ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CH3-036 PROFESSOR LAWRENCE RAST PROFESSOR WILL SCHUMACHER Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***** >> PAUL: In recent years, a debate in our country over the separation of church and state has become quite heated. I remember the news frenzy that surrounded the removal of a statue depicting the 10 Commandments from a public court house. In that instance, and many others, many from the Christian right will claim that our forefathers clearly saw the United States as a Christian nation. Is this an accurate reflection of history? Was the USA established as a Christian nation? And what kind of religion shaped the early leaders and the Constitution? >> SPEAKER: Paul, I don't think that this question is going to go away anytime soon so I'm really glad you raised it. This question about relationship between church and state, or as some people will put it sometimes, the separation of church and state, has been an ongoing question for the history of the United States generally speaking and especially Christianity itself. There are some indications that, in fact, we can read it both ways. That is to say, when you ask, is the United States or was it founded, was the United States founded as a Christian nation, I think maybe the best way to respond is to say, many Christians were involved in the founding of the nation, but they didn't necessarily establish it specifically a Christian nation. Now, that attempt had been made earlier back in the 1600's. The Puritans in New England who grew into the Congregationalist church, specifically saw themselves as establishing a theocracy, a place where God would rule, a place where confession of Christian truth would be necessary for one to be participant in the secular realm, political realm shall we say, as well. That is to say they made very little distinction between the secular realm and the Christian realm. All were bound up into one. So if you wanted to vote, you had to be a member of the church. And one had to be a member of the church before one would receive the franchise. So there was a close relationship there. But in other parts of the colonies, this arrangement was rejected. Very specifically in Pennsylvania, William Penn founded that colony as a place where Christians could go to have freedom to worship as they saw fit. You see, back up in New England, if you weren't participating in the established churches, the Congregational Church, then you really had no freedom, no avenue to express you religious convictions in other realms. In fact, even in New England, Quakers were put to death for their proselytizing, their evangelizing activities. But in Pennsylvania, that freedom was assured. Now, granted, that freedom was limited to Christians. But because of that broad label Christians, Lutherans in many, many numbers found their way to Pennsylvania to take advantage of the freedoms that were offered there. So what you find in the colonial period is a mixed bag. Some colonies have established churches, the Congregational Church in the New England colonies, the Anglican or Episcopal Church in Virginia and the southern colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Other colonies did not have established churches. There's a difference of opinion. So that when these colonies began to come together and seek to hammer out a constitution so that they will be a united nation, the United States of America, that question of established churches is right there at the forefront. Now, how do they handle it? Well, you may know the famous establishment clause of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law establishing a particular church. That has been read two ways, historically speaking in America. The older reading, which dominated at least through the first half of the 1800's, probably through the entire 1800's, was that the national or federal government, the Congress, had no right to reestablish a national church. That, however, according to this reading, did not preclude colonies or states now from establishing their own churches. Case in point: The Congregational Church in Connecticut remained the established church through at least the year 1817, and the Congregational Church remained the established church in Massachusetts through about 1833. That meant, as the established church, the Congregational Churches of New England, Massachusetts, Connecticut, received tax dollars. Their buildings were supported by public tax dollars. Their ministers were supported by public tax dollars, and this was maintained freely in these situations until the states chose to disestablish the particular churches. Congress never had a say. On the other hand, as things emerged in the latter part of the 1800's and certainly, this thought intensified in the 20th-century, the idea that there should be a solid wall of separation between church and state became more and more to the forefront. Now, this language never appears in the United States Constitution. It appears in the personal letters and thoughts of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson himself worked hard for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia and was successful. And then also assumed that would be the case within the national context, though it didn't always play out that way. Jefferson did not want an established church really at the national level or at the state level. Yet, in order to bring about cohesion among the various colonies, he was willing for that to remain in place for some time hoping, in fact expecting, that as time went by, the churches would be disestablished, which, in fact, they were. Part of the reason for that disestablishment is the religion of the founders. Sometimes you'll hear that described in singular terms. I think we should put it in plural, the confessional postures of the founders. There were a variety of perspectives of those who participated in the formation of the national government. Lutherans were a part of that. The sons of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, about whom we'll talk in a little bit, were, in fact, participants in Pennsylvania government. John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg was a general in Washington's Revolutionary army. Frederick Muhlenberg served in the Pennsylvania House. A certain Hanson was president under the articles of Confederation, and he had Lutheran background as well. So Lutherans were participants here. So were Anglicans, not surprisingly, so were Presbyterians, to a lesser extent. There were a variety of Christians who were participant in the formation of our national government. And, of course, as you may know, George Washington himself was a professing member of the Church of England. At the same time, some members among the founding fathers were, in fact, given more to what we would call deism. And deism, as a religious perspective, has some very problematic elements. Deists believed that God acted as a great clockmaker, a watchmaker. And what he did was to put the world together, establish its foundations, put together the workings like a great clock, wind the clock up, and then simply let the world work itself out as natural law would have it do. Among many of the founders, this was the basic perspective. So you come back around to the question and you say, was the United States founded as a Christian nation. Well, many Christians would not recognize deists as Christians for their idea of a detached God and the implications of deist thought for the work of Jesus. Others were willing to be a little more broad in their perspective and say, at least it's a religious perspective that respects God. Well, so what does this mean? Some historians of American Christianity, American religion more generally speaking, have done the hard number crunching as to what really characterized the churches at the time of the writing of the United States Constitution. For example, Edwin Scott Gaustad who has done lifelong work in American religious history and in the demographics that make up the churches in American Christian history makes the argument that at the time of the founders, the time of the writing of the Constitution, somewhere around 9 to 10 percent of the American population were actually formal church members. If you go by that as your bar, then it's difficult to make the claim that the United States was a Christian nation. It wasn't until you reach the year 1850 or so that you would find greater than 40 percent of the population being formal church members. On the other hand, can you recognize Christian thinking, and are there recognizable Christian principles in some of the elements that make up the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution? There I think you can say, yes, the convictions of Christian men as they wrote these documents come through and are observable. Does that make the United States a Christian nation? I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far. After all, what we find ourselves today struggling with is that basic question of identity. What does it mean for a nation to be a Christian nation? What are the explicit necessities? What are the doctrinal commitments that must be present for a nation to be called a Christian nation? Those kinds of questions did not shape the thinking of the founders. Rather, what they did was reflect their general Christian situation, their general Christian perspective influenced the documents that made up our nation and provided us with a tremendous freedom to establish not only a worship according to conscience, but also to take the message of the gospel out into the world. So in a way, the question is America a Christian nation sort of misses the point, Paul, because it can lead us too complacency when, in fact, what I think we need to recognize is that we've been given a tremendous blessing in this nation. The freedoms we enjoy allow us to share the gospel without burying it. That's one of the tremendous blessings that God has bestowed upon us in this United States of America. ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *****