by J. Daryl Charles, Ph.D., Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy Senior Fellow • 4 minutes
In the almost boundless literature devoted to America’s founding, two general deficiencies can be detected. One is the obvious, and understandable, attention given to the “prominent” founders – usually a cast of five characters (Washington, Franklin, Madison, Adams, and Jefferson), with the flip-side being a neglect of other important yet less well-known – and thus “forgotten” – founders who were guided by a deep commitment to Christian faith (for example, John Witherspoon, John Dickinson, James Wilson, George Mason, John Jay, Benjamin Rush, Edmund Randolph, and Roger Sherman).
A second tendency, at least in more scholarly discussions, is to discount or downplay the role of religion and religious freedom in the founders’ and framers’ thought-world. Related to this approach is the relative failure to grasp the unique manner, compared to other worldviews, in which both Judaism and Christianity presuppose the importance of freedom of conscience, and hence religious liberty.
During the present season we do well to reflect anew on the reasons for America’s unique “experiment in ordered liberty,” at the center of which is lodged the “sacred rights of conscience.” Out of this pre-political foundation, “natural rights” and religious freedom flow. And make no mistake: both in the American context and around the globe, religious freedom is in trouble – serious trouble.
The standard account of America’s founding that is widely disseminated in our time is that religious freedom was the creation of Enlightenment thinking, with its commitment to secular rationalism in the wake of religious wars and violence that ravaged Europe.
This view, it is thought, finds substantiation in several elements – for example, certain assumptions about a “wall” of separation between church and state, the absence of creedal affirmations or biblical citations in the framers’ charter documents, and purported “deistic” references to the divinity in these documents.
A retelling of the narrative of America’s “origins,” by contrast, proceeds under different assumptions. (In recent decades we have the writings of people such as Daniel L. Dreisbach, Mark David Hall, and Jeffry H. Morrison to thank for recognizing the role and influence that Christian faith had on the founders’ generation. Their argument is not that America is – or was – a Christian nation, only that Christian convictions were enormously influential in 17th- and 18th-century colonial thought, and hence informed the founders’ vision of a free society and religious freedom.)
It is more accurate to acknowledge that our nation’s charter documents, which declare all to be “created equal” with “inalienable rights” that have been “endowed by the Creator” and which assert that these “self-evident truths” are anchored in the “law of Nature and Nature’s God,” are in fact a mirror of Christian conviction. In theological terms, this understanding of “religious freedom” proceeds from an awareness of human beings being created in the image of God. Without this foundation, as the founders knew, “inalienable rights” become “alienable” and in time shift in dangerous ways and in dangerous directions.
It is the religious impulse, and specifically the Judeo-Christian impulse, that acknowledges the source of our most basic rights to be pre-political, and thus neither to be “established” nor eliminated by government. Religious freedom and any “establishment” of religion is voluntary and does not need the state’s coercive power for support, as Christianity teaches. “Free exercise” is a gift of “nature and nature’s God” and hence a sacred right. Because human conscience is ordered to the truth, it is “sacred” and therefore to be respected. A moral realism characterized the founders’ thinking regarding human nature, which they understood to be a mixture of dignity and depravity. Therefore, to concentrate too much power in the hands of a few is dangerous.
However, upon visiting America fifty years after its founding, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville warned against an opposite error – a “tyranny of the majority” – by which Americans’ obsession with freedom and equality could render that democracy unjust. Tocqueville at the same time praised America for the freedom and influence that religion possessed in this young nation.
A generation ago Pope John Paul II extended this “Tocquevillian” warning in multiple forms and with different words. Notably, in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor and his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae John Paul cautioned those living in Western democracies only a few years after the extraordinary events in Eastern Europe to which he himself had contributed. Today, he warned,
when many countries have seen the fall of ideologies which bound politics to a totalitarian conception of the world . . . there is no less grave a danger that the fundamental rights of the human person will be denied and that the religious yearnings which arise in the heart of every human being will be absorbed once again into politics. This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from the political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible. (Veritatis Splendor no. 101)
John Paul’s words should give us pause. The self-centered perversion of our freedoms, coupled with the disappearance of moral law, can serve to veil either a softer or harder form of “totalitarianism.” Democracy cannot survive without virtuous and self-governed people. And with that erosion of the social-cultural fabric, religious freedom becomes impossible.
Irrespective of political winds that are blowing, may we as American citizens substitute gratitude for grievances, replace resentment with reconciliation, and prayerfully use our freedoms for the common good and service to those in need around the globe. And may we be bold, with many of the founding fathers, in asserting our religious freedom – for the good of others and the glory of Almighty God.
