What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (33 page)

Nor did the Puritans, who arrived a decade later, put a premium on religious freedom. They treated dissenters more harshly than they themselves had been treated back in England. You see, they wanted religious liberty, but only for themselves—a concept even the Mullahs of Iran can roll with.

When Quakers started to arrive in Massachusetts, Boston authorities passed a law in 1656 that imposed a fine of one-hundred pounds on any sea captain who brought a Quaker to their shores. If one was discovered, he was whipped. Mary Barrett Dyer, a Quaker activist who opposed this law, was hanged in 1660. She wasn’t the only one to get this treatment. In other colonies, Christmas celebrations were outlawed because it was regarded as a papist holiday or too larded with pagan evergreens and whatnot.

By the time of the American Revolution, over a century later, North America was cluttered with offbeat religions too weird for the mainstream churches back in Europe to stomach. With all these dizzy cults in the land, it was impossible for America’s founders to concoct a state religion that wouldn’t piss somebody off.

Most of these churches were Christian, but that didn’t mean they got along. Methodists, Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Huguenots, Quakers, Mennonites—most of them had little affection for each other. Half of them didn’t think the other half were even Christian.

There was no way this smorgasbord of sects was going to be happy with a one-faith-fits-all national church. So, the framers dumped the idea of government-backed religion altogether. This didn’t mean religion was removed from the public sphere. Americans could worship God any way they wanted, including right out in the open. They just couldn’t do it on the public dime or on public property. Churches would have to rise or fall on their own.

Separation of Church and State

Strange as it sounds, separation of church and state is one of America’s great gifts to the modern world. Critics insist those exact words, “separation of church and state,” are nowhere in the Constitution. It’s true. Neither is the word “democracy,” but it adds up to the same thing. The words “Original Sin” are nowhere in the Bible, but nobody claims the idea isn’t in there.

The term “separation of church and state” comes from an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson to a Baptist congregation assuring them that their religious rights would be secure under the new American government:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god…
their
legislature [the American people] should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”

 

The term was coined as a
defense
of religious freedom. Of course, some folks don’t want to hear this. They naturally fall back on the famous words from the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…

 

It sure sounds like Jefferson thinks our rights come from God. But a couple of points here. First, the Declaration was a rationale for revolution; it’s not the law of the land. Second, it doesn’t matter where Jefferson thought our rights came from. If I think they come from a pizza joint in Albuquerque, I’m every bit as American as he was. What matters is that our government recognizes these rights, not our personal theories about where they originated. Third, the word “Creator” is deliberately broad so it can encompass almost any belief. Some thought “Creator” referred to the laws of nature. Straining logic, am I? Let’s look at the
first
sentence of the Declaration:

When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…

 

America was entitled to separate from Britain based on “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Notice that the Laws of Nature—scientific rationalism—come first.
Then
comes Nature’s God. And who is Nature’s God?

Well, he wasn’t the faith-healing, corpse-raising, miracle-whipping guy who makes statues of Mary cry tears of blood in horror movies. He was the Deist god of the Enlightenment. The Supreme Being who created the universe, set up the laws of nature to make it run, and then let it go. America’s founders believed in God, but they also subscribed to Newton’s Laws of Motion. The rule of Reason was their guiding principle. The Declaration of Independence was not written by a theologian. It was written by a scientist.

Eleven years later, in 1787, the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia without any public prayer. As the framers debated, Ben Franklin became so frustrated by their stalemated haggling that he suggested an appeal to God in the form of a morning sermon. But he also said, “I beg I may not be understood to infer, that our general Convention was divinely inspired when it formed the new federal Constitution.” That’s Ben Franklin saying the Constitution is not divinely inspired. His motion for a sermon never carried.

During their presidencies, both Jefferson and Madison refused to issue public prayers. Madison didn’t even want chaplains in the military or in Congress.

Religion is mentioned only twice in the Constitution—both times to separate it from the government. The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free practice thereof,” and Article VI, Section 3 says that members of the U.S. government shall be bound by oath to the Constitution, but that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Pledging loyalty to the Constitution had nothing to do with pledging loyalty to God—even if this idea gets lost during presidential primaries.

Summing up the process of writing the Constitution, early American historian Robert Middlekauff observed, “There were no genuine evangelicals in the Convention, and there were no heated declarations of Christian piety.”

In God We Trust

These words are the national motto of the United States. But they weren’t always. In fact, up until 1956, the national motto was “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many, One). It enshrined the notion that many colonies and peoples united to form a single country. The founders didn’t mention God because, after witnessing 400 years of religious warfare, they got the message. Religion divided as much as it unified. Maybe more.

