by the Rev. Dr. Forrest Church, Guest Minister

A sermon given November 11, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Just how thorny the relationship between church and state can be [is something] religious conservatives should remember whenever they bid for government to play the role of Holy See.  Earlier this fall, fundamentalist preachers and lawmakers started shrieking like stuck pigs upon learning that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was bagging born-again Christian tracts together with books on Islam and tossing them together out of prison libraries all across the country.  This act of federal censorship violated the First Amendment, they justly pled—alike defying its clause protecting free speech and the one that prohibits the government from interfering with the free exercise of religion. 

It seems that the federal censors had whittled down the list of acceptable books to about 150 titles for each of 20 religious groups.  Any book not on this approved list was tossed out.  When I heard of this outrage, I was happy to raise my voice of protest with my fundamentalist friends, having even more of a beef with the Feds in this matter than they do.  Since Unitarian Universalism is not included among the 20 acceptable religious groups, two of my books in particular I am told—A Chosen Faith, my introduction to Unitarianism, and The Jefferson Bible—have by now doubtless been chucked from dozens of prison libraries.  As one long wary of the danger state interference poses for the church, this action surprised me less than I suspect it did the politicized pastors on the Religious Right who have long been praying for the administration to exercise more religious zeal.  In joining their expression of legitimate outrage at this silly yet pernicious attempt at government interference with religious freedom, I respectfully reminded my fundamentalist Christian friends that the whirlwind they were reaping sprung from the wind they had sown.  By the way, we won this particular set too.  On September 24th, the government reversed itself.  As if we needed further reminder, it is useful these days to have thousands of angry fundamentalists on your side.

When Senator John McCain suggested recently that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” and stated his preference for a president who had “a solid grounding” in the Christian faith, he entered into a debate that began raging with the founding itself.  Today’s Christian Right claims that the United States was founded explicitly as a Christian nation with a Christian government; they seek only, they say, to restore the faith of the founders.  The secular Left claims that the United States was founded on an explicitly secular foundation, as codified in the Constitution.  As it turns out, both sides are one hundred percent half-right.  As we do today, the early republic divided right down the middle on this question, fighting tooth and nail in a contest over American values; a vigorous, sometimes savage, yet nearly forgotten thirty-year conflict to redeem the nation’s soul.

Two very different themes combined to compose the dissonant music of early American politics.  The first theme, sounded in New England from the time of the Puritans, posited the ideal of a Christian Commonwealth.  Uplifted by the imperatives of Christian morality, the government would be a shining city on a hill, fulfilling God’s mandates and receiving his aid.  The second theme, codified in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, arose from Enlightenment France.  Rather than that of Christian Commonwealth, it posited the ideal of sacred liberty.  Jefferson dreamed of establishing an Empire of Liberty, whose government sacredly would protect each individual’s God-given freedom of conscience. 

Both visions had religious dimensions—call them divine order and sacred liberty.  Cast in terms of the nation’s motto, E pluribus unum (“out of many, one”), the unum people believed that, to uphold “one nation under God,” the secular and sacred realms must rest on a single foundation.  Without a united sense of purpose and clear moral vision, they argued, liberty would lapse into license.  Champions of sacred liberty, pluribus people as it were, believed that to promote “liberty and justice for all,” the secular and religious realms must be kept autonomous.  Government attempts to impose religious (or moral) values suppress religion instead, they claimed, by violating individual freedom of conscience.  As hinted at above, viewed in terms of our Pledge of Allegiance, Puritan New England advocated “One Nation under God,” the Enlightenment faction and their religious supporters held up “liberty and justice for all.”

Many of the questions that continue to roil the seas of presidential politics teem at the center of our first great culture war, most particularly the question of precisely how separate church and state should be under the constitutional rules of American political engagement.  The players, however, will surprise you.  Two centuries ago, the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and, yes, the Unitarians stood squarely on the Religious Right.  Our Unitarian predecessors, numbered among the religious establishment of New England, saw no problem with giving God a seat in Government.  

After all, it was their God who would be enthroned.  The religious laws, and government financial support, would favor their churches.  In the vanguard of the religious left back then were the Baptists.  No religious body fought more eloquently for freedom of conscience and church-state separation than the Baptists did.  After all, they were religious outsiders, accustomed to persecution.  Together with leading Methodists, Jews, Roman Catholics, and a smattering of influential Deists, the Baptists championed strict church-state separation as a guarantor of the religious liberty they long had labored to secure.

From the moment the new government opened for business in 1789, the question—“Is the United States destined to be a Christian Commonwealth or an Empire of Liberty?”—spurred heated debate.  Initial discussions exploded into fierce animosities, pitching absolutists on both sides into a war of conflicting ideals that threatened to tear the country in two.  At the presidential level, these contests took on the character of religious crusades.  First the apostles of divine order were victorious, then the champions of sacred liberty.  Though they shared similar theological views, John Adams presided over a Christian federal authority; Jefferson, over a secular one.  Juiced by their partisans, like a key on a kite in an electrical storm, pulpit politics during the early Republic carried easily as much voltage as they do today, at times more.  Federalists and Democrats hurled imprecations at each other that would make a modern talk show host blush.  When Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800, New England’s Unitarian and Congregationalist preachers proclaimed the Apocalypse, even as American’s Baptists were hailing the dawn of the Millennium.

Unlike the Baptists, who forgave him his Deism in gratitude for his advocacy of sacred liberty, to the established churchmen Jefferson was anathema.  Many New England preachers, not a few Unitarians among them, rejected the Declaration of Independence as subversive to Christian values.  Preaching explicitly against liberty and equality, they wore black rosettes (“the American cockade”) on the Fourth of July, rather than the hated, sacrilegious (not to mention, French) “Red, White and Blue” brandished by an equal majority of left wing Christians and Deists.

