Easter is often said to be a time of reflection. It certainly is for any mind even vaguely curious about Christianity (even as not more than an amazingly world-shaping idea) during what Mexicans call Semana Santa/Semana de Pascua and English-speakers of the world term the “Easter Season.”
It was 2,000 years ago and is today what is called the intersection of religion and public life. The lengthy, and disturbing (say a number of presently weary citizens) primary campaign of the Grand Old Party has made it clear that religion doesn’t mix well with politics when its escorts assume the role of zealots.
Many of us – and certainly zealots – are uncomfortable with seeming contradictions. For instance: 1) The United States founders believed churches should be protected and encouraged, and 2) the founders believed that government should not assist or support churches. To many, the consideration (reflection on) twining the two is at least perplexing.
Actually, the founders were as “interested in keeping religion free from corruption by the state” as they were in keeping “the state free from corruption by religion.” This contradiction was based on the lesson they saw in recent rough history.
American colonists realized that religious wars had torn Europe apart from the time of the Reformation: the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, the Catholic/Protestant enmity in France. Those bloody events prompted some to continue intolerance in the New World (the Puritans), and convinced others that if they continued their religious conflicts, their lives in America would echo the bloody persecutions they’d left behind. This gritty truth, and an enthusiasm for the Enlightenment (Jefferson and Franklin), nourished an emerging sense of religious harmony. Although it was interrupted from time to time, wiser and calmer minds prevailed to convince Americans that what was crucial to a life free of religious strife was tolerance. Roger Williams, a dissenter from the Massachusetts Bay Puritan colony, argued that the state had no right to dictate religious practice to its citizens. Many other leaders, such as Jefferson, Madison and Franklin urged that a line of separation between church and state be established and made permanent – ultimately resulting in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But first came George Mason’s useful Virginia Bill of Rights, in 1776, which stated that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” The state of Virginia and then the nation followed a policy of keeping religion and politics officially separated. With the Virginia statute on religious freedom written by Thomas Jefferson, endorsed by James Madison, and enacted in 1786, the states began to remove all connections between governments and churches. (Mason’s Virginia Bill of Rights formed the basis for the Declaration of Independence and parts of the Constitution.)
{/access}Pronouncements by a current crop of politicians that America was founded as “Christian nation” is true only in the thinnest sense – there weren’t any Buddhists or Islamists around. Reliable historians estimate that only about 17 percent of Americans professed any formal religious adherence. No Catholic schools were institutionalized until the mid-19th Century. And though virtually all the colonies’ colleges began as sectarian institutions, the distinction between public and private was hardly expressed.
Today, the wisest of minds – those that can read, analyze and question simultaneously – see in this tension between the Enlightenment and Evangelism the fruitful origins of the U.S. Constitution. One sage religious-history expert writes,”... the tension between these two poles contributed directly to the Constitution’s single wholly original contribution to political tradition: disestablishment of the official creed and the separation of church and state.”
When the Founders wrote the nation’s Constitution, they specified that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” (Article 6, section 3). This provision was radical in its day – giving equal citizenship to believers and non-believers alike. They wanted to ensure that no religion could make the claim to being the official, national religion, such as England had.
Yet, none of the Founding Fathers were atheists. Most were Deists, which is to say they thought the universe had a creator, but that he does not concern himself with the daily lives of humans, and does not directly communicate with humans, either by revelation or by sacred books. At the same time, most believed in a god, which is expressed in the Declaration of Independence when they spoke of “the Laws of Nature” and “the Gods of Nature.”
Yet, the founders weren’t determinedly dismissive. And a great number of historians who write of those men, believe after all their research and analysis “that because the separation of church and state is, fundamentally, about equality, about the idea that no religion will be set up as the religion of our nation, in the end separation is also about protecting religion,” wrote Jill Lepore in the New Yorker in 2008. Steve Waldman writes, in “Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America,” “It’s probably impossible to discover precisely what the Founders believed about God, Jesus, sin, the Bible, churches, and Hell. They changed their minds and gave different accounts to different people: Franklin said one thing to his sister Jane, and another thing to David Hume; Washington was a vestryman at his church, but, as he lay slowly dying, he never called for a clergyman. This can make them look like hypocrites, but that’s unfair. They approached religion in more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own; Washington proved diplomatic; Adams grumbled about it; Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it; and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it.”
James Madison, by the standards of evangelists of both his day and ours, was not a Christian, though he, like his colleagues, wrestled greatly with religious questions. “Madison,” Waldman writes, would “be delighted by surveys showing that, compared to most developed nations, Americans believe in God more, pray more, and attend worship services more frequently.”
And it seems that not a few of those churchgoers question the assumptions of their religious leaders, preachers and priests, at least privately and most certainly in their actions, if not in noisy public forums. That is one of life’s certainties: contradiction, somewhat like the founders’ faith and beliefs in Christianity.
Which is good cause for Easter reflections – to thank our astonishing good luck – and possibly for a little time in church to send some good wishes to family and friends. {/access}