This is why “In God We Trust” never appeared on U.S. currency during the lifetime of any of the founders. It’s a religious idea stamped onto a government document—a constitutional no-no. It first appeared nearly a century after the Revolution, during the Civil War—one of those unfortunate periods of religious revivalism. After the war, cooler heads prevailed and the words were removed. But they popped up again several times until the 1930s, when they stayed on for good.

It wasn’t until 1956 that Congress, in a fit of anti-communist pandering, made it the national motto. But it was never the heart and soul of the republic. It was an afterthought.

One Nation Under God

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

 

This is the original Pledge of Allegiance as written by a Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy, in 1892.

A couple of details. First, the word “indivisible” was intended to emphasize national unity in the wake of the Civil War. Second, in 1923, the Daughters of the American Revolution pushed to change “my Flag” to “the flag of the United States of America,” in case there was any confusion about whose flag they were pledging allegiance to. (The Daughters were a persnickety bunch, but they did have a point. The Stars and Bars of the old Confederacy still had a big fan club.)

The Pledge of Allegiance was first published in
The Youth’s Companion
, a hugely popular family magazine. At the time, Bellamy was chairman of a committee of state superintendents for the National Education Association. He led a nationwide effort to celebrate the 400
^th
anniversary of Columbus’s voyage by having a U.S. flag raised on every schoolyard in America. He wrote the pledge, in part, to promote that cause.

Not coincidentally,
The Youth’s Companion
was also in the business of selling…flags. By 1892, they had peddled Old Glory to 26,000 schools. Nobody said patriotism couldn’t be lucrative. Wanna bet somebody’s making a mint from flag lapel pins today? Wanna bet they probably live in China?

To his credit, Bellamy tried to include “equality” in the pledge (he was a Christian Socialist), but he was voted down by the board that approved it because the others were against equality for blacks and women. Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

It wasn’t until 1954 that Congress, in another bout of anti-communist showboating, inserted “under God” into the pledge—an addition that Bellamy’s own granddaughter said he would have opposed.

America’s founders would also have opposed those words. Pledging loyalty to the republic is not the same thing as believing in God. That’s why the Constitution forbids religious tests for office. Taoists and Wiccans are Americans, too, though don’t tell that to the Christian Coalition.

Oh, and for those who insist that young minds are substantially shaped by flag-worshipping rituals, remind them that the original salute to the flag, before we started putting our hands on our hearts, involved extending the arm forward and up—like the Nazis did. It’s the weirdest thing seeing old photos of kids in American classrooms saluting the Stars and Stripes like Der Führer. Those kids grew up to become America’s “greatest generation,” and they all learned the pledge without the words “under God.” The ones who
did
grow up saying those words were the Baby Boomers.

In Their Own Words

So, what did the founders themselves actually think about the American republic and God? Were they pious Christians bent on a Bible-based society? No. Mostly they wanted tax cuts and the vote—neither of which are in the Laws of Moses or the Lord’s Prayer. Let’s see what they had to say about religion.

George Washington:

There’s a famous story about Washington, who attended services at his Episcopal church. He’d show up for the first half of the service, then get up and leave once the sermon started. When his bishop told him this disturbed the proceedings, Washington agreed…and he stopped showing up altogether.

For Washington, church was something you grew up with, and he spoke many times of the virtue and necessity of religious belief. But he was not a fundamentalist, he did not obsess over faith, and he kept it a safe distance from his official duties. That painting of him kneeling in prayer in the snow at Valley Forge? Urban legend. This doesn’t mean he didn’t pray. He just didn’t do it out in the snow during the coldest winter of the 18
^th
century.

Like many of his day, Washington gave religion its due:

“Reason and experience forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail to the exclusion of religious principle.”

 

Fair enough. But historians see him as more or less a deist, and throughout his career he made scant mention of God or Jesus in his official capacities. When it came to religion, he spoke for himself, not the country. He also told dirty jokes.

Ben Franklin:

Also raised in the Episcopal Church, and originally headed for the priesthood, he abandoned it for Deism. He believed in a generic religion, but he separated it from virtue and morality. He was hardly a model Christian. Aside from his womanizing, he confessed that he liked Christ’s teachings, but did not believe in his divinity. This would get you scolded in Sunday school—which didn’t become popular until the next century, by the way.

Franklin was an inventor and a man of science, and he had a few run-ins with preachers, most notably over his new lightning rod. They objected to it because lightning was regarded as punishment from God, and it was out of line for man to circumvent it. Ironically, the churches that didn’t use it were the ones most likely to burn down. Their pastors preferred to ward off lightning strikes with prayer, or by ringing the church bells—which sometimes got the bell-ringer electrocuted. Small wonder Franklin copped an attitude toward traditional religion:

“Original Sin was as ridiculous as imputed righteousness.”

 

He was not hostile towards Christianity; his views were pretty moderate. But he was not much of a churchgoer. The following may explain why: