TAKING LIBERTIES

WHY RELIGIOUS FREEDOM DOESN'T GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO TELL OTHER PEOPLE WHAT TO DO

Prometheus Books

Contents

HISTORY

A lot of countries don't have religious freedom. In manynations, the government presumes to tell people whatto believe and how to behave when it comes to religion.Saudi Arabia, where faiths outside Wahhabi Islam are illegal, is anextreme example.

But even some generally tolerant Western nations regulate (orattempt to regulate) the religious behaviors of their citizens. The practiceof Scientology is illegal in Germany, and some states there stillattempt to place restrictions on the faith of Jehovah's Witnesses.

The United States took a different path. Why?

The short answer is that we have religious freedom in Americabecause there was a time when we didn't, and we learned fromthat. This period of restrictions on religious liberty was not anabstraction to key founders. They lived through it; they observed itfirsthand. Having seen the results of colonies where there was nomeaningful religious freedom, they sought to protect its practice.

I have discussed the history of this period in one of my previousbooks, Why the Religious Right Is Wrong about Separation of Churchand State. It's not my intention to revisit all of that again here, butit is important to take a quick look at the development of religiousfreedom in the United States. As is often the case, a glance backwardtells us how we got to where we are.

This is important because the use (or misuse) of history is fundamentalto the strategy of those who would redefine religiousfreedom. They have constructed a narrative—one that does notnecessarily jibe with the facts—to buttress this redefinition.

One of the things they have sought to do is decouple religiousfreedom from the concept of the separation of church andstate. These two concepts—religious liberty and church-state separation—havebeen portrayed as enemies and have been made tofight. The implication here is that the American people will have tochoose: Do they want separation or religious liberty? We are toldthat our nation can't have both.

Actually, we can. In fact, we have. Indeed, we must. Religiousfreedom is not the enemy of separation of church and state. Thesetwo concepts are partners. More than that, they're like mutualisticorganisms. They need one another to survive. The founders knewthis; that's why the First Amendment says what it does.

Prior to the founders, early religious-liberty pioneers alsounderstood this. Roger Williams, an iconoclastic minister and thefounder of Rhode Island, challenged the Puritan establishmentof Massachusetts with a bold demand for "soul liberty." Williamsmaintained that the state had no business dictating orthodoxy toanyone. His preferred method of making certain that the governmentdid not do this was the separation of church and state.

Williams's separation was not merely the end of establishedchurches, although he certainly favored that. He insisted that thegovernment had no right to compel anyone to recite a religiousoath, and he blasted attempts by the state to define which religionswere pleasing to God. Such attempts inevitably led to persecution,Williams maintained. And compulsory religion, he argued, "stinksin the nostrils of God."

Williams's ideas were heretical at the time. Indeed, Massachusetts'sruling Puritans found him tiresome and had plans to forciblyship him back to England. Williams escaped and fled into the wilderness.He purchased (rather than simply seized) land from the nativesand founded his own colony—Providence.

Meaningful religious liberty, Williams believed, encompassesthe right to be wrong from someone else's perspective. And thiswasn't just talk on his part; Williams put it into practice. Williamswas not fond of Quakers and found their theology strange. YetQuakers worshipped unmolested in Providence. If Quakers werewrong, Williams believed, God would have an opportunity toexplain that to them at some point. It was not the magistrate's job.

In a famous metaphor, Williams spoke of a "wall of separationbetween the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world."The phrase is interesting because it anticipates something ThomasJefferson said many years later—although there is no evidence thatJefferson knew of it.

We get the impression here that Williams is advocating for thepurity of the church in the face of state encroachments. RandallBalmer, a highly respected scholar of American religion, has pointedout that the word wilderness had great meaning for the men and womenof Williams's day. It's likely Williams chose it with great care.

Balmer notes that the Puritans viewed the wilderness as a frighteningplace, untamed and full of dangers. To mix the church withthe wilderness, then, was a great threat to the church. Williams'sseparation was in no way designed to lessen the power or purity ofbelief. In fact, this wall was a protector, not a destroyer.

As European settlements grew along the East Coast, coloniesadopted various rules relating to religious freedom. Some had establishedchurches, while others were more liberal in their attitude.

In those colonies with official state churches, dissenting clergymembers were the first to raise the argument for separation ofchurch and state. A distance between the two institutions, theyargued, was the only way to ensure freedom of belief for all.

Some pastors framed their argument in explicitly theologicalterms. Official establishments, they argued, served the interests ofneither church nor state.

Isaac Backus, a colonial-era Baptist preacher in New England,argued the former, asserting, "Religious matters are to be separatedfrom the jurisdiction of the state, not because they are beneath theinterests of the state but, quite to the contrary, because they are toohigh and holy and thus are beyond the competence of the state."

John Leland, an especially fiery Baptist cleric, worked his entirelife to end established churches and any government interferencein soul liberty. Leland argued that mere toleration was not enough.The government had to get out of the religion business entirely.

"The liberty I contend for is more than toleration," Lelandwrote in 1820. "The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposesthat some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence;whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks [Muslims], Pagansand Christians. Test oaths and established creeds should be avoidedas the worst of evils."

Leland holds an unusual distinction in American politicalhistory: he helped end state-established churches in three states. Heis perhaps best known for providing a theological voice to the effortsof Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to free Virginia from theAnglican establishment. Less well-known are his efforts in his homestate of Massachusetts. The Bay State was the last to surrender itsestablished church, finally cutting it loose in 1833. Leland, who diedin 1841, helped lead the charge for disestablishment. While doingthat, he found time to make cross border raids into Connecticut,where he assisted pro-disestablishment forces there.

Although Leland's theology was conservative, he had no problemembracing Jefferson, whose religious views were notoriouslyunorthodox. Leland was influenced by Jefferson, who combined elementsof Deism and European Enlightenment with a Christianitystripped of miracles and mysticism, thus creating his own idiosyncraticbrew. In 1791, Leland called for the right of "everyman to speak freely without fear—maintain the principles that hebelieves—worship according to his own faith, either one God, threeGods, no God, or twenty Gods." Ten years earlier, in his Notes onthe State of Virginia, Jefferson observed something similar, "It doesme no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or noGod. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Jefferson and Leland didn't agree on theology. But they remainedclose and worked together to promote the separation of church andstate because both understood that true freedom could not existwhen the government imposed religion on its citizens.

Remember, religious persecution was not an abstractionto people like Jefferson and Leland. They saw it. They lived it.Jefferson's partner and protégé, James Madison, became a powerfuladvocate for church-state separation after seeing "well-meaningmen" in jail because they dared to preach their Baptist doctrines onthe street. Madison was especially incensed that so many membersof the established clergy in Virginia backed this type of persecution.

Religious freedom, then, to many people of the foundingperiod, chiefly meant the right to worship as one saw fit. Despitethe actions of people like Jefferson, Madison, and their allies in thedissenting clergy, it was by no means clear that this right wouldbe secure everywhere. It had to be fought for in some states. InVirginia, Jefferson and Madison worked together to end the establishedAnglican church and pass a law giving all residents the rightto worship as they saw fit.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Jefferson,was a pioneering piece of legislation when it was enacted in 1786.Many historians believe it influenced Madison so strongly that hetook its values with him when he played a key role in authoring theFirst Amendment.

But, for the time being, it remained only a Virginia law. Thelevel of religious liberty in other states varied. The situation wasso unsettled that members of minority groups felt uncertain abouttheir status.

In 1790, the leadership of Touro Synagogue in Newport, RhodeIsland, wrote to President George Washington to express its concernsover the rights of Jews in the new nation. The leaders notedthat they had been "Deprived as we heretofore have been of theinvaluable rights of free Citizens," and they expressed their desirefor a nation free from bigotry and persecution.

Washington's eloquent reply is a classic of religious liberty. Heassured the synagogue's leaders of their rightful place in America,writing, "The citizens of the United States of America have a rightto applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples ofan enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. Allpossess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. Itis now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgenceof one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise oftheir inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of theUnited States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecutionno assistance, requires only that they who live under its protectionshould demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasionstheir effectual support."

Powerful words. But at the time Washington penned them, theywere not backed by anything official. The Bill of Rights, with itsFirst Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, had yet to beadded to the Constitution. In some states, Jews did face persecution.Indeed, some states even barred them from holding public office.And in the states that retained established churches, Jews, alongwith everyone else, had to support these official religious institutionseven though they did not belong to those churches or evenbelieve in their doctrines.

Much of this history is disputed by the religious Right. It's disputedin much the same way that some people dispute the theory ofevolution. Through a selective culling of history, backed by a campaignof distortions and outright lies, they have created an alternate"history."

But it's not history, just as "creation science" isn't science. I'm old-fashionedenough to believe that if something didn't actually happen,it doesn't qualify as history. It's something else: it's a myth, a legend,a comforting (for some) story, even. Not history. History is the stuffthat actually happened, not the stuff you wish had happened.

The "Christian nation" didn't happen. If it had, we would see evidenceof it. First and foremost, we would see it in our Constitution.It is not there. That document contains no references in the body ofthe text to Christianity, Jesus Christ, or God, for that matter.

There are just two references to religion in the Constitution. Oneis in the First Amendment, which we've already touched on. The otheris found at the end of Article VI, which states that there shall be "noreligious test" for public office. This is an odd provision to put into aconstitution of a Christian nation, is it not? Language that guaranteeseveryone—Christian and non-Christian—the right to hold federaloffice hardly establishes a Christian nation. It rather cuts the other way.

Furthermore, ultraconservative Protestant groups in the wakeof the Civil War tried repeatedly to add a Christian-nation amendmentto the Constitution. Why would they have wanted to do thatif the Constitution already acknowledged Christianity?

The answer is because the Constitution didn't do that, and theextremely conservative ministers of that time, a kind of prototypicalreligious Right, knew that. They considered it a flaw, and theywanted to see it corrected.

Interestingly, the Christian-nation concept first took off duringthe Civil War, when minsters in the North, distraught over theUnion Army's early losses, began asserting that the battlefieldreverses were God's punishment on the nation for spurning him inthe Constitution.

Later, as the North turned the tide and it became obvious thatthe South was going to lose, these same ministers changed theirtune and began claiming that God favored the North because itwas more spiritually upright than the South. Their argument suddenlyshifted, and they began asserting that the framers of theConstitution had meant to add recognition of Christianity to theConstitution but had failed for some unknown reason, so it was upto these ministers to complete that task. Amazingly, they arguedwith a straight face that our secular Constitution somehow perpetuateda Christian order anyway and that adding a Christian-nationamendment would merely codify this.

In the modern era, an entire cottage industry has sprung up inreligious Right circles, offering this phony history to fundamentalistthrongs. I call it "historical creationism," and, indeed, the parallelsbetween ersatz history and junk science draped in clericalvestments are startling.

Neither stands up to examination well. Real scientists havedebunked creationism (including its younger, hipper cousin, "intelligentdesign") more times than I care to count. Similarly, actualhistorians and other scholars have let loose on the Christian-nationcanard so many times that it should have ended up in the trash heapa long time ago. It survives because its main support system is thewill to believe, not real research.

David Barton, a Texas man who is not a historian, has for manyyears made a living peddling the Christian-nation myth to eageraudiences. His main claims are that Thomas Jefferson and otherfounders didn't really support church-state separation and that theUnited States was founded to be an officially Christian nation.

In 2012, Barton's carefully constructed cardboard village ofphony history came crashing down when a number of Christianscholars, led by Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter atGrove City College in Pennsylvania, finally decided they'd hadenough and dissected his tall tales bit by bit.

Others had done it before Throckmorton and Coulter (aresearcher named Chris Rodda has been especially active), but theThrockmorton/Coulter broadside, which, among other things,debunked Barton's fallacious claims about Jefferson's personal religiousviews, stung Barton especially hard because these guys werehardly flaming liberals. Until then, Barton's typical response to hiscritics had been exactly that: it's all political.

Maybe it's not all political. Maybe it really is about history.Maybe it's something as simple as being offended by bad history orsomething that's not really history after all.

Obviously, history is open to interpretation. Scholars look atevents from the past, marshal evidence, and present conclusions. Ifyou want to upset the conventional wisdom concerning a historicalincident, by all means, have at it. But you must present some evidence;you must make the case.

You must also understand that history is a record of thingsthat happened. As I've pointed out, events that never happened arenot history. Barton argues that the United States was deliberatelyfounded to be a Christian nation, but that never happened. What hepromotes is not history; it is something else.

As of this writing, Barton continues to hang on. A book he wrotepurporting to debunk lies about Jefferson was so full of errors thatthe publisher took the rare step of withdrawing it from circulation.(A flavor for this book can perhaps be gained by its main argument:Jefferson, the man who rejected the divinity of Jesus, the miraclesof the New Testament, and the resurrection, was really an evangelicalChristian. It got worse from there.)

The Christian-nation crowd is famous for taking a kernel oftruth and turning it into an entire bag of buttery popcorn. Onething they point out is that the First Amendment didn't apply tostates when it was adopted.