What the Founding Fathers Meant When They Wrote the First Amendment
I started reading Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto last night and he has a short chapter devoted to the Christian foundations of America and said a few interesting things about the so-called “separation of church and state” that I thought were definitely postworthy, especially in light of the recent Kentucky Court of Appeals decision detailed in my father’s last post and all the hub-bub about Christmas displays. Here are a select few quotes:
We must not forget that many of those who came to America from Europe came for religious purposes. As they arrived, most of them established their own individual civil governments based upon the Bible. It is, therefore, totally foreign to the basic nature of America at the time of the writing of the Constitution to argue a separation doctrine that implies a secular state.
The first purpose [of the First Amendment] was that there would be no established, national church for the united thirteen states. To say it another way: There would be no “Church of the United States.”…Nevertheless, a number of the individual states had state churches, and even that was not considered in conflict with the First Amendment. “At the outbreak of the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen colonies had conferred special benefits upon one church to the exclusion of others.” “In all but one of the thirteen states, the states taxed the people to support the preaching of the gospel and to build churches.”"…the Massachusetts Constitution was not amended until 1853 to eliminate the tax-supported church provisions.” (Quotes from Herbert W. Titus, Education, Caesar’s or God’s: A Constitutional Question of Jurisdiction)
As a matter of historical fact, the Founding Fathers believed that the public interest was served by the promotion of religion…[and] in 1811 the New York state court upheld an indictment for blasphemous utterances against Christ, and it its ruling, given by Chief Justice Kent, the court said, “We are Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity.”…The Pennsylvania state court also affirmed the conviction of a man on charges of blasphemy, here aginst the Holy Scriptures. The Court said: “Christianity, general Christianity is, and always has been, a part of the common law of Pennsylvania…not Christianity founded on any particular religious tenets; nor Christianity with an established church and tithes and spiritual courts; but Christianity with liberty of conscience to all men.”
The reason I mention these things isn’t necessarily that I think that the government should run the same way it did back then with state churches, etc., but that it is very clear from these quotes that this country was founded upon the principles of the Christianity of the reformation, and that the writers of the First Amendment did not take it to establish a secular state. And if the Constitution is going to mean anything as the guiding force of the government of this country, then it must be interpreted by what its writers meant. If we are free to reinterpret the Constitution in whatever way we see fit, it doesn’t even make much sense to have a Constitution.