The principle of church-state separation is not a myth even though those exact words don’t appear in the U.S. Constitution, according to scholar David R. Brockman.
Brockman, nonresident scholar in religion and public policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute and adjunct professor at Texas Christian University, was among panelists speaking at an April 8 symposium on religion and journalism in Texas. The one-day event at Southern Methodist University was sponsored by the Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.
One tenet of Christian nationalism is that Christianity should be privileged in American law and public policy, he explained. “That’s where it runs up against the concept of separation of church and state. In fact, it runs headlong into the concept of separation of church and state.”
Critics of separation often will base their arguments on the language of the Constitution, he noted. “The words ‘separation of church and state’ are not in the constitution,” but the concept is.
“The words are not found anywhere in the Constitution, but they’re there.”
“The words are not found anywhere in the Constitution, but they’re there. … It’s a constitutional principle and you can find it in its most basic form in a couple of places. One is in the main body of the Constitution and that is in the prohibition on religious tests for public office. You don’t have to confess a belief in the Holy Trinity for example, in order to serve as secretary of state.”
“The second place, probably more important for our purposes, is the First Amendment to the Constitution, the two religion clauses in that first amendment, first the Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from establishing an official or state religion. And second, the Free Exercise Clause, which basically … prohibits the government from interfering with people freely exercising their religion.
“So these are the aspects, the minimal aspects of what we call separation of church and state. As with any part of the Constitution, there are lots of different interpretations of that separation of church and state, but it ain’t a myth.”
The phrase “wall of separation” originated with Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut in 1802.
Christian nationalists like David Barton declare separation to be a myth, which is one of three ways opponents critique separation of church and state, Brockman said.
A second way is illustrated by the father of Sen. Ted Cruz, itinerant evangelist Raphael Cruz, who has declared the wall of separation to be a one-way wall that protects the church from government but not the government from the church.
A third tactic, as illustrated by Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas, “argues that when the founders were talking about religion in the sense of not establishing a religion, they meant Christian denominations. They didn’t mean Christianity; they meant denominations of Christianity. So no particular denomination should be the established denomination, no Presbyterianism or Methodism or something like that.”
All three of these notions are contradicted by history, the scholar said. “If you look back at the writings of Madison and Jefferson, for example, you’ll find they really did have a kind of separation of religion and government in mind.”
Religious pluralism has been a hallmark of the United States from its beginning, he argued, citing the work of former SMU history professor Kathleen Wellman.
“At the time of the founding, the United States was already religiously diverse, already many different religious groups, many of which differed drastically over theology, over polity, over ethics and so forth,” Brockman said. “We are even more diverse today and Christians are now just sort of a slight majority of the population, even here in Texas, nowhere near the 90% or so that they probably were in the past. We have about a third of the country who are religiously unaffiliated. … If the country would’ve been ungovernable as James Madison feared by establishing one particular religion over others back in 1787 or 1789, just imagine how much more ungovernable it would be today to establish one particular religion and one particular slice of one religion as the official religion.”
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