EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series of commentaries adapted from articles that ran in consecutive issues of Report from the Capital.
By Brent Walker
The United States of America is one of the most religious and certainly the most religiously diverse nations on the face of the earth. Despite our country’s religiosity, many of us were surprised by a recent poll released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life about how little we know about other religions and even our own religion. What’s more, despite pride in our democracy, the Constitution and Bill of Rights that guarantee our fundamental liberties, we are similarly misinformed about our rights under the First Amendment generally and religious liberty in particular. Following is a series of commonly held myths about the separation of church and state.
Myth #1: We don’t have separation of church and state in America, because those words are not in the Constitution.
True, the words are not there, but the principle surely is. It is too glib an argument to say that constitutional principles depend on the use of certain words. Who would deny that “federalism,” “separation of powers” and the “right to a fair trial” are constitutional principles? But those words do not appear in the Constitution either. The separation of church and state, or the “wall of separation,” is simply a metaphor, a shorthand way of expressing a deeper truth that religious liberty is best protected when church and state are institutionally separated and neither tries to perform or interfere with the essential mission and work of the other.
We Baptists often hold up Roger Williams’ “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world,” and point to Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 Letter to the Danbury Connecticut Baptist Association where he talked about his “sovereign reverence” for the “wall of separation.”
But we sometimes overlook the writings of the father of our Constitution, James Madison, who observed that “the number, the industry and the morality of the priesthood and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of church and state.”
Even Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famed 19th-century “Democracy in America,” a work often cited by those who would disparage separation, writes favorably of it:
“In France, I had seen the spirits of religion and freedom almost always marching in opposite directions. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land … [A]ll thought that the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.”
The Constitution may not have those words — church-state separation — in it, but those who wrote the Constitution and other early observers had the words in them.
Myth #2: We do not need or want separation of church and state because the United States is a Christian nation.
Depending upon the poll, a little more than half the American people agree with this statement. But it is not true. The United States of America is not a Christian nation, legally and constitutionally.
Yes, most of our founders were religious folk of some ilk, but they did not want to impose their own religion by law on others. And they certainly thought that a religious citizenry was important to good government; but they did not intend to set up a Christian regime under our founding documents. Our civil compact, the Constitution, is a decidedly secular document. It never mentions “Christianity.” Even the word “religious” is used only once in Article VI to ban religious tests for public office. And then two years later the Bill of Rights starts off “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This language dispelled any lingering doubt whether America was intended to be a Christian nation when it prevented the federal government from advancing or inhibiting any religious tradition.
Today, no one can deny that Americans are a very religious people. A 2007 Pew Forum poll showed that about 75 percent claims to be Christian. So, yes, demographically speaking, we may be Christian, but we do not have anything approaching a theocracy, Christian or otherwise. We have a constitutional democracy in which all religious beliefs are protected. The same Constitution that refuses to privilege any religion, including Christianity, protects all religions and the right of other American citizens to claim no religious beliefs at all. As a result, we are a nation of Christians sociologically because we are not a Christian nation constitutionally.
