National Reform by Constitutional Amendment not Right.
The Evangelical Repository for March has an excellent article from Rev. J. G. Carson, D. D., professor of homiletics and pastoral theology in the United Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Xenia, Ohio, from which we make the following extract which we commend to the advocates of religious legislation. Mr. Carson’s proposition is “that the proposed Christian amendment to the Constitution of the United States is neither a possible, nor proper, nor necessary, method of National Reform. After giving his reasons for regarding it as impracticable, the writer says:— But we proceed to show that this method of National Reform, even if it were possible, is not proper or right, because the civil constitution is not designed or adapted to be the expression of the religious faith of a nation.
Granted that the nation should have a religion, or, in other words, that the people composing it should acknowledge their allegiance to God, and even to Jesus Christ, in his mediatorial authority; yet it is pure assumption to argue that this can only be done through the State in its civil constitution. The fact is that the nation, or, to speak more properly, the people of a nation, can act just as well through the church as through the State. Many are misled by the phrase, the “Nation or the State (for these two are unwarrantably used as interchangeable terms), is a moral person,” which is a mere figure of speech, like a “fiction of law.” The true idea is something like this: The State, or civil government, is an organization, or thing, like a piece of machinery, through which the nation, composed of moral persons, acts in its civil capacity; while the church is an organization through which the same composite moral person acts in its religious capacity. In either case, the moral character of the action and the moral responsibility belong to the individual moral persons composing the organism, and not to the organization itself. If it be proper to apply the word person to the nation as an organism, then we would say the same person in the one case is acting in a civil capacity, and in the other in a religious capacity. If there be any one form of religion embraced by the majority of the nation, the profession of that religion is made, and can be properly made, only through the church. In every Christian nation, that church or body of professed Christians which includes—in its various branches, it may be—the decisive majority of the people, that church indicates by its profession, the religious character and profession of the nation, and not its civil constitution or form of civil government. We believe that the whole nation, embracing all ranks and classes, kings, nobles, princes, judges, governors, legislators, and all citizens, should “kiss the Son,” acknowledge allegiance to Christ in every relation of life; but this they can do properly only through the church, and not through the State. And this is the true national church and national religion, though it be not established by law; yea, though another church and religion be so established. This Nation is a Christian nation, and even a Protestant Christian nation, and so recognized, not from its civil Constitution or form of government, but from the character of the religion prevailing among its citizens, as professed by the churches to which they belong. If it be said that this profession should also be made by the nation in its organized capacity as a civil government, then it follows, as a natural and necessary consequence, that this distinctive form of the Christian religion becomes the established religion, and the church representing it becomes the established church. And to this end does the movement for the religious amendment of the Constitution logically tend and arrive at last, notwithstanding all disclaimers on the part of its advocates as to their intentions. In the last analysis it involves a religion established by law, a union of Church and State. It is not necessary for us to show that, under the present dispensation, the establishment of religion by law, which necessarily requires an established church, is not admissible or proper. This, like the “requiring of religious tests,” may be assumed or taken for granted. Any method of national reform which, like this proposed amendment, leads inevitably to the confounding of the relations of Church and State, is thereby convicted as improper and wrong. Nowhere is this fundamental distinction between the respective provinces of the Church and the State more closely and tersely defined than in the language of our fathers of the Secession, in the action adopted by the Associate Presbytery, September 29, 1743, which reads thus: “True religion is not only the church’s blessing, but her very substance; so that true religion and a true church cannot be divided. Now, if true religion became a part of the civil constitution, it inevitably follows that the church became a part of the State; which doctrine, as it is absurd in itself, so it lays a plain foundation for Erastianism, overturning the distinction betwixt the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and the kingdoms of this world. Moreover, if the true religion (which is spiritual and supernatural) became a part of the civil constitution, then it could no longer remain a civil, but become a religious, a spiritual, a supernatural constitution.” (See Gib’s Display, vol. 1, p. 274.) Now, inasmuch as the mediatorial authority of Jesus Christ is a principle of the “true religion,” which is purely “spiritual and supernatural,” and even its fundamental principle, which includes all others, it follows that the “civil constitution is not designed nor adapted” to be the place for its acknowledgment by the nation, else would it cease to be a civil and become a religious document.