I was recently talking to someone and it was brought to my attention that the seperation of church and state is not in the constitution. I read through it and was unable to find anything beyond no established governmet religion. I may have missed something so I would appreciate it if someone would correct me. Anyway I was told that the place that seperation of church and state only appears in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote after his presidency. I was hopoing someone could verify this.
BTW- Sorry about my last thread. I dont know what I was thinking. If I could turn back the clock I Would. Thanks for Understanding.
Correct. The phrase “separation of church and state” does not occur in the written Constitution. However, the general view of all informed people, including the judges who rule on things like this, is that the meaning behind the First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion is that such a separation is called for. Any other reading of that passage implies things that do not fit the freedoms this country considers itself founded on.
BTW, generally when somebody brings this up, it’s to make a point that his church should be allowed to weasel something into law that they believe in. Got some background?
Another point that the churches which attempt to blur that wall of separation forget is that it’s there to protect the churches from the government as much as to protect the government from the churches.
The recent Faith-Based Initiative and the controversy that surrounded it brought an aspect of this to the fore…if church-associated charities accept government money, doesn’t that also mean that they have to accept government regulation, including measures that may conflict with their religious beliefs?
I have heard some of the nascent theocrats among the religious right actually claim that the separation was only meant to be one-way, to keep the government out of the churches! Sorry…the only way to do that is to keep the churches out of the government as well. That usually doesn’t go over well with that crowd, though…
jayjay
Uh, on rereading my second paragraph, I could easily see it as sounding like I’m flaming donotprodme. What I meant was that there was a likelihood that the person who told him the statement he questioned in the OP had an ulterior agenda to pursue, and I wanted to know if he could/wanted to give us some further background on the situation, given the possible leading tendency of what he has reported. Sorry if it looked hostile, donotprodme!!
The Church as an institution was in steep decline in Jefferson’s time. The Age of Enlightenment and all.
Religion was tied to the Devine Right of Kings.
(:eek: or divine, if you proofread)
The Devine Right of Kings was the right to, if they ever starred in a Western, have Andy Devine play their sidekick?
Thanks Polycarp. I did note you were hostile. I was sitting here thinking why is this man or woman mad at me it was just an innocent question. Thanks alot though. You did answer my question and i appreciate it.
This issue has been on my mind a lot in the last couple months due to the (U.S.) nation’s reaction to the Sept 11th bombings. It really bothers me as a humanitarian atheist that we are bombarded with the Christian God by our government in situations when all our country’s citizens deserve to be included. I don’t have a problem with political figures publicly worshipping and grieving in their own religious ways. I do have a problem with the whole government doing so. Although it’s not officially declared, I’m constantly getting the message that our government does have established religion, and I’m not part of the club.
“Seperation of church and state” is not written in the Consitution but I feel like we as a nation do a decent job of abiding by that guideline. “No established government religion” is in the Constitution though, and I feel that through our gov’t’s heavy promotion of Christianity they are ignoring the intentions of that phrase.
“Establishment of religion” had a specific meaning when the Constitution was written. “Separation of church and state,” as understood today, goes far beyond simply prohibiting the establishment of religion. SOCAS may (or may not) be a good idea, but it was not the meaning that was intended by the founders in the Constitution.
I’m a law student, and I just finished a casenote on this topic.
For at least some of the Founders, the Estalishment Clause meant just what it said: that Congress was not to lend the weight of its legal and punitive authority to any church (and nothing more). In an instructive passage, James Madison announced on the floor of Congress that he “apprehended the meaning of the [Establishment Clause] to be, that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.” It was the coercive nature of religious establishment that many of the Founders found so oppressive.
But for Madison, there was a clear distinction between acknowledgement of religion and establishment of religion, and this distinction is evident in his actions. On one hand, Madison-—the “Father of the First Amendment”—-insisted that “compulsive support of [a] religion [is] unnecessary and unwarrantable;” he vetoed a statute which endowed the violation of a church regulation with “the penal consequences applicable to a violation of . . . local law;” and he asserted as a matter of course that “the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience” was “the gift of nature.” This same Madison, on the other hand, saw no inherent inconsistency in issuing a proclamation setting aside a day for the offering of “humble adoration to the Great Sovereign of the Universe.” This mere acknowledgement of widely held religious sentiment was, to Madison, apparently differentiable from “the legal compulsion to support or participate in religious activities” that would constitute establishment.
