On 4 July 1776, the day the delegates to the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, a committee was formed to draft a national seal for the fledgling new nation. It would ultimately require three committees and six years to develop the seal that would eventually be a national coat of arms topped by an eagle, with a pyramid on the reverse side with the “Eye of Providence.” But early drafts submitted by the two early members of the committee, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, called for more overtly Christian symbolism.
Franklin’s idea included:
Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity.
Jefferson’s draft was nearly identical to Franklin’s, but suggested for the reverse side “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” The two Founders didn’t get their way in the final product, whose religious language includes both the nod to Providence and the Latin phrase annuit cœptis, “He has favored our undertakings.”
That the most secular of our Founders, Jefferson and Franklin, insisted on this Christian language is just one example of many that demonstrates how very unsecular the American project really is. Yes, indeed, the men who launched the unique American experiment were allergic to a state church at the national level, having been scarred by the long history of church-state entanglement and the so-called religious wars in Europe. Yet having grown up in a thick Protestant milieu, they wouldn’t recognize the secularism that is often preached in their name.
Consider James Madison, the father of the Constitution, who wrote that “conscience is the most sacred of all property” and who drafted and championed the Bill of Rights (influenced as he was by early Baptists such as Isaac Backus and John Leland). Yet Madison was not shy about appealing to God for his blessing on the new nation. In the midst of the War of 1812, he issued a proclamation calling for a day of prayer. He urged a turning to “that Almighty Power in whose hand are the welfare and the destiny of nations.” Madison urged citizens to pray
that He would look down with compassion on our infirmities; that He would pardon our manifold transgressions and awaken and strengthen in all the wholesome purposes of repentance and amendment; that in this season of trial and calamity He would preside in a particular manner over our public councils and inspire all citizens with a love of their country and with those fraternal affections and that mutual confidence which have so happy a tendency to make us safe at home and respected abroad.
Jefferson, who had perhaps the dimmest view of religion and the most expansive view of liberty, nevertheless in his first inaugural address acknowledged “an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people.”
To be sure, they resisted the idea of an established state church at the national level and, increasingly, through debate and revision, established churches in the states. They were influenced by preachers such as John Leland who declared, “state establishment of religion, like a bear, hugs the saints, but corrupts Christianity, and reduces it to a level with state policy.” Though primarily Protestant, this understanding grew to include Jewish citizens, as witnessed in George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Rhode Island. What emerged was both the acknowledgment of a generic theism in most state constitutions and the resistance to a religious test in the national Constitution.
In assessing the Constitution, celebrated jurist and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story sums up the tension between the necessity of religion, and arguably Christianity, for the success of the republic and yet the resistance to state-enforced belief. In his popular Commentaries on the Constitution, he writes at one point, “The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion . . . never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community.” Yet in another section he commends the Bill of Rights and writes that “the rights of conscience are, indeed, beyond the just reach of any human power. They are given by God, and cannot be encroached upon by human authority.” Later he decries the way in which the power to regulate conscience by the state was wielded throughout history as a tool of persecution and tyranny.
Today this tension is at the heart of our national debates. Unlike the men of the Founding era, scarred as they were by the religious wars of the old world, we find ourselves scarred by the fruits of modernity and the false promises of secularism. Twentieth-century jurisprudence moved from Madison’s “line of separation” between church and state to the “high and impregnable” wall of separation of Everson v. Board of Education (1947), misinterpreted from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists. This created decades of jurisprudence that weaponized the establishment clause in open hostility to religion. Thankfully, in the last few decades, a more originalist court has peeled back the “Lemon test” that made courts allergic to any incidental contact between government and religion. Recent cases such as Kennedy, Hobby Lobby, Trinity Lutheran, and Fulton forbid the state from punishing religious organizations for the crime of being religious.
Still our debates rage. Secularism’s so-called neutral public square has been filled by all sorts of perverse ideologies, weakening the social contract. We’ve forgotten the warnings by the Founders of a society without virtue and bereft of the thick Christianity that makes liberty possible. John Adams’s words haunt us: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The answer is not a rejection of the constitutional order that has endured for 250 years. Those who shaped this nation rightly recoiled at a state with the power to trample conscience. “God alone is Lord of the conscience,” echoed in Baptist and Presbyterian confessions, is still a good warning to governments who seek to compel belief. Jesus’s rendering only some rights to Caesar still stands. Caesar can barely run a functioning post office or pass a healthy budget. We shouldn’t think the state—as opposed to the God from whom our rights originate—is equipped to separate sheep from goats and wheat from tares. History shows us that a state with this power only ever damages some segment of Christ’s church. Conversion at the end of the sword is not true conversion. What’s more, the most vocal of those who call for this kind of arrangement don’t engender confidence that they can be trusted with this power. There’s a large gap between edge-lording meme-makers and a so-called Christian prince. In a fallen world, I’ll take my chances with the American experiment.
Still, those of us who proudly champion religious liberty and who resist such theocratic projects should be more vocal about the thick Christian culture that is required to uphold this experiment. For instance, it was in vogue, at the start of the twenty-first century and during the rise of progressive social movements, for well-meaning Christians to celebrate the death of cultural Christianity. In this framework, secularism would help make the distinctions clear between genuine believers and the posers. I think this is naive, because what fills the void left by the loss of this consensus is worse. To be sure, cultural Christianity isn’t salvific. The church must still say, as Jesus said to the very religious Nicodemus, “You must be born again.”
Andrew Walker, a Southern Baptist theologian, writes:
To lament the decline of cultural Christianity is to lament not simply the loss of a Christian consensus, but the loss of the social capital born of common grace that secular society was borrowing from. Is it any surprise that a growing secularity is coinciding with the hollowing out of American civil society? . . . As society sheds its Christian foundations, there will be a serious detriment to human flourishing. We should mourn this as Christians. We don’t want just the salvation of our neighbors but the good of society, too.
The Founders understood the necessity of a thick layer of virtue and Christian faith underneath this framework of liberty. So we should root for this and, rather than dream in vain for a Christian prince or naively think liberty can survive secularism, work and pray for the growth of the church and the spiritual renewal of the nation. As William Penn, who eloquently defended religious liberty, wrote, “Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.”
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