Religious Liberty in America
By Charles Miles Snow
By Charles Miles Snow, Editor of "Liberty" The Constitutional Guarantees
The clauses pertaining to liberty in the Constitution of the United States were not an experiment. They were the result of an experiment that had been going on for ages. From the day when Cain slew his brother Abel, men have sought to dictate to other men as to whom they shall worship and in what manner that worship shall be performed. Every heathen religion has had that as one of its actuating principles; and when heathenism secured a dominating influence in the Christian church in the early centuries of the Christian era, it brought that principle with it, and succeeded in fastening it upon the church organization with a grip so firm that it has never yet been fully broken. Paganism had persecuted Christianity; and when the Christian church organization had become inoculated with the deadly virus of intolerance, and had become possessed of civil power, the church organization, forgetting the Golden Rule, turned upon its enemies, and hounded the pagans as fiercely as the pagans had hounded the Christians. In the pagan mind, religion was a function of life that could be legitimately exercised only under government supervision. The individual existed for the State and belonged to the State. Therefore all his functions must be under State control. That united religion and the State; and religion being the soul of the church, it necessarily united the State and the church. The church organization, in taking that step, began an experiment that has been attended by results more disastrous than any other experiment which the annals of the world record. The Inquisition was the logical result of such an experiment, and it was duly inaugurated. It is impossible for the human mind to conceive the sum of the distress and agony which the race endured while that terrible institution was grinding out its grist of human wo. The church and the State had become a wedded pair; politics and religion were one; the State had become a sword in the hand of an organized religion of form and ceremony; and all who were even suspected of opposition to that unscriptural union, suffered the vengeance of that unholy alliance. He whom the church professed to serve, had declared: “If any man hear My words, and believe not, I judge him not;” but this union of civil and religious affairs, heedless of the principle so plainly enunciated by the Master, adopted the policy of not only judging but of condemning also, and that even to the death, all who chose to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. As a result of that policy, Europe was drenched in the blood of her most conscientious citizens. No one pretends to know how many millions of conscientious Christians went down under the cruel wheels of that terrible Juggernaut. We find the population of Bohemia alone reduced from 4,000,000 to 80,000. “Against the reformed doctrine and its adherents the House of Austria directed, almost exclusively, the whole of its immense political power. In France the Reformation had kindled a civil war which, under four stormy reigns, shook the kingdom to its foundations, brought foreign armies into the heart of the country, and for half a century rendered it the scene of the most mournful disorders.”—“History of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany,” page 5. “From the interior of Bohemia to the mouth of the Scheldt, and from the banks of the Po to the coasts of the Baltic,” that policy of church-and-state union “devastated whole countries, destroyed harvests, and reduced towns and villages to ashes.”—Ib., page 6. The country over which that despotism held sway has never been able to rally from the result of its rule. With that cruel and costly experiment the founders of the American nation were familiar. They had seen the blood, they had heard the groans, they knew of the wasting and the blighting of that régime. It would seem that the power of inspiration had caused the founders of the new nation to take a panoramic view of that awful holocaust, and erect in the wilderness of America an effectual barrier against its work of ruin here. “The real source of the Constitution,” says one American writer, “is the experience of the American people.”—“Historians’ History of the World,” volume 23, page 394. But that experience was not due to what their eyes had witnessed in America alone. It was bound up also in what their fathers had fled from and what their fathers’ fathers had endured; and they read it in history as well as in personal experience. Moreover, in America the Bible was unchained. Men were taught to reverence its sacred teachings, and were at liberty to dig deep into its exhaustless mine of treasure; and it could not be otherwise than that the liberty which it teaches in the things of God should find an echo in the vital national document which they produced. They had seen the character of Jesus Christ in Holy Writ, the world’s pattern in religious liberty; and they saw that He, with all the power of heaven at His command, had refused to use any force other than reason and5spiritual persuasion to influence the hearts and minds of men. Thus it came about that after having established a government which guaranteed civil liberty to its citizens, and after having incorporated in that government’s fundamental law the guarantee that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” the nation’s founders were made to realize that there was still something lacking, and they went to work at once to supply that lack. That is why the very first amendment to the Constitution was a guarantee of freedom in religion. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The national Government did not by this provision, of course, prohibit the various States’ passing such laws; but the weight of the nation’s example was thrown in that direction, and State after State, through the influence of those constitutional provisions, incorporated similar provisions in their constitutions. The result of that influence in making religious laws unpopular, and thus holding back persecution, it is impossible to estimate. Those two provisions of our national Constitution are in perfect accord with the “Bill of Rights” enacted by the Virginia Assembly, and do in themselves constitute the bill of rights of the American citizen. Through those provisions the conscience of the American citizen—temporally speaking—lives and moves and has its being; which is to say that without those provisions the conscience of the individual would be an outlaw and a vagabond in the eyes of whatever religious party had secured control of the Government and was enforcing the tenets of its faith upon the people. All the woes that Europe and the American colonies suffered in the line of persecution for conscience’ sake, came as a result of domination over the civil power by a religious combination. Some religion secured control of the government, and used that power to the furtherance of its own ends. But religion never could do that without combination. The founders of the nation, realizing that, adopted the first amendment to the Constitution in order that it might be forever impossible for any church to attain to a position in this country where it could compel the Government to do its bidding and could make the practise of any other religion a penal offense. When Congress was estopped from establishing any religion, religion was estopped from dominating and domineering over the consciences of the people. The Evil Seed Still Germinant
But not all the people were converted to the idea of granting freedom of conscience to all individuals of whatever belief. The roots of that ancient error, that the magistrate ought to regulate the religious practise of the people, were not wholly eradicated from American soil—and are not yet. It is like the old Canada thistle; it matters not how many times the soil is turned over with the plow, the thistle will spring up afresh if its roots are left in the earth. But little time elapsed from the adoption of the Constitution till the church-and-state element were seeking, through Congressional legislation, to have that pestilential principle adopted by the new nation. But the majority had evidently come to think with Benjamin Franklin that “when religion is good, it will take care of itself; when it is not able to take care of itself, and God does not see fit to take care of it, so that it has to appeal to the civil power for support, it is evidence to my mind that its cause is a bad one.”—Letter to Dr. Price. Familiar to the people also was the declaration of Thomas Jefferson: “Almighty God hath created the mind free; all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and mean- ness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercion on either, as was in His almighty power to do.”—Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, 1785. Nevertheless the demand for religious legislation in the form of a Sunday law continued to increase, until in the year 1829 Congress itself spoke through the Committee on Post-offices and Post-roads, in the report submitted to the Senate by Col. Richard M. Johnson, of Kentucky. Colonel Johnson, in presenting his report, stated that he believed the efforts put forth to secure a Sunday law from Congress “were but the entering wedge of a scheme to make this Government a religious instead of a social and political institution.” This report was one of the most striking and forceful documents ever presented in Congress. It was an admonition to the people as well as a report to Congress. Note these vital principles which it voiced: “It is not the legitimate province of the legislature to determine what religion is true, or what false. Our Government is a civil and not a religious institution. Our Constitution recognizes in every person the right to choose his own religion, and to enjoy it freely without molestation. . . .” “Among all the religious persecutions with which almost every page of human history is stained, no victim ever suffered but for the violation of what government denominated the law of God. To prevent a similar train of evils in this country, the Constitution has wisely withheld from our Government the power of defining the divine law. . . .” “Extensive religious combinations to effect a political object are, in the opinion of the committee, always dangerous. . . . All religious despotism commences by combination and influence; and when that influence begins to operate upon the political institutions of a country, the civil power soon bends under it; and the catastrophe of other nations furnishes an awful warning of the consequence. . . .” “What other nations call religious toleration, we call religious rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indulgence, but as rights, of which government can not deprive any portion of its citizens, however small. Despotic power may invade those rights, but justice still confirms them.” The following year Mr. Johnson, being in the House, and chairman of the House Committee on Post-offices and Post-roads, presented another report dealing with the same matter. That report was another unanswerable argument against the passage of a Sunday law by the national legislature. A few excerpts must suffice: “If Congress shall, by the authority of law, sanction the measure recommended, it would constitute a legislative decision of a religious controversy, in which even Christians themselves are at issue. . . . The principles of our Government do not recognize in the majority any authority over the minority, except in matters which regard the conduct of man to his fellow man. . . . If the measure recommended should be adopted, it would be difficult for human sagacity to foresee how rapid would be the succession, or how numerous the train of measures which follow, involving the dearest rights of all—the rights of conscience.” Those principles are as applicable to-day as they were in 1829 and 1830, and the dangers which threaten now are just as real and just as great as the dangers which threatened then. What would have meant a union of Church and State then would mean a union of Church and State now. To enact a Sunday law and carry it into effect, is to open a Pandora’s box of evils to afflict the people of State or nation through all the days to come. When the precedent is once established of legislating upon religious things, the door is opened for all sorts of interference with the religious concerns of men. But let the principles of the Constitution stand in all their vigor and all their meaning, and the freedom of the people, religious as well as civil, is guaranteed for all time.