The Jefferson letter to which you refer, BTW, is his “Letter to the Danbury Baptists.”
Sorry. Cites upon request.
I’m no expert in these things, far from it. But if SOCAS was not the intent of the founders in drafting the First Amendment (or at least the intent of some of the founders), why does the phrase come from one of the founders in his explanation of the intent?
http://www.usconstitution.net/jeffwall.html
Ugly
I’m no expert, either. Your cite makes it sound as though Jefferson had one interpretation, whereas Washington and Adams had another.
The current interpretaton of SOCAS was discovered or invented within the last 40 or 50 years. So, it would appear that for the first 180 years of our republic, the Washington-Adams interpretation held sway.
I was also struck by this Jefferson quote:
Apparently Jefferson considered certain governmental religious activity Constitutional, but undesirable. I’m unclear about what sorts of activiteis this clause refers to.
I invite clarification from someone who knows this field.
We run the risk here, as SCOTUS Justice Reed quipped, of drawing a rule of law from a figure of speech. More illustrative of Jefferson’s intent is his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom:
The evil that Jefferson seems to be railing against here is compulsion. I think the “SOCAS” quote misrepresents Jefferson’s take on the matter.
Any church or any religion? Some claim that the First Amendment forbids Congressional establishment of a specific denomination, but not of Christianity in general. However, the Church of England single established denomination model was not necessarily the only model of religious establishment in the United States at the time of the adoption of the First Amendment. The Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty was written in opposition to a scheme of “plural establishment”, i.e., public support of multiple Christian denominations. So, “an establishment of religion” would not necessarily have been understood by the framers of the First Amendment to mean only “a single established national church”.
Actually Madison at one point wrote that
Like many politicians, Madison’s actions were not always consistent with his professed principles. In the “Detached Memoranda” Madison also warns against the danger of allowing bad precedents to overcome good principles.
Whatmove:
I’m with you on this. It really bothers me, a believing semi-active Mormon, that we’re getting bombarded with a particular representation of God all the time now. What bothers me most though is that so many of the people (Religous Right) agitating for that bombardment to continue have no compunction whatsoever against telling me and many other Americans that we either don’t worship the real God or that we’re flat out godless.
Thank God (or Providence, or Good Luck, or just plain happenstance) that’s not the way the Constitution was written!
I see your distinction, and I think it’s a good one. The first amendment clearly applies to more than the establishment of a national denomination, and to argue that the first amendment envisioned the establishment of non-denominational Christianity is ill-informed at best.
True enough, although JM was by no means afraid to defend his vision of the first amendment (Note the veto mentioned in my first post, and the fact that JM opposed the widely-accepted Congressional Chaplaincy on establishment grounds.) We are still faced with the fact that Madison did, despite his protestations, issue just such a proclamation. Perhaps JM was able to abide the mention of a “great sovereign of the universe” because of its non-specific nature. (In other words, maybe he acknowledged religion, and not a religion.) I’m guessing that, for JM, such a non-specific reference, although it clearly assumed a God, would have little or no coercive value. (And coercion/compulsion is, I believe, what the first amendment was designed to prevent.)
The more I study this topic, the more difficult and subtle it gets. The impression I keep getting is that, although they were drafting the supreme law of the land, the Founders had in mind a sort of SDMB “Don’t be a Jerk” gentlemen’s agreement between religion and the state. Yeesh.
Just as an observation, the fact that the First Amendment does not call for the separation of church and state, in view of Madison’s stance, does not imply that it would not be considered part of the Bill of Rights. The Ninth Amendment was in there because there was nearly unanimous consensus among the Founding Fathers that the “rights of man” could not be delineated in a select list (such as the first eight amendments). (I admit, this runs contrary to the philosophy of our current Chief Justice, but is well borne out by reading of the adoption of the Constitution. In fact, Madison was at first opposed to a Bill of Rights for precisely this reason: that by defining certain rights, all the others would be deemed as not having been protected.
I’m wondering what specific insight people with better background than I in constitutional law might be able to offer as to the strict constitutionality of this concept.
Poly,
To split a hair, I would agree that the first amendment does mandate the separation of church and state, whatever that means. The question lies in the definition of “separation.” Does it mean merely that the federal government (and now the states, post-14th amendment) should not establish an official religion and force citizens to support and adhere to it? Or does it mean that a strict secular culture should be imposed on all the activities of the US government? Obviously, I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle, but either of those extremes could be arrived at from the phrase.