Summarizing the “Separation of Church and State”

There is much confusion surrounding the concept of the “separation of church and state”; much of it likely born out of the steep secular decline in religious affiliation across recent generations, with particular emphasis among atheists and anti-deists. 

While many have hastened to leverage this language (“separation of church and state”) in order to condemn or censure religious values — particularly those which are Christian — where they have carried influence in public life (i.e. prayer in schools, teachers covering lessons from the Bible, government representatives appealing to God, coinage bearing the words “In God We Trust”), the truth is that this “separation” was never expected to completely eliminate religious practice or religious sentiment from all matter of public life. In fact, religion was so deeply enmeshed in American life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the French magistrate and prison reformer Gustave de Beaumont, during his nine-month tour of America alongside Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, noted that religious conventions were “so characteristic of America” that “nothing is done without the sanction of religion.”

Indeed, far from a prohibition on public Christian expression, the truth is that the “separation” pertained merely to the institution of the “church” and to any religious body, specifically the official establishment of any national church or the creation of any theocratic political authority within the state; and remember, this was at a time when matters of moral and academic instruction were conducted not through public schooling but through local churches and family homes. Indeed, matters of instruction and convention were assumed the prerogative of each family, and the government, it was assumed, had no place in these affairs — but that was not to say that the values were not themselves present in the formation of the American republic. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence itself was, as Thomas Jefferson called it, “an expression of the American mind” — and, as it has been shown, that was a mind decidedly under the persuasion of Christian principles.

Neither the phrasing of the “separation of church and state” nor any of the clauses contained within the First Amendment to the Constitution should be construed to limit the personally-held beliefs, values, or customs of churchgoers; congregations to which almost all of America’s Founders belonged. They are meant only to keep people free from religious persecution and religious coercion, and free to practice and exercise their religion so long as they don’t infringe upon the God-given rights of others.

Indeed, the Founders could never even have anticipated such a radical shift in public attitudes toward religion as we see today, nor could they have possibly conceived of the scope of today’s government, having influence in or direct control over so much of public life as to risk snuffing out religion altogether, to the extent that such a radical misinterpretation is applied — where unfounded prohibitions or condemnations of this kind continue to extend to all matters within the ever-expanding jurisdiction of government. It is in this way that the state, like a serpent, threatens to coil around every meaningful aspect of life before squeezing out all freedom and purpose — particularly the kinds which support the values, cultures, customs, and beliefs opposed to state power.

America’s founders were not opposed to religion or religious influence, nor to religious sentiments shared publicly in speech. They were merely aware of the risks posed by theocratic governments: institutions wielding the power to restrict speech, limit religious expression, or force religious participation; institutions wielding the power of the state with the claimed backing of the divine, and institutions thus beyond reproach where mere mortals are all that threaten to keep the institutions accountable. Such a power, they understood, was incompatible not just with the freedom of religion but with the tenets of a free and open society. Such power, they understood, was total and absolute, anathema to a state of liberty.

However, their apprehensions toward theocracies mustn’t suggest to the reader that the Founders were hostile toward religion or religious values on the whole, least of all toward the Christian beliefs and Christian values which were so influential in shaping society and intellectual thought at the time of the founding yet which are so popularly maligned and widely disparaged in politics today; on the contrary, most signers of the Declaration of Independence identified with some form of Christianity, and due to the demographics of their time, they had little reason to expect any meaningful divergences in core cultural or religious values in the foreseeable future. They each understood that, as George Washington put it, “Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people”; and, for almost all of the Founding Fathers of the United States — in the New World with its new form of government — ‘virtue’ was a matter of adhering to the Commandments and Truths of God, as immortalized in their Holy Bible — a matter as common and ordinary to them as breathing. Interestingly enough, as further evidence of this context, one of the rationales suggested to President Jefferson by Attorney General Levi Lincoln as pretext for the planned Lewis and Clark Expedition had its basis in elevating the religious beliefs of the Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River: “If the enterprise appears to be, an attempt to advance them, it will by many people, on that account, be justified, however calamitous the issue.” President Jefferson embraced this pretext and thus ordered Captain Lewis to learn what he could about Indian religion, for it would help “those who may endeavor to civilize & instruct them.” Despite the fact that this rationale served merely as pretext to quell political opposition and to earn the approval of both the New England clergy and the “public mind”, the matter nonetheless serves to inform readers of the prevailing attitudes and the common ground in the early years of the fledgling republic.

As for the Constitution, it is imperative that the reader recognize that the Establishment Clause, the Free Exercise Clause, and the principle later described by Thomas Jefferson as a “wall of separation between church and state” were each intended to prevent any church, religious bureaucracy, or established religious institution from usurping civil authority or evolving into a powerful national church like the Church of England; each of these characteristics, ‘national’ order and theocratic rule, being starkly at odds with the values of Patriots who had just fought a long and bloody war against tyranny of that kind. These provisions together were intended to secure both the individual’s free exercise of religion and the people’s protection from religious coercion or persecution — abuses which many in the Old World had endured and escaped, and abuses which America’s founders sought to prevent in the governments they created; governments created not to prevent anyone from appealing to God or engaging in prayer, but to prevent the government from developing into (or combining with) an established religious institution wielding the power and lawmaking authority to coerce, to persecute, and to act as the final and irreproachable arbiter on man’s life, liberty, and property.

So, when considering the “separation of church and state”, it is key to remember to distinguish the “church” from its congregants’ values, and to remember that in a society the values tend to be taken for granted — just as they have been in the course of American history, and just as they have at the same course of time been diluted by a population secularized through public schooling and by an age of immigrants who continue to flow into America — often illegally — without the intention of assimilating. 

In a 1924 speech, President Calvin Coolidge spoke of “the many divergent virtues that are characteristic of the different races which have made America their home”, stating: “It is my own belief that in this land of freedom new arrivals should especially keep up their devotion to religion.” Coolidge urged that they “ought to cling to all these virtues and cultivate them tenaciously.” Little could Coolidge have anticipated just how “divergent” the beliefs in America would eventually become, just how far they would diverge from traditional American values, the ideas and intentions of the Founders, and even the “divergent” milieu of his own time — a “‘divergent’ milieu” which, in retrospect, looks rather homogenous in comparison to the “diversity” and “multiculturalism” of the modern age. 

Little could Coolidge have known that less than a century later America would not only be failing to cling to virtue; the country would be in such a state that the matter of ‘virtue’ would itself be both equivocated and assailed partly on the basis of Christianity being slandered and otherwise on the basis of so many ill-informed reimaginings of law and phrasings such as “the separation of church and state”. 

Little could the men of the Enlightenment Age have known just what lie ahead in what would become the Age of Information: an age in which so many people could read and write while at the same time remaining functionally illiterate, unwise, and unable to think for themselves; an age of widespread distraction and deception, and with it social, religious, and intellectual disintegration.

While Jefferson remarked in his time that “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors,” I doubt that even he wouldn’t be impressed with just how functionally illiterate and imprudent people have become in the most “informed”, “educated” and “credentialed” society in human history. Even Jefferson, the great thinker, visionary and polymath he was, could never have imagined scale and efficiency of modern technology, let alone the state of moral and intellectual thought that would enable it to so efficiently confuse and clutter the minds of the people. Then again, Jefferson could never have imagined a United States in which families would hand over their greatest privilege and responsibility to the state: the education of their children. While there is so much of the modern age that would defy the expectations and imaginations of America’s founders, there would be scarcely anything more surprising to them than the fact that most Americans today outsource the academic education and moral instruction of their own children to the state. Bearing this in mind, it would hardly surprise them that so many of their writings and warnings have gone unread, unheeded, misunderstood, and misconstrued; it would hardly surprise them that such a widely-held misunderstanding of the “separation of church and state” (among other concepts) has coincided with the separation of the country’s children from a real and true education. It is in just this way that the people have been conned into accepting one kind of separation when a host of others were lurking among them: the separation of the people from each other and their own families, and ultimately their separation from truth, reason, and morality.