Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment

📖 The Scoop

"The American founders did not create their experiment in religious freedom out of nothing. The principles of religious freedom outlined in the First Amendment were a part and product of nearly two centuries of colonial experience, and nearly two millennia of European history and thought. A host of historical examples of religious freedom were readily at hand as the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights were being drafted. Foremost among the sources was the Christian Bible, which was by far the most widely used and commonly cited text in the American founding era. American politicians, preachers, and pamphleteers alike quoted the Bible's many bracing aphorisms on freedom: "For freedom, Christ has set us free." "You were called to freedom." "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." "You will be free indeed." You have been given "the glorious liberty of the children of God." Equally important were the Bible's calls to believers to "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's," and to remain "separate" from worldly temptations. Christians are, at heart, "strangers and foreigners on the earth"; their true "citizenship is in heaven." St. Paul even used the phrase "wall of separation" (paries maceriae), albeit very differently from the way it came to be used in law and politics. Such biblical passages inspired hundreds of impassioned sermons in defense of religious liberty. Indeed, political sermons, issued both in churches and in statehouses, constituted around 80 percent of all the American political literature published in the 1770s and 1780s. Beyond the Bible, the American founders also turned for inspiration to the martyred prophets of religious liberty in the West: the early English heroes of the faith-Thomas Becket, John Wycliff, and Thomas More-and the sundry English Levellers, Quaker dissenters, and Catholic missionaries who followed them. They turned for instruction to a host of European theologians and philosophers, from the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin, to early modern Catholic champions of rights Francisco de Vitoria and Bartholomew las Casas, to later European voices of liberty, such as Baron Montesquieu and François Voltaire of France; David Hume and Adam Smith of Scotland; and John Locke and William Blackstone of England. They also turned to many classical legal texts on religious freedoms and rights such as the Edict of Milan (313), the Magna Carta (1215), the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the Peace of Westphalia (1648), and other such documents of the civil law, common law, and canon law traditions. Historical counterexamples also came quickly to mind, however, particularly to those founders who denounced traditional state establishments of religion and defended religious freedom for all peaceable believers. In defending the novelty of the American experiment, the founders often depicted the Western inheritance as a veritable "career of intolerance," in Virginia statesman James Madison's words. "In most of the Gov[ernment]s of the old world," Madison declared, "the legal establishment of a particular religion and without or with very little toleration of others makes a part of the Political and Civil organization. . . . [I]t was taken for granted, that an exclusive & intolerant establishment was essential, and notwithstanding the light thrown on the subject by that experiment, the prevailing opinion in Europe, England not excepted, has been that Religion could not be preserved without the support of Gov[ernmen]t, nor Gov[ernmen]t without the support of Religion.""--

Genre: History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies) (fancy, right?)