Don't Get Madison

[posted by Callimachus]

While I'm sympathetic to sincere people of faith, I caution them against arguing that the Founders intended to make America a Christian nation. Especially if they are going to do it with a set of cherry-picked quotes and no deep reading of the sources. Especially if they're going to let someone else pick the cherries for them.

As Michael Medved seems to have done here. His argument is built from disconnected snippets; ten-word half-sentences from men who wrote millions of words of pubic discourse. And when the snippets turn out to be flimsy, the argument becomes a house of cards. For instance:

Jefferson’s friend and colleague, James Madison (acclaimed as “The Father of the Constitution”) declared that “religion is the basis and Foundation of Government” ....

I believe Medved wrote honestly and sincerely. But I suspect he had some less-than-honest book of history or quotations open in front of him. They are out there. The Christian bookstores are full of them. And they are mine-fields for an honest writer. They are full of mangled, out-of-context, or outright bogus quotations.

Here's the full paragraph of the Memorial and Remonstrance from which Medved's first Madison quote was plucked:

15. Because finally, "the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience" is held by the same tenure with all our other rights. If we recur to its origin, it is equally the gift of nature; if we weigh its importance, it cannot be less dear to us; if we consult the "Declaration of those rights which pertain to the good people of Virginia, as the basis and foundation of Government," it is enumerated with equal solemnity, or rather studied emphasis.

Emphasis added by me, to show how badly you have to torture Madison to make him say what Medved wants him to have said.

So what is Madison really talking about here? Well, read the introduction to the "Memorial and Remonstrance."

We the subscribers, citizens of the said Commonwealth, having taken into serious consideration, a Bill printed by order of the last Session of General Assembly, entitled "A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion," and conceiving that the same if finally armed with the sanctions of a law, will be a dangerous abuse of power, are bound as faithful members of a free State to remonstrate against it, and to declare the reasons by which we are determined.

It takes a willful disregard for truth to take that document and employ any part of it as an argument for the Founders wanting America to be a Christian nation.

When Madison took his place in the Virginia legislature after the Revolutionary War, a bill stood in the General Assessment, sponsored by Patrick Henry, that would funnel tax money to support religious education in all denominations.

Henry justified this as a way to curtail the sin and immorality of young people. But the General Assessment bill would have hatched the monster Madison feared most: a "tyranny of the majority." If the ministers from all the major Protestant denominations were paid from the state treasury, a coalition of Protestant groups would relegate minority views to a "tolerated" status or worse.

Madison scholar Robert Alley writes that, "toleration presumed a state prerogative that, for Madison, did not exist." Madison wrote that "the right to tolerate religion presumes the right to persecute it." Instead Madison argued for "liberty of conscience." The "natural rights of man," centering in the concept of "liberty of conscience," stand, without question for Madison, above and before any other authority.

The legislature was on the verge of passing the bill, but Madison convinced his colleagues to postpone a vote until the next session in 1785. Madison used the postponement to take his case to the public, writing a broadside critique, the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," which has become the classic statement for religious freedom in North America.

His sole concern was protecting the individual conscience from the intrusion of state power.

The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.

Madison insisted government keep its hands absolutely off religion.

Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.

Madison, in his Virginia pamphlet, addressed a God-fearing audience. Probably there's a degree of sophistry in his painting Patrick Henry's bill to provide public funds for religious education as an anti-Christian bill, because "it at once discourages those who are strangers to the light of revelation from coming into the Region of it; and countenances by example the nations who continue in darkness, in shutting out those who might convey it to them."

But in the course of his central argument Madison makes statements that, though he comes down on the secular side, show as high a respect for religion as you can find anywhere.

As I've written in many places before, the Founders had a complex and shifting set of attitudes toward religion overall, religion as they found it in America, and religion as they felt it personally. They by no means agreed on any of these things. But to act as though they had a single, simple, clear vision, and to attempt to prove it by quotes picked by dubious pickers, only makes you look foolish.

For God's Sake

[posted by Callimachus]

Why is this so hard?

OLYMPIA -- Holiday trees are a longtime tradition in the rotunda of the Washington state Capitol, and this week the governor also lit a menorah.

Now a Nativity scene has been ruled out on the advice of the state attorney general's office.

It's the latest permutation of this story -- the Seattle-Tacoma airport Christmas tree flap. It's also the latest example of what you get when you let a country be run by agendas that can afford lawyers.

At the airport, a rabbi saw a plastic Christmas tree display and asked to place a menorah next to it. My reading of what happened next is that the airport managers might have been OK with that, but they also realized granting the request would mean they'd have to let anyone put up any sort of religious display there, or else be guilty of discrimination.

So instead, they pulled the trees. Then the pundits let loose the Dogs of War on Christmas, and so a deal was cut: The rabbi agreed not to sue, and the trees came back.

The same rabbi earlier had convinced Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire to install, and personally light, a menorah in the statehouse rotunda. You can guess what happened next.

A local real estate agent saw the menorah and asked to place a creche next to it. The state turned him down.

Steve Valandra, a spokesman for the Department of General Administration, officials were concerned that in comparison with a tree or menorah, a Nativity scene might carry a stronger impression of government endorsement of religion.

Unlike, say, the governor lighting a public menorah in the capitol rotunda.

Forget for a minute the First Amendment; this is about civil society in a multicultural nation, as we inescapably are and always have been. This is family.

A private entity can do as it pleases. But the government's buildings are everyone's house. Yet in this case the airport managers saw something the state's lawyers missed: The one thing you can't do is play favorites with religions. And in a diverse nation, that forces you into the unhappy corner of "all or nothing." It's the elementary school talent show: Everyone gets a turn in the spotlight, or no one does. Which probably is why public life in the U.S. so often resembles an elementary school musical.

Embrace it all or ignore it all. If you're a government, probably wisest to ignore it all and thereby encourage it to flourish on its own. The government's hand has the Midas touch when it reaches out toward religion.

Personally I can't wait to get off work and go light the Rastafarian menorah.

Founding Father

Who was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence?

Here's a hint: Among his direct descendants (allegedly) is Reese Witherspoon.

Give up? You're not alone. John Witherspoon is perhaps the most forgotten of the forgotten Founders. And it's no wonder; his views and his centrality in the cause will upset some settled notions.

Here Roger Kimball attempts a resurrection. His conclusion:

For us looking back on the generation of the Founders, it is easy to deprecate the religious inheritance that, for many of them, formed the ground of their commitment to political liberty. Theological skeptics and even atheists there were aplenty in late eighteenth-century America. But for every Jefferson who re-wrote the Bible excising every mention of miracles, there was a platoon of men like Madison who wrote commentaries on the Bible. Witherspoon believed that religion was “absolutely essential to the existence and welfare of every political combination of men in society.” Madison agreed. As did even the more skeptical Washington, who in his Farewell Address observed that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports… . And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.” For many, perhaps most, of the Founders, Morrison observes, the chain of reasoning ran thus: “no republic without liberty, no liberty without virtue, and no virtue without religion.” John Witherspoon did as much as anyone to nurture that understanding. Which is perhaps yet another reason he is less known today than other figures from the period. Whether that is a sign of our maturity and sophistication or only, as Witherspoon might put it, our pride and natural depravity is a question we might do well ponder.

The so-called Religious Right has put forth long and loud claims that America's Revolutionary roots are entirely Biblical and that the American legal system is entirely a product of its "Judeo-Christian heritage." This is demonstrably false.

Yet the push-back against that should not prevent anyone from acknowledging that the Founders' hostility to bigoted sects and authoritarian preachers was not identical to a postmodernist sneer at spirituality or morality in general. And that religion, and Christianity, as it was felt in that generation played an important role in America in 1776 and 1787. And that it shared that privilege with an Enlightenment rationalism that itself was marbled with Christian ideas and arguments.

Religion and Democracy

My country is torturing itself with a feud over religion. I feel sorrow for my Christian friends who again must suffer the spectacle of their Christian god being evicted from the government institutions of the United States. This time, again, the battle is over the Pledge of Allegiance as recited in the public schools.

Though not a Christian in any sense, I neither mock the faith nor regard it as irrelevant in the modern age. Rather, I appreciate its central and necessary function in American democracy.

And stop and think, fellow free-thinkers and pagans and non-Christians: Would you replace the mosaic of American Christianity with another faith? Which one? Where would you find one more inclined to steer its adherents toward public virtue, love of humankind, humility, tolerance, optimism, and non-violence?

Like the liberal Founders, who did not practice the Christian faith or believe in its theology, I would do nothing to discourage the American people from their Christianity. Even Jefferson, the deist/Unitarian who so riled the pious Christians of his day, understood this. One Sunday morning, as president, he was walking to church service, prayer book in hand, when a friend accosted him and said, "You going to church Mr. J. You do not believe a word in it." [Americans were more familiar with their presidents then].

