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Celebrate Religious Freedom [1]
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Date: 2025-01-15
January 16th is Religious Freedom Day when we celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom.
The Statute embraced a strict separation of church and state and “defined” religious freedom, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled. With support from eighteenth-century evangelicals, it became a foundation for the First Amendment.
Sadly, Jefferson’s ideal of religious freedom has suffered in recent years. It is particularly unfortunate that many attacks on church/state separation are based on a misunderstanding. Separation means that government cannot take sides on matters of religion, and religion cannot, officially, have a role in government. It does not restrict private action.
Children can (and always have) prayed in schools, but government (teachers and principals) cannot decide how they pray or demand prayer. A public school cannot insert a prayer in a graduation ceremony, but a student valedictorian can. (Government cannot mandate what the prayer is, so schools permitting this must accept a Catholic, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Buddhist, … prayer if that is what the student chooses.) As Presbyterian minister William Swan Plumer wrote in the 1840s, government cannot give even all Christians “any civil, political, or religious privileges except in common with Jews, deists and atheists.”
Can Christianity play a role in public (non-governmental) society? Of course, as can Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, etc.
What is restricted is using government to support that effort, picking winners/losers and urging people toward a particular religious view.
James Madison understood the “danger of a direct mixture of Religion & civil Gover[n]ment”. While a valid religion did not need government support, using government to support a religion was dangerous politically and theologically. After all, God did not want coerced prayers.
John Leland, the great eighteenth-century Baptist preacher, agreed. Even government endorsement unfairly coerced the free will prayer that God desired; receiving government “indulgence, preferment or even protection” was idolatry by acknowledging a power not of the church.
Today, one of the leading issues facing the Supreme Court is what does it mean for government to “coerce” religion. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch say that the government cannot use physical force or financial pressure but can otherwise encourage religion.
This dangerous new theory is inconsistent with our nation’s history. If correct, a president could issue formal executive orders urging everyone to attend a particular church or support one particular religion. A Muslim crescent could be placed on all government buildings, or a Jewish star on all government documents. If this revisionist view is adopted, government could fund a chosen religion, as a taxpayer-plaintiff could not easily say how they were coerced.
Jefferson, author of the Statute that we honor today, knew better. In rejecting a request that he declare a day of fasting and prayer in response to a national crisis, he said that government could not take sides, even encouraging religion. He rejected the idea that government had to inflict “some penalty … of fine & imprisonment….” A proclamation favoring religion would violate the Constitution by imposing “some degree of proscription perhaps in public opinion.” In other words, if government endorses some religion – implicitly encouraging participation and discouraging other religions – it violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court recently noted that “any attempt by government to dictate or even to influence such matters [of faith] would constitute one of the central attributes of an establishment of religion.”
Yet, in each of his inaugural addresses, Jefferson prayed. Some critics claim an inconsistency and urge officials today to use their positions to promote prayer.
Jefferson, though, understood the difference between government and private action. In his inaugural addresses, he offered private prayers in a public setting. He neither demanded concurrence nor used his position to encourage it.
Jefferson was clear: An official can pray, even publicly, but cannot pray officially.
The Statute we honor today, and separation of church and state, have served us well. The free market of religion separation encourages brought on an explosion of American religion. (Compare European nations that maintain some official religion while their churches sit empty.)
Sandra Day O’Connor, former Republican legislator from Arizona and first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, was well-aware of the damage that had been done when church and state mixed. She understood that, as eighteenth-century evangelicals put it, mixing the two corrupts both. She asked those attacking separation an important question that rings true today: “At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, …Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”
As eighteenth-century Presbyterians noted, if government has authority to promote Christianity, it also has the authority to promote one sect – Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, or others. In supporting adoption of the Statute, they insisted that it had no such power.
It is a good day to remember their wisdom.
* Dr. Ragosta, a fellow at Virginia Humanities and former acting director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies, authored Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed.
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