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Separation of Church and State

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 4 months ago
Checking out the New York Times bestseller list for the past several decades gives a hint of how the topic of separation of church & state sits squarely in the forefront of American thought.
 
1620 saw the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, brought here by primarily by a quest for religious freedom. In those early years, church & state were so totally intermingled that separating them was nearly impossible, but a few rules were in effect to keep a semblance of that separation. A pastor could not be a civil leader. A pastor was a pastor and a civil servant was a civil servant. All governmental laws were based on Judeo-Christian Biblical law, but the governmental arm, not the church, enforced those laws. Church attendance was compulsory.
 
Other colonies developed a bit differently. Jamestown saw its new pastor die within months of the 1607 arrival, and no replacement was sent for nearly 3 years. Church services were mandatory there, too, with punishment of withholding food for a day for not attending on the first offense up to six months in the gallows for the third offense.
 
Maryland was founded with religious toleration for Catholics and Quakers, even though few of them actually lived in that colony. Virginia stuck to its state Anglican Church for many years. The Carolinas and Georgia, although settled later, did the similar things.
 
It is difficult for us today to understand the true underlying meaning of this issue, as it has been thoroughly clouded by today’s commentators, and by the lack of historical education in our schools. Our nation’s founders had no intention of separating the Christian faith from government. Christianity & its Biblical laws was the basis of our national & state governments. Pros and cons of this subject are written daily, but most of the cons are taken out of context of what the Founding Fathers actually said and did.
 
The First Amendment reads like this "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". What did that actually mean to them? After years and years of state churches, they wanted to protect the churches from governmental interference. The states were free, as guaranteed under the Tenth Amendment, to do as they pleased. And most of them did. Connecticut & New Hampshire had officially tax supported state churches until nearly the end of the 18th century. Massachusetts dismantled her state Congregational Church in 1833. Virginia, North & South Carolina, and Georgia all had state supported Anglican Churches for many years after the Constitution was written. Notice the word “Congress”. Only the federal government was prohibited from getting into the church’s business. Reread the amendment again. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". That amendment doesn’t say anything about protecting the government from the Christian church. It was written to keep one denomination from overriding another denomination. It meant to keep the federal government from establishing a national church.
 
In the early years of the colonies, there was no religion except Christianity, and mostly Protestant Christianity at that. Catholics (who weren’t considered Christian at the time) & Jews made up less than three percent of the total population. Many arguments are made about which religion America was founded upon. There was no other predominant religion in the colonies at the time. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists were unknown, and no Founding Father ever dreamed that any of them would ever reside within what is now the United States. Colonial population was homogenously Western European Christian, and no one ever thought it to change into the diverse pluralistic society we have today.
 
Whether the all the Founding Fathers were Christian or not, their intention was to create a country with a Christian based government.
 
James Madison said, "We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions ... upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God”.
 
John Adams wrote, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion ... Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
 
George Washington said, "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."
 
Daniel Webster said, "Moral habits ... cannot safely be trusted on any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits ... Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens."
 
"... But for [the Bible] we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare ... are to be found portrayed in it.", Abraham Lincoln wrote.
 
"Religion is the only solid basis of good morals: therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man toward God," said Gouverneur Morris.
 
Patrick Henry said, "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been offered asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."
 
Robert Winthrop, Speaker of the House in the early days of the Republic, said, "Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them or by a power without them, either by the Word of God or by the strong arm of man, either by the Bible or by the bayonet.”
 
These quotes can be cited on and on for volumes. If these men had no intention of creating a Christian based government, why did they say the things that they said?
 
Jefferson gave a speech to a Danbury, CT, Baptist Sunday School association during his Presidency in 1802. He used the phrase "wall of separation" to reassure them that the federal government would not establish a federal government supported denomination to be superior to all other denominations. (1) The "wall of separation" phrase was meant to keep the government from interfering in religion. (2) This “wall of separation” is the groundwork for most ACLU or atheistic writings proclaiming that any religious ornamentation has to be removed to protect the government from religious interference, but this interpretation is taken out of context, as Jefferson was one of the biggest promoters of various denominations during and after his presidency. He assisted the Catholic Church to obtain land in Washington during his tenure in the White House. He donated money, according to his account book of 1824, to Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Baptists to build new churches. He even wanted Calvin’s Geneva College to move to Virginia to form the basis of the present day University of Virginia. And he provided government money to build churches and pay the salaries of missionaries to the Native Americans.
 
None of this sounds like the Founding Fathers, and later Congressional statesmen, were looking to protect the federal government from Christian influence, like is frequently espoused today. The Constitution provides & pays for chaplains for both Houses of Congress. Congress commenced its first session with a couple hours of Bible study, which all Congressional members attended, and this continued for many years. Both Houses of Congress held Sunday worship services, and President Jefferson attended the one in the House of Representatives. When he wanted the service livened up, he ordered the U.S. Marine band to come play during worship. Look it all up in the historical record! It is all there! Better yet, pick up a copy of the U.S. Constitution & read it. It is a relatively short document, but quite enlightening, especially as one reads today’s newspapers relating all the activities done in Washington! If one thinks the church & state issue is violated, it will quickly become evident that most of today’s Congressional activities are illegal according to the Constitution. But that is a subject of another essay!
 
Today, the concept of church & state separation has been taken too far, and totally out of context from the original documents, by the courts, and the non-believing segment of the American population to the detriment of the rest of society.
 
Historian Roland Bainton writes, "all freedoms hang together.... Civil liberties scarcely thrive when religious liberties are disregarded, and the reverse is equally true. Beneath them all is a philosophy of liberty, which assumes a measure of variety in human behavior, honors integrity, respects the dignity of man, and seeks to exemplify the compassion of God."

The First Amendment provides freedom for religion, not freedom from religion. Judges have taken prayer out of American schools and manger scenes out of town squares by blatant dishonesty. They have taken a constitutional amendment that clearly limits Congress, and only Congress, and applied it to states, villages, counties and school districts.  

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