The Constitution vs Religion
I recently had reason to read what John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and others wrote about freedom of (from) religion. (My reading included the obvious Constitution of the United States, Constitution of Virginia, and the Constitution of New York, for a few examples. Sources of much of their thought on the subject came from John Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, and other members of the “Enlightenment”.
They were all keenly aware that nearly every country in Europe had a “state” religion that was abusive and coercive. There were ecclesiastical laws that were often brutally enforced by whatever church could wield enough power. People were required to give a certain amount of their income to the “established” churches, no matter what they believed. Churches ran schools in which they not only educated their students, they indoctrinated them in their religious beliefs. Believers in various sects fought bitter wars over what one was supposed to believe.
The founding fathers thought that, by not endorsing any church at all, there would be hundreds of sects and each sect would be small enough that it would be unlikely to take on the others for power and influence over government. They did not imagine that one species of religion, Reformation Protestantism, could become dominate enough to begin eroding the freedoms guaranteed by their Constitution.
There were many long and heated arguments over this at the Constitutional conventions, not only of the U.S. but of several states. Jefferson wrote a lengthy piece on the subject that became part of the Constitution of Virginia, and James Madison did the same for the Constitution of New York.
In America, largely as a result of the terrors of the French revolution, we had what was called the “Great Revival” (late 18th Century) in which old-line Protestants of numerous stripes, primarily in the South, declared that the French revolution happened because God had been left out of government. They immediately tried to redress this by insinuating religious doctrine into government documents and laws at every opportunity.
That they were successful is shown by the success of the religious right even today, who can influence law about marriage rights, abortion, stem-cell research, teaching of science, “In God We Trust” on our money (did not become official until 1956, it supposedly proved we were not communists), the pledge of allegiance itself, (In 1892, a socialist named Francis Bellamy created the Pledge of Allegiance for *Youth’s* *Companion*, a national family magazine for youth published in Boston. In 1888 the magazine started a fund-raising program in which they sold american flags to schools, along with the pledge of allegiance. Very few schools even had a flag until then.[http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur10.htm], and especially onerous is the insertion of “under God” (by Eisenhower in 1954, with the explanation that it was a quote from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — where the phrase “under God” does not actually occur in any manuscript copy.” to name a few instances.
Not only are we very fortunate that we are not governed under the laws of Islam (for an extreme example) — we are very fortunate that our founding fathers fought so hard to try to keep religion completely out of governance.
They could not have expected that their hard won nation, built on rational philosophy, with no supernatural references except to some great force they usually called simply “Providence”, could have succumbed so much to organized religion and what they correctly called “superstition”.