Is God An American? (giant college paper)
Is God An American?
"We have staked the whole of our political institutions, upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God," wrote James Madison, at least according to some members of the Religious Right (“Pat Robertson’s Regent”). In 2003 Judge Roy Moore refused to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments that he displayed in his courtroom. His reasoning was that the Ten Commandments were the basis for the entire United States legal system (“Ten Commandments judge”). There are some in the United States today who believe that the country was founded as a Christian nation. In 1996, David Barton, the revisionist historian who circulated the Madison quote, admitted that the quote was faked and should not be used. Some religious leaders including the head of the Christian Broadcasting Network and president of Regent University, Pat Robertson, still use it however and even teach it to the younger generations of Christians (“Pat Robertson’s Regent”). In November, 2003, Judge Roy Moore was removed from the bench by a unanimous panel for ethics violations in Alabama (President Bush later nominated Moore for an even higher position in the federal judiciary) (“Ten Commandments judge”). The Religious Right would like to see the United States return to its roots as a Christian nation, founded upon Christian principals and Christian morals. But how much did religion, and specifically a promulgation of Christian ideals, play into our founding documents and writings from the colonial era through the Constitution?
Certainly during the colonial era in this country religion was an important and central part of the debate on what would constitute “American thought”. Early writers and thinkers used religious ideas as both the basis and foundation of their philosophies. John Winthrop, a Puritan leader during the 1600’s and governor of Boston, used his religious ideas in ways that would today not be considered part of American ideals. Winthrop’s basic proposition in “The Little Speech” of 1639 was that democracy, or control of the government by the people, could dangerously stray from the desires of a Christian God. Instead, government should be run by a few people who were in the service of God. This is maybe the type of forefather that the Religious Right is trying to emulate when it talks about how they believe that our government was created, and the purpose it was created for.
“[Man] hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority,” said Winthrop in “The Little Speech”, fearing what freedom may ultimately do to the colonists. Liberty “cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority.” Winthrop simply believed that man was made to exist under authority. He makes this even more clear in “A Model of Christian Charity”. There he states that some people are supposed to be poor, that others are supposed to be rich, and that there are some people who are supposed to rule over you. You, as a decent Christian, are simply supposed to deal with that simple fact. After all, those in charge of you are bound by love, Winthrop ascertains, and have your best interests in mind. Your leaders are not out to do you any harm: “For it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.”
But while Winthrop’s ideas were definitely an important part of our country’s beginnings, they were firmly and utterly rejected as a part of our nation’s conscience. In some writings, however, it was still religion itself which came about to define and champion American ideas about Democracy and freedom. John Wise, another minister in the early colonies, saw Christianity as supporting of these ideas, and used his religion to buttress his claims. “An able standing force and an ill-nature, ipso facto, turns an absolute monarch into a tyrant” Wise wrote in “Democracy is Founded in Scripture”. Wise saw it both impossible to be assured that our positions in life should be accepted absolutely, no matter what that position was, and even more impossible that all leaders would automatically have the people’s best interests in mind. A leader could just as easily try to work against Christianity as for it. Likewise, a government of only a select few “has no more barrier to it against the ambition, insults, and arbitrary measures of men than an absolute monarchy”. Wise also states that nobody would give up their natural rights to be treated like a slave when they give themselves to the authority of their leaders. To “[alter] himself from a freeman into a slave… is repugnant to the Law of Nature”.
“Government was never established by God or Nature to give one man a prerogative to insult another,” Wise continues in “Democracy Is Founded in Scripture”. And since this is what often may happen in a monarchy or aristocracy, then these are not good Christian governments. Instead, Christ would have wanted a government that would “least expose his people to hazard” and work best for the members of that society, Wise imagined. This sort of government would need to be democratic. In a democracy “a just equality is to be indulged so far as that every man is bound to honor every man, which is agreeable both with Nature and Religion.” Wise saw the idea that democracy could create brotherhood and unity, since all would be equal in it. This would be the best, and therefore most Christian form of government.
But one could still make the point that the United States was founded on scripture, especially if democracy itself was found within biblical verses. However, there is another aspect to the evolution of American thought that forges ahead and plants itself more deeply into the American psyche before the founding documents concretely established what role religion would have in our government. This was the idea that people should be allowed to worship God in whatever way they desired.
Roger Williams’ “The Bloody Tenant of Persecution” makes the hypocrisy of religious compulsions very clear. He points out that the wars committed in the name of religion stand directly opposed to the idea of Jesus as being the Prince of Peace. “God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, [and] persecution of Christ Jesus…” Williams then argues that people of any religion must be allowed to worship in any way that they please, even if it is a “false” religion. They only sword that should be used to conquer others is “the sword of God’s Spirit, the Word of God… God needeth not the help of a material sword of steel to assist the sword of the Spirit in the affairs of conscience.”
One of the problems with religious decrees is that every person, on both sides of any argument, believes that what they are professing, or fighting for, or adhering to is being done for the sake of God. “He that kills, and he that’s killed, they both cry out: ‘It is for God, and for their conscience’” Williams continues. Because of this reasoning, Williams suggests not only that one should not force their religion on another, but that government (which is principally the actor who creates the religious requirements that lead to persecutions and wars) should remain strictly separate from religion itself. Civil leaders should not play any part in how a church governs itself, and likewise a church should not have any power in setting up or maintaining civil law.
And this is the idea that from Roger Williams in 1644 becomes firmly implanted as the central theme regarding religion and its role in the government of the United States. By the time that the sentiments of revolution had sparked in the colonies, this was the only idea that seemed to connect religion and government in American writings. It also seemed at the start of the revolution to be a point that was largely taken for granted. While various writers at the time mentioned the need for freedom of religion in the colonies, the idea of it was completely absent from the complaints listed in the Declaration of Independence. The role of religion was accepted at this point, and it seemed that even the British understood that fact, as the colonists pushing for independence did not list forcing conscriptions to the Church of England as a principle complaint. But the idea of religion did gain a small note in the Articles of Confederation that followed. In it, the states guarantee to aid each other and come to each other’s defense in case they are attacked from a religion.
By this time in the development of the United States, religion seemed to be playing a very small part in what our government was bound to do for the people. Some of this could be due to the actual religious tendencies and philosophies of many of the founding fathers. George Washington, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison were actually deists (Robinson). And, should any citizens who proclaim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation discover the intents and beliefs of deism, they would be greatly disappointed. To most deists, God is a very distant thing who no longer gets involved in the day-to-day maintenance of the world. And as opposed to Christian fundamentalists, most deists do not believe in the inerrancy of the bible or even the idea that the bible is the divinely inspired (Robinson). These ideas are very far from what the Religious Right would have you believe about what the founders of this country were thinking.
The Constitution, which the United States system of law and government was to be based upon, itself was written with very little mention of religion. Ratified in 1787, it certainly makes no mention of creating a nation that was to uphold Christian ideals, morals, or values. Even the preamble is silent on the issue. In fact, the only place where religion is mentioned at all in the original Constitution is within Article VI: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” But this fact does not seem to be obvious or accepted to some members of the Religious Right. “There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore,” Pat Robertson stated in 2003 to the American Center for Law and Justice (“What In God’s Name”). Since the Constitution does not actually use the word “separation”, some church leaders see that as evidence that the United States was supposed to be built as a strictly Christian country. However, there is nothing else to back up these claims within the text itself.
The Bill of Rights makes this same mistake. By not using the word “separation”, those members of the Religious Right would like to believe that there is no reason not to use Christianity as the basis for government and law. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” the first Amendment was added to say in 1791. But some do not seem to interpret “shall make no law” to mean the same thing as “separation”. The question then becomes though, how does one take “no religious Test” and “shall make no law” as being proof that the United States was meant to be run by church doctrines? The Constitution certainly makes no mention of God, Christianity, the Ten Commandments, or the Bible.
So maybe one must look into the Federalist Papers. Written from 1787 to 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, the Federalist Papers were meant to explain the intentions of the Constitution, and to make plain exactly how the government of the new country aimed to run. And, once again, they are in their entirety completely devoid of the words Christ, Christian, Christianity, Jesus, Godliness, the Ten Commandments, and the Bible. The word “God” makes its appearance only once in just one of the eighty-five Federalist Papers. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 43 about how the laws of nature and nature’s God meant that governmental institutions were supplicant to the good of society. This is hardly a cry for a national religious or moral decree. In fact, this is a deist idea that simply means that the way things were created to work was that government was supposed to benefit the people. It makes no claim to any supposition about placing God within the context of the new government.
The word “religion” appears a few more times in the Federalist Papers. Five times it is mentioned, but not once does it appear to indicate in any way that religion should play a central role in government. Instead, they seem to say that people of different opinions regarding religion will need to be able to work against each other in our pluralist society, such as in Madison’s Federalist No. 10, or that you cannot change someone’s religious ideas by force, such as in Hamilton’s Federalist No. 1. The word “church” likewise makes only a small appearance in the Federalist Papers. It appears three times, once in Hamilton’s Federalist No. 71, and twice in Federalist No. 69, and only in regards to executive powers of the president. And it makes the executive powers very clear. In comparison to the monarch, who “can confer titles of nobility at pleasure; and has the disposal of an immense number of church preferments,” the president “has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction”.
The United States was in no way established to be a Christian nation, and its laws were not founded upon the Bible or scripture. Though there certainly were Puritan leaders who contributed to the early writings of the country, the religious ideas that took hold and became a part of the American conscious were ideas of freedom for a pluralist society of different religions. A government simply cannot conscript the people, any people, to follow a certain line of religious tenants. While the Religious Right and historical revisionists would like to create the idea that Christianity was the basis for our founding documents, there seems to exist no textual evidence for that argument. Many of the founding fathers were of a completely different religious mindset that would not be accepted today by fundamentalist Christians or the Religious Right, but they would still have us believe that those same forefathers set out to develop a country in-line with their current fundamentalist beliefs. Both the documents at the heart of American government and the essays written at the time to explain those documents are completely devoid of any religious arguments or moralistic expositions other than these: that one cannot force someone to adhere to any religion, and that the government itself should have no religious powers.
Selected Bibliography
“The Federalist Papers”. 24 May 2006. The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. 24 May 2006. .
“Pat Robertson’s Regent University Flunks American History”. 4 April 2001. Americans United for Separation of Church and State. 24 May 2006. .
Robinson, B.A., “Deism: The God that got away”. 14 August 2005. ReligiousTolerance.org. 24 May 2006. .
“Ten Commandments judge removed from office”. 14 November 2003. CNN.com. 24 May 2006. .
“What In God’s Name?” DefconAmerica.org. 28 May 2006. .