Up a Tree

The headline jumped out at me as I perused one of the several news feeds I check each day: "Taylor Swift is related to famed poet Emily Dickinson and now it all makes sense," proclaimed a CNN headline. Ordinarily I wouldn't have cared a whit and moved on. I'm not a Swiftie or even a fan (then again I'm not exactly the target audience.) But these days she can hardly sneeze without some news outlet posting a breathless article about it. But with what I consider to be the inordinate amount  of publicity the woman receives and my delving into my family's past to learn more about history, I gave the article a read.  A lot of questions popped up in my head. Who cares, was the first. Well obviously Swift fans, who've apparently made comparisons between the women. And I suspect they'd be excited because they would imagine a genetic link between the two women's perceived greatness, so of course their idol would have been fated to become their favorite songs...

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 t...

A letter such as the one sent by the Danbury Baptist Association to a sitting president needed to be answered. When I first read it, I was a little confused because the letter doesn't seem to indicate that the writers knew anything about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, which were ratified a decade before they contacted President Jefferson.  Now I wonder if they were testing the President. How committed was he to religious freedom? After all, his politics trended to a "states' rights" perspective. Now that he held the president, would he commit to defending religious rights for everyone as part of the duties of his office, or might he side with states that had enacted establishment legislation and defer to them in the hopes that they, like his home state, might see the light and disestablish their Christian denominations? I've not read widely enough to settle these questions. But keep them in mind when you consider the contents of the letter. Take a min...

I neglected to mention last time the outcome of the "Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion" -- it failed. Perhaps you already guessed that.  I should also point out Patrick Henry's reasoning on the bill. Simply put people who follow religion -- and yes, I know that whole argument about how "Christianity's not a religion, etc." -- and who regularly attend churches for religious instruction tend to be the kind of citizens we want to foster: prone to follow rules (laws), not given as much to being quarrelsome, more generous than the average unchurced person, regular nice people. And government should want to prop up an institution that creates these law-abiding, somewhat passive citizens. I see this reasoning quoted in an annual ad by a commercial business that used to appear in the papers I read. Ben Franklin -- hardly a Christian icon -- and George Washington -- pretty much your standard Anglican churchgoer -- believed the same ...

Arguments over the meaning of religious liberty have taken place since before the creation of the nation. We've all heard the tales about the Puritans and the Pilgrims coming to America to escape the religious persecutions in England -- and in truth many other European countries.  England, of course, has an established church, the Church of England, more commonly referred to as the Anglican Church, though we may have forgotten that the reigning monarch is also the titular head of this communion. He or she technically can push the church in any direction he/she chooses and can appoint any number of officials. In practice these days, the Crown takes advice on the nomination of the Archbishop of Canterbury from the prime minister, who in turns takes advice from a nominating committee which consists, somewhat paradoxically, of members mostly not from the Anglican communion. What we don't usually hear much about is that once the Puritans, and Pilgrims to a much lesser extent, arrive...

Thomas Jefferson made his views on religion abundantly clear in his writings. If you're curious and have the time, look up his correspondence with Joseph Priestly, an English scientist credited with "discovering" oxygen, and Unitarian minister.  James Madison, on the other hand, can be a little harder to pin down. He associated with Jefferson, who could properly be called Madison's mentor, sought Jefferson's advice, acted as a stand-in for Jefferson and succeeded Jefferson in the presidency, in no small part because of Jefferson's support. He was baptised as an infant in an Anglican church and was married by an Episcopal minister. He seems to have attended church regularly when at home, but was not so faithful while away attending legislative session. As a president, though, he attended worship at a local congregation and with a group that met in the House of Representatives. Some have ascribed political motives or social convention to this attendance.  He did...

Today I intend to approach my topic a bit backwards from my usual method. That method is to search through the genealogies of the Reagans and O'Connors until I encounter a relative whose info contains a reference to a historical event, then research that event and write about it. Occasionally I run into an interesting story about the person that illuminates the times he/she lived in and relate that story. But today, in light of discussions that have been ongoing for a couple of decades and have intensified in more recent years, I wanted to hark back to the reason the Barebones Parliament failed -- a striking difference in approaches to religion in public life. That same issue resulted in the colonization of the land we live in by English settlers -- note that this did not seem to be a problem for the other major nations who made their mark on the American landscape: the Spanish, French, and to some extent the Dutch. Sure religious dissidents existed in those nations, but they weren...