Not that church and state were pristinely separate, even during Jefferson’s tenure.  When the government moved to Washington, Christian worship took place not only in the House of Representatives, but also in the Supreme Court, War, and Treasury buildings (where Scots Presbyterians served Communion).  Jefferson surprised his critics by worshiping on a regular basis in the House chamber on Sundays, especially when his Baptist friends were in the pulpit preaching church-state separation. 

Among those who were decidedly not beguiled by Jefferson’s apparent religious posturing was his old archenemy Alexander Hamilton.  In his last political act (shortly before falling to Aaron Burr’s bullet in their tragic duel across the Hudson), Hamilton dreamed of establishing a “Christian Constitutional Society” to lobby for a Constitutional ban prohibiting non-Christians from standing for national office.  He and his cohorts needed only wrap themselves, he said, “in the holy garments of Constitution and Christianity” to rally patriotic churchmen to the holy Federalist cause.  Hamilton’s fidelity to the Constitution, which he called, a “frail and worthless fabric,” was no greater than his reverence for the Bible—he almost never attended church—but this seasoned provocateur of American religious politics recognized the political advantages accruing to those who wrapped themselves in both.

The religious wars came perilously close to sundering the nation during the War of 1812.  But then something remarkable happened.  Immediately after the war, an armistice was struck.  New England’s Puritan preachers, the most active advocates of Christian Commonwealth, had rebelled against the War of 1812, viewing it as a sacrilegious struggle against Christian England, which at the time was battling infidel France, putting America, in their view, in league with Napoleon, whom they anointed the anti-Christ.  When America won the war, the established churchmen were branded as traitors.  Their state churches were disestablished and silently they removed themselves from national politics. 

Far from vanquished, the Standing Congregational Orders of New England redirected their prodigious organizational talents from electoral contests to Bible and tract societies, designed to redeem the nation from the grassroots up, not from the presidency down.  Democratizing their gospel, they established national Bible, Tract, and Abolition societies.  These voluntary associations laid the groundwork for participatory democracy as we know it today.  During the Second Great Awakening, which began in Jefferson’s day and flourished once the state churches were disestablished, religion grew like topsey.  America’s churches flourished, in number and spiritual power, during President James Monroe’s “Era of Good Feelings.”  Incorporating both themes—moral citizenship and sacred liberty—the hard-fought contest to fashion America on either the Puritan model of Christian Commonwealth or the Jeffersonian vision of an Empire of Liberty ended with the fulfillment, temporary to be sure and strained severely by the continuing specter of slavery, of E pluribus unum.

What surprised me most while doing the research for my new book is how large religion loomed in early American electoral fortunes.  Today’s Christian campaigners and their secular critics seem almost timid in comparison.  Henry Kissinger memorably said that academic politics are so fierce because the stakes are so small.  Religious politics draw their ferocity from how cosmic the outcome seems.  Its practitioners are religious crusaders.  Salvation is their goal, and almost any means can justify so lofty an end.  American electioneering is brutal to begin with; throw salvation into the mix and, if people aren’t careful, it can become toxic.

Balancing this caveat, I walk away with a deeper appreciation for the saving grace of religious politics.  As important as Church-State separation is (to church and state alike), morally-grounded politics are equally essential to the commonweal.  If God’s banner had been removed from early American discourse entirely, the counter gospel of sovereign, often amoral, individualism might have taken full possession of the nation’s soul.  The early apostles of religious governance succumbed too easily to authoritarian persuasion, yet they checked the drift toward amoral relativism.  Washington’s refusal to sanction Christian anti-slavery lobbies and, more ominously, the Jeffersonian recourse to states’ rights as a libertarian stopgap against Christian attempts to legislate morality greased evil wheels.  In the early Republic, liberty and slavery walked hand in hand down the road to the Civil War.

Finally, in America’s early politics, religion, even when it entered the halls of government freely, wound up being manipulated for political gain.  When church and state tucked into bed together, it was the church that ended up asking, “Will you respect me in the morning?” and the answer was almost always, “No.”

I close where I began, with the First Amendment, which proscribes both the federal establishment of religion and also government interference with religious belief and practices.  I’d like to remind my fundamentalist friends that it was Virginia’s Baptists, not a reluctant James Madison, who spearheaded the drive to supplement the Constitution with a Bill of Rights.  Madison was opposed to enacting a Bill of Rights.  He viewed such an action unnecessary, supporting the Constitution as it stood, without amendments.  To be elected to Congress in Virginia’s Orange County, however, Madison had to appease the Baptist clergy, who held the power to swing the election to his less luminous opponent, James Monroe, who had opposed the Constitution precisely because it lacked a Bill of Rights.  In one religious gathering after another, Madison promised to his Baptist constituents, that, if elected, he would place a Bill of Rights at the top of his congressional agenda.  And so he did, championing the enactment of what he called “this nauseous business of amendments” and shepherding the Bill of Rights through Congress.   So it was that the Baptist passion for freedom of conscience led directly to the First Amendment.  

I stand by today’s Baptist critics of government interference in religion, even as I hail their Baptist forebears.  A bit more of the old Baptist passion for freedom of conscience and a little less of the old Unitarian affection for government oversight of religion would make the religious censorship of prison libraries unimaginable.  People could then freely read Baptist books to their heart’s content—and mine as well.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Dr. Forrest Church. All rights reserved.