TJ and the liberties: The wall and the glitch in the Matrix

I've read several news analyses and opinion columns over the years discussing why Supreme Court rulings on the religion section of the First Amendment are so varied. Why, they ask, can't the court be consistent with its rulings?

The answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer is that the rulings reflect the two main streams of thought that have existed since the ratifications of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: accommodationism and separationism. The more complex and nuanced answer is that even if you appeal to the Founding Fathers -- a group whose membership fluctuates according to the persons or groups who appeal to them -- you find both sentiments at play, even in the two men we've been looking at: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Just one example for each man: Jefferson started attending worship services held in the House of Representatives after a prominent Virginia preacher was invited to speak at a service, and apparently continued to attend for the rest of his time in office. This would seem to show that Jefferson had no problem with religious activities occurring on public property.

James Madison had no problems with the houses of Congress having paid chaplains based on tradition. Legislatures and legislative bodies had employed chaplains for many years, and he seemed to think no harm had been done. 

Other Founders are often cited in religious freedom arguments, such as George Washington, whose religiosity appears to be the same as a great deal of people -- he regularly attended services in the Anglican Church, which had taught him he was a Christian because he'd been baptized in the church. He expressed the theology of the church, hardly a firebrand of more evangelistically inclined churches. 

And Ben Franklin often comes up. Now good old Ben favored church attendance and a certain amount of church support from the government because he believed good church people made good citizens, meaning they worked hard, as a rule, and tended to stay out of trouble. And he encouraged having opening prayers at the sessions of the Constitutional Convention. But Ben's beliefs are so fuzzy as to cause some writers to refer to him as a deist, a description he applied to himself in his autobiography,  while others think he had no real religious beliefs at all. He was one of the original, "I'm spiritual but not religious" kind of people. 

But because of his references to prayer, morality, and a God who "governs the affairs of Men," he is also enlisted in the cause of proving the Founders wanted Christianity to be the default religion of the land. So appealing to the Founding Fathers introduces rather a lot less light on the subject of religious freedom than groups who try to enlist them for support would claim. 

As they did in framing the founding documents of our republic, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its Bill of Rights, Jefferson and Madison set the tone for the discussion of religious freedom, and their views mostly held sway in the early years of the nation. Some years would pass between the Constitutional Convention and the time when all the then existing states adopted religious freedom rights, fulfilling a dream Jefferson expressed in his letter to the Danbury Baptists.

In the debates since that time, another aspect of the Danbury letter winds up being hotly debated. Was the wall metaphor intended solely to protect the church from the government? Given the historical background, this seems unlikely. Both Jefferson and Madison knew that when a government supports and funds one particular religion or substrate of that religion, it means that other religions and those who don't follow a religion find themselves cut off from their rights to free exercise of their beliefs because the favored religion will use the government for its own ends.

So the wall separates the government from the church but also separates the church from the government. Both men expressed that even the Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist should enjoy religious freedom if they attained citizenship. The Christian church, in their writings, does not and should not enjoy favored status over any other religion , or to repeat, no religion at all. 

Figuring out how to accomplish these ideals has produced the mishmash of decisions we've seen in this country in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Image: Country church. Picture by the writer, all rights reserved.