<\/p>\n
Recent months on this program there have been several references to the time-honored American principle of church and state. Today let us examine that subject a little more closely.<\/p>\n
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” We have already pointed out on previous broadcasts that this amendment had long historic background. For more than a century before the enactment of the Constitution, American colonists had come to detest church-dominated government. They had bitter experience with it in Massachusetts, where Puritan Congregationalists insisted that no one should be permitted to worship God in any way but their way. They had confronted it also in Virginia, where government was controlled by the Church of England.<\/p>\n
After Massachusetts had hanged Quakers and banished Baptists, resistance began to mount until, some time before the Revolution, the General Court of the Province so far relented as to permit Quakers, Baptists and Episcopalians to have their own churches, and years later freed them from the compulsory tax to support the state churches.<\/p>\n
During the decade before the outbreak of the Revolution, 1765 to 1775, the developing movement for complete separation of the colonies came to a head. As the question of independence came to be more heatedly discussed, along with it was discussion about the place of religion in government. Church tyranny came to be dreaded as much as British tyranny. Ministers as well as laymen, began to voice their opinions on which was more binding, obedience to the crown, or defense of freedom, obedience to a dominant church, or freedom of conscience.<\/p>\n
When Washington’s army was assembling at Cambridge in 1775, a Virginian Episcopal rector announced to his congregation: “There is a time to preach and a time to fight. Now is the time to fight.” He left his pulpit, joined the army, and before the war was over had become a general.<\/p>\n
The break was, however, neither rapid nor universal. Many of the clergy and laity remained within the Church of England or within the state church of Massachusetts. But even they began to shed some of the oldtime doctrines such as predestination. Even the Trinity was questioned, leading to eventual establishment of the Unitarian Church. New conceptions of God and humanity spread throughout the land.<\/p>\n
As the freedom movement spread, freedom of religion went hand in hand with political freedom. In May 1775, within a month of the shots at Lexington and Concord, Ethan Allen led his Green Mountain Boys from Vermont on a successful attack against Fort Ticonderoga.<\/p>\n
The awakened and surprised British commander asked Allen by what authority he demanded surrender. Allen replied, “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” That expression, linking God and the people’s government then assembled at Philadelphia, was only the outward expression of a conviction deep in American character. That conviction was that viable, enduring government depended upon providence and the blessing of God. When victory finally came at Yorktown, the people just naturally extended thanks to their Creator.<\/p>\n
That does not mean that during the Revolution or the framing of the Constitution there was any such thing as political unity among the thirteen colonies. There were indeed deep-seated differences.<\/p>\n
The Mercantile north had economic and social customs vastly different from those of the south. People making their homes west of the Alleghenies became decidedly different from folks on the seaboard. Settlers on widely separated farms had little in common with the population of Boston, New York and Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
Despite those differences, colonial Americans had a kind of unity that we sadly find missing today. It was the unity of moral convictions. Today many of our people consider right and wrong to be matters of relativity. The same act may be right in certain circumstances, wrong in others. It seems admissible to lie on occasion,
\nto cheat, especially on your income tax, to be honest in spots.<\/p>\n
That was not the case when the ideas that gave rise to the Revolution claimed attention of Americans. At that time there was a sense of moral unity among the people, high and low, rich and poor, townsman or farmer. The feeling knew no boundaries. It was equally strong in Massachusetts and in the Carolinas. In every colony there were lawbreakers, but they did not claim that cheating, theft and dishonesty were right. Even the offenders admitted such acts were wrong. They just hoped not to get caught.<\/p>\n
Those moral convictions were what held together people of various religious beliefs. People were divided on theological doctrines, but they were united on ethical principles. Philosophical principles in the colonies were affected by the rising attention to reason in human affairs. The writings of John Locke and other European supporters of reason deeply affected such men as Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and John Adams. If an all-wise and all-powerful God had endowed man with reason, did he not expect man to use it? To use it wisely would only enforce one’s belief in God and ultimate dependence upon Him. To colonial Americans reason was not the atheistic humanism that, to many thinkers, it later became, but a way of determining God’s will. The framers of the Constitution felt strongly that reason and religious faith went hand in hand to form the new republic.<\/p>\n
Fear and hatred of sectarian domination had become deep-seated in American life by the eighth decade of the 18th century. Since no single mode of worship or no one creed could claim the allegiance of all the people, there was no general support to lift one faith over another. Live and let live, with respect to religious worship, was the only principle with respect to government’s relation to religion that was acceptable to the framers of the Constitution.<\/p>\n
The comparatively short time that church control of the state lasted in either Massachusetts or Virginia is evidence of the distaste that developed toward it in both north and south long before the Revolution. Massachusetts has scarcely begun to function under its royal charter before conflicts arose between church dominated local government and the royal governors sent from London. And it was not long before the legislature in Boston had to face the complaints of those groups that differed from the state church on matters of faith. New England descendants of the Puritans had to accept not only the presence, but also the rights, of members of the Church of England who dwelt among them. By the middle of the 18th century such merchants as Florend-us VassalL.and such professional men as Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, both of whom were to play so large a part in the development of Maine, had great influence, and both were Anglicans.<\/p>\n
Sharp divisions appeared in other colonies as well. In Rhode Island, which Roger Williams the Baptist had founded when he was driven out of Boston, had in Providence a firm Baptist stronghold, but in nearby Newport Anglicans had come to dominate. In Bristol, Conn., Congregationalists prevailed, but in East Greenwich the dominating group was the Quakers.<\/p>\n
One element of church cooperation in Revolutionary times has been overlooked by historians. That was the sharing of meetinghouses. When the first meetinghouse was erected in Buckfield, Maine, arrangements were made for it to be shared on a proportionate basis by the Congregationalists, Baptists and Presbyterians. Right here in Waterville, when the first tax-supported minister, Joshua Cushman, resigned and there was for several years no settled minister, the town meeting voted that the meetinghouse, which stood near the present site of Waterville City Hall, should be controlled by the selectmen and its use to be open to preachers of any Protestant sect on a first-come, first-served basis.<\/p>\n
Religious toleration in the colonies actually progressed faster than it did in Europe. Jews and Catholics, both persecuted in mid-Europe and the British Isles, found security and equality in America. By 1775 Jews had for a century been prominent in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and even in the Carolinas.<\/p>\n
It is true that anti-Catholicism flourished on this side of the Atlantic from time to time, but that was not because the Pope was a foreigner. It was because he was a bishop and Americans came to distrust episcopacy of any kind. In 1763 a Boston clergyman declared: “The people can be protected in their freedom only by preventing all bishops and other church hierarchy from getting a foothold “in our land. 1t But twenty years after that clerical statement, the Catholic John Carroll of Maryland had become an accepted and respected member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. By the time when the Congress sat down to frame the Constitution, large numbers of Americans had come to accept not only the right of every person to worship as he pleased, but had come to admit that every sect had elements of divine truth in its doctrines, and none could claim perfection.<\/p>\n
There is not a scrap of evidence that the framers of the Constitution intended to ban religious influence from American life. What they did intentionally and successfully ban was interference in any area of government by any single kind of religion. It is inconceivable that those founding fathers intended to bar God from the schools. They kept Him in the courthouse and in the legislatures where to this day sessions are opened by prayer.<\/p>\n
The same Constitution we have been talking about places upon the Supreme Court the duty and the power to interpret the Constitution, and we must accept its interpretation. But what a particular Supreme Court has overthrown, a later Supreme Court can restore, just as, more than a century ago, they overthrew the notorious Dred Scott decision declaring a Negro not a person, but property, so let us not give up hope about religion in schools.<\/p>\n
Year: 1982<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1303, Broadcast on April 4, 1982<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35294,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}