The Separation of Church and State Makes the United States Exceptional
Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven . . . it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.
—John Adams
I’m an unabashed liberal politician who proudly believes in American exceptionalism.
The exceptional nature of American civil liberties and the enshrining of minority rights in our Constitution make the place of our nation in world history distinctly valuable and praiseworthy. The separation of church and state, enshrined in our First Amendment, is central to America’s unique and unprecedented civil liberties. While I fully admire and recognize the many vitally important individual liberties protected by our Constitution, I agree with the importance and emphasis that Thomas Jefferson placed on this foremost principle. Jefferson directed that his three most important accomplishments be engraved on his headstone. Serving as President of the United States didn’t make his cut, but his authoring of the Declaration of Independence, his fathering of the University of Virginia, and his crafting of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom did. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom served as the basis of the separation of church and state in our Constitution. That separation remained central to Jefferson’s values—and is central to American exceptionalism. There have already been more than forty-five U.S. presidents, but the separation of church and state stands out as a singularly brilliant accomplishment in human history. And we have Jefferson and Madison (Jefferson’s key collaborator) to thank for this world-changing concept. Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” created one of the great steps forward for rational thought and civil discourse. Like the invention of the wheel, Jefferson’s wall made not only our country but also our world a better place. Thus, when any politician focuses on American exceptionalism in the divine sense and propose or adopt policies based on their particular interpretation of scripture rather than our Constitution, they in fact undermine that which truly makes America exceptional.
The Political Price of Independent Thought
The Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial stand steps from each other on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and Washington’s Mt. Vernon and Jefferson’s Monticello remain the two most visited presidential homes. These sites symbolize the tremendous pride we feel in our nation’s founding, but what kind of nation are we today in comparison to the days of our nation’s birth? Let’s engage in a little mind experiment. Let us pretend that we are political consultants. Let us assume a young politician preparing to run for Congress enters our consulting firm. How will we help this candidate? As majority whip of Maine’s legislature, I helped recruit candidates. A smart first step is to vet candidates. Google the heck out of them. See what they might have said that the opposition will inevitably dig up.
What would we advise an aspiring politician if we were to uncover that he’d made these statements on Facebook:
Quote one: “The hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus with one body and three heads had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.”
Quote two: The clergy dreads “the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight.”
Quote three: The candidate hopes that “the human mind will get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2,000 years ago”—that is, before the advent of Christianity.
Quote four: Christianity is “our particular superstition.”
In the real world of politics, how would we political consultants advise this aspiring candidate? Having spent more than ten years in elective office, I’ll tell you what we’d say, “Sorry, Thomas Jefferson. Have you considered accounting?” Then we’d say, “That’ll be $5,000 for our consulting fee.” Any one of the above quotes would land a candidate today in boiling hot water, but all four quotes are Jefferson’s.
Just imagine, Thomas Jefferson, one of our greatest thinkers, one of our greatest presidents, might be lost to us if he ran for office today—because the author of the Declaration of Independence dared to think independently.
Even today, with record numbers of Americans identifying as “nones,” a candidate of Jefferson’s views would face almost insurmountable electoral odds. Consider the words of W. A. Criswell, the man selected by President Ronald Reagan to deliver the benediction for the 1984 Republican National Convention. Criswell said the separation of church and state “is the figment of some infidel’s imagination.” It was Criswell who introduced Reagan at a giant gathering of fundamentalist preachers in 1980 to whom Reagan made this pivotal declaration: “I know you can’t endorse me, but . . . I want you to know that I endorse you.”
Now what if we political consultants uncovered the following set of quotes from another aspiring politician:
Quote one: “In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”
Quote two: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”
Quote three: “During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.
Quote four: “Religion . . . has been much oftener a motive to repression than a restraint from it.”
How might political consultants react to a candidate with the above quotes? As with Jefferson, the response would likely be, “Hang it up there, James Madison, Father of the Constitution.”
At least Jefferson looked like a politician: he was tall, handsome, and even played the violin. Madison was short, paunchy, and shaped rather like an oversize toad, and is one of the most underrated of the Founders. But if the words and ideals of Jefferson cause today’s theocrats fits, Madison’s might put theocrats into an outright seizure.
Jefferson famously wrote the words “separation of church and state.”
Madison wrote that government and religion are served by “the total separation of church and state.” As a twenty-five-year-old legislator, Madison succeeded in his first major legislative proposal, which left religious opinion completely to the “dictates of conscience.”
Consider the National Prayer Breakfast, the annual event held in Washington, DC, that was long hosted by members of the U.S. Congress and attended by every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Contrast that with Madison, who publicly opposed any government-sponsored prayer day. In 1817 he wrote that a national day of prayer would “imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion.”
Today a chaplain opens Congress with a prayer. Madison said, “Establishment of a chaplainship to Congress is a . . . violation of equal rights, as well as . . . Constitutional principles.” As the Constitution’s prime author, he’d know.
With regard to chaplains in the military, Madison said, “Better also to disarm in the same way, the precedent of chaplainship for the army and navy than erect them into a political authority in matters of religion.”
Madison concluded that the appointment of military chaplains would inevitably constitute majority tyranny—that religious truth would be tested by numbers and that major sects would end up governing minor sects.
This, as Madison foresaw, is the case today. What of so-called faith-based initiatives? Madison opposed federal recognition of religious charities, even when they involved no federal funds. According to the Father of the Constitution, a bill vesting in churches an authority to provide for the support of the poor was something he opposed as giving “legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.” Today, so-called faith-based initiatives involve your tax dollars going to religious organizations. But get this: Madison vetoed legislation that recognized a church charity even though the legislation gave the church no money at all.
Regarding legislation pertaining to a parcel of land for the Baptist Church, Madison opposed “the appropriation of funds of the U.S. for the use and support of religious societies,” which he saw as contrary to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. He not only vetoed bills that would have allocated surplus land for churches but also vetoed bills that offered only symbolic support to houses of worship. Wrote Madison: “There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property . . . by ecclesiastical corporations.”
In other words, Madison went much further than any recent president in separating government from religion. Many fundamentalists mouth the phrase “original intent.” I’m quoting the real original intent, from the Father of the Constitution. It is understandable that theocrats seek to paper over Madison, and even delete references to Jefferson in textbooks, as was once attempted in Texas.
The forceful nature of Madison’s strong support of church-state separation is something fundamentalists work hard to shout over. They must shout because, despite their repetitive claims, America was not founded as a Christian nation—the evidence against them is the decisive clarity of the actual original intent. In his day, Jefferson espoused legislation in Virginia that specifically rejected the idea of Christian-only religious protection to include, according to Jefferson himself, protections for “the Jew,” “the Hindoo,” “the Mahometan,” and “the infidel.” Jefferson won the 1800 election over strong opposition from most religious groups. How? Well, by one estimate, only 10–15 percent of Americans were church members in 1800.
Some say Jefferson was a Christian. Perhaps, but Jefferson, in writing, specifically rejected the following: the resurrection, the miracles, Christ’s divinity, and the immaculate conception. Can you imagine what fundamentalists would say about such a “Christian” today?
Jefferson proposed the idea for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1776 at the same time he met Madison, with whom he would have a political partnership lasting a half-century. Madison, as a legislator, led the statute to passage in 1786, stating that no one “shall be compelled to . . . support any religious worship . . . whatsoever” and that one’s religious opinion “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
Let’s give John Adams, our most religious early president, final word on whether America is a Christian nation. “The United States,” Adams wrote, marks “the example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature. . . . Governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone without a pretense of miracle or mystery . . . are a great point gained in the favor of the rights of mankind.”
The 1796–1797 treaty between the United States and Tripoli, reviewed and approved by the secretary of state, unanimously approved by the Senate, and signed by President John Adams, states that the U.S. government is “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Not in any sense. The treaty was drafted under the previous administration, and the language was specifically approved by President George Washington.
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison—these were leaders of the Enlightenment. Just as important, they were thinkers imbued with Enlightenment values. Sometimes this made them lightning rods—an especially apt metaphor when recalling that clergy in both America and Britain condemned Ben Franklin’s lightning rod as a sacrilegious defiance of God’s ability to smite whosoever God chose. But that view, so similar to the attitudes of today’s fundamentalists, was a minority view during America’s founding. Jefferson, widely accused (with some justification) of apostasy, won elections and remained revered by the solid majority of Americans.
Thomas Jefferson believed that “reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” The Enlightenment philosophy of our Founders got enshrined in our Constitution, which indeed constitutes a philosophy, a worldview. This worldview stands inherently and most essentially as evidence based. Yet, America is exceptional only so long as it embodies the rationalism and reason that were central to the genius of our Founders.
This essay is excerpted from Attack of the Theocrats How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Sean Faircloth is a lawyer, writer, and politician who has served as a Maine state senator and mayor of Bangor.