Secularism on the Edge

Rethinking Church-State Relations in the United States, France, and Israel

J. Berlinerblau, S. Fainberg, A. Nou, J. Berlinerblau, S. Fainberg, A. Nou

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137380371
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología de la religión

In this dynamic and wide-ranging collection of essays, prominent scholars examine the condition of church-state relations in the United States, France, and Israel. Their analyses are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from ethnography and demography to political science, gender studies, theology, and the law.

P A R T I

Contemporary Challenges to American Secularism

C H A P T E R O N E

America: A Christian Nation or a Secular Nation?

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JOHN FEA AND JACQUES BERLINERBLAU

Jacques Berlinerblau: Many Americans insist that the United States is a secular nation. Yet one is more likely to hear from the majority of the population that it’s a Christian nation. So my first question is: what types of folks out there will claim that the United States is a Christian nation?

John Fea: Sure. I will begin with some context. It is only recently that the idea that America is a Christian nation has been a contested one in American culture. This occurred largely in the 1960s and 1970s, with the rise of the Christian Right and the Moral Majority.

Today, those who defend the idea that America was founded as a uniquely Christian nation are mostly found on the Christian Right. Figures such as David Barton come immediately to mind. Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever heard of Barton, but if you go to any town hall meeting or school board meeting in the heartland of this country, David Barton’s name will come up. He’s a very entertaining speaker and a regular on the Glenn Beck show. He has thousands and thousands of followers among Christian conservatives. Barton was a member of the Republican Party Platform Committee in 2012 and claimed that 70 of the 71 ideas he offered at the committee meeting became part of the platform.

Berlinerblau: Just so we really understand your thesis, you’re basically saying that up until the 1970s, there wasn’t that much contestation about the fact that this was a Christian nation. Did I get that correct?

Fea: I think that’s right. I think most people simply assumed it was a Christian nation. It wasn’t a contested issue. If there were secularists who didn’t like the idea that America was a Christian nation, they were out of the mainstream. America’s perception of itself as a Christian nation took on various shapes and forms. If you read Martin Luther King’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” that letter is loaded with Christian Nationalist language. He writes about returning to our Judeo-Christian roots and fulfilling our mission as a Christian nation by ending segregation and racial injustice.

Berlinerblau: Now, the name of Dr. Fea’s book is Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? I think the “was” is important. I don’t think the claim that he is making presently is that it should be a Christian nation, right? In that vein, why don’t we start looking at some foundational texts of our Republic, and with the aid of a skilled historian, let’s analyze them. Let’s start with the Declaration of Independence. Just to be clear: what legally binding force does the Declaration of Independence have in the United States?

Fea: None.

Berlinerblau: Thank you. Just wanted to get that out there. The line that we’d like you to exegete for us is the one about “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” I don’t think many understand the degree to which natural law theories were percolating in the minds of our founders. Very quickly, could you give us Natural Law 101?

Fea: The Declaration of Independence states that all human beings were created with inalienable rights. In the realm of politics, Jefferson suggested that these natural rights included the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All of the founding fathers believed that these rights came from God. But the Declaration of Independence does not describe or define its God.

I think historical context is important here. We have fierce debates over the “original intent” of the US Constitution, but we never talk about the so-called original intent of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence, as written, was just that—a declaration of independence. It was a public announcement to the world that the newly formed United States of America was no longer under the authority of Great Britain and would exist as an independent nation. Those first paragraphs, which talk about inalienable rights, do not represent the primary message of the document. Jefferson was not trying to make a definitive statement about where rights come from or what the relationship between God and such rights is. The rights articulated in the first paragraph would have been widely accepted in the eighteenth century. In other words, they were not new or uniquely American.

Berlinerblau: But the text is so God-soaked, right? It’s God-pervaded in a way that the Constitution is not.

Fea: This is the point that I’m trying to make. The rights language of the document does not become important to Americans until abolitionists begin to use the Declaration of Independence, especially the first few paragraphs, to oppose slavery, and Abraham Lincoln references them in Gettysburg Address. Today, the Christian Right will refuse to acknowledge, or at least pay any attention to, the original intent of the document. They have turned it into a document that, because of the references to God and the Creator, will somehow justify the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation. The Declaration of Independence references or alludes to God four times, but it was never intended to be a theological document or a document that explained the relationship between Christianity and the nation.

Berlinerblau: How much of this is because of that divine void in the Constitution? Tell us a little bit as we move to the religion clauses. Tell us about the absence of God in the Constitution.

Fea: The Constitution never mentions God. There is no reference to God or the Creator. There is a reference to “The Year of our Lord, 1787,”¹ but if you read the minutes of the Constitutional Convention, you will not find any debate over whether or not to include that phrase. That is because “The Year of our Lord” was a common way of noting the date. A clerk probably added it after the members of the Constitutional Convention had already left Philadelphia. There is a mention of religion in Article VI, which forbids religious tests for federal office. And the First Amendment mentions the free exercise of religion and forbids religious establishments. There is nothing here about a Christian nation.

Berlinerblau: If I were to say to you, with about a dozen legal scholars, that the First Amendment’s religion clauses don’t make a whole lot of sense—do you think I’m standing on solid ground there? Do you think that, after all those versions of Mr. Madison’s amendment were rejected in the floor debates, the final product is coherent? Going even further: do you think a pluralistic democracy of 300 million people can be guided by those 16 cryptic words?

Fea: This is difficult. It is very, very hard to figure out what the founders meant in the First Amendment. The Disestablishment Clause was a radical idea for the eighteenth century. There is no other nation, maybe other than the Dutch Provinces, that have this kind of disestablishment. The First Amendment affirms that there will be no church that will be officially endorsed by the government. The First Amendment also states that the government cannot interfere with the way that people worship or choose not to worship. That’s it. Thus, we need to rely upon the Supreme Court to interpret this vague amendment. That is why it troubles me when I see Christian Nation advocates making a case based upon a couple of clauses.

There is one argument popular in Christian National circles, which goes something like this: The Establishment Clause is really about different Christian denominations. In other words, the framers did not want a Presbyterian nation or a Baptist nation, but they certainly wanted a Christian nation. According to this view, in the eighteenth century, the word Christian really meant Protestant. But there is nothing in the records of the convention or the Federalist Papers to suggest that this is a legitimate interpretation of the First Amendment’s Disestablishment Clause.

Berlinerblau: But just to be fair, when Justice Hugo Black in 1947 exegetes (or eisegetes) out of this cryptic amendment a mandate to erect a “wall of separation”—isn’t that just as egregious a misreading of the religion clauses as the idea that you’ve just noted?

Fea: In Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared that there is a “wall of separation” between church and state in America, and that wall is “high and impregnable.”² This is how Black understood the amendment, but it is certainly not an interpretation that reflects the reality of the way church–state interaction played itself out in American life from 1789 to 1947. We have multiple examples of religion passing through that wall. For example, if the framers meant for the wall to be “high and impregnable,” then why does the United States have military chaplains? (By the way, James Madison opposed them because he believed that their presence violated the separation of church and state.) Why is there a prayer before meetings of Congress? Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the famous letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802, coined that phrase “wall of separation between church and state.”³ The day after he wrote this controversial phrase, he attended a Christian worship service in the hall of the House of Representatives.

To suggest that this wall has always been high and impregnable certainly does not reflect practice on the ground. You could say church and state have been separate to some degree, but such a wall, according to Library of Congress historian James Hutson, has always had many “checkpoints.” Black’s argument in Everson was not based upon any sort of insight into the Constitution or the Federalist papers that interpreted the Constitution. It was based on the 1802 letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of Baptists. That was his primary source for drawing this conclusion.

Christian Nationalists believe that the Everson case was wrongfully decided. As they see it, the decision has led to secularism, which they understand to be a synonym for irreligion or atheism. Everything went downhill after 1947.

Berlinerblau: I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but when I make some of the exact arguments that we’ve just been sharing, invariably, if I’m on NPR or giving a public lecture, someone calls in and talks about the Treaty of Tripoli. Tell us about that text.

Fea: I’ve probably done close to 70 or 80 public talks and radio interviews related to my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? and 95 percent of the time someone asks a Treaty of Tripoli question. The Treaty of Tripoli was an obscure treaty in American diplomatic history. It was struck between the United States and the Muslim nation of Tripoli. Tripoli was suppressing American trading vessels in the Mediterranean, and because the United States no longer had the protection of the British Navy, the vessels were forced make their own treaty to avoid being attacked by these pirates.

The United States decides to negotiate with t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Secularism and Its Confusions
• Part I Contemporary Challenges to American Secularism
• Part II Laïcité in a Multicultural France
• Part III Hiloniyut: Israel and the Challenge of Ultra-Orthodoxy
• Part IV Women and Secularism: Problems and Possibilities
• Conclusion: Scooting Away from the Edge
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index