Disciple: Faith and Freedom

The struggle for religious freedom in America

By The Rev. Dr. N. Brooks Graebner

Each year, we celebrate July 4th with fireworks, picnics, baseball and parades. We revel in the freedoms we enjoy, give thanks for them, and marvel at the odds overcome to make them a reality. United as Americans, we are of one mind as we celebrate Independence Day, and we spend little, if any, time thinking about how divisive the founding of our nation was. The fact is, not everyone supported the fight for independence, including many religious leaders. Faith and the meaning of religious freedom played a significant role both in our founding and in the years following.

No religious body in the American colonies had a harder time coming to terms with the American Revolution and the concept of disestablishment than our own. One sure sign of how slow we were to embrace the new American nation is reflected in the fact that The Episcopal Church didn’t add Independence Day to the calendar of feasts until the Prayer Book of 1928. The reasons colonists fought disestablishment are not hard to fathom. Loyalist sentiment was strong within the Church, especially among the clergy. Moreover, in the southern colonies at least, the Church of England enjoyed the privileged status that went with establishment. This was especially significant in Virginia, the longest and best-supported of the colonial Anglican establishments.

Equally clear was the fact the new American nation was ill-equipped to form a strong new religious establishment. There was no single religious group that enjoyed widespread support across the 13 colonies. Even where establishments did exist - Anglican in the South and Congregationalist in New England - they were under increasing pressure to accommodate dissenting groups of Baptists, Quakers and Presbyterians. More importantly, there were several colonies, Pennsylvania in particular, with no formal establishment of religion at all, yet civic order and religious vitality seemed no worse for the lack.

In the early days after the revolution, it was by no means self-evident what the religious policy of the various states—and the new nation—would be. Some states, like North Carolina, abolished their establishments as early as 1776. But in New England and Virginia, proponents of establishment held on and continued to contend for it into the 19th century. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1833 that Massachusetts finally did away with the last vestiges of its colonial establishment.

But it was the battles in Virginia, pitting Patrick Henry against future presidents James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, that were of special interest to the nation—and to the interests of The Episcopal Church.

A PERSUASIVE ARGUMENT

Patrick Henry is best remembered as an ardent patriot, famous for declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death!” But he was an equally ardent Episcopalian, and he remained committed to the notion of religious establishment. Henry was realistic enough to understand that the monopoly enjoyed by colonial Anglicans was not sustainable. So in 1785, he sponsored a bill in the Virginia General Assembly calling for a modified form of establishment called a “general assessment,” whereby public funds would be shared by all Christian groups willing to teach Christian doctrine and morality and to play a positive role in upholding the civic order. This would, in effect, broaden the establishment of religion in Virginia by embracing other denominations besides the Episcopalians. But it would also make Virginia an unmistakably and explicitly Christian commonwealth. The government would be recognizing and authorizing certain religious groups and granting them privileged status.

Thomas Jefferson had made what was, in effect, a countering argument six years before. He proposed a bill in 1779 to establish religious freedom in Virginia, but Jefferson was unable to get it passed by the General Assembly. So this time, upon hearing Henry’s proposal, it was James Madison, also an Episcopalian, who took the lead in countering it. He composed and circulated a document known as “A Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” which garnered sufficient support in the Assembly to turn back Henry’s bill and make possible the subsequent passage of Jefferson’s. Madison’s views were also soon enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Why was Madison so persuasive? How he framed his argument had a lot to do with it. From the outset of the “Memorial and Remonstrance” document, Madison made it clear his aim was not to diminish religious observance, but rather to protect it from all intrusions of the State. He began from the premise that our duty to God takes precedence over the claims of civil society, and it can be fulfilled only by reason and conviction, free from all coercion. Madison rejected the notion that civil magistrates were competent to make religious judgments on behalf of others or entitled to use religion as an engine of civil policy. Christianity, he asserted, needs no support from the powers of this world. When it allied itself to such powers, the result was the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of purity and efficacy, the co-mingling of civil and spiritual powers produced “pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” Rather, the ages in which Christianity appeared with greatest luster were the ages prior to its incorporation with civil policy - before the time of Constantine - when all support for Christianity was freely offered. The best religious policy for government to take, Madison argued, was simply to protect every citizen in the free exercise of religion with the same equal hand with which it protects person and property. This religious policy was best for the well-being of Christianity.

In other words, Madison appealed to the very nature of Christianity itself in its purest and most original form. He reminded his readers that freedom of conscience is at the heart of genuine religious observance, and the alliance of church and state corrupts Christian witness. His approach stood in contrast to Jefferson’s. Jefferson, who was prone to speak dismissively about religion, famously declared at one point in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Madison’s argument contained not a hint of anti-religious or anti-Christian rhetoric. Disestablishment was not a denigration of Christianity but a safeguard for an authentic religious life of freely offered service to God. Matched side by side with Patrick Henry’s bill, Madison had the high theological ground.

Thomas Jefferson. By Rembrandt Peale [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons	James Madison. By John Vanderlyn [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons	Thomas Paine. By Auguste Millière [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Church and State

Madison’s way of thinking about church-state relations broke with the dominant Anglican position held since the time of Henry VIII, who regarded the Church and the Crown as inseparable. But in America, Madison gained adherents among his fellow Episcopalians. Among those who wholeheartedly embraced Madison’s position for ecclesiastical reasons was the Rt. Rev. John Henry Hobart of New York, the early 19th-century architect of the High Church tradition in the American Episcopal Church. Hobart was a firm proponent of church-state separation, precisely because he wanted to identify The Episcopal Church with the apostolic and primitive character of the Early Church and keep it free from contaminating influences. When other American denominations wanted to join forces and pressure the United States government to stop Sunday mail delivery, Hobart demurred. The role of the Church was strictly to attend to its own distinctive character and witness, not to bend society at large to some allegedly Christian project.

Not all Episcopalians agreed with Hobart. The Rt. Rev. William White of Pennsylvania, for example, served as chaplain to the Continental Congress and remained a strong proponent of the Church’s continuing leadership in American society, albeit on a voluntary, non-established basis. Many Episcopalians took part in social reform movements broadly supported by other American Protestants, and they were critical of the High Church Party’s refusal to take a stand on the great moral issue of slavery. But Hobart’s witness, like Madison’s, was a reminder that a Church that claims apostolicity can never be reduced to one particular political or social agenda. And the Church doesn’t need the trappings of public displays of Christian symbols to maintain the integrity of its own witness.

Indeed, the Church witnesses best to society when it proclaims the Gospel and speaks its own conscience. We must be truly grateful to live in a country where the rights of conscience are upheld, and where no one should be forced to accept another’s religious convictions. May we be vigilant in helping to keep it so.

The Rev. Dr. N. Brooks Graebner is the rector at St. Matthew’s, Hillsborough, and also serves as Historiographer of the Diocese for the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. Contact him at [email protected].

LEARN MORE

Want to learn more about faith and the founding of our nation? Check out some of the books that proved useful to the Rev. Dr. Graebner as he wrote this article:

David L. Holmes, Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford, 2006), meticulously reconstructs the varied personal religious beliefs and practices of our nation’s first leaders.

Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, The Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 2006), chronicles the role of religion in American public life and lobbies for a middle path between ardent secularism and the religious right.

Robert Bruce Mullin, Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (Yale, 1986), details the life and legacy of Bishop John Henry Hobart (1775-1830).