Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges
288
Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges
288Paperback(First Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806147079 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 01/13/2015 |
| Series: | Studies in American Constitutional Heritage , #1 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Kyle Harper is Senior Vice President and Provost and founding director of the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality.
Roger Finke is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the Pennsylvania State University and Director of The Association of Religion Data Archives.
Steven K. Green is Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Director, Center for Religion, Law & Democracy, at Willamette University.
Charles C. Haynes is director of the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute in Washington, D.C. He writes and speaks extensively on religious liberty and religion in American public life.
Thomas S. Kidd is Professor of History at Baylor University and Senior Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion.
Robert Martin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Political Science and Concurrent Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame.
Rajdeep Singh joined the Sikh Coalition in December 2009 and serves as its Director of Law and Policy, in which position he focuses on developing and promoting policy solutions for civil rights issues through an interdisciplinary combination of government affairs, media relations, and interfaith coalition building.
Harry F. Tepker, Jr., is Floyd and Irma Calvert Chair in Law and Liberty and Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.
Asma T. Uddin is Counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Washington, D.C., and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AltMuslimah.com, a web magazine dedicated to issues on gender and Islam.
Robin Fretwell Wilson is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Family Law and Policy at the University of Illinois College of Law.
Read an Excerpt
Religious Freedom in America
Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges
By Allen D. Hertzke
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4990-5
CHAPTER 1
Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and the Context for Religious Liberty in Revolutionary America
Thomas S. Kidd
In the presidential election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated the sitting president, John Adams, in what Jefferson styled the "Revolution of 1800." Jefferson's election was the final event of the Revolutionary era, and the first peaceful transfer of presidential power under the new Constitution. On New Year's Day, 1802, the Baptist evangelist John Leland, delighted by the election of his friend and ally to the presidency, delivered to Jefferson a prodigious gift: a 1,235-pound block of cheese. The "mammoth" cheese came from Leland's farming community of Cheshire, Massachusetts, which seems to have voted unanimously for Jefferson in the 1800 presidential election. The cheese's red crust was adorned with the motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
Two days later, on Sunday, January 3, Leland delivered an effusive sermon before a joint session of Congress and the president. A hostile Federalist congressman in attendance, writing in his journal, called Leland a "cheesemonger" and a "poor, ignorant, illiterate, clownish preacher." Leland spoke on the text "Behold a greater [one] than Solomon is here," with a not-too-subtle implication about his beloved president. The embarrassed Federalist congressman groaned that "such a farrago, bawled with stunning voice, horrid tone, frightful grimaces, and extravagant gestures ... was never heard by any decent auditory before."
To say that Jefferson and Leland made religious odd-fellows is an understatement. Leland had devoted his life to saving souls, and estimated at the end of his career that he had preached about eight thousand sermons. An evangelical, Leland simply confessed that "my only hope of acceptance with God is in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ." Although he attended church regularly as president, Jefferson did not believe that the blood of Jesus would save him, or anyone else. He always professed to be "sincerely attached" to Jesus's teachings, but Jefferson did not believe that Jesus ever claimed to be the Son of God. He similarly thought the doctrine of the Trinity was nonsense, and the "mere Abracadabra of ... the priests of Jesus." What, then, led Leland to admire Jefferson so much that he would think to give him that big cheese?
The answer to this question goes a long way toward explaining how religion helped to cement the new American nation. Although Jefferson and Leland could not have been more opposed in their personal religious views, they shared the same view of church and state. Indeed, the Baptists of New England saw Jefferson as a sort of political savior. Religious dissenters like the Baptists had long suffered persecution in Congregationalist New England, even after Patriot New Englanders fought for liberty in the Revolution. Jefferson had championed religious freedom in Virginia, where the itinerating Leland had come to know and love the future president. Jefferson the skeptical deist and Leland the fervent evangelical both believed that government should afford liberty of conscience to its citizens, and not give preference to one Christian denomination over another. These public beliefs about religion and politics made fast friends of a deist and an evangelical. To modern American eyes, this seems a most improbable alliance.
Not all conservative Christians liked Jefferson, to be sure. Many hated him because they saw him as an infidel. One called him a "howling atheist." But these critics did not represent the wave of the future. Jefferson and Leland did.
The link between Jefferson and Leland shows that in the American founding, deists and evangelicals (and a range of believers in between) united around public religious principles that keyed the success of the Revolution, and helped create America. The union of evangelicals and deists was fragile and hardly unanimous—even on religious liberty—but it proved strong enough to allow Americans to "begin the world over again," as Tom Paine put it.
The public religious beliefs that helped unite Revolutionary America included the idea that all men are created equal, the importance of virtue in preserving the republic, and the role of Providence in human affairs. But this chapter focuses on the idea that lay behind Leland's cheese: religious liberty, and the disestablishment of the state churches. Across America, dissenting evangelicals led the charge against religious establishments during the Revolution, but they often gained critical assistance from liberal Christians or deists like Jefferson who shared their goals. From the Baptists of New England to the Presbyterians of South Carolina, dissenters sought to prevent state governments from giving preference to any denomination.
Everyone agreed with religious liberty in principle, but the Founders did not agree on the exact implications of religious liberty. This disagreement is perhaps best illustrated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's rivalry with Patrick Henry over the issue of public support for churches. Religious liberty brought together unexpected allies in the era of the founding—almost everyone supported ending persecution of religious dissenters, but people on the two poles of the American religious spectrum, evangelicals and Enlightenment rationalists (the latter including Jefferson and Madison), were more likely to support full disestablishment. More moderate, traditional Christians like Patrick Henry often advocated a continuing role for an establishment of churches.
Note that Henry had a deep background—as deep as Madison's and Jefferson's—in defending religious liberty, particularly the freedom of dissenters from persecution. In 1776, Henry played a critical role in crafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights' sixteenth article regarding religious freedom. For years, the Baptists had been petitioning the House of Burgesses for relief from the requirements of the Anglican establishment. Within days of independence, Baptists from Prince William County again petitioned the convention, arguing that since Virginia's leaders were contending for their basic liberties, they should also respect the fundamental religious rights of their fellow citizens. Disestablishing the Anglican Church would prevent internal divisions over religion in Virginia, they maintained. They insisted that they be allowed to worship God with no interference from the state, and be relieved from religious taxes that supported the Anglican Church. Henry understood that the Anglican Patriots should actively court the Baptists in order to win their support for independence. In a public letter he wrote in August 1776, Henry praised the growing interdenominational spirit in America, and declared that "the only contest among us, at this most critical and important period, is, who shall be foremost to preserve our religious and civil liberties." As Patriots, Anglicans and Baptists were "brethren who must perish or triumph together," he said.
After much debate, the committee agreed to phrase the sixteenth article in these expansive terms: "That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other." Madison also had Henry introduce an amendment to the article that seemed to imply disestablishment of the Anglican Church, in the assertion that "no man or class of men ought on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges; nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities." When other delegates challenged him, however, Henry denied that this amendment was intended to end state support for the Anglican Church, although that probably was Madison's goal. Henry, unlike Madison, saw no inconsistency between state support for religion and religious freedom. In this somewhat obscure episode we see the seeds of Madison and Henry's split over religion. The Declaration of Rights, in any case, had become a momentous articulation of the human rights upon which government should not intrude.
There's much to say about Henry, Jefferson, and Madison in wartime, but the war effectively put on hold Virginia's debate about religion's official role in society. After the Revolution concluded, Henry remained deeply committed to promoting public virtue in Virginia, for he and most of his revolutionary colleagues did not believe that independence would be worth anything if Virginians degenerated into immorality, selfishness, and vice. To Henry, only one public institution could adequately support virtue, and that was the church. But at the beginning of the Revolution, Virginia had stopped giving financial aid to the Anglican Church—there was little money to spare during the war—and Anglican parishes had suffered badly during the conflict. The church's financial deprivation was exacerbated by its traditional association with Britain.
At the war's end, Henry believed that the time had come to resume public funding for religion, but he knew that the state would never go back to one exclusive, established church. Instead, Henry became the champion of a so-called general assessment for religion. Under this system, people would have to pay taxes to support a Christian church of their choosing; it could be Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, or whatever. (Most defenders of the assessment also agreed that tax exemptions could be given for non-Christians.) This tax would bolster not only the pastors and facilities of the churches, but their educational and social welfare functions. For Henry and the assessment's many supporters, this arrangement would honor both the public importance of religion, and the realities of Christian pluralism in the state.
Henry came out on the losing end of this issue, and Virginia decided in favor of Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786. Before we dismiss the value of Henry's general assessment, however, we should put his views in context, and remember that Henry was as much an activist for religious freedom as were Madison and Jefferson; to him, religious liberty and the question of establishment were different issues. Henry's general assessment plan was also approved by other prominent Virginia leaders such as George Washington and Richard Henry Lee. Washington expressed a common view that Christians should be made to support that which they profess to believe.
Henry's general assessment plan also reveals a distinction in the Founding period between religious freedom, and separation of church and state. This distinction was important to many in the Revolutionary era, but has been blurred since the concept of separation came into modern use after World War II. Henry fully supported religious freedom, by which he meant that no one should be persecuted or disadvantaged for their religious beliefs or practices.
Separation of church and state, meaning that the government should have no connections with religion, was another matter entirely. Jefferson at times approached such a position, but even he felt comfortable permitting and even attending church services in government buildings as president, and as president he once even approved the national government assisting in the building of a church and paying the salary of a missionary among the Kaskaskia Indians. Madison developed the most far-reaching theory of separation of church and state among the Founders, but only after his retirement from politics. During those later years, Madison wrote (but did not publish) his "detached memorandum," which speculated on what real separation of church and state might require, such as the elimination of congressional or military chaplains. But the notion that government agencies could totally disengage from religion simply did not occur to most Revolutionary-era Americans, for churches were seen as the moral bulwark of the republic and a chief agency for social welfare and education.
Henry and most of his Revolutionary colleagues also would not have supported strict separation because they believed that government should promote morality. Two primary ways to do this were through punishing immorality under the law, and encouraging morality through the work of churches and schools. Modern Americans have largely ceased to see the encouragement of morality as a primary function of the state, but they have certainly not abandoned the notion that government should discourage immorality through law enforcement. Most laws, even today, are undergirded by some moral assumption or consensus. The government punishes people who kill or steal, for instance, because we think it is wrong to do those things. We are not so different from founders like Henry who saw the government as a promoter of morality, or at least a legal deterrent to immorality.
The real point of contention concerning the general assessment was whether, as a matter of conscience, people should be required by law to support a church of their choice in order to help bolster the strength of the churches and thus encourage public virtue. Jefferson and Madison cooperated with many evangelical dissenters, especially Baptists, in arguing that religion could survive, and even thrive, on a purely voluntary basis. Government support inevitably led to corruption of the church, the evangelicals believed. They did not have to think back very far—only to the early 1770s—to remember a time when Baptist preachers languished in Virginia jails for illegal preaching. That experience made the Baptists, along with Madison, who as a young man deplored the state's persecution of evangelicals, wary of official state churches.
In mid-1784, these differing visions of religious liberty clashed when the Episcopal Church boldly proposed an act of incorporation that would have given it both increased independence from state oversight and increased legal protection for church property that it held as the established church. Henry and other supporters of the church introduced the measure, but it struggled to gain support in the legislature and was postponed until the next session. The bill exacerbated the growing split between Madison and Jefferson on one side, and the ever-popular Henry on the other. Madison thought the incorporation bill was outrageous, and told Jefferson that "extraordinary as such a project was, it was preserved from a dishonorable death by the talents of Mr. Henry."
Later that year, Henry and the supporters of public religion again introduced both the incorporation bill and the general assessment plan, which argued that "the general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society; which cannot be effected without a competent provision for learned teachers [pastors]; and it is judged that such provision may be made by the legislature, without counteracting the liberal principle heretofore adopted and intended to be preserved by abolishing all distinctions of pre-eminence amongst the different societies or communities of Christians." Many Virginians—especially Anglicans—sent petitions to the legislature supporting the assessment. Madison spoke out against the assessment, but the tide seemed to be turning in its favor.
The momentum for the assessment bill abruptly changed, however, when Henry was elected governor again on November 17, 1784. Neither the assessment nor the incorporation bill had come up for a final vote, but Henry may have thought that he could safely leave the legislature prior to their acceptance. He was wrong. Madison was quite pleased to see Henry go to the governor's mansion, and anticipated that the change of offices would prove "inauspicious to [Henry's] offspring."
Although the incorporation bill passed the House, Madison managed to delay the vote on the general assessment until 1785. Then he and the bill's evangelical opponents began a public campaign against it. Madison penned the Memorial and Remonstrance against the assessment, and crisply stated the reasons that many Virginians, including many devout Christians, opposed the plan. Religion, he argued, "must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right." To Madison and his Baptist allies, religious freedom required that the government give no support to any denomination. State entanglement only corrupted churches, and any action government took on behalf of a particular denomination was inherently discriminatory. Henry believed that religion's importance required its support by government; Madison, Jefferson, and the Baptists argued that churches and individual believers (and outright skeptics, in Jefferson's case) needed to be safeguarded from government.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Religious Freedom in America by Allen D. Hertzke. Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface
Kyle Harper
Introduction: A Madisonian Framework for Applying Constitutional Principles on Religion
Allen D. Hertzke
Part I. The Founding Moment and Constitutional Evolution
- Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and the Context for Religious Liberty in Revolutionary America
- The Founding Fathers’ Competing Visions for the Proper Separation of Church and State
- The First School Prayer Debate and Its Impact on Modern Church–State Doctrine
Part II. Societal Implications of Constitutional Principles
- Defining and Redefining Religious Freedom: A Quantitative Assessment of Free Exercise Cases in the U.S. State Courts, 1981–2011
- Religious Liberty in the Public Schools: Toward a Common Vision for the Common Good
Part III. Exploring Contemporary Challenges
- The Erupting Clash between Religion and the State over Contraception, Sterilization, and Abortion
- In This Enlightened Age and Land of Equal Liberty: Implications of Equality for Religion and Marriage
- Sikh Americans, Popular Constitutionalism, and Religious Liberty
- American Muslims, American Islam, and the American Constitutional Heritage