Recently the Tennessee House of Representatives attempted to
pass a law that would have made the Bible the official state book. Their Senate
realized, after their State’s Attorney General opined this, it would violate
the First Amendment by approving the Book. It was establishing a religion. The
attempt ended.
Bobby Jindal,
Governor of Louisiana, had made a public point in an invitation to a
Christian event in January 25, that the US was founded by Christians and this
is a Christian country. That this
country was founded by Christians is true. The majority of the US practices
Christianity today, but the Constitution
defined freedom of religion quite differently than that envisioned by our
earliest settlers.
The Pilgrims, Christians, came to the US to seek freedom to
practice their religion, but not to establish freedom for others. The Mayflower
Compact, the document written aboard their ship, was an understanding of what
kind of colony they were founding and what the attitude should be of the
non-Pilgrims accompanying them. They wrote as their purpose, “ for the glory of God, and advancement of the
Christian faith.” By the time of the
Declaration of Independence and later officially when the US Constitution was
written, freedom of religion was meant for all practitioners of religion and
even non-practitioners. The First Amendment made it clear that there should be
no state religion. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religions, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”
The definition of freedom of religion addresses freedom for
whom to do what. The Pilgrims and
Puritans came to establish freedom of religion for themselves free to practice
their own brand of Christianity free of the King of England. Tolerance of
others was not their purpose. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony hung
Quakers for not going along with their concept of purification. Roger Williams left the Colony to found Rhode
Island because “As faith is the free work of the Holy Spirit, it cannot be
forced on a person.”
Nearly every colony
had established their state approved religion before 1776. Maryland tried to legislate tolerance.
Unfortunately it got tangled up in the religious conflicts of the Cromwellian
era and intolerance of Catholics lasted until the signing of the Declaration of
Independence when Baptists and Presbyterians demanded disestablishment of state
churches and protection of religious freedom
It was the son of the Age of Reason, Thomas Jefferson, who
wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1779 and the concepts were
incorporated in the First Amendment and who argued for separation of church and
state. The Supreme Court has upheld the
concept but modern applications have
raised issues never envisioned by our
forefathers, leading to many hair
splitting rulings and more to come.
Yes, Christian
protestants were the first founders of our nation but it took another 160 years
for our forefathers to understand that separation of church and state was
crucial to freedom for all to practice their religion and that there should be
no established state religion.
A version of this appeared in the www.skyhidailynews.com May 29, 2015
A version of this appeared in the www.skyhidailynews.com May 29, 2015
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