The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America's Founders - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807077224 ISBN 13: 9780807077221

Verlag: Beacon Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

A primer of essential writings about one of the cornerstones of our democracy

Certain basic issues will always be debated in our country, even without a presidential election at stake. One of the most important of these is the separation of church and state. On this issue, Americans constantly interpret and reinterpret the intentions of America’s founders. Now, they will have a collection of the most eloquent writings of the founders to help them understand the original reasoning behind this separation.

Forrest Church, well-known writer and religious leader, son of former senator Frank Church, has used his considerable knowledge about this subject to bring together these writings for modern readers. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, George Washington, Patrick Henry—these are just some of the leaders who wrote movingly about the need to separate religion and government. This concise primer will get past the rhetoric that surrounds the current debate and deliver instead specific writings by the original authors of the Constitution.

Edited and introduced by Church, this volume will inform readers about the founders’ original vision and will stand as a timely reminder of how important this fundamental separation is to our way of life.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Forrest Church served almost three decades as senior minister and is now Minister of Public Theology of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City. He was educated at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in early church history. He has written or edited twenty-three books, including Life Lines; Lifecraft; Bringing God Home; The American Creed; Freedom from Fear; and Love & Death.

Forrest Church (1948–2009) served for almost three decades as senior minister and was minister of public theology at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. He wrote or edited twenty-five books, including Love & Death.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Introduction
 
One chapter in the saga of our country’s birth—the dramatic debate over church-state separation— illustrates the founders’ gathering vision more vividly than almost any other. It spans three decades, from 1772 (with Samuel Adams’s broadside linking religious and civil liberty) to 1802 (with Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that, in the Bill of Rights, a “wall of separation” has been built between church and state). Starring several of the new nation’s leading protagonists, it also sets the tone for their experiment in governance. During the course of this debate, religious liberty becomes the cornerstone of e pluribus unum—“out of many, one.”
 
Arguments over church-state separation didn’t end once the language of state and national constitutions was finally hammered out. They continue to this very day, with partisans (from the pulpit to the Oval Office) interpreting the founders’ and framers’ actual intent. People ask, should a judge be permitted to express his reverence for religious laws by posting the Ten Commandments in his courtroom? Are “faith-based” initiatives appropriate when generated out of the White House? Under the Constitution, can state or federal prisoners be organized according to faith and given special privileges for spiritual achievement? Should we restore the Pledge of Allegiance to its original language by removing the phrase “under God?” Is there a place for any kind of prayer in the public schools? Does church-state separation discriminate against religion, or, to the contrary, is organized religion increasingly trespassing on secular ground? Should marriage rights be extended to all couples, regardless of gender? And, finally, is the lack of any mention of God or Christ in the Constitution intentional, or did the founders assume that everyone understood that the United States of America was a Christian nation? With issues such as these dividing the American people right down the middle, to address them with better justified confidence we must reopen the first chapter of our history.
 
How citizens today view the founders’ intent is as much a Rorschach test of our personal religious and civic views as it is a true picture of what such men as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and even George Washington had in mind when they drew up their blueprint for the nation and began building state and federal institutions according to its design. On both the religious right and the secular left, much contemporary confusion stems from an inability to distinguish between: 1) the universal spiritual values that underlie the American experiment in democracy, and 2) the role assigned to government to advance those same values by protecting freedom of conscience and belief.
 
The American Revolution was not driven by the anti-religious pathos that powered the French Revolution a decade later. In the Declaration of Independence, its draftsman (our most secular founder) emphatically proclaims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” Citing as his authority “nature and nature’s God,” Thomas Jefferson establishes for liberty and equality a clear metaphysic, grounded in nature itself as part of the Creator’s plan. The founders’ professed goal was to establish a nation true to the spirit of divine law, a spirit some understood in Christian terms and others according to the canons of Enlightenment philosophy. These two streams met to affirm the dual imperatives of equality and liberty, best expressed in the above-mentioned motto of e pluribus unum. And the first liberty the founders endeavored to ensure— articulating in the First Amendment what already was enshrined in their hearts—was religious liberty. Sworn (“on the altar of God” as Jefferson put it) to protect freedom of conscience, they established a clear line of demarcation between church and state, not to abridge but to fulfill the nation’s spiritual mandate.
 
One British observer, G. K. Chesterton, memorably defined America as “a nation with the soul of a church.” His characterization is 100 percent half-right. By the founders’ design, we embody both the soul of a church and a resolutely secular mind. I tell here the story of how this unique development in the history of governance occurred, highlighting, in their own words, its champions’ understanding of the essential significance full religious liberty held then and continues to hold for the future of our nation.
 
As was true of the broader American struggle for freedom, the revolution that led to religious liberty was powered by two very different engines: one driven by eighteenth-century Enlightenment values, the other guided by Christian imperatives that grew out of the Great Awakening, a spiritual movement that spread like wildfire across the American colonies throughout the middle decades of that same century. The former movement, emphasizing freedom of conscience as both a political and a philosophical virtue, stressed freedom from the dictates of organized religion. The latter, stemming from a devout reading of the gospels (especially their proclamation of spiritual liberty from bondage to the world’s principalities and powers), demanded freedom for religion. Those who embraced Enlightenment teachings included the men most responsible for drafting our foundational documents (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton). And many so-called “New Light” or “Dissident” ministers formed what one Tory referred to as the “Black Regiment,” stirring people up by preaching the gospel of liberty. Together, these seemingly opposite world-views collaborated brilliantly and effectively to establish the separation of church and state in America.
 
Though new in the annals of statecraft, the American experiment in religious liberty was not without foundation, both in British Common Law and Christian Reformation teachings. And certainly the quest for religious freedom was instrumental to early American colonization, beginning with the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, many of whom crossed the Atlantic in order to practice their faith more freely. Nonetheless, Great Britain maintained a church establishment; the leading Reformers replaced long-standing ties between European governments and the Roman Catholic Church with a Protestant church-state connection; and the Puritans, as President Howard Taft once put it, “came to this country to establish freedom of their religion, and not the freedom of anybody else’s religion.” In fact, the first major reform of the church establishment in Massachusetts was imposed by England. In 1684, King James II temporarily revoked Massachusetts’ royal charter, due to restrictions the Puritans had imposed on their fellow Protestants limiting religious freedom and the right to worship. To receive their charter back, the leaders of the colony had to cede to all Protestants within their jurisdiction the right to worship as they pleased.
 
By the time our chapter in the tale of growing religious freedom in America opens, the spirit of religious liberty has already made great strides. In the vanguard were Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. The Reverend Roger Williams, a fiery Baptist with an inviolable conscience, bequeathed Rhode Island with a charter guaranteeing freedom of conscience to all its citizens. Williams considered it “against the testimony of Christ Jesus for the civil state to impose upon the soul of the people a religion,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Beacon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807077224
• ISBN 13: 9780807077221
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Herausgeber: Church Forrest
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar