An Establishment for the Ages
We humans are gifted—sometimes even tormented—by the desire to capture life as we experience it within visual depictions, auditory semblances, and verbal constructions. Hence we draw, paint, compose, and write what we feel and think about in order to give tangibility to the reality we share with others of our kind. And when we engage in serious reflection and conversation, especially when pondering life’s great quandaries or mysteries—we often become metaphorical. Metaphors provide us with mental pictures by which we can compare the familiar with the abstract and mysterious. Metaphors allow us to envision our world in ways that make it more sensible, memorable, and predictable.
Not that long ago a group of self-proclaimed American citizens set out to recreate the world in ways never before conceived. Out of their deliberations a government based on laws, reason and the tacit consent of the governed was formed. It didn’t happen overnight, however, but in fits and starts, trial and error, controversy and compromise. Nonetheless the world’s most significant democratic republic was launched, even if it took fifteen years after its declarative promise of 1776 to come to fruition.
Before the Constitution could be unanimously affirmed by its thirteen constituent states, some changes had to be incorporated into its framework. At the top of the list were limitations to the new government believed necessary to ensure that its citizens enjoy the free exercise of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly and grievance petitioning. Over the ensuing 241 years these rights have been tested in the crucible of public opinion, social protest and legal precedent. In the process our nation has wrestled with trying to understand what of, by and for the people really means.
The Supreme Court has recently weighed in on several issues now convulsing Americans across the spectrum of our political leanings: the legality of prayer on public school gridirons; the legitimacy of parents getting tax credits to help pay for their children’s parochial education; and whether the right to terminate fetal life falls under State or National jurisdiction. Each has raised the hackles of many who see these as battering ram breaches against the 1st Amendment’s wall separating Church and State. Their concerns are by no means trivial. Nor should they be automatically lumped into an anti-religious vendetta that some fear has been undermining long-held American values. Yet the indignation generated seems to betray a simplistic grasp of what the Constitution, as amended, actually grants and prohibits.
In legal parlance the controversy centers on what is called “the Establishment Clause,” terminology derived from the specific word used by the Founders in writing the 1st Amendment. Historians of that era acknowledge that our 18th Century leaders were unapologetic adherents of public worship, who, in keeping with the religious sentiments of their era, considered church affiliation an important part of their civic and moral duty. While their beliefs in God place them all over the theological continuum, their commitment to the free and unobstructed pursuit of religion was unequivocal. Even the self-avowed agnostic, Thomas Jefferson, elaborated in his 1802 letter to Baptists in Danbury, CT, that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions.” It was in that same correspondence that the sage of Monticello first introduced the concept of a “wall of separation” that he believed should exist between Church and State. Yet living in a time when most of the states supported particular Christian denominational churches—including his beloved, and Anglican, Virginia—he only applied the 1st Amendment wall to national government, for religion “must then rest with States, as far as it can be in any human authority.”*
Over time Jefferson’s metaphor became the lens through which the 1st Amendment’s so-called “Establishment Clause” was interpreted. On at least 43 different occasions the high court has attempted to demark the line beyond which neither religion nor government could intrude on the other. From prayer to polygamy, taxes to the Ten Commandments, corporal punishment to creationism—the mortar upon which the wall is held in place has been eroded as much as it has been repointed. Not surprisingly, our Supreme Court has been both pilloried and praised, depending on which interest group felt more attacked or affirmed in their ultimate decisions.
Interestingly, fellow Virginian and presidential successor, James Madison, who was to the writing of the Constitution what Jefferson was to the Declaration of Independence, expressed himself this way in his original draft of the 1st Amendment:
“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”
It is apparent that both Madison and Jefferson understood freedom as such an inalienable and precious right that no government had the right to infringe on it—particularly freedom of religion. At the same time they were uncompromising in their disdain for the kind of state-sponsored religions from which their colonial ancestors had fled in Europe. But what kind of barrier could be created through legislative dictate that could both ensure and prohibit?
As I ruminate on this question, Robert Frost’s observation, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” comes to mind. That may help explain why the supposed mythical divider separating Church and State remains so problematic. For me it hinges on two inherent quandaries:
· What is, and what isn’t, religion?
· Where are private and public life completely separate?
Now religion is generally understood to be a very personal aspect of one’s relationship with whatever one holds to be ultimately true, good and real. God, Christ, Jehovah, Allah, Brahman, Buddha, et. al.-—all name transcendent realities upon which the intellectual and spiritual experiences of most religious people are derived. And when enfleshed in the social matrices from which institutional forms, doctrines, scriptures, and rituals have developed—and continue to evolve---they acquire a public identity that intersects with nearly every aspect of human communal existence. It is virtually impossible to tell the American story without recognizing this interconnection. From “pilgrim” immigrants to Winthrop’s “City Set on a Hill,” from promised land to manifest destiny, from sainted founders to martyred presidents, we have been, as G.K. Chesterton once coined, “a nation with the soul of a church.” So many of our schools, hospitals, and community service organizations bear witness to the impact that religion has made on the well being and progress of our country. And at every turn the employment of the Bible and God-language in our civic oaths, our national pledge and on our currency—make clear how inextricably entwined is the sacred and the secular in our public life.
Church and State typically assume several different postures in relation to each other. Most commonly they are compatible bedfellows who worship at the same shrines in a “civil religion” where God and country mutually reinforce one another. On occasion, churchy folks retreat into ghettos of their own creation, isolating themselves from contamination by the sights, sounds and values of a society they regard as evil or dead. Those of an anti-religious bent often feel much the same, dismissing Church in most of its forms as the source of the cultural and political evils they are quick to ridicule, denounce and oppose. And then there are those for whom Church provides a purpose and mission to redeem a world broken by hate, lost in its addictions, and intoxicated by its own delusions of self-sufficiency. Whether engaged in dialogue or arrayed on fields of battle—Church and State are partners in a symbiotic dance in which neither is fully capable leading, or following, the other.
The 1st Amendment remains a wonderfully timeless articulation of the safeguards necessary in a republic wherein citizens must buy-in and accept their civic responsibility for it to flourish. But it was not written in stone, and its provisions and prohibitions are not safeguarded behind some immovable wall. For religion and politics, Church and State, do not exist on either side of a fixed and impermeable barrier. Rather they overlap, mutually invading each other’s space and influencing each other’s values. If there is a separation, it is not bisected by a fixed, impenetrable structure, but by a membrane, a semi-permeable zone in which many ideas and values pass through, and others are blocked, as they should be, from passing. The Supreme Court, our constitutional gatekeepers, bears the burden of assessing what, from either side, may safely exist in the realm of the other. In doing so our justices are entrusted with guarding us from the coercions and entanglements that would bring us harm or encroach on those rights that we still regard as self-evident and universal.
Where then do we, or should we erect and defend Jefferson’s wall separating our religious character from our political preferences and legal constraints? Nowhere, and everywhere, given the intersection of public and private, sacred and secular in the life we share as Americans. For the social contract that joins us is a fluid and ever-emerging relationship in which we must always balance our self-interest and the common good if we have any hope of living, working and enduring as a nation. And that covenant is an establishment, like its most virtuous interpreter, that belongs to the ages.
*From Jefferson’s 2nd Inaugural address, March 4, 1805
