re; 'Liars For Jesus'...
Here's the foreward. It's a pretty fair read:
Foreward
The work that you hold in your hands has been a labor of love and of will. It has taken almost three years to come to print. Along the way there were many preliminary working deadlines. Many of us closest to Chris Rodda’s work yearned for those deadlines to be met and the promise of her work to be fulfilled. This was for very selfish reasons. We wanted a credible and thorough way of addressing the numerous lies and misrepresentations being spread by some Christians and their leaders concerning the faith and religion of our Founding Fathers. The deadlines we pressured Chris to meet were more often temptations because of the political climate than realistic expectations.
The Newdow Case concerning the Pledge of Allegiance coming before the Supreme Court of the United States of America, the emergence of Faith-based Initiatives, the battle over Roy Moore’s rock and the posting of the Ten Commandments in “his” courtroom in Alabama, and the election campaigns of 2004 with the increased mixing of religion and politics in public policy: these were all used for political gain and/or turning out the vote of well-intentioned and often misled Christians. With those temptations resisted, the book you have in your hands is far better and far more thorough than the original concept, plus there are now more volumes to follow. Chris was impassioned by the cause of confronting those who distort and reconstruct history to the shape of their own political and religious goals. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
Chris heard arguments over and over again from radical, conservative Christians about the lives and intentions of the Founders – arguments that contradicted her recollections of their work. Chris Rodda loves primary source research. She loves reading old and difficult script manuscripts and finding bits and pieces of a puzzle long forgotten by others. On numerous occasions she would Instant Messenger me asking if we could talk about some new and exciting piece of information that drew a clearer and clearer picture of just how strong the wall of separation conceived by Jefferson and Madison was meant to be. How much I came to love and appreciate her digital signature clause, “What Would Jefferson Do?” whenever I saw it. Most often, Chris was responding to someone who had bought in to the polemic she, generally, referred to as the “Liars for Jesus,” regurgitating via cut and paste something from David Barton’s Wall- Builders or some similar website.
Chris and I disagreed about and debated her use of the term “Liars for Jesus.” I felt using the term in the title might alienate some of the very people who most needed to read her work, but she has stood by her convictions. Whatever our opinions about religion and political causes, the Founding Fathers had their own, forged in the midst of a mixture of faiths and philosophies much like our own. The religious mix of their world included Christians: many of whom considered other Christian denominations nothing less than heretics. There were the New England Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the Anglicans of Virginia. There were Lutherans, Reformed, and Moravians among the German immigrants. There were Roman Catholics and Quakers. There were Jews and the Musselman or Mohametan (as the Islamic faith was known in their time). And there were the philosophical deists and Unitarians, the secret Masonic societies, and even rationalistic atheists.
As the Founding Fathers lived in the midst of this diverse world experience, they reflected on the knowledge of the political and religious conflicts lived out on the European continent in the preceding centuries. They read and debated the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and other rationalists and empiricists. Then, personally religious or not, they made a choice to create a separation between the public life of law and politics and the private realm of personal religious life and practice. They separated the process of governing under the Constitution into three branches of government and secured to the people the protection of personal life under the Bill of Rights. Religion was never to be used as a test for fitness to serve in public office, nor was government ever to make law suppressing religious activity of any particular faith. What was good for one was to be good for all.
So why would any Christian pastor write a foreword to a book entitled “Liars for Jesus?” As I said above, I debated the title with Chris and argued against it. Nonetheless, I understand and support her efforts to establish strong arguments from the historical record and primary source documents concerning the political and religious truths about the Founding Fathers. That some people have tried to obscure and manipulate these events and writings to their own end will I believe become clear as you read her work. Besides the obvious implications of the eight or ninth commandment, depending on the enumeration of one’s particular faith community, and with a belief that nothing good or permanent can be built on deception or misrepresentation in good Trinitarian tradition, I will give you three answers;
1) A conviction that religion is a deeply personal issue and one that falls to each person to practice for themselves, privately or corporately, with or without favor, support, or restraint of the government.
2) A deep respect for the Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights, and the work of the framers;
3) A equally deep belief that the strength of religious life in this country is the direct result of that freedom of religion so carefully constructed by the framers and recognized for two centuries by the Supreme Court.
