Were the Founding Fathers "Christians"?

[Keith Justified And Ancient Cochran]

This is for all those people who claim that the Founding Fathers wanted
the US to be guided by "Christian" principles...

From: cda...@whale.st.usm.edu (Clark Davis Adams)
Date: 3 Oct 1993 01:21:06 -0500

This is a compendium called "Quotations that Support the
Separation of State and Church" by Ed and Michael Buckner.
I have broken this into 6 parts. The total size of the
files is approximately 250K. This is not an ordinary
quote list.

Ed Buckner is a professional researcher who lives in Atlanta,
Georgia. An active state-church separation activist, he and
his son, Michael, have compiled this list over the past couple
of years. Originally, this was a pet project designed to help
Ed counter fundamentalist editorials. However, it has grown to
be published and offered for sale at various Freethought and
Civil Libertarian events. Ed has a column in _Freethought Today_,
called "In Others' Words" in which he uses "cryptoquotes" to
present these quotes. He offers the hard copy of this compendium
for sale in _Freethought Today_ for $9.00. But, you get it free.
I have also just learned (9/30/93) that this has been accepted
into the Library of Congress.

All of these quotes have been throughly researched. None are "out
of context" or otherwise misleading. For example, the bogus John
Adams' quote, "...this would be the best of all possible worlds if
there were no religion in it ..." is not included.

This compendium is an excellent reference for debating zealots
who claim that this is a "Christian Nation", all of Founding
Fathers were twice borns, and other nonsense.

Please send all correspondence to:
Ed Buckner Atlanta Freethought Society
P.O. Box 1975 or P.O. Box 2385
Smyrna, GA 30081-1975 Stone Mountain, GA 30086-2385

THOUGHTfully Yours,
Clark Adams
cda...@whale.st.usm.edu
cda...@delphi.com

Copyright 1993, Ed and Michael E. Buckner and the Atlanta
Freethought Society, P.O. Box 2385, Stone Mountain, GA
30086-2385. Version 7.2 (26 Mar 93). Compiled by Ed and Michael
E. Buckner, P.O. Box 1975, Smyrna, GA 30081-1975. Permission to
reproduce any or all pages freely is hereby granted, provided
that this notice is retained. Acknowledgement of compilers for
excerpts, especially lengthy ