"What would Jefferson do?" An essay on tolerance and secularism

[Selatius]

I. ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

The United States enjoys higher levels of religious observance than any Western nation with an official church. Yet the religious right and its political allies are far from satisfied. They would like to accomplish what the Founders explicitly disavowed: to entangle the state in the promotion of religion. At a time when the United States and other Western countries are resisting Islamist holy war and attempting to convince Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere of the virtues of a pluralist democracy, the project of the religious right to inject God into government is ill-advised, if not bizarre. America's Christian fundamentalists, dubiously, have also made common cause with Israeli ultras, and zealots like Lieutenant General William Boykin have described battles with Muslims as "my god was a real God and his was an idol." This set of events is unhealthy for our democracy, ominous for religious freedom, and an engine of a messianic foreign policy.

History judges religious zealots harshly, particularly those wielding state power. The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries. When the Founders of the American republic wrote the Constitution, they included no reference to God and barred the states, as well as the federal government, from requiring any religious oath for public office. The First Amendment guaranteed freedom of conscience, denying Congress the power to make any law "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The people of the original states varied in their religious tendencies, but the Founders were determined that the folly of religious war not wreck the American republic. A corollary insight was that keeping the government from regulating or requiring worship would be good for religion. American religiosity surely proves them right.

Constitutional separation, the great cause of Jefferson and Madison, reflected an Enlightenment determination both to bolster reason over faith in civic deliberation and to protect minorities from the tyranny of majorities, including religious ones. A great milestone on the road to the constitutional separation of church and state was the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, enacted in 1786. Jefferson, the moving force behind the law, wrote that it was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination." As Jefferson saw it, "Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What have been the effects of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites."

For at least two decades, the religious right, in arguments summarized in Richard John Neuhaus' 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, has contended that modern secularists and runaway courts have stripped God from the Constitution and the republic. But the record is precise: The Founders separated church from state, deliberately and after extensive, documented debate.

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[Maestro]

1. Great read!

I received my Masters in Spanish literature and remember the 700 year period when the Muslims ruled Spain and how advanced their culture was plus the forward thinking tolerance that they had. I am not sure our societies will ever get back there again sadly. The far religious right is one group of people I fear.