Jefferson replied, "no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir."

(Of course, he never denied that he didn't believe a word of it.)

George Washington, the practical plantation-manager among the learned Founders, often spoke about the political importance of religion. He did so in his "Farewell Address" (based on a draft by Hamilton), where he named it along with education and public credit as things productive of "public felicity." He was not talking about government-sponsored religion. He was talking about the people and their faiths. Plural. When it came to the government, Washington was no less a separationist than Madison and Jefferson. He had had first-hand experience with the problem -- or rather the twin problems -- of the people failing to accommodate one another's beliefs and the government's heavy-handed impositions.

As commander in chief during the Revolution, Washington outlawed New England regiments' "Pope's Day" buffoonery because it offended his Catholic soldiers. Politically correct? He had a war to win and he needed everyone. In 1777 he opposed a congressional plan to appoint brigade chaplains in the Continental Army. "Among many other weighty objections to the Measure," he wrote to John Hancock (then president of Congress), "it has been suggested, that it has a tendency to introduce religious disputes into the Army, which above all things should be avoided, and in many instances would compel men to a mode of Worship which they do not profess."

America could survive without its Pledge of Allegiance, without its flag, without its public schools. But not without its public virtues, which are driven by its religious sensibilities. Madison used to say that such things could be superfluous to a "nation of philosophers" who were motivated by "the voice of an enlightened reason." Nobody in Philadelphia in 1787 had any illusion that they were living in such a nation. All they had to do was walk a few blocks up to Market Street for evidence.

This concept of virtue was crucially important, and the Founders wrote of it often. But they defined it differently than we do. To them, it didn't mean not drinking too much or sleeping around (though certainly they'd discourage these things), but, as their favorite political writer, Montesquieu, put it, virtue in a republic means "the love of the laws of our country" and "a constant preference of public to private interest."

Just one example: When my wife and I recently went looking for a place to donate our mite to help hurricane survivors in the Gulf, we pretty much knew it was going to be a church charity of some sort. A pagan/freethinking household, we never set foot in a church except as tourists. We ended up giving mostly to the Mennonites. [You can be sure they're not going to go out and blow half of it on Hummers and martini lunches for their executives.] This didn't bother us at all. Maybe someday there'll be an Agnostic World Disaster Relief Fund. Maybe.

But God does not belong in government itself. Rather, religion serves as the counterbalance to the popular liberties the government protects and is forbidden to touch. And it serves as a counterbalance to the competitive essence of our social system.

DeTocqueville, as usual, hit the nail on the head:

At the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything.

Why did the Founders omit it from the Constitution? Because they believed it to be rooted in man's nature, and to be flourishing in the American people. They did not have to build religion into the Constitution any more than they had to build Independence Hall before they met in it.

Because it is no business of government to promote God. True faith has wellsprings in the home. The Scandinavian nations all have official, government-supported churches. And the citizens there are among the most secular in the world. The religions that received the most governmental support in early America -- the Church of England in Virginia and the Congregational church in New England -- are among the least flourishing in the country today. The Amish, among whom I live, are people of deep piety; they run their own school system, according to their own model. And they do not teach anything about religion and God in the classroom. That is the job of the parents and the preachers.

And to the Enlightenment sensibilities of the Founders, to make religion the direct object of government "would be counterproductive, undermining the natural impulses that gave birth to them and kept them alive" [Gertrude Himmelfarb] .To put all in one place -- the government and the religion, is to unbalance this, and it is religion that will be most corrupted.

Part of the problem here is that the Founders also did not conceive or make provision for a national system of public education. This, like religion, they left to the people, or to the states.

I am sorry to see so many Christians aggrieved by this court decision over the Pledge. But the ruling is correct, both constitutionally and spiritually. By now, most people familiar with the case know the "under God" was inserted into the pledge a half century after it was written. The error is not in removing it; the error was made in 1954. We are correcting it now.

The blame, if any, resides not with the judges, but with those who insist on setting up their particular statue of the Christian god in the political edifice of the nation, where it does not belong. I cannot but think some of them do this pugnaciously, knowing politicians will be too craven to follow the constitution and thus enrage their constituents, knowing the courts eventually will have to do it, and the sight of God carted out of the public schools or the courthouse will create the impression of religious persecution. Sadly, this narrative seems to suit some people.

Tolerating the Intolerant II

Paradox of paradoxes: Is Western separation of church and state an idea rooted in Christianity?

Plant your feet in the land of pure Islam, where religion governs all life's choices, and look at the West: The Seal of the Prophets, Muhammad, has delivered God's message. And we have rejected it. Whether we are Christian, Wiccan, Jew, or secular, our refusal to submit to Islam is a religious decision. Moreso, our secular government is seen as an act of religion. We choose to limit faith to private and personal matters, not to give it primacy in civic law and communal life, as Muslims do.

We say that experience has taught us the wisdom of separating church and state, religion and law. But is this so? It also is true that this rule of secular law is allowed us, if not required of us, by the Christian Gospel.

Now, I haven't seen any Muslim apologists make this argument, perhaps because they haven't studied our sources and noted how the foundations of Western secularism are rooted in Christian (Protestant) theology. But they are so rooted, especially in Christ's injunction about God and Caesar.

In part, certainly, the authors of the Enlightenment knew their audience would be overwhelmingly believers, and the secularists had to walk the tightrope to coax such minds out of their theocratic notions without appearing to be anti-God. I can believe such cynicism of a Hume (who often wrote about Islam when he meant Christianity) or a Tom Paine.

But Locke and Milton were sincere Christians, and they advanced the notion of secular government and separation of church and state. And they drew deeply on the Scriptures to do so.

In both the documents I quoted earlier -- Locke's letter concerning toleration and Madison's resolution asserting government non-cognizance of religion, the authors grounded their assertions in the Gospel. Locke, direct quotes nine times from the Bible in his letter. He denounces religious intolerance in explicitly Christian terms:

[T]he Gospel frequently declares that the true disciples of Christ must suffer persecution; but that the Church of Christ should persecute others, and force others by fire and sword to embrace her faith and doctrine, I could never yet find in any of the books of the New Testament.

Since Christianity lacks a detailed code of laws and behaviors, government legislation of religion would be dangerous to faith:

Nor, when an incensed Deity shall ask us, "Who has required these, or such-like things at your hands?" will it be enough to answer Him that the magistrate commanded them. If civil jurisdiction extend thus far, what might not lawfully be introduced into religion? What hodgepodge of ceremonies, what superstitious inventions, built upon the magistrate's authority, might not (against conscience) be imposed upon the worshippers of God?

Even when he extends the widest degree of toleration, Locke bases it on the absence of a prohibition in the Gospels to do so.

[N]either Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The Gospel commands no such thing. The Church which "judgeth not those that are without" wants it not.

Madison, in his Virginia pamphlet, also addressed a God-fearing audience. Probably there's a degree of sophistry in his painting Patrick Henry's bill to provide public funds for religious education as an anti-Christian bill, because "it at once discourages those who are strangers to the light of revelation from coming into the Region of it; and countenances by example the nations who continue in darkness, in shutting out those who might convey it to them."

But in the course of his central argument Madison makes statements that, though he comes down on the secular side, show as high a respect for religion as you can find in the works of any ayatollah:

Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign.

By that way of seeing, if America's culture of faith had been Islamic, not Christian, the laws of the nation would have been bound to follow Shari'a. Both Locke and Madison, I think, would say secular civil government is an act of obedience to Scripture.

Tolerating the Intolerant

I've been going back to the sources to try to discover whether the religious tolerance of the American Founders would or should extend to extremist Islamist preaching. Even in a tolerant society, not all things are or should be tolerated. You have freedom of speech, but you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater.

Freedom of religion -- or liberty of conscience to give it its broadest name -- seems to admit very few exceptions. An astonishing range of religions thrive among us, from Santaria to Southern Baptism. In the name of liberty of conscience we tolerate religions that require their followers to surrender liberty of conscience and follow a preacher or a book.

But what about Islamist religion, which preaches identification with the worldwide Muslim ummah rather than local civic society, which sets religious authority above any secular state power, and which has a long-term goal of plowing under Western freedoms, including liberty of conscience, into shari'a law? Such things existed in the world in the 18th century, but the Founders never addressed them.

America is not re-invented every generation, despite the appearance, and it has underpinnings in certain currents of philosophy and the thoughts of specific men. Yet to discuss the Founders as a guide to present policy seems anathema to many otherwise thoughtful people; as if to accept the relevance of Madison and Jefferson is to accept their whole vision of America. To less thoughtful Americans, I think, our past is a dead land, populated by monstrous slave-owning philosophes and Indian-killers and sexually repressed Puritans.

