HISTORICAL SKETCH: Roger Williams, Apostle Of Religious Freedom

By Ellen G. White – The Great Controversy pp. 293-298

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Eleven years after the planting of the first colony, Roger Williams came to the new World. Like the early Pilgrims, he came to enjoy religious freedom; but unlike them, he saw what so few in his time had yet seen—that this freedom was the inalienable right of all, whatever might be their creed. He was an earnest seeker for truth, with Robinson holding it impossible that all the light from God’s word had yet been received. Williams “was the first person in modern Christendom to establish civil government on the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law.” He declared it to be the duty of the magistrate to restrain crime, but never to control the conscience. “The public or the magistrates may decide,” he said, “what is due from man to man; but when they attempt to prescribe a man’s duties to God, they are out of place, and there can be no safety; for it is clear that if the magistrate has the power, he may decree one set of opinions or beliefs today and another tomorrow; as had been done in England by different kings and queens, and by different popes and councils in the Roman Church; so that belief would become a heap of confusion.”

Attendance at the services of the established church was required under a penalty of fine or imprisonment. “William’s reprobated the law; the worst statute in the English code was that which did but enforce attendance upon the parish church. To compel men to unite with those of a different creed, he regarded as an open violation of their natural rights; to drag to public worship the irreligious and the unwilling, seemed only like requiring hypocrisy. . . . ‘No one should be bound to worship, or,’ he added, ‘to maintain a worship, against his own consent.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed his antagonists, amazed at his tenets, ‘is not the laborer worthy of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘from them that hire him.’”

Roger Williams was respected and beloved as a faithful minister, a man of rare gifts, of unbending integrity and true benevolence; yet his steadfast denial of the right of civil magistrates to authority over the church, and his demand for religious liberty, could not be tolerated. The application of this new doctrine, it was urged, would “subvert the fundamental state and government of the country.” He was sentenced to banishment from the colonies, and finally, to avoid arrest, he was forced to flee, amid the cold and storms of winter, into the unbroken forest.

“For fourteen weeks,” he says, “I was sorely tossed in a bitter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.” But “the ravens fed me in the wilderness,” and a hollow tree often served him for a shelter. Thus he continued his painful flight through the snow and the trackless forest, until he found refuge with an Indian tribe whose confidence and affection he had won while endeavoring to teach them the truths of the gospel.

Making his way at last, after months of change and wandering, to the shores of Narragansett Bay, he there laid the foundation of the first state of modern times that in the fullest sense recognized the right of religious freedom. The fundamental principle of Roger Williams’s colony, was “that every man should have liberty to worship God according to the light of his own conscience.” His little state, Rhode Island, became the asylum of the oppressed, and it increased and prospered until its foundation principles—civil and religious liberty—became the cornerstone of the American Republic.

In that grand old document which our forefathers set forth as their bill of rights—the Declaration of Independence—they declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And the Constitution guarantees, in the most explicit terms, the inviolability of conscience: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust under the United States.” “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

“The framers of the Constitution recognized the eternal principle that man’s relation with his God is above human legislation, and his rights of conscience inalienable.

“The framers of the Constitution recognized the eternal principle that man’s relation with his God is above human legislation, and his rights of conscience inalienable. Reasoning was not necessary to establish this truth; we are conscious of it in our own bosoms. It is this consciousness which, in defiance of human laws, has sustained so many martyrs in tortures and flames. They felt that their duty to God was superior to human enactments, and that man could exercise no authority over their consciences. It is an inborn principle which nothing can eradicate.”

As the tidings spread through the countries of Europe, of a land where every man might enjoy the fruit of his own labor and obey the convictions of his conscience, thousands flocked to the shores of the New World, Colonies rapidly multiplied. “Massachusetts, by special law, offered free welcome and aid, at the public cost, to Christians of any nationality who might fly beyond the Atlantic ‘to escape from wars or famine, or the oppression of their persecutors.’ Thus the fugitive and the downtrodden were, by statute, made the guests of the commonwealth.” In twenty years from the first landing at Plymouth, as many thousand Pilgrims were settled in New England.

