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Religion and the Founding Fathers
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Mike Merritt

Call to Worship:
"We come into this space, some with joy in our hearts, some with sorrow. Here may we find both salvation and solace. We come to be reminded of our commitments, and history. Here may we find strength for the journey ahead. May we know that we are not alone. By our presence we make this space holy. Come, let us worship together."

Prayer:
By Reverend Hope Johnson

"We give thanks for the community shared in this congregation. We give thanks for the legacy we have inherited from those who have gathered in the past. We give thanks for that transformation that changes indifference and hatred into love.

"Despite sorrow, despite pain, here is joy in the commitment of staying bodaciously in the struggle for wholeness. We say praise to our ancestors even if we don't know them; we carry them in our hearts to the river for consecration and we fall symbolically on our knees, thankful for and surrounded by our history, a history that is filled with authenticity, triumph, complicity, and resistance. Winter offer another opportunity to participate in the transformation of a world that is broader than any one faith. Winter present us with the question, how shall we life? May we answer, by living into our best selves. May we consciously create legacies for generations yet unborn. May we be guided by the vision and dream of beloved community. Blessed be."

Sermon:
One of our seven principles reads, "The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in the society at large." Recently, I have dedicated my attentions to an aspect of this principle in our American history, the question of separation of church and state described in our Constitution and practiced in our government. I believe that by returning to the founders, a review of their attitude toward church and state might shed some light on today's religion-political debate, especially as we see it our current Presidential contests. The tale of America's first great culture war-a conflict that raged from George Washington's presidency to James Monroe's and arose over the same question that continues to haunt presidential politics today. My research lead me to the work of Reverend Dr. Forest Church, a Unitarian minister out of All Souls Church in New York City. His writings interested me. I have drawn from his work and when you hear a well turned phase, give him the credit not me.

I am amazed by the subsets, tone and texture of the political environment with the founding of our country. It is important to remember the participants in this founding debate were not as diverse as our political debate today. Two of the current candidates would not even have been allowed to participate in the early years, except through their owner or husband.

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 half-right. As we are today, the early republic was divided. From the outset of our experiment in government, the founders fought tooth and nail in a contest over American values; a vigorous, sometimes savage, yet nearly forgotten thirty-year conflict to define the nation's soul during the late 1770 until the early 1800's.

Two very different themes combined to compose the 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 France, which has been through the Enlightenment. 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 toss the seas of presidential politics were 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, may surprise you. Two centuries ago, the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and 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, in that time 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.

Like any good story, this one is full of surprises. George Washington, for instance, was so opposed to religious lobbying that he cursed church interference in government affairs even when he agreed with those who were trying to reverse national policy. His successor, John Adams deemed the church essential to government, even if Christian theology happened to be false (which he suspected it was). Thomas Jefferson, who built a famous "wall of separation between church and state," worshipped on Sundays at a chapel set up in the Capitol and dreamed that one day all Americans would subscribe to a single, "national faith." Departing from lifelong principle, James Madison declared a record four national Fast Days as president. Later, in a blistering attack on his own policies, he recommended that the offices of congressional and military chaplain be abolished and urged future administrations to tightly regulate religious corporations, lest their unchecked wealth and growing political power undermine the government. And James Monroe, a non-believer who steered clear of religion, became a clergy favorite. He won kudos from many of the same preachers who earlier insisted that unless the president was a professed Christian eager to mount his bully pulpit and lead the nation in prayer, God would bring down His hammer on America.

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 insults 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 an abomination. 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 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 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 dividing 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 organizational talents from electoral contests to Bible and tract societies, designed to redeem the nation from the grassroots up, not from the presidency down. Secular governance was confirmed, yet the religious nation prospered. America's churches flourished, in number and spiritual power, during President James Monroe's "Era of Good Feelings." Adams, Jefferson, and Madison joined in signing their successor's accomplishments. 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.

Until I started this research, I, harbored a few easy illusions about religion and the founders. What surprised me most is how large religion loomed in their electoral fortunes. Today's Christian campaigners and their secular critics seem almost timid in comparison to the warring American dreamers and would-be saviors who tilted in the nation's early contests. It is impossible to pore over this material without developing a keener awareness of how combustible religious politics can be. 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.

However, I walked away from this research with a deeper appreciation for the saving grace of religious politics. Church-State separation is one thing, morally-grounded politics another. If God's banner had been removed from early American discourse entirely, the counter gospel of sovereign 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. Self-interest needed to be balanced by the values of religion.

The most spirited combatants on both sides of the divide imperiled their own principles by their unquestioning devotion to them. The imposition of order triggered rebellion even as unchecked liberty invited repression. The first law of history might well be, "Pick your enemies carefully, for you will become like them." As exclusive absolutes, sacred liberty (the essence of Jefferson's Empire) and divine order (the foundation stone of a Christian Commonwealth) led their devotees to opposite banks of the same brink.

Another insight I garnered along the way is this: The effect of a president's civic faith is greater than the influence of his personal religious beliefs. That none of the first presidents was an orthodox Christian had little bearing on where each stood on the religious-political spectrum. Christian activists of the time understood this instinctively. How else can we make sense of the adoration born-again Baptists felt for the Deist Jefferson or the equally avid support orthodox Presbyterians lavished on the Unitarian Adams?

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."

In closing, I would like to discuss 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 the Baptist passion for freedom of conscience that led directly to the First Amendment.

As I started, one of our seven principles focuses on the right of conscience and the democratic process in society as a whole. In our focus for a successful America, we must concentrate on the right of conscience in the use of the democratic process, regardless of religion. That does not mean that we should ignore the practices of the individual or the religion. We should look for the conscience, values and personal core of the candidate.

What this discussion of history tells me is that in the current political environment, the need is for a value based moralistic approach to change and growth. I stand by today's critics of government interference in religion, even as I hail the moralist forebears. I stand by today's critic of religion interference in government. A bit more of the old passion for freedom of conscience and a little less of the old affection for government oversight of religion would make religious censorship unimaginable. All religions have sinned and it is the values of the participants in the political process, not their choice of religious label, that lead to a successful administration.

Benediction:
Tolerance and support is the spirit of this church, and service is our practice. This is our great covenant: To dwell together in peace, To seek the truth in love, and to help one another.