Reply #33: The Best Argument is the US Constitution

[On the Road]

Remember that many local governments had strong religious ties, such as the Plymouth colony. These were well-known predecents. The Constitution specifically rejected those in establishing separation of church and state.

Arguments like this tend to muddy some very important distinctions:

"This Christian consensus is easily verified by the fact that prior to 1789 (the year that eleven of the thirteen states ratified the Constitution), many of the states still had constitutional requirements that a man must be a Christian in order to hold public office."

Yes, they may have, but this shows that those requirements were rejected when the Constitution was written.

The founding fathers obviously did not mean to exclude all references to God from public life. Even deists like Franklin led public prayers when the government was being worked out. This is the one valid point in articles like this.

However, the article jumps from general references to God to a quote from Romans that is completely at odds with the constitution and the whole idea of a self-governing democracy with checks and balances. Romans has been used as a proof text to argue for the divine right of kings. It was a tory argument that supporters of George III made. The founders were well acquainted with this and rejected it.

What articles like this miss is that the founders considered a belief in God fully compatible with humanism. What they did not consider compatible was relations with an organized church, the claim that the government was ordained by God, or that the government should follow a literal belief in the Bible.

The lines were drawn differently then. The vast majority of people believed in God, but not necessarily the Bible and definitely not the organized church, which they viewed with extreme suspicion. The founders rebelled against a government with an official church and made sure they did not found another one. John Adams even considered it a violation of the first amendment for the census to count the number of ministers.

I wish I had more specifics, but that's my view. The founders freely mentioned God in the abstract, but had very different theologies and very different idea on how the church and religious principles should be incorporated into law.