The American experience has been marked by a deep and abiding religious content. From the landing of the pilgrims and my ancestors with them at Plymouth to the religious right political wars of today, religion has been a consistent catalyst for judgment and division. The pilgrims had no interest in philosophical concepts of religious freedom. Their pursuit was for a religious freedom for themselves and they were quite prepared to enforce their concepts of right behavior on all other members of the community. Absence from worship could result in severe punishments including fines, imprisonment and whipping. Similarly, harsh punishments, including capital punishment, existed for all sorts of violations of religious and civil law as they were merged in the life of the colony. The Law of God, not the grace of Jesus Christ, was the hallmark of Puritan religion and all had to comply.
The intolerable conditions of the Puritan way were so great that they resulted in the first expression of religious freedom in the New World when in 1636 Roger Williams fled controversy and trial in the Massachusetts Bay Colony over his teaching of a complete separation of church and state. Settling in Providence, he founded Rhode Island as the first colony based on religious freedom. In all issues religious, Williams believed in the freedom of the conscience and so created a relationship between government and religion that was unprecedented. It was Williams who became the first promoter in the colonies of the term “wall of separation.” Today, we are once again under great pressure to prop up the practice of religion in this country by finding increasing ways of involving government in affairs of faith and conscience. We are having passionate and bitter debates of the role of religion in public life.
We struggle over whether the words “under God” belong in the Pledge of Allegiance despite the fact that Francis Bellamy, a Baptist pastor, who first wrote the Pledge, intentionally, left them out. We argue over the appropriateness of judges posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses, as if justice exists no where in the world without them being posted. We have used the words “In God We Trust” on our currency beginning in 1957 more to prove we are not mid-50s communists than as an act of confession by true believers. In all these things and more, some American Christians have behaved as if the absence of government sanction and support of religion means they cannot believe or hold sacred in themselves what they believe is received as a gift from God in the work of his Holy Spirit. Some Christians have behaved as if the Lord of creation is of such a fragile ego that he must be placated by mindless, rote acts of civil religion or else he will cause another plague, another Katrina, or some other form of eschatological judgment.
If the faith of Americans is already so weak that these things above are necessary to sustain our faith, then we are in far greater trouble, spiritually, than we may be willing to admit. Where have gone the people, especially Protestants, who believed that an act of conscience was so inviolable that it led Martin Luther to stand before the state and church at the Diet of Worms proclaiming, “… it cannot be right for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other. May God help me! Amen!” If our conscience is clear and our faith is true, government can neither sustain nor deny us that faith as it comes from God. That belief does not, however, give us the right to distort the beliefs of the Founding Fathers or compel others to be subject to our religion, denying them the same freedom we would seek. If the Founders, as individuals, were Christians so let them be, and if they were not, then let that be, too. Let each of us be bold in our confessions and, also, defend the right of our neighbor to his own as well. What the Founders and framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights did accomplish was to minimize to the point of elimination the interrelation, if not the interaction, of state and church.
While Jefferson was not present for the negotiations and writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, his close friend and communicant James Madison was. Madison, skillfully and ably with others, represented the cause of separation. One cannot overestimate the desire of the fledgling nation to avoid the religious conflicts of the previous centuries in Europe and some American colonies. They also understood that they had no extensive resources of finances or energy to waste on such issues if the nation was to survive. The Congregationalists, the Anglicans, and the Roman Catholic Church all had colonies in which they were the dominant state faith by fact or de facto and in which they were heavily invested; and all were still wary of each other and power sharing. There were populations of Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and others within the various colonies raising minority concerns, as well. Adding deists and rationalists to the mix and trying to create a national policy addressing religious issues would be a nightmare.
In the end, the solution was simple. Create a national government that treated all men (yes, women weren’t really a concern) as equals before the government without regard to their sectarian religious preferences. Religion and the state were to be so separated that the religious tests used by some of the states as a qualification for office would not apply, such as membership in the Anglican Church in Virginia had once been required. In one brilliant stroke, they resolved a roadblock that might have resulted in years of quarreling about how this law or that ordinance was favoring one religious party or the next. Building a “wall of separation,” as Baptist preacher Roger Williams had once erected in Rhode Island, the framers secured to each person free exercise of religion and right of peaceful assembly. Jefferson would later refer to this “wall of separation” in correspondence with another Baptist group in Connecticut, defining the issue as one of conscience not to be interfered with through governmental power:
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”
By the time that Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America in 1831, the separation of church and state created under the U.S Constitution and Bill of Rights had played itself out for over a generation. Although his initial task was to study and make a report on the U.S. penal system, which he published in 1833 under the title Du systeme penitentiaire aux Etats-Unis et de son application en France, Tocqueville became enamored of the vibrant faith and religious spirit he found. During his visit, Tocqueville became interested in the growth and expression of democracy and religion in America. By the end of 1835 he had published the first volume of Of the Democracy in America. It was primarily a political and social study of the country. It was, also, based on his experiences of 1831 while in America. This was at the height of the second Great Awakening and he had been taken with the religious fervor of the nation. He saw that fervor as a direct result of the separation of church and state in America in contrast to the state churches of Europe. He wrote:
“On my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country. My desire to discover the causes of this phenomenon increased from day to day. In order to satisfy it I questioned the members of all the different sects; I sought especially the society of the clergy, who are the depositaries of the different creeds and are especially interested in their duration. As a member of the Roman Catholic Church, I was more particularly brought into contact with several of its priests, with whom I became intimately acquainted. To each of these men I expressed my astonishment and explained my doubts. I found that they differed upon matters of detail alone, and that they all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.”
And, also;
“Care (is) taken by the Americans to separate the church from the state—The laws, public opinion, and even the exertions of the clergy concur to promote this end—Influence of religion upon the mind in the United States attributable to this FOREWORD ix cause—Reason for this—What is the natural state of men with regard to religion at the present time—What are the peculiar and incidental causes which prevent men, in certain countries, from arriving at this state.”
“The philosophers of the eighteenth century explained in a very simple manner the gradual decay of religious faith. Religious zeal, said they, must necessarily fail the more generally liberty is established and knowledge diffused. Unfortunately, the facts by no means accord with their theory. There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and debasement; while in America, one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world, the people fulfill with fervor all the outward duties of religion.”
Tocqueville’s observation of the state of religious life in America was that it was vibrant, passionate, and filled with zeal. There was an enthusiasm and practicality to religion in the American experiment in democracy.
“Not only do the Americans follow their religion from interest, but they often place in this world the interest that makes them follow it. In the Middle Ages the clergy spoke of nothing but a future state; they hardly cared to prove that a sincere Christian may be a happy man here below. But the American preachers are constantly referring to the earth, and it is only with great difficulty that they can divert their attention from it.”
Religion and government both seemed to be thriving in their separation and the result was a form of practical religion that sought to address the many needs of the communities outside the rule of government. These passages from Of the Democracy in America should caution us concerning the present struggles to institutionalize civil religion. In what appear to be social niceties, there may be a danger in supplying people with mindless public rituals in contrast to personal accountability for the practice one’s faith. Tocqueville had experienced first hand the state churches of Europe as a Roman Catholic layman and met little passion in the laity there. Nothing in the European churches depended on them and the exercise of their faith in the world. They were passive recipients of the work of the priest and the church.
Such religious acts emptied of active faith seemed to inoculate the public to the real power of personal faith that Tocqueville witnessed in America. Faith where each person was responsible for their own faith and not labeled Catholic, Lutheran or Reformed simply because of where they lived or the religion of their monarch. In contrast to religion in Europe, American religion freed from the burden of the government led Tocqueville to write, “The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.” So in the United States of America, even to this day, it is a natural right of a person in liberty to exercise faith according to their conscience and to worship God as they may or may not be moved. This right was protected from the tyranny of government by the Founding Fathers as they attempted to prevent age-old conflicts between religions from consuming the limited resources of their young country.
To the surprise of many, maybe almost everyone, the result was a passion for religion that exceeded anything found in the old homelands of Europe. This passion continues even to this day when the state churches in Europe record attendance figures of about 3-5% weekly in contrast to the almost 30-50% figure across religious communities in America. So it is that we, as a nation of diverse religious sentiments, have not just survived but flourished, politically and spiritually, because of this “wall of separation” that some would tear down. The question is “To what end would the tear down this wall of separation?” Sandra Day O’Connor expressed this very concern during rulings on cases involving displays of the Ten Commandments in 2005, when she said, “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”
Tocqueville was not entirely optimistic with everything he found here, however, and wrote of the ways in which intolerance could raise its head in the nation. “In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.” How prophetic his words are proving to be as we in America seem to have turned from a culture that valued and celebrated the right of “every” American to stand equally free before our government. Chris Rodda may push us beyond these barriers by taking us back to the origins of our government and how these courageous men built a nation with true freedom of religion and freedom of government.
Rev. William N. Esborn
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