To secure the object which they sought, “they were content to earn a bare subsistence by a life of frugality and toil. They asked nothing from the soil but the reasonable returns of their own labor. No golden vision threw a deceitful halo around their path. . . . They were content with the slow but steady progress of their social polity. They patiently endured the privations of the wilderness, watering the tree of liberty with their tears, and with the sweat of their brow, till it took deep root in the land.”

The Bible was held as the foundation of faith, the source of wisdom, and the charter of liberty. Its principles were diligently taught in the home, in the school, and in the church, and its fruits were manifest in thrift, intelligence, purity, and temperance. One might be for years a dweller in the Puritan settlements, “and not see a drunkard, or hear an oath, or meet a beggar.” It was demonstrated that the principles of the Bible are the surest safeguards of national greatness. The feeble and isolated colonies grew to a confederation of powerful States, and the world marked with wonder the peace and prosperity of “a church without a pope, and a state without a king.”

But continually increasing numbers were attracted to the shores of America, actuated by motives widely different from those of the first Pilgrims. Though the primitive faith and purity exerted a widespread and moulding power, yet its influence became less and less as the numbers increased of those who sought only worldly advantage.

The regulation adopted by the early colonists, of permitting only members of the church to vote or to hold office in the civil government, led to most pernicious results. This measure had been accepted as a means of preserving the purity of the state, but it resulted in the corruption of the church. A profession of religion being the condition of suffrage and office holding, many, actuated solely by motives of worldly policy, united with the church without a change of heart. Thus the churches came to consist, to a considerable extent, of unconverted persons; and even in the ministry were those who not only held errors of doctrine, but who were ignorant of the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. Thus again was demonstrated the evil results, so often witnessed in the history of the church from the days of Constantine to the present, of attempting to build up the church by the aid of the state, of appealing to the secular power in support of the gospel of Him who declared, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The union of the church with the state, be the degree never so slight, while it may appear to bring the world nearer to the church, does in reality but bring the church nearer to the world.

The union of the church with the state, be the degree never so slight, while it may appear to bring the world nearer to the church, does in reality but bring the church nearer to the world.

The great principle so nobly advocated by Robinson and Roger Williams, that truth is progressive, that Christians should stand ready to accept all the light which may shine from God’s holy Word, was lost sight of by their descendants. The Protestant churches of America and those of Europe as well—so highly favored in receiving the blessings of the Reformation, failed to press forward in the path of reform. Though a few faithful men arose, from time to time, to proclaim new truth and expose long cherished error, the majority, like the Jews in Christ’s day or the papists in the time of Luther, were content to believe as their fathers had believed, and to live as they had lived. Therefore religion again degenerated into formalism; and errors and superstitions which would have been cast aside had the church continued to walk in the light of God’s word, were retained and cherished. Thus the spirit inspired by the Reformation gradually died out, until there was almost as great need of reform in the Protestant churches as in the Roman Church in the time of Luther. There was the same worldliness and spiritual stupor, a similar reverence for the opinions of men, and substitution of human theories for the teachings of God’s word.

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The First Baptist in America (Florida Baptist Witness)

EXCERPT:

By JERRY WINDSOR
Special to Florida Baptist Witness

The earliest Baptists in America stemmed from a group of like-minded individuals who surrounded Roger Williams. It was on Feb. 5, 1631, that Roger Williams (1603-1683) and his wife sailed from Bristol on the ship Lyon and landed at Nantasket, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Roger Williams was born in London in 1603, the son of James and Alice Pemberton Williams. James was an importer and trader. He and his wife had a daughter Catherine and sons Sydrach, Roger and Robert. Roger studied at the Charterhouse and later at Pembroke College (B.A., 1627), a school in the Cambridge University system. Williams became an Anglican minister and on Dec. 15, 1629, married Mary Barnard, the daughter of a Puritan clergyman. While at Pembroke, Williams was one of eight students granted a scholarship based on his excellence in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. This in-depth study of the biblical languages brought some questions to the mind of Williams about such issues as infant baptism, believer’s baptism, religious freedom, and separation of church and state.

Read the full article at http://www.floridabaptistwitness.com/9835.article

J. Brent Walker – “Church and State in the USA: Promises and Challenges”

This thought-provoking address was given by J. Brent Walker of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty at the Congress on Religious Liberty in Buenos Aires, Argentina on April 28, 2008.  It was originally posted on the BJC website (bjcpa.org) and is reposted here in its entirety with permission.

