Religion and Society

There always seems to be some degree of discussion about the role of God and religion with regard to the government and society in the United States. We often here of the US founders as being “god-fearing men” with divine providence as their guide. First and foremost, there is no question most of the Founders of the United States were for the most part Christian believers to some degree or another. However, many founders were also Deists, which was popular among many of the eighteenth century educated elite. Deism was a very generalized belief in a Supreme Being who created the Universe, but was no longer involved in the creation, and left natural laws in place to govern life on Earth inclusive of human beings who would use their abilities to reason as a way of discovering those natural laws and determining ways to live and prosper in society. 

The Founders, particularly the most influential ones such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington did not hold to strict denominational Christian doctrines and were Deists or otherwise culturally influenced by the Enlightenment, which was the reason the founders used such terms in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as “Divine Providence,” “Nature’s God,” and “Supreme Judge.” The role of religion, much like the role of political philosophy was part of the educational background and culture of the U.S. founders, and of course did inform their moral compass and values, but it is difficult to pinpoint a single defining influence as the founders were not singularly ideological, nor religiously dogmatic. They considered themselves to be reasoned thinkers of their age and never intended nor publicly proclaimed the new United States as a Christian Nation in any of the founding documents. As the new nation’s leaders struggled to lead the fledgling country to victory during the revolutionary war against Great Britain and later as they struggled to formulate a system of government that balanced states' rights with those of a national government, they did so with a keen awareness of the dangers inherent in a country where there was an established national religion.

As educated members of society, the founders understood that Europe had gone through several centuries of religious wars and persecutions. The religious wars between Protestants and Catholics, and related persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were bloody affairs that left an indelible mark on the US founders and influenced the way they embarked on the formulation of the governing principles of the new democratic nation-state in the late eighteenth century. The U.S. founders were thinkers steeped in the traditions of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and they were very careful not to create a nation based on any one religious tradition, which was the reason the first article of the Bill of Rights was the First Amendment:   

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We know that initially the young nation was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which gave most governmental power to the states at the expense of a national government, and, from the founders’ views, this put the young US nation-state in jeopardy of dissolving as there was no mechanism for creating and maintaining national cohesion. This fear of the Union breaking apart over differing states’ interests versus a national interest and the fear of being unable to respond to a national crisis, such as the case with the Shays or Whiskey rebellions in the 1780s, led to the Constitutional Convention culminating with the ratification of the Federal Constitution and The Bill of Rights (1790-91). The New Federal Constitution created a strong national government with strong state governments contingent upon states not contradicting national laws. Included in this new US Constitution, the one that continues to govern the United States in the twenty-first century, was the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments and was part of the compromise that created a strong national government while preserving individual liberties and rights. It is important to have just a bit more context on the Federal Constitution; it was designed for a country where citizen's rights were restricted to white males, where slavery was legal (the slave trade continued until 1833), and the entire population did not vote for the President, or Senators, and the Supreme Court was appointed by non-elected leaders, which means the only national body elected by the general population was the House of Representatives. However, in time, the constitutional amendment process was used to further democratize the United States making the President elected by the entire nation of citizens (white males) in 1826; and, the Civil War Amendments (13th, 14th, 15th) expanded the franchise to African-Americans, who continued to have their rights hindered by the Jim Crow Laws until Brown vs. Board of Education (1955) and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965. Additionally, women were not granted the right to vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920. These major changes occurred within the context of a secular U.S. Constitutional system working to further democratize U.S. Society by expanding rights and not abridging those rights over the course of United States history, nor intoning God or any religion.

The founding documents and cultural context of those who wrote them is very important to understand in order not to allow present day ideological currents to re-write history outside of the evidence. The U.S. system of government was not founded as a religious republic, but was intentionally secular. The United States was founded as a democratic nation-state by people within a common culture of the time, and this did include Christianity, but it also included a strong influence from the anti-religious aspects of the Enlightenment, which recognized Divine Providence, but was also careful not to assign a governmental role to that “providence.” The U.S Founders recognized the need to maintain a secular society at the same time as protecting citizens from religious persecution as well as protecting citizens’ rights to worship in accordance to their values, desires, and beliefs. Understanding the historical dimension of sectarian/religious conflicts in their own era, the Founders did their best to prevent such tensions and conflicts when the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights was approved in 1790-1791. Additionally, the establishment of the new nation-state was not proclaimed as a Christian country, but instead the founders were very careful to use the following language that set the tone for the new nation as evidenced by the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. They did not call upon Divine Providence or God to ordain the new country, but proclaimed sovereignty and the authority to govern with these words:  

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It would seem that our Founders intended on a secular government and desperately so.  After all, the centuries of religious wars and persecutions in Europe's past were clear warnings for the founders who understood the perils of religious conflict and knew there was enough to divide the young republic, so the separation of church and state was a virtue enshrined in the new constitution, now over 200 years old.  Let's hope we keep this example in mind when religious institutions pressure society to erode those separations using a Christian history of the U.S. that just does not exist.