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The question of the consitutionality of President Bush's Faith-Based Initiative is before the Supreme Court. I have posted information already here.

In this post I wish to give a brief historical survey of the relationship between Church and State in the United States into the 20th century.

To begin, I will repeat material from an earlier post on Religion and Public Policy. (If interested in the entire series, see Religion and Public Policy under Categories on the right.)

The Constitution of 1787 has been called the most secular document produced until then. There is no mention of God. ( An omission which some 19th-century evangelicals tried and failed to correct through Constitutional amendment.) And the few mentions of religion are negative (no religious tests for public office, etc.) Furthermore, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion, or from interfering with the free exercise of religion. As is well known, we have been debating since then exactly what the role of religion, and its relationship to government, should be regarding public policy. Avoiding the lengthy and messy details of this history, I wish to make a few points.

First, neither the Declaration of Independence, nor The Articles of Confederation, nor the actions of the Continental Congress, nor the Constitution of 1787, nor the actions of Congress in the opening decades of our nationhood, can be understood to be a deliberate rejection of religion. This assertion can be sustained by comparing our Revolution and its aftermath to the French Revolution. Even our most Enlightenment influenced founders such as Jefferson and Franklin were products of the English-speaking Enlightenment, not the French-speaking. They rejected traditional Christianity, but did not reject the idea of God and an orderly universe governed by laws established by the divine Law Giver. Jefferson and Adams did not hope that all religion would die away; they hoped that a sort of Rational Christianity would replace traditional sects. My point: the founders did not envision a secular society as we understand one, therefore the context in which to understand our Constitution, and by extension our present government including public debate, is not that of a thoroughly secular world-view.

Second, in prohibiting the Federal government from establishing a religion (First Amendment), the founders were paying homage to two realities: states with their own laws, including established churches in some of them (Massachusetts was the last to disestablish in 1833); and the Christian diversity of the American population in which no single church had the alliegance of an overwhelming majority of citizens. Another reality that may have influenced the decision, a significant number of Americans belonged to no church. (Though very few of these were secular men and women in the modern sense of the term; their worldview tended to be a kind of generic Protestantism.) My point: the no establishment clause cannot be understodd as a mandate for removing religion from the public square.

Third, the history of political discourse, and public policy, in the United States is filled with religious motivation and rhetoric. Slavery, Women's Rights, Consumption of Alcohol, the place of Farmers and Workers in the Industrial Economy, Race Relations, and more, all have been argued in Christian language and reasoning. Point: historical precedent allows the use of religious reasoning in public discourse, and by extension, in public policy.


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Today is the 200th anniversary of the British decision to end the slave trade within the empire. Today also is the release date for the new movie Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce, the Christian politician whose achievement the ending of the slave trade is.

USA Today has a good article on the movie, with some historical background, and some early evangelical reaction to the film. Link from Religion Headlines.