Good morning! I appreciate the kind invitation of Raul Scialabba to participate in this Congress on religious liberty. I am truly honored and delighted to be here in Buenos Aires. I bring greetings from the U. S. and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. The BJC is a seventy year old group supported by fifteen different Baptist bodies and working on matters concerning religious liberty and the separation of church and state. Established to provide a united witness for Baptists in Washington D.C., the BJC works to defend and extend the religious liberty of all. History has taught us that if anyone’s religious liberty is denied, everyone’s religious liberty is endangered.

I. Introduction

Informing our understanding of the proper relationship between the church and the state is a conviction that religious liberty is a gift from God, not the result of any “toleration” on the part of government. It has to do with our being created in the image of God, and the ability that God gives us to respond as free and competent moral agents. This is why we Baptists treasure voluntary religion and “soul freedom” — a God-infused liberty of conscience — that Roger Williams, a 17th Century Baptist champion of freedom, and many other Baptists since then have fought for and sometimes died for.

Even though our religious liberty is a gift from God—not the result of an act of grudging concession by the state—in the U.S. we have chosen to tailor our political institutions to protect that God-given religious liberty. We do this mainly through the first two provisions of the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution. The first sixteen words of the First Amendment provide: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These two clauses require government to be neutral towards religion—neither helping nor hurting religion, but turning it loose to allow people of faith to practice their religion—or not– as they see fit, not as government wants them to.

Both of these provisions ensure religious liberty; both require an institutional and functional separation of church and state. Full religious liberty is a goal; church-state separation is the political means of accomplishing that goal. Simply stated, separation of church and state is good for both.

The wise architects of the U.S. Constitution had learned the lessons of history. They knew from experience that, as soon as government meddles in religion – for or against— or takes sides in religion – favoring one over another – someone’s religious liberty is at least threatened and persecution sometimes ensues. If nothing else, government control of religion – even in the hands of a benevolent government – often winds up watering religion down.

The U.S. Constitution is a secular document. It never mentions Christianity and religion is mentioned only once in Article VI and then to ban religious tests for public office. And, with the adoption of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, our founders made it clear that one’s status in the civil community would not depend on a willingness to embrace any religious confession.

II. Establishment Clause

There are two basic views about the meaning and interpretation of the Establishment Clause. The first is a broad view, or “no-aid view.” It understands the language “no establishment” to prevent governmental endorsement of and aid to religion in general, not just a ban on denominational discrimination or outright coercion. Proponents of this view point out that the nation’s founders considered and rejected three proposed amendments that would have expressly allowed the government to prefer or advance religion generally, as long as it did not favor one religion over another. For example, the Senate in 1789 rejected a proposal that provided, “Congress shall make no law establishing one religious sect or society in preference to another.” Instead, the founders settled upon much broader language that banned laws even “respecting an establishment of religion.”

Others take a narrow view of the Establishment Clause, sometimes called “non-preferentialism.” They understand the intent of the framers and the language of the First Amendment only to prevent government from preferring one religion over another, establishing a single national church or coercing religious choices. They would allow government to aid religion generally if done evenhandedly. Proponents of this view often point to the actions of the nation’s founders that showed little interest in keeping government from promoting religion, at least a generic Protestantism.

Generally speaking, the broad view of the Establishment Clause has been majority view for most of the past sixty years. Justice Hugo Black, writing in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), articulated its parameters when he said:

The ‘establishment of religion clause’ of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither the state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws…which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. In the words of Jefferson the clause against the establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a “wall of separation between church and state.” (Everson v. Board, 330 U.S. 1, 15-16, 1947)

Over the ensuing decades, culminating in a Supreme Court decision called Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971), the Court fashioned a three-part test for deciding the constitutionality of government action challenged under the Establishment Clause. In order to be upheld, the law or governmental action must (1) have a secular purpose, (2) have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religions, and (3) not foster excessive entanglement between church and state. Over the past several years the test has been criticized as encouraging hostility to religion and has been modified by the Court at least in the area of challenges to governmental funding of religion.

Those who have a narrow, non-preferential understanding of the Establishment Clause usually favor what is called a “coercion test.” This test posits that,

government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in any religion or its exercise; and it may not…give direct benefits to religion in such a degree that it in fact establishes a [state] religion or religious faith, or tends to do so. (County of Allegheny v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573, 659 (1989) Kennedy, J., concurring in part.)

Otherwise government is free to aid religion.

Establishment Clause cases tend to fall into one of two general areas. First, concerns are raised when government expresses an opinion on or takes sides in matters of religion. It has to do with attempts by government to promote or endorse religion in words or symbols. These cases involve, for example, government displays of the Ten Commandments and other religious symbols and state-sponsored religious exercises in the public schools.

The second general category of Establishment Clause cases has to do with what government does with public funds. These cases involve claims that government establishes religion by subsidizing pervasively religious organizations or religious activities. Examples include attempts to fund parochial schools and churches’ social service ministries.

III. Free Exercise Clause

The second religion clause – the Free Exercise Clause – is intended to prevent government from burdening or inhibiting the exercise of religion.

People disagree on how this clause should be interpreted and applied as well. Those who have a broad understanding contend that governmental exemptions based on religion are often permitted and sometimes required to remove burdens from the exercise of religion. This view says that robust religious liberty involves not just the right not to be discriminated against, but sometimes requires an exemption from facially neutral, general applicable laws.

So, for example, a Seventh Day Adventist could not be required to work on her Sabbath or risk losing unemployment compensation. Likewise, members of the Amish community would be entitled to an exemption from the compulsory education law that requires school attendance through age 16 when the Amish, for religious reasons, object to formal education through that age. This view of the Free Exercise Clause says that government may not impose a substantial burden on the exercise of religion without showing a compelling state interest – an interest of the highest order – and then it must do so in the least restrictive way. This broad view of the Free Exercise Clause was the majority view of the Supreme Court from the 1940’s through 1990.

Others take a narrow view of the Free Exercise Clause. They say that religiously-based exemptions from laws of general application, while in some cases permitted, are never constitutionally required. This view declares that the government need not demonstrate a compelling interest in order to justify burdening religious exercise; it simply must treat religion as it treats secular counterparts and not discriminate against religion. Of course, this view offers scant protection for the exercise of religion as a matter of right. But this narrow understanding of free exercise has become the majority view of the United States Supreme Court.

In Employment Division vs. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), the Court ruled that members of a Native American Church were not entitled to an exemption from the anti-drug laws to allow them to ingest peyote – a banned substance – as a sacrament in worship. As long as anti-drug laws are even-handedly enforced, government would not have to demonstrate a compelling interest to justify a denial of a religiously-based accommodation.

IV. Challenges

Having given this general overview of the interpretation of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, I now want to talk about two challenges to religious liberty in the U.S.

As I have said, both of these clauses in the First Amendment ensure religious liberty, but in different ways. The Establishment Clause keeps government from indirectly hurting your religion by helping somebody else’s religion and Free Exercise keeps government from harming your religion directly. Even though these provisions are complementary, sometimes—when taken to their logical conclusion—they rub up against the other clause.

This tension between the two clauses is good. If one assiduously enforces the Establishment Clause and forgets about free exercise, an environment of hostility to religion can result. However, if one concentrates only on the Free Exercise Clause and forgets about no establishment, the logical outcome can be a theocracy or something close to it. In either case, religious liberty would be diminished.

In short, it is important that we understand that government should accommodate religion, without advancing it; protect religion, without privileging it; sometimes lift burdens on the exercise of religion without extending religion an impermissible benefit.

Although U.S. constitutional law has come up with elaborate typologies to help us sort through this dilemma (mandatory, permissible and impermissible exemptions), I like to employ a common sense exercise. Every time we say “no” to government activity to uphold the Establishment Clause, we should find a way to say “yes” to its Free Exercise counterpart. This allows us always to try to find a “win-win” solution.

For example, if we disallow teacher-led prayer in the public schools or devotional Bible reading in the classroom, we should also permit voluntary student prayer, student-initiated Bible clubs, and teaching about religion at appropriate places in the curriculum. If we ban government subsidies for religion and religious institutions, we should favor tax exemption and permit government to fund separate religiously affiliated social service agencies that minister without religious discrimination. If we forbid government-sponsored displays of the Ten Commandments, we should permit private citizens to do so even in public places. Again, every Establishment Clause “no” should be teamed up with a Free Exercise “yes”.

The second challenge that confronts us in the U.S. has to do with how we uphold our commitment to the separation of church and state without diminishing the relevance of religion to public life. This is a particularly apt topic this year because of our quadrennial presidential elections.

The separation of church and state does not require segregation of religion from politics or strip the public square of religious discourse. Religious people have an equal right to vend their views in the marketplace of ideas and (with some limits) to convert their religious ethics into public policy by organizing, speaking out, voting, and running for and serving in office.

People of faith need not limit their piety to the church house or to acts of private devotion, nor do they have to concede the public square to others. They should be involved, and seek to transform culture in part through the political process.

Religion can be a positive force in politics—both running for office and in governing – in at least two ways.

First, when candidates and government officials talk about their faith it helps us know who they are and examine what their moral core is like. We should have a free and fluid discussion, as I think we have had over the past 30 years since Jimmy Carter in a sense broke the silence on talking about faith in a campaign. But we must always keep in mind that Article VI of the Constitution bans religious tests for office. True, that provision addresses only legal disabilities based on religion and citizens can take religion into account when voting. But we should make every effort to live up to the spirit as well as the letter of Article VI. And, we must be tolerant of some candidates who, although they might have deep religious convictions, are not comfortable discussing them publicly. We should respect their right to keep their deepest religious convictions private and not quickly conclude they are irreligious just because they are not used to bearing their souls in public.

Second, it is important to inquire about how a candidate’s religious views will impact public policy and how one’s leadership style will be affected. There must always be this linkage. It is not at all helpful to have a theological discussion isolated from impact on policy and governance. For example, will religion merely motivate or entirely dominate a potential office holder’s decision-making? Does a candidate’s religious convictions ordain a particular policy position? What about choice of language? Will it involve narrow and sectarian or broader and more inclusive language? What about a conscious effort not to let one’s religious beliefs dictate policy? Will a candidate promise, for example, to bracket his or her convictions? We tend to see this a lot in connection with the abortion issue (John Kerry, Mario Cuomo), capital punishment (Virginia Governor Tim Kaine) and religion generally (President Kennedy, Governor Romney).

All of this said, I want to offer three words of caution to the notion that religion can be helpful. The first is theological. Any foray into politics with focused religious motivation should be tempered with a dose of humility. For good reason. Was it Blaisé Pascal who said that “men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction?” We need to understand that, however sure we think we are of our position, the other person at least has something to say and maybe in the final analysis is right. As James Dunn has said of the bombastic broadsides that we hear mainly from the religious right in recent years, “What they say is not totally false; it is falsely total.” It often lacks a note of self-evaluation, of tentativeness, of humility that one needs to bring to bear on a public policy message based squarely on one’s religious conviction. This goes for extremism on the religious left as well.

The second caveat is ethical in nature. It has to do with the use or abuse of “civil religion”—a blending of a generic Judeo-Christian piety with U. S. patriotism to the point that one can’t tell them apart. It should not surprise us that, in a country as religious as the U.S., references to God find their way into our civil ceremonies, mottos, slogans and public rituals. These include, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, “In God we Trust” on coins and the ubiquitous “God Bless America” at the end of almost every speech of public officials. These acknowledgements of religious heritage generally have been tolerated by our courts. But, I bristle when it appears civil religion is being used to advance a political agenda. We must apply some ethical breaks here on the general idea that including religion in a campaign and in governance is (or can be) a plus. It’s dicey and dangerous to judge a politician’s sincerity and good faith. But we do it the same way we make other judgments about such matters: observing the demeanor of the speaker and seeking to determine if they walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

The third cautionary note is a constitutional one. The ultimate outcome of religiously motivated policy initiatives should always have a secular purpose and have the primary effect that does not advance religion. That is what U.S. Representative David Price means when he talks about “a coincidence of the religious precept with broader public values.” For example, former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Roy Moore clearly crossed the line when he installed outside his court a two ton monolith bearing the Ten Commandments, as every court that looked at the case concluded. But at the same time Alabama Governor Bob Riley was seeking tax reform, explicitly citing his Christian beliefs and Jesus’ teachings about the poor for justification. Riley’s religious motivation, however, was proper because there were a number of non-religious arguments and secular justifications to support tax reform.

While it is permissible for religion to motivate a policy, it should not dominate it. Stated differently, Jon Meacham the editor of “Newsweek” has said religion is a thread in the tapestry of American life, not the tapestry itself. Religion should shape policy, but not strangle it. Moreover, if the only rationale for a policy position is an a priori religious assertion, it is hard for it to be debated and tested in the marketplace of ideas and on the political scene. There must be some secular rationale for public policy that is based on religious conviction. Otherwise, it runs risk of violating the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion.

I do not shy away from talking about separation of church and state as some are wont to do these days. Properly understood, it does not ban, but actually makes possible, the full inclusion of religion in the public square. And with these three caveats, that is good for religion and good for politics.

V. Conclusion

Along with theological precepts and constitutional principles, good citizenship and common sense compel the same results. Another way to look at this is to think of the “golden rule.” Everyone appreciates the sheer reasonableness of the golden rule, people of faith and no faith alike. I would like to propose a golden rule of church-state relations: I must not ask government to promote my religion if I do not want government to promote someone else’s religion; I must not permit government to harm someone else’s religion if I do not want the government to harm my religion. Enlightened self-interest, common courtesy and fundamental fairness require no less. What could be more Christian than that?

Government, Religion, and a Mythical Past

By Karen Scott, Walt Pontynen, and Leigh Johnson

In this  article, originally published in Spectrum in 2002, the authors discuss the intent of the founders of the United States and how historical revisionism obscures our national heritage. (Re-posted with Permission.)

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER and poet George Santayana (1863-1952) wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”1 Unfortunately, from the highest offices (both elected and appointed) to the lowliest voter, the reaction of Americans to the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision in the Pledge of Allegiance case indicates that Americans are condemned to repeat the horrors of the Dark Ages.

Many, in attacking the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision, rest their case on the myth that separation of church and state in the United States is the product of modern secularists. They attack a string of decisions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court since the 1960s. They misuse and misinterpret the Founding Fathers2 who supposedly saw government promotion of Judeo-Christian values as necessary for the survival of the Republic.

However, the record is clear: despite their own personal piety, those who successfully argued for ratification of the First Amendment did not see government as the appropriate avenue for promoting those religious beliefs. They recognized that coercion, the essence of civil government, in matters of conscience is repugnant.

The Founding Fathers were clearly against the formation of the United States being founded on any religion, Christian or otherwise. For example, in 1796 the administration of George Washington negotiated a treaty with Tripoli that the US Senate ratified – unanimously – the following year at the request of President John Adams. The treaty denied that the U.S. government was founded on Christianity, reading in part:

As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion: as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen [Moslems]; and as the said states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.3

Washington, Adams, and members of the U.S. Senate were not alone. The United States Constitution itself verifies that the United States is not “founded on the Christian Religion.” One searches in vain through the U.S. Constitution, which encapsulates the thinking of the Founders and provides the framework for national government, for wording that the United States is based on Christianity. Indeed, it makes no mention of God at all. In an era when European monarchs routinely claimed a divine right to rule, the point was obvious. In the United States, authority derives not from any church or religious creed, or from God, but from “the people” – as the preamble to the Constitution plainly states.

So sensitive were the Founders to the danger of pressuring consciences that out of deference to Quaker beliefs they included a provision in the Constitution for Quaker officeholders to “affirm” rather than “swear” their oaths of office. In addition, they forbade any test of religion for holders of federal office. The U.S. Constitution is blind to the religion of its civil servants—whether Catholic, Buddhist, Latter-day Saint, Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist, Methodist, or atheist.

However, the American tradition of strict separation between church and state goes back much further in time than the framers and the Constitution. Its parent was not a liberal, secularist, U.S. Supreme Court, nor an anti-Catholic bigot,4 as some have recently suggested. The tradition even predates Thomas Jefferson, who customarily gets credit for coining the term “wall of separation.”

Its originator was Roger Williams, a devout Christian who lived in the seventeenth century. So devoted was Williams to God that his contemporaries described him as “God-intoxicated.” Williams was a Puritan clergyman who emigrated from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. He spoke his piece, which disagreed with religious authorities in the colony, went on trial for unorthodox views, and was forced to flee for his life in the dead of winter.

The colony that Williams established in 1636, Rhode Island, is the stuff of legend. Unlike Massachusetts, whose religious establishment had a reputation for whipping, banishing, and hanging religious dissenters, including Quakers and Baptists, Rhode Island extended full religious freedom to everyone, including Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. The colony had no religious taxes, no church establishment, and no religious tests for office holding. It even exempted nonbelievers from swearing the oath “so help me God,” which, in Williams’ view, would have been meaningless to them and contrary to God’s ways.

Williams believed that God communicates with humans by working on people’s hearts through the Holy Spirit. Thus, even the slightest coercion that interfered with that process displeased God. “Rape of the soul” was the term Williams used to describe forcing people who did not believe in God to observe and participate in religious rituals.5

To Williams, “a wall or hedge of separation” was needed to guard between “the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world.”6 As a result, Rhode Island’s charter guaranteed “full liberty in religious concernments,” and the colony thrived from a diversity of religions. Later, nearly identical wording cropped up in the colonial charters of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Carolina.

During the American Revolution, Williams’ view of separation between church and state was revitalized and expanded by Baptist Ministers Isaac Backus and John Leland, spokesmen for the fastest growing denomination in the United States at that time, whose activism played no small part in ratification of the First Amendment. Government and religion, Backus warned in 1773, “Are distinct in their nature and ought never to be confounded together.”7

Alexis de Tocqueville was a young French traveler who visited the United States in the 1830s. He wrote in the introduction to his book Democracy in America, “One cannot establish the reign of liberty without that of mores, and mores cannot be firmly founded without beliefs.” This statement is often quoted today by those who tout that the separation of church and state is a myth. What is not quoted from the same book is de Tocqueville’s statement that religion “realizes its sway is all the better established because it relies only on its own powers and rules men’s hearts without external support.”8

Those who have either forgotten why our Founding Fathers erected a wall of separation of church and state or who refuse to acknowledge our history also fail to quote de Tocqueville’s observation that on questioning the “faithful of all communions,” including clergymen, especially Roman Catholic priests, de Tocqueville found that:

“They all agreed with each other except about details; all thought that the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.”9

The high wall of separation between church and state is not the creation of a twentieth-century, liberal, anti-Catholic, secularist U.S. Supreme Court. Rather, it is the creation of a devout and godly seventeenth-century Christian and is an American tradition since the founding of the Republic. History has proven Roger Williams right: religion retains its sanctity best and remains most vital, vibrant, and dynamic when strictly separated from government.

Unfortunately, now with the removal of each brick in the wall of separation, our freedoms are that much less secure and the foundation of our nation less firm. The loss of understanding in the reason for the wall of separation between church and state can only condemn us to repeat the bloody history of past religious persecution.

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A shorter version of this article can be found under the title “God, Caesar and Historical Revisionism” at:http://old.spectrummagazine.org/library/columns2002/020902scott.html.

1 Allison Jones, ed., Chambers: Dictionary of Quotations (New York, 1997), p. 842, No. 84.

2 See Pontynen and Scott article Founding Fathers: Cannon Fodder in a Cultural War, 2000.

3 “Treaty with Tripoli, 1796, Article XI,” quoted in William Addison Blakely, ed., American State Papers and Related Documents on Freedom in Religion (Washington, D.C., 1947), 311, 312. See also, Robert Boston, “Joel Barlow and the Treaty with Tripoli,” Church and State Magazine, June 1997, 11 – 14.

4 See, most recently, Philip Hamburger Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

5 Our main source for Williams’ life is Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991).

6 Ibid. 43.

7 Ibid. 203 – 204. The quote comes from An Appeal to the Public (Boston, 1773). See also, Leigh Johnsen, ed., Isaac Backus Papers, 1630 – 1806 (Ann Arbor: UMI, forthcoming).

8 Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayers, trans. George Lawrence (New York, 2000), 17, 47.

9 Ibid. 295.