Church and state: the eternal debate
Given the current political climate, it is difficult to imagine that in the early days of the nation's history, Massachusetts was much less religiously tolerant than Virginia. During that time, it was conservative evangelicals - such as Middleborough minister Isaac Backus, a Baptist famous for unsuccessfully taking on John Adams about whether the Bay State should have an official religion - who pushed for more of a separation of church and state.
The intellectual debate about the role of religion in American life, both during the nation's early days and today, is the focus of "Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America." Steven Waldman provides a balanced though opinionated analysis of this important, complex, and emotion-laden subject.
His narrative style is quite lively (though sometimes a tad glib) yet has more scholarly heft than most books written by journalists, and he seems to have read every primary and secondary source on the subject.
To help readers understand the Founders' religious views, he writes chapters on each of the key leaders of early American history. He contends that many of them (e.g., George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) respected the intellectual underpinnings of Christianity but were skeptical of its rituals. In what could be one of the more controversial chapters, Waldman tries to disprove the conventional wisdom that Jefferson was a Deist - one who believes God created the world but since then has taken a hands-off approach - and anti-Christian. The truth was more nuanced, and he argues that Jefferson "did believe in religious truth; he just had an overriding conviction that it was reason, acting in a marketplace of ideas, that would lead people to find it."
Waldman, editor of the online religious news website beliefnet.com, gives the anti-Deist view his best shot, but the evidence presented to the contrary in other books is stronger.
The author then goes about showing how the beliefs of Jefferson and the other Founders shaped the actions they took when establishing the framework for the relationship between church and state. Declaration of Independence author Jefferson and James Madison, the main writer of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, saw having a wall between church and state (a metaphor crafted by Jefferson) as the best way to protect religious minorities. Both men read avidly about religious history and doctrine, and Waldman notes that this knowledge made their views more nuanced: "If it is ultimately impossible for mortals to know God's mind, the history of persecution becomes cosmically tragic - two thousand years of dogmatic men burning one another over religious ideas whose veracity only God can know." He contends that Madison felt "state support of religion would wound religion because real faith must flow from a free mind, without even an ounce of coercion."
The Founders were, however, able only to ban the federal government from limiting religious freedom. Congressman Fisher Ames of Dedham, who introduced the First Amendment in Congress, felt the measure would ensure that the Bay State could regulate religion as it saw fit. It took the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, to apply the protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to the states.
Waldman sees problems with how contemporary analysts on both the right and left interpret the Founders' views of the role of religion in society. He argues that modern-day conservatives are forgetting the battles fought during the founding era when they advocate more government support of religion.
By contrast, he thinks liberals read too much into the Founders' desire to separate church and state and are too eager to make Jefferson's wall even higher. He concludes that the United States has struck the right balance between the secular and sectarian.
This kind of rigorous yet opinionated analysis makes "Founding Faith" a valuable addition to the literature on this important subject.
Claude R. Marx, an award-winning journalist, is the author of a chapter on media and politics in "The Sixth Year Itch," edited by Larry J. Sabato. 