Ask the average American to define the meaning of the oft-repeated phrase of “separation of church and state” and usually you will receive a blank stare. Following a brief pause, they may start giving examples like: “It means we can’t have prayer in schools.” “The government can’t sponsor any event that is connected with a church.” or “The Founders wanted to keep church and faith out of government.” If one follows up with a question as to the origins of “separation of church,” answers will include: “It was invented by Thomas Jefferson.” “It is part of the Declaration of Independence.” “It was established by the Supreme Court.” And a few will identify its source as the U.S. Constitution.
Not only are most Americans substantially ignorant of our nation’s history, they are grossly uninformed about the form and operation of American government. What little understanding of government they have usually originates from listening to the nightly news, political pundits, Hollywood and media celebrities, Internet headlines and sound bites, and an educational system vehemently opposed to the central cultural vision of the Founders. Few concepts within American governance are so important and so misunderstood as that of separation of church and state.
The original Constitution was signed by Congress on September 17, 1787 and subsequently ratified by the states. The Bill of Rights was adopted by Congress on September 26, 1789 and became part of the Constitution when Virginia became the tenth state to ratify the Amendments on December 15, 1791.[1] The First Amendment reads as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.[2]
The Founders were strong proponents of separation of church and state. But the confusion as to its meaning over the last seventy years derives from the modern revisionists’ misrepresentation of the Establishment Clause as opposed to those who argue for the original intent of the Founders that had been observed by custom and the courts for over 150 years.
It is clear from the words and actions of the Founders that the intent of the Establishment Clause was to prohibit government from establishing one denomination as the official or preferred church. Modernists have reinterpreted the Establishment Clause to be a separation clause that effectively purges any hint of religious activity and influence in the public square which has come to mean any of the spheres of American life.
To understand the concept of separation of church and state and why the Founders so valued it, we must look back in history. The idea that a group of people bound by a religious allegiance with its own history, beliefs, and traditions could exist within a society but remain independent of the governing political entity was a concept unknown to the ancients. This radical concept that a distinction must be made between the roles of church and state arose from Christianity at its very birth.[3] It was evident in Christ’s challenged to the politically-connected religious leaders (Pharisees and Herodians) when they attempted to entrap Him with questions as to man’s loyalty to man or God. “Then he said unto them, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’” [Matthew 22:21a. RSV]
For the next three hundred years the church fathers maintained this separation but endured severe persecution as a consequence. In 313 AD, Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, but he soon began intruding in church affairs. In 353-356, Hosius, bishop of Cordoba, Spain, reprimanded one of Constantine’s three sons (Emperor Constantius II) for intruding in church affairs by attempting to get Western bishops to oppose Athanasius of Alexandria for supporting those who rejected the Arian heresy. Hosius invoked Christ’s words in Matthew 22:21 which were preceded by a warning to the Emperor. “Intrude not yourself into ecclesiastical affairs…God has put into your hands the [secular] kingdom; to us [bishops] He has entrusted the affairs of His church.”[4]
Because of Constantine’s legalization of Christianity and in spite of the church’s early resistance to government interference, the church began a thousand year period in its history when church and state were intertwined to varying degrees. At the beginning of this period, government attempted to interfere with and bend the church to its will. However by the Middle Ages, it was the church who attempted to bend government to the will of the church. This was a corruption of God’s design for each realm.[5]
Out of the mixing of church and state came abuses such as the Crusades and the Inquisition. In spite of their motives to further His kingdom, the church had violated God’s plan because Christianity is not a religion that can coerce faith for it is a matter of the heart.[6] This intermingling of the spiritual and secular realms corrupted the roles of both church and state. A few men such as John Wycliffe and John Huss in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries recognized this corruption and called for changes in the church which was in dire need of fundamental reform. They also recognized that such reform would only occur with the recognition that the Bible was the final arbiter of faith and not the church.[7] These early stirrings of reformation exploded in the early sixteenth century when Martin Luther nailed his ninety five theses to the door of the Wittenberg church. The turmoil within the church produced one of the doctrinal pillars of Protestantism–the priesthood of the believer.
Alvin Schmidt presents an excellent summation of Martin Luther’s understanding of the distinct roles of the two realms in the early sixteenth century.
He [Luther] especially criticized the papacy’s role in secular government, seeing it as violating what he called the concept of the two kingdoms (realms). It was the church’s task solely to preach and teach the gospel of Jesus Christ…the government’s task was to keep peace and order in society by restraining and punishing the unlawful. The secular government can only compel people to behave outwardly; it can never make a person’s heart spiritually righteous. Only the preaching of the Gospel (the spiritual realm) can do that. In the spiritual realm the Christian functions as a disciple of Christ; in the secular realm he functions as citizen. Although the two realms are separate, the faithful Christian is active in both because God is active in both. In the spiritual realm he is active in proclaiming the gospel, whereas in the secular kingdom he is active by means of the law and the sword, or government.[8]
The early colonists and their descendants still had fresh memories of the church-state conflagrations that swept Europe in the century prior to their first arrivals on the eastern shore of America. They well understood the need for separation of church and state, but that separation was a freedom of religion and not a freedom from religion as interpreted and imposed by modern Constitutional revisionists. For the colonists and Founders, separation of church and state was an institutional separation and not an influential separation. Institutional separation meant that government has certain roles and duties in which the church must not interfere (keeping peace and order in society by restraining and punishing the unlawful by means of the sword). Yet, the church has every right and duty to influence government. Likewise, the government does not have the right to interfere with the roles and duties of the church (teaching and preaching the gospel and influencing society).
There are numerous documents that attest to the Founders’ sentiments of the right of the church to influence society. Perhaps one of the best examples of the attitude of the Founders was expressed by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (appointed by James Madison, the fourth president and delegate to the Constitutional Convention which speaks volumes about Story’s understanding of the Founders’ meaning and intent with regard to the Constitution and its Amendments). Speaking specifically of the Establishment Clause, Story wrote:
…We are not to attribute this prohibition of a national religious establishment to an indifference to religion in general and especially to Christianity which none could hold in more reverence than the framers of the Constitution…Probably at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and of the Amendments to it, the general, if not universal, sentiment in America was that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State…An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation (condemnation), if not universal indignation.[9]
To confirm the continuing existence of this strong religious sanction that still held sway over the nation forty years after the Constitutional Convention, we look to the words of Alexis De Tocqueville’s 1835 Democracy in America, one of the most influential political texts ever written about America.
Americans so completely identify the spirit of Christianity with freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive the one without the other…
In France I had seen the spirit of religion moving in the opposite direction to that of the spirit of freedom. In America, I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.[10]
Tocqueville went on to say that the peaceful influence exercised by religion over the nation was due to separation of church and state.[11] Unlike the modernists’ separation of church and state, Tocqueville’s separation was a separation of the spheres of power and not a separation of government from ethics and moral guidance supplied by the moral suasion of Christianity and the church.
The Founders did not prohibit but encouraged the church’s influence upon government, and for one hundred fifty years the church played a vital role in helping the state be the state by continually asking if the state’s actions were justified as a legitimate fulfillment of its role. Since 1947, the courts have sided with the modern Constitutional revisionists who deny the church has a right to influence the state and society in the public square. This denial is the subject to be discussed in Part II.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Michael Kammen, ed., The Origins of the American Constitution – A Documentary History, (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. xxix.
[2] The Constitution of the United States of America, (Washington, D. C.: National Archives and Records Administration).
[3] Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2004), pp. 265-266.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., p. 266.
[6] David Barton, Original Intent – The Courts, the Constitution, & Religion, (Aledo, Texas: Wallbuilder Press, 2008), p. 86.
[7] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 143-145.
[8] Schmidt, p. 266.
[9] David Barton, The Myth of Separation, (Aledo, Texas: Wallbuilder Press, 1989), p. 32.
[10] Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 343, 345.
[11] Ibid, p. 345.
