Posted by
jarhead on Friday, December 21, 2007 12:59:11 PM
Given the current stir about Huckabee and religion I thought it might be a good time to fully understand just what the ‘establishment clause’ is all about. The clause is part of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution and addresses freedom of religion as follows:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,”
So what does that mean and what was the intent of Founding Fathers in writing those words into the very 1st Amendment? Did it simply mean that we are a Christian nation but we don’t want the Anglicans’ to have sway over the Baptists or was it better thought out and intelligent than that?
In 1779 Thomas Jefferson, in support of his Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and a full 12 years before the Bill of Rights was written into our laws, wrote the following:
Whereas Almighty God has created the mind FREE (my emphasis), so that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who, being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose NOT (my emphasis) to propagate it by coercions on either, as was his almighty power to do; that the impious presumptions of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them others, has established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world”.
It does go on further and addresses a law to prohibit the state from requiring contributions for religions among other issues and is a document from which Madison would later write the 1st Amendment establishment clause. It is interesting to note that Mr. Jefferson was a Deist. An even casual reading of this shows that Jefferson believed that God created each of us with a free mind, free, as Thomas Paine would have it, to allow each of us to make peace with God in our own way. From Paine’s ‘The Age of Reason’:
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.”
And that Church in his own mind surely houses the religion Jefferson refers to in “the Holy Author of our religion”. It is the religion of our own making, derived from our own God given powers of Reason, individual and unassailable by any intrusion by the State.
Madison, another Deist in the Paine mold, in his formal presentation of the Amendments to the Constitution in 1789, wrote the following:
“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or in pretext, infringed.”
To those who firmly believe that the United States was established as and remains a Judeo Christian nation with certain obligations to sustain that tradition despite the 1st Amendment I say you make arguments of convenience not fact. The Founding Fathers, especially those who authored and inspired our founding documents, were Deists, professed faith in no religion but the one that populated the ‘Church of their own minds’ and that the wisdom of their efforts to assure that church and state are indeed separate, as their words clearly attest, should not be lightly overturned to suit the popular revelation of the moment.
Which brings us to Mr. Huckabee; he remains an ordained minister and he made an impassioned plea to his fellow ministers that they must ‘wake up and take America back for Christ’. Obviously the Founding Fathers had no intent of willing America to Christ to begin with but one must surely ask, if America is to be taken back from whom will it be taken? And what of the rights of those from whom it is taken? And what America would Mr. Huckabee choose to put in place of that which the Founding Fathers established 231 years ago and which has apparently done very well without Mr. Huckabee’s need to revise it.
We further do not need Mr. Huckabee’s commitment to his current and binding ordination to follow him clanking and banging like Marley’s chain ‘forged in life’, to conflict with his oath as President and with which to burden American’s not of his belief.