On Church and State
I have always felt that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment had specific meaning: to prevent the state from ‘establishing a religion’ but I never really saw it as a prohibition of religion in state funded/sponsored organizations (schools and townhalls). My view was unique mainly because I wasn’t terribly religious earlier in my life. Prior to meeting my wife the only church I attended with any regularity was a Unitarian congregation in Massachusetts. In 1998 my wife and I began visiting various churches around Dallas looking for a church home and literally ran across a Cooperative Baptist church called Wilshire. We immediately connected with the church and I was baptized in 2001.
My views about separation of church and state have been evolving of late. As a Republican in Texas I have been surprised how much the party seems to revolve around religious values instead of conservative values. While at first glance this may seem positive, I think it has hurt our party and ironically our religious institutions. When Governor Bush became President Bush his first executive order was to create the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives. His second executive order lifted restrictions on DOJ, HUD and Health and Human Services, Department of Labor and Department of Education that made it difficult for private organizations (i.e. churches) from seeking federal funds. The federal government was going to start funding activities sponsored by churches (and other groups). This didn’t seem like a very conservative measure – in fact it seemed a lot like an expansion of government and intermingling of the state and religion.
Bush’s executive orders meant that billions of dollars would be injected into faith-based organizations as well as non-faith-based organization like ACORN. The proverbial floodgates were opened and the money flowed. I believe this was a mistake. Bush and his allies suggested that the money would NOT be spent on religious purposes – but this is a silly argument – money is 100% fungible. ACORN has two arms. The nonpartisan side of the house at ACORN focuses on voter drives, receiving federal funding to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year. The partisan side of the house at ACORN endorsed Barak Obama and took money from his election to fund voter drives.
MY POSITION: The founders never mentioned God in the Constitution. They specifically sought to prevent the establishment (i.e. funding) of religion in the United States. We need to return to those ideas. Separation of church and state is NOT meant to protect the state, but to protect the church. The state can ONLY poison religion (see the Middle East). Bush sought to expand the role of the church to offset the role of secular groups like ACORN, but abandoning conservative values is never the answer. Ironically, ACORN was MUCH better at securing federal funding than our churches were. Our party is made up of Christians, but it shouldn’t be a Christian party. Our country is made up of Christians, but we shouldn’t attempt to make it a Christian state.
Last Sunday Wilshire hosted a Baptist historian from the First Baptist Church (i.e. the first Baptist church founded in the New World – 1638) who gave a presentation on the history of the Baptist church as it relates to the separation of church and state. I was fascinated by Stanley Lemmons presentation. Dr. Stanley was a history professor at Rhode Island College from 1967 to 2006 and is the historian for the First Baptist Church in America. I learned a couple of interesting things:
- Early Baptist in England, like Roger Williams, came up with the revolutionary idea that church and state should be separated.
- Rhode Island was chartered by Baptist and it was the ONLY colony/state not to adopt a state religion.
- Baptist in Virginia blocked ratification of the Constitution until James Madison promised to include the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment after ratification.
Interestingly, the Baptist felt that any institution with the power of the sword had no business dealing with matters of the church. They believed in soul freedom, i.e. “the soul is competent before God, and capable of making decisions in matters of faith without coercion or compulsion by any larger religious or civil body.” In early America Baptist were a fringe religious sect and they felt that given a ‘free marketplace of ideas’ their ideas would spread like wildfire – all that was needed was for the state to get out of the way. They were right. Once each state abandoned the idea of a ’state’ religion the Baptists and Methodists flourished in the United States.
The atheists have co-opted the argument FOR separation of church and state and many conservatives (even Baptists) have taken up the argument FOR inclusion of religion in state sponsored activities like school and in town squares. The whole idea of the separation of church and state was invented by Baptists who sought the freedom to practice their Religion without state interference. Roger Williams, one of the early founders of the Baptist church, was exiled from England for his beliefs. He was even exiled from Massachusetts for those same beliefs. Conservatives (and Baptists) need to take back the issue of separation of church and state – the concept is biblicaly sound as well as founded in conservative values. Today we may be the majority, but tomorrow we might be the minority (see growth of Islam).
