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Protestantism and the Founders
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15619 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1989 |
2,925 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
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FAITH AND FREEDOM
Benjamin Hart
Dallas: Lewis and Stanley, 1988
380 pp., $18.95
Benjamin Hart's work on the background of American religious freedom grows out of a single overarching truth: The establishment clause of the First Amendment was intended not to restrict but to protect religious bodies, including state churches, from control by the federal government. Citing President Jefferson's letter to the Danbury, Connecticut, Baptist Association on January 1, 1802, Hart demonstrates that the often quoted phrase "building a wall of separation between church and state" did not refer to making public life antiseptically secular. What has become a favorite text of civil libertarians was written to reassure Baptists (one of Jefferson's largest Virginia constituencies) that "legislative powers of government" will not encroach upon a "matter that lies solely between man and God."
Jefferson, though properly regarded as an advanced civil libertarian in his day, never tried to strip religious, more specifically, Protestant Christian, symbols from American public life. Though he and James Madison helped to disestablish the Anglican Church of Virginia, through the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1976, neither invoked the ideal of a secular society. Both Jefferson and Madison appealed to the "Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions." The reference in the bill (mostly drafted by Jefferson) to the "impious presumptions of legislators and rulers. . . who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others," may well have engaged the pious attention of the legislators. By 1786 the Anglicans of Virginia had dwindled to a minority of the state population; Baptists, Presbyterians, and other Protestant denominations formed the disgruntled majority forced to subsidize a theologically uncongenial state church.
Significantly, neither Jefferson nor Madison hesitated in the Virginia legislature to support Baptist-led bills aimed at punishing Sabbath-breakers and blasphemers. On the day after Madison proposed the First Amendment, he called for the appointment of a chaplain to Congress. He also helped draft a proclamation for a "national day of prayer and thanksgiving" to celebrate the passage of the First Amendment. He loaded this proclamation with unmistakably theocentric phrases and biblical allusions that were to be read aloud at public assemblies.
Hart manages, without belaboring the point, to show that the Founding Fathers had a different understanding of religious freedom from the one prevalent among today's journalists and intellectuals. He discusses Jefferson and Madison in particular, for both are regarded as among the progressives of the founding generation regarding freedom of conscience. But Hart also examines conventional interpreters of the First Amendment during the early republic, and he finds there were no contradictions perceived between the general popular view of the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom and religious establishment at the state level. The first Amendment was seen as protecting state and local churches against congressional interference or against attempts by the federal government to impose a national church. None of the founders thought that the national government should interfere with the religious practices of
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