians have been vigorously
trying—through legislation—to constitutionalize (or enforce by law)
Christianity and Christian expression in the public square. In simpler words,
“the Left fears that fundamentalists have subverted the Constitution to
establish a theocracy, while the Right complains of galloping secularism.” In fact, every U.S. Supreme Court
confirmation becomes a battle-royal over the quasi-religious issue of abortion.
As Christopher Clausen eloquently
points out in the most recent issue of “The Wilson Quarterly,” “War between the
faiths, as well as between faith and government, is raging again throughout
most of the world, and America is
part of the picture.”[8]
Voices of Reason and Truth
In this great American debate (or constitutional struggle), the
truth is somewhere in the middle and is often not heard by the American people because of the loud and ugly
shouting matches that regularly occur in the print and broadcast media.
A few years
ago, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in a speech at the University
of Northern Ireland, argued that America’s
Constitutional Founders understood the potential for either extreme to strangle
its experiment in freedom and the development of a democratic form of
government. She said that today it is no different: “The religious zealot and
the theocrat frighten us in part because we understand only too well their
basic impulse. No less frightening is the totalitarian atheist who aspires to a
society in which the exercise of religion has no place.”[9]
For practical and civil reasons, America’s
Founders, after realizing the need to add a Bill of Rights to solidify their
constitutional experiment, sought to uphold both the Establishment and Free
Exercise clauses of the First Amendment
to a high constitutional standard against very real and powerful forces. Using
this standard, the Founders meant to do more than just prevent the
establishment of a national religion. They intended the federal model to be a
subtle but powerful inspirational guide to state governments to disestablish
their state supported churches and to be neutral toward religion and people of
faith. They did, with Massachusetts becoming the last of the original thirteen
states to disestablish its state supported church. In time, the U.S. Supreme
Court, in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) concluded that government
neutrality meant that religion and religious institutions must be allowed to
thrive freely, but without its official endorsement.[10]
The First Amendment,
in part, states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” But today, many
evangelical Christians seek to reinterpret the no Establishment provision
separating Church and State in ways that would require government to
financially support their institutions and enforce their religious dogmas in
the public square so as to solve the moral ills of the nation. They seek to
restore America to a time—a
pre-constitutional period—in which government directly supported the church,
and thus by default established it. In this case, instead of establishing a
particular Christian faith or creed or denomination, it seeks to establish
Christianity and its values as a whole.
But there are others, mostly on the Left, who seek to
marginalize the Free Exercise of Religion in favor of placing a higher level of
protection on lifestyles that are not viewed
favorably by a society that is predominantly made up of moral and social
traditionalists (i.e., evangelical Christians), specifically when it is
perceived that any proposed religious freedom legislation competes with
same-sex rights.[11]
Both of these approaches are unnecessarily divisive and
extremely harmful to our nation’s constitutional health. However, the Nation’s
Founders anticipated this tension, creating an internal check and balance
within the very wording of the First Amendment
in order to prevent America from
being overrun by either extreme in the great church-state debate (a puritanical
vs. godless society). Remove this balancing safeguard and I believe America’s constitutional guarantees will be lost,
and with it its civil and religious freedoms.
Professor Jack Rakove, a noted constitutional and political
historian at Stanford University, in his book Original Meanings: Politics
and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, takes this point even further,
arguing that “James Madison and Thomas Jefferson…countenanced a constitutional
solution to the religion question [by] renouncing the authority of the state to
regulate the one aspect of behavior that had most disrupted the peace of
society since the [Protestant] Reformation. At
the heart of their support for disestablishment and free exercise law was the
radical conviction that nearly the entire sphere of religious practice could be
safely deregulated, placed beyond the cognizance of the state, and thus defused
as both a source of political strife and a danger to individual rights. By
treating religion as a matter of opinion only, Jefferson and Madison identified
the one area of governance in which the realm of private rights could be
enlarged by a flat constitutional denial of legislative jurisdiction, thereby
converting the general premise that all government rested on a delegation of
authority from the people into a specific refusal to permit government to act
over an entire area of behavior. In this sense religious liberty differed
markedly from other civil rights that Americans
valued. These other rights were essentially procedural; they assumed that
government had the authority to act, but that it had to do so in conformity to
the due processes of law that legislatures and courts both followed. In the
realm of religion, however, what Madison and Jefferson contested was the
capacity of the state to act at all.”[12]
Dr. Rakove, of course, is cognizant of the fact that since America’s Constitutional Founding in 1787, the
courts have consistently concluded—beginning with its ruling nearly one-hundred
years later in 1879 that forced Mormons to abandon polygamy (United States v. Reynolds)—that there
are times when governmental interests outweigh the religious free exercise
claims of religious peoples, particularly when the overall health and moral
welfare of the state and its citizens are at stake.[13]
Religious Pluralism and Separation —
The Cultural and Constitutional Answer
to “Is America a Christian Nation?”
Back to the original question: Is America
a Christian Nation? Demographically speaking, yes. We are predominantly
Christian in terms of our population. 251 million Americans,
out of a total population of slightly over 300 million, profess to be
Christian. That’s roughly 82-83 percent of America’s
population, with each categorized at varying devotional levels. Therefore, America is a Christian nation, particularly in a
pluralistic sense—a nation of many faith groups and religions.
But there is a more relevant question to ask in our
discussion: Is America a Christian
nation from a constitutional and legal standpoint? When reading the Constitution
on a line-by-line basis, does it make biblical demands on us as citizens, or
propose to organize our federal governmental system on the basis of biblically
defined principles? Did America’s
Constitutional Framers specifically intend the Constitution to make
Christianity the established religion or law of the land?
With more and more faith groups escaping from a troubled
European Continent where religious wars and religious persecutions were a
frequent and well-known condition of those times, our nation’s Founders knew
full well that a greater influx of immigrants would bring a corresponding
increase in religious pluralism. To anticipate an increasing flood of new
immigrants meant establishing the new and fledgling Republic on a secure
basis—on the basis of civil and religious freedom. To do this they would have
to at once calculate, acknowledge, enunciate, and apply the radical principle
of the separation between church and state in the new Constitution by
preventing the establishment of a national church. It would also mean ensuring
that the federal government was not involved in financially supporting,
officially endorsing or sponsoring any particular religious
activity—particularly denominational acts of worship or spiritual devotion.
Constitutionally speaking, then, the United States remains a
secular nation with secular laws that are neutral toward religion, religious
individuals and religious entities, where no religious belief system, tenet, or
church is established through legal enforcement. If America
was a Christian Nation by law and was specifically spelled out as such in our
Constitution, then our government would be no different than some Muslim
countries whose Constitutions are based on Sharia law and Haditha
writings—laws derived, interpreted and applied from the Koran, the sacred
Scriptures of Islam and Mohammed's writings. The only difference, of course,
would be that our Constitutional laws—if placed on a similar footing—would
derive its authority, interpretation and application from the Holy Bible, the
sacred Scriptures of Christianity. How this would be interpreted would be a
dilemma.
Perhaps the closest our country came to becoming a Christian
nation was when Alexander Hamilton
proposed the creation of a “Christian Constitutional Society.” While Hamilton’s
proposal was contained in an obscure letter to Congressman James Bayard of Delaware, and never saw the light of day,
it represented a systematic plan for ensuring the election of “fit [Christian]
men,” and thus ensuring the transformation of the American
political system into a Christian consensus, effecting generations of
legislation with a Christian intent.
Hamilton's proposal was, in some distinct ways, a precursor to the Moral
Majority and the Christian Coalition in our day—voting guides and all![14]
So then the question must be asked again: Is America a Christian Nation, legally and
constitutionally speaking? The simple and direct answer is “No.” If America were indeed a Christian Nation on a legal
and/or constitutional basis, religious freedom in this country would virtually
be non-existent. Oh sure, religious tolerance might exist. Muslims, Hindus,
Buddhists, Spiritists, and even some Christian minorities might be tolerated
(i.e., Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists,
all American born religions). But
there would be no true religious freedom in the country we call the United
States of America.
This is why Christian men like
John Leland, an itinerant, hell-fire preaching colonial Baptist from Virginia, was
motivated to write in his “Chronicle of His Time in Virginia” that “The notion
of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever.” He argued that “Government should protect every man in thinking and
speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend
for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it
supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence,
whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians." [15]
In these words Reverend Leland echoed the thoughts and words of many other
Christians of his day. Indeed, no reasonable historian could accuse Reverend
Leland of being a modern secular humanist.
Revisiting the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom
Perhaps the most convincing proof of the fact that America's constitutional Fathers did not intend to
establish a Christian Commonwealth comes from a little known piece of our
nation’s formative history: from the pen of Thomas Jefferson.
In reflecting on his Virginia Statute for Religious
Freedom—what would become the Model for the First Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution—Mr. Jefferson, then retired at Monticello, noted in
his Autobiography that even though “a
majority of the legislature were churchmen…a great majority” rejected an
amendment put forward by those who insisted on declaring in the preamble that
coercion was “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our
religion.”[16]
While Jefferson had no personal problem with the theological
correctness of such a statement, he had a problem with Virginia declaring that
it was a Christian State when in fact it was more than a state that merely
tolerated other religions, but instead gave them equal status with Christians
of every creed and stripe. He observed that “The insertion was rejected by a
great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of
its protection, the Jew and the Gentile,
the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”[17]
In other words, all people of faith, including those who chose to refrain from
faith altogether, were to be treated equally.
Derek Davis, noted church-state
constitutional scholar and Director of the School of Humanities at Mary
Hardin-Baylor University, comments that “Jefferson wrote this at a time when America was even more culturally Christian than it
is today.” But, he
argues, “this never meant that Virginia, let alone America,
was to be Christian in a constitutional sense. The Founding Fathers at the
Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia could have easily included
language in the Constitution declaring the nation to be ‘Christian’ had they
wanted to. In fact, many citizens argued for this kind of expressly ‘Christian’
language at the state ratifying conventions after the document was presented to
the states for approval. But the Founders weathered these proposals, choosing
to remain true to their conviction that the nation would embrace a principle of
religious pluralism whereby all citizens’ beliefs would be legally protected
with none favored.”[18]
Conclusion
From this, another clear line of reasoning emerges: the
principled need for religious freedom in a diverse land of many people of
varying faiths and faith experiences. John Tyler is one of the least remembered
presidents in the history of the United States. Yet on July 10, 1843, he penned
one of the most eloquent letters ever written applauding the American constitutional experiment in religious
freedom. He wrote:
“The
United States has adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is
believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent—that of
total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists
among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted
to worship his Maker after his own judgment. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are
levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man
set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mahommedan, if he will to
come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the Constitution to
worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to
Brahma if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our
political institutions…. The Hebrew persecuted and down trodden in other
regions takes up his abode among us with none to make him afraid…. and the Aegis of the government is over him to defend and
protect him. Such is the great experiment which we have tried, and such are the
happy fruits which have resulted from it; our system of free government would
be imperfect without it.”[19]
Religious freedom and pluralism thrive in this country
because America's Founders resisted
the temptation to establish a Christian nation when drafting the Constitution.
They had the courage to make sure that no religious test could manipulate and
control the Constitution they had worked so hard to frame.
And
finally, the Founders of the United States
had the wisdom to understand that political and governmental intrusion into the
affairs of the church and individuals of faith would only undermine political
and religious freedom and the moral underpinning of any successful Republic.
Instead of adopting the worn out and failed slogans of "God save the King," or "God save the church," America's
constitutional Founders urged their countrymen to adopt secular utilitarian
values when crafting the Constitution and establishing governmental
institutions. The absence of any king or clerical rule would ensure that all
faith traditions would be welcomed. Religious and political pluralism—not a
Christian nation—was the principled foundation that was chosen by America’s constitutional founders so that religious
and political freedom could truly be lasting. As
such, it was intended to serve as a positive model and influence to the rest of
the world.