Evangelicals and the First Amendment.

EVANGELICALS AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

UNLIKE THE origins of most nations, America's origins are not obscured in the mists of time. Not myths but objective chronicles and pure primary sources record our beginnings: writings meant to be understood in the same way by all, composed without deliberate obscurity or hidden motives. Yet our wisest men still debate the meaning of the American founding. Perhaps public-spiritedness renders some disputants reluctant to reject openly the principles the Founders followed. Perhaps others recognize the rhetorical advantage of credibly claiming: "The Fathers believed as we." Or perhaps all parties mean what they say and say what they mean.

In any case, the differences go deep. Some contend that the Founders built on a foundation of atheism, hedonism, and materialism. Others argue that our Fathers fabricated from more theistic, moralistic, and idealistic materials of classical, mostly Aristotelian, origin. But almost always, at bottom, seems to be this question: Are America's founding principles irreligious? Given the actual and rhetorical importance of the First Amendment as a defining aspect of our political tradition, much of the argument over that question is carried on under the guise of an argument over the purposes of the separation of church and state. If the First Amendment were generally regarded as a brake upon the power of religion, rather than as a protection for religion, that would go far toward persuading most people to view the Founders' handiwork as the product of anti-religious minds. The origins of the First Amendment, then, are a key piece of evidence in the debate over the purposes of the Fathers.

In Virginia today, there is a large public park called the Leland-Madison Park. In it stands a monument to Baptist preacher John Leland (1754-1841) and on it are these words:

Near this spot in 1778, Elder John Leland and James Madison, the Father of the American Constitution, held a significant interview which resulted in the adoption of the Constitution by Virginia. Then Madison, a member of Congress from Orange, presented the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing religious liberty, free speech, and a free press. . . .

Historians will caution reserve in giving credence to the monument, but it is testimony to the liberal convictions Baptists and other evangelical sects held. In fact, Baptists and Presbyterians in this nation once quarreled amicably over where Jefferson first learned lessons in democracy--in Presbyterian ecclesiology or Baptist-church polity. One source reports the following:

At some place the question was raised as to whether Jefferson got his idea of civil freedom from attending a Presbyterian church. Mrs. Madison, wife of the fourth President, replied: "I have a distinct remembrance of Mr. Jefferson speaking on the subject, and always declaring that it was a Baptist church from which these views were gathered."

One fact of history is certain, if practically forgotten: We owe separation of church and state in America today at least as much to the influence of evangelical Christianity and the likes of Reverend Leland as we do to the so-called rationalistic Enlightenment and Madison and Jefferson. Indeed, the gulf between Evangel and Enlightenment may not have been nearly as great as contemporary intellectual history claims.

Before Christ the world knew nothing of the distinction, not to say separation, of church and state. Princes and priests, often one and the same, claimed to stand in a special place between the people and the gods, or even to be gods themselves.

In modern times after the Reformation, the earliest advocates of religious liberty were Christians from the so-called "spiritualist" or "radical" wing of Protestantism--i.e., that wing most insistent on the Protestant principle of individual faith. At first called Anabaptists, later Baptists, they carried to logical conclusion Luther's principle that it is every man's right to seek truth in Scripture.

WITH A liberality breathtaking for his age, Thomas Helwys, founder of what is generally regarded as the first Baptist church on English soil, denied in his A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612) "Haveing anie thoughts of provoking evill against them of the Romish religion, in regard of their profession," and indicated that "if they be true and faithfull subjects of the King . . . wee do freely professe that our Lord the King hath no more powers over their coonsciences than over ours, and that is none at all . . . let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it apperteynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. . . ."

In America, Roger Williams, the colonies' "Apostle of Religious Liberty," became the best known and most widely read seventeenth-century Baptist writer on religious liberty. During the 1640s while in England seeking a charter for Rhode Island, Williams wrote his most famous work, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, challenging "that commonly received and not questioned opinion, viz., that the civil state and the spiritual, the church and the commonwealth, they are like Hippocrates' twin, they are born together, grow up together." Williams's first point in The Bloudy Tenent was this:

First, that the blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the wars of present and former ages, for their respective consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace. . . . An enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state confounds the civil and religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ is come in the Flesh . . .

For Williams and the Baptists, separation of church and state was a Christian conviction. By the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the enactment of the Toleration Act of 1689, toleration (at least of Protestant dissenters from the Church of England) had become part of a broad consensus of English religious/political opinion.

Locke's A Letter concerning Toleration (1689) contained few if any novel opinions--scarcely a point not found in the Baptist writings of a half-century earlier. In Locke's reasoning, anything other than toleration became irrational--an attempt at the impossible. Baptists, and now men of many other confessions, could agree with Locke's formulation of the first principle of religious freedom: True Christianity, says Locke, cannot be forced:

The care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate any more than to other men. It is not committed unto him . . . by God; because it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one over another as to compel anyone to his religion. Nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people, because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave to the choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace. For no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another.

Unlike modern liberals, Locke and the Baptists championed religious toleration not because they considered belief in toleration itself a faith that saves, but rather because intolerance suggests error in understanding the true doctrine of salvation--that only a free belief can send one to heaven.

In colonial America, as the Revolution approached, the tide of opinion flowed toward separation of church and state. The deep current of America's Protestant heritage, emphasizing free heart belief as the only faith that saves, added the strength of religious conviction to the cause. And the Great Awakening, which so revived the spirit of scriptural Christianity in the 1740s and 1750s, helped to make freedom of religion the wave of the future.

DEVELOPING CHRISTIAN conviction and the "improved science of politics" central to the Enlightenment converged on the issue of religious liberty. The denial of any role in religion to government was a cardinal tenet of the new political science, which began with the principle that government has only a very limited purpose: protection of individual rights. It was no accident that the single most important figure in modern political science, John Locke, also wrote the most influential work of the age on religious liberty, A Letter concerning Toleration. Locke gave rigor and precision to what people already believed. Not surprisingly, he was much quoted by advocates of separation of church and state among the sects whose doctrines he had philosophically reflected and refined. In 1774, for example, when they were engaged in a struggle for liberty in Massachusetts, where church and state remained closely intertwined, Baptists appealed to the First Continental Congress in these terms:

Men unite in society, according to the great Mr. Locke, with an intention in every one the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property. The power of the society, or the Legislature constituted by them, can never be supposed to extend any further than the common good . . . We affirm that the magistrate's power extends not to the establishing of any articles of faith or forms of worship, by force of laws; for laws are of no force without penalties. The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but pure and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.

Simultaneous with the War for Independence, a struggle broke out in the states to remove the remaining impediments to religious liberty. As colonies became states, new constitutions were required, and rapid progress was made toward separation of church and state. Not deists and infidels but mainly evangelical sects such as Baptists and Presbyterians spearheaded the drive for religious liberty at the state level. By the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, separation of church and state was nearly a reality in every state. Here and there remained vestiges of former religious establishments in the form of religious taxes and tests. But none of the state constitutions made any provision for full-blown established churches on the Old World model, as had once existed in some of the American colonies.

The proposed Constitution of the United States created not "a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion," claimed James Madison. His views were repeated by other members of the Constitutional Convention as they sought to persuade the people to ratify. Thus Edmund Randolph, speaking to the Virginia ratification convention, said, "No power is expressly given to Congress over religion." But in the states it was objected that some express prohibition of religious legislation was needed. Many were not persuaded by Madison's assurance that "The government has no jurisdiction over" religion, or by Alexander Hamilton's question in the Federalist, "Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?" Some states refused to ratify until a bill of rights with guarantees of religious liberty was adopted, and others ratified with the condition that a bill of rights would be added later.

Madison was elected to the new House of Representatives in 1789. By this time the man now known as the Father of the Constitution was convinced that "all essential rights, particularly the rights of Conscience in the fullest latitude . . . etc.," ought to be protected by specific constitutional amendments. Washington, the new President, was convinced now, too. On August 8, 1789, Virginia Baptists, who had finally supported ratification of the Constitution on the premise that a bill of rights would be added, wrote to Washington, praising him as "our Hero" and expressing confidence in him as President, but repeating their concern about lack of specific guarantees of religious liberty in the Constitution:

When the Constitution first made its appearance in Virginia, we . . . had unusual strugglings of mind, fearing that the liberty of conscience (dearer to us than property and life) was not sufficiently secured. . . . But amidst all the inquietudes of mind, our consolation arose from this consideration, the plan must be good, for it bears the signature of a tried, trusty friend; and if religious liberty is rather insecure in the Constitution "the administration will certainly prevent all oppression, for a Washington will preside."

In reply, Washington wrote of his recollection "that the religious society of which you are members, have been throughout America, uniformly, and almost unanimously the firm friends to civil liberty." He offered this assurance:

. . . if I could now conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, and that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.

In accordance with the letter and spirit of his assurances to the Baptists, the President supported Madison's move to amend the Constitution with a specific provision for separation of church and state.

In 1791 the requisite number of states had approved, and the Bill of Rights became the law of the land. Thomas Armitage, a century later, wrote in his History of the Baptists:

Thus, the contemned, spurned, and hated old Baptist doctrine of soul-liberty, for which blood had been shed for centuries, was not only engrafted into the organic law of the United States, but for the first time in the formation of a great nation it was made its chief cornerstone.

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson replied to Connecticut Baptists who had praised their "beloved President" and desired encouragement in their struggle for complete separation of church and state in Connecticut. He gave the classic statement of the meaning of the First Amendment:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I comtemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

By the time the First Amendment was adopted, prohibiting Congress from passing religious laws, only four states had any laws worth noting "establishing" religion. By 1833, these were completely gone. In that year, final victory came in the struggle for separation of church and state in Massachusetts, where connection of church and state was so ingrained that John Adams once said that it would be as impossible to "change the religious laws of Massachusetts as the movements of the heavenly bodies." Here, too, Elder John Leland and his fellow Baptists played a decisive role in repealing a law permitting use of tax money to pay religious teachers.

The victory for full freedom of religion in America at the national and state levels was not a victory against Christianity. To the contrary, as James Madison said, "Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of government." The phenomenal growth of Christianity in America in the century after adoption of the First Amendment bears Madison out.

The nineteenth century saw such a surge in Christian growth that it is considered the "great century" of evangelism. "Because of a combination of geographic expansion, inner vitality, and the effect upon mankind as a whole," concluded Kenneth Scott Latourette, the late Yale scholar of church history, the nineteenth century "constituted the greatest century which Christianity had thus far known."