Church and State According to the Founders

The first freedom protected in the first amendment of our Bill of Rights is freedom of religion. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … ”

Tellingly, on December 16, 1791, the day after that Bill of Rights was ratified, Congress asked President Washington to “recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God.”

The point being that Thomas Jefferson’s insistence, written in a private letter, that there must be a “wall of separation between church and state” does not mean that religion has no place in our public or political life.

For one thing, by forbidding Congress from “establishing” a religion, the First Amendment is saying Congress may not favor one national faith to the detriment of other faiths. Unlike England, which declared Anglicanism the official faith, America was declaring that Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, what-have-you, must all be treated equally.

Also, the “free exercise” language means that citizens can “exercise” — they can practice, or not practice — any religion they see fit. It could be a traditional religion, such as Protestantism, or a non-traditional religion, such as Buddhism. It could be atheism. Provided the religion’s tenets don’t cause the worshipper to act in ways that conflict with established law (human sacrifices, for example), people could worship however they liked.

In other words, the First Amendment says governments can’t favor one religion, nor interfere with one’s practicing or not practicing one’s religious beliefs. Period.

Which is very different from assuming the Founders wished to ban all traces of religion in our public and political life. In fact, they encouraged the practice of religious faith, including in the public square. Why? Because most religious faiths teach moral principles — the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. Moral principles positively influence human behavior, and the Founders believed that a well-ordered society depended on the good behavior of the citizens. And good behavior, the Founders also believed, would clearly come in handy when needing to enforce the laws, which they worried might be a problem in their new government, with its somewhat vague language regarding who enforced the laws, and how they’d be enforced. But it would be much less of a problem if the people were predisposed to obey the laws based on their religiously inspired moral principles.

In our Founders’ America, all religions, although “practiced in various forms … inculcate honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude and the love of man.” So wrote the author of the “church and state” separation language, Thomas Jefferson, in his First Inaugural Address, after which he attended a church service.