Introduction

One of the biggest mistakes made by American history students is to talk about the founding fathers as a monolith. In truth, they were divided on many issues and that includes whether or not states should have established religion. Established religion is when the state officially sponsors, supports, and funds a particular religion.

The Founder's Argument For Established Religion

In the 1780s, Patrick Henry was concerned about the disestablishment of the church in Virginia. One reason Henry was still in favor of established religion was that he was convinced that Virginia’s free society would only work if the majority of the people did the right thing. This was a kind of virtue that only Christianity could produce. There is a remarkable consistency among the founding fathers that Christianity needed to thrive so that virtue would thrive. For example, David Ramsay, a delegate to the Continental Congress and the first major historian of the American War for Independence, expressed this idea succinctly in 1789, “Remember that there can be no political happiness without liberty; that there can be no liberty without morality; and that there can be no morality without religion.”  Benjamin Rush similarly opined in 1786: “Without [religion], there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”

So, some of the founding fathers, including Patrick Henry, concluded that the only way to ensure Christianity flourished was a state-supported church. Henry is not alone in this belief. John Adams believed that state support for churches should continue. George Washington believed the same thing. This is why, for example, George Washington envisioned a great national church in the nation's capital. A great government would need a great church to sanctify its most solemn occasions. In one part of the city would be the great government buildings—the Capital Building and White House. In the other part of the city would the great National Cathedral. The National Cathedral was not constructed in Washington’s lifetime. Congress authorized the National Cathedral in 1893.[1] The official name of the cathedral is the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the City and Diocese of Washington. The church is officially part of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Another example of Washington’s vision for established religion comes from 1775 when he authorized chaplains for the new army. Writing on July 9, 1776, to Major General Artemas Ward, General Washington said, “The Colonels or commanding officers of each regiment are directed to procure Chaplains accordingly; persons of good characters and exemplary lives—To see that all inferior officers and soldiers pay them a suitable respect and attend carefully upon religious exercises. The blessing and protection of Heaven are at all times necessary but especially so in times of public distress and danger—The General hopes and trusts, that every officer and man, will endeavor so to live, and act, as becomes a Christian Soldier defending the dearest Rights and Liberties of his country.”

Their argument for established religion was quite simple. If religion is the greatest source of virtue in the Republic and if virtue is indispensable to the life of the republic then the government should support religion.[2] This was a time when churches were a source of education and poor relief programs rather than the federal government. The colonies inherited a tradition of established religion from Great Britain. The historian Gordon Wood writes that since religion tended to bolster monarchical authority, the crown was happy to approve of established religion in the colonies, “The European tradition of centralized state-supported churches that had been only fitfully applied in the colonies during the seventeenth century was dramatically expanded in the first third of the eighteenth century. Although religious groups in most of the colonies lacked the kind of legally established dominance that the Church of England achieved in the mother country, all of their churches, including the dissenting ones, extended their institutional and disciplinary hold over colonial society. Everywhere in the decades following 1690 governments helped the churches assert coercive Christian authority over increasing numbers of people who had hitherto been neglected or ignored. In all the colonies clerical power was reinvigorated, new parishes were laide out, larger and more elegant churches were built, new and more elaborate ceremonies were established, and more and more unchurched were brought under the control of formal religion.”[3]

The Founder's Argument Against Established Religion

In contrast to Henry, Adams, and Washington are James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. They argued that when the government supports one denomination, then that restricts Christianity from spreading. So, the way to make Christian virtue thrive is to disestablish religion.

Benjamin Rush, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in the fall of 1800, gives a compelling explanation for church-state separation, “I agree with you in your wishes to keep religion and government independent of each Other. Were it possible for St. Paul to rise from his grave at the present juncture, he would say to the Clergy who are now so active in settling the political Affairs of the World. ‘Cease from your political labors, your kingdom is not of this World. Read my Epistles. In no part of them will you perceive me aiming to depose a pagan Emperor, or to place a Christian upon a throne. Christianity disdains to receive Support from human Governments. From this, it derives its preeminence over all the religions that ever have, or ever Shall exist in the World. Human Governments may receive Support from Christianity but it must be only from the love of justice, and peace which it is calculated to produce in the minds of men. By promoting these, and all the Other Christian Virtues by your precepts, and example, you will much sooner overthrow errors of all kind, and establish our pure and holy religion in the World, than by aiming to produce by your preaching, or pamphlets any change in the political state of mankind.’”

Alexis de Tocqueville, though not a founding father, agreed with Jefferson and Madison and explained their logic, saying of established religion, “I have always held, that if they be sometimes of momentary service to the interests of political power, they always, sooner or later, become fatal to the Church.”[4]

Given the current state of the historical debate, how it has been politicized, and how the secularists like to high-horse their cock and bull interpretation of the wall of separation between church and state, it is important to realize the reason why Jefferson and Madison wanted disestablishment. The reason was not to restrict the influence of Christianity in public life, but to further it.[5]

Conclusion

Those who advanced arguments for and against established religion had the same concerns, even when they differed on the prescription for how to make Christianity flourish. The founding fathers had a clear instinct for the necessity of clear commitments to public and private virtue among free citizens. The thing that best produces virtue is the culture-shaping power of Christianity. Henry said the best way to produce this virtue was through the support of churches. Jefferson said the best way to produce this virtue was to eliminate state support of churches, so that multiple denominations have a chance to thrive, thus spreading Christian virtue even more.

Interestingly, Harvard Professor of Government, Robert Putman, has conducted studies that reveal the central importance of virtue to a nation’s prosperity. But this insight is nothing new. C.S. Lewis observed, “Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.”[6] In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke wrote, “Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put chains on their appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”[7]

The historian Robert Louis Wilken has written a helpful book about religious freedom called, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. In explaining how the founding fathers were shaped by the Enlightenment, Wilken unpacks how their thinking goes back much further than the Enlightenment, “It was early Christian teachers who first set forth ideas of the freedom of the human person in matters of religion; it was Christian thinkers who contended that conscience must be obedient only to God; and it was the dualism of political authority and spiritual authority in Christian history that led to the idea that civil government and religious beliefs must be kept separate.”[8]

Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, a 1785 tract against church-state alliances, may be the most important defense of religious liberty ever written by an American. In it, he captures the consensus of the founders, irrespective of their stance on established religion, “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.” For the founders, the fundamental and prior obligation was to the Creator first, and government second.

[1] https://cathedral.org/discover/history/timeline/

[2] The 1796 Treaty of Algiers, Article 11 says, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” This is when the USA’s constitution was the Articles of Confederation, in which states had established religion, but not the Federal government.

[3] Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 17f.

[4] Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam, 2004), 670.

[5] Madison, once said, “We have staked the whole future of American civilization . . . upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

[6] C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 265.

[7] Edmund Burke, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791.

[8] Robert Louis Wilken,  Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 187.