John Locke's "Letter Concerning Toleration" is the philosophical foundation of the American separation of church and state, religious equality and freedom of conscience -- key elements of the Western pantheon, and hateful poisons to its Islamist enemies.

When it comes to religion, Locke politely tells the political authorites to butt out. He enjoins the would-be religious meddlers:

If any man err from the right way, it is his own misfortune, no injury to thee; nor therefore art thou to punish him in the things of this life because thou supposest he will be miserable in that which is to come. Nobody, therefore, in fine, neither single persons nor churches, nay, nor even commonwealths, have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretence of religion.

Locke mainly was concerned with mutual toleration among Christians in England. But he extended this philosophy beyond the Christian churches. Even pagans, who in his day would have been regarded with abhorrence, came in for the hands-off treatment.

But, indeed, if any people congregated upon account of religion should be desirous to sacrifice a calf, I deny that that ought to be prohibited by a law. Meliboeus, whose calf it is, may lawfully kill his calf at home, and burn any part of it that he thinks fit. For no injury is thereby done to any one, no prejudice to another man's goods. And for the same reason he may kill his calf also in a religious meeting. Whether the doing so be well-pleasing to God or no, it is their part to consider that do it. The part of the magistrate is only to take care that the commonwealth receive no prejudice, and that there be no injury done to any man, either in life or estate.

Locke wrote at the close of a generation rent by a civil war and a revolution, and in a century when the clash of Crown and Parliament and the overlapping conflicts between Protestants, Anglicans and Catholics, bloodied England.

Locke's "toleration," however, was not universal. It expressly excluded atheists, because, as is still commonly believed, they had no motive to be moral and therefore could not be trusted to be so. And Locke's toleration, like John Milton's, excluded Catholics, who, at that time, acknowledged the authority of a Pope who was prince of a secular realm, and a power-rival and dangerous enemy of the ruler of Britain.

And it certainly would have excluded the type of religion preached in modern Britain by Islamist imams. Locke excludes the intolerant from his toleration (a needle's eye that probably excludes many modern Christian fundamentalists as well).

These, therefore, and the like, who attribute unto the faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is, in plain terms, unto themselves, any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals, in civil concernments; or who upon pretence of religion do challenge any manner of authority over such as are not associated with them in their ecclesiastical communion, I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate; as neither those that will not own and teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion. For what do all these and the like doctrines signify, but that they may and are ready upon any occasion to seize the Government and possess themselves of the estates and fortunes of their fellow subjects; and that they only ask leave to be tolerated by the magistrate so long until they find themselves strong enough to effect it?

In America a century later, James Madison took Locke one step further. Madison scholar Robert Alley writes that, "toleration presumed a state perogative that, for Madison, did not exist." Madison wrote that "the right to tolerate religion presumes the right to persecute it." Instead Madison argued for "liberty of conscience." The "natural rights of man," centering in the concept of "liberty of conscience," stand, without question for Madison, above and before any other authority.

No religion, or irreligion, can be banned by the state. Even religions that make it a central aim to overthrow the state (up until the point where they act in that aim).

When Madison took his place in the Virginia legislature after the Revolutionary War, a bill stood in the General Assessment, sponsored by Patrick Henry, that would funnel tax money to support religious education in all denominations.

Henry justified this as a way to curtail the sin and immorality of young people. But the General Assessment bill would have hatched the monster Madison feared most: a "tyranny of the majority." If the ministers from all the major Protestant denominations were paid from the state treasury, a coalition of Protestant groups would relegate minority views to a "tolerated" status or worse.

The legislature was on the verge of passing the bill, but Madison convinced his colleagues to postpone a vote until the next session in 1785. Madison used the postponement to take his case to the public, writing a broadside critique, the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," which has become the classic statement for religious freedom in North America.

I cannot find that Madison, here or anywhere else, made exceptions, as Locke did, to what the state ought to tolerate in the way of religion. His sole concern was protecting the individual conscience from the intrusion of state power.

The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.

Madison insisted government keep its hands absolutely off religion.

Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.

Madison, it seems, took no cognizance of what Karl Popper, in a later, darker century than the 18th, would describe as the “paradox of tolerance.”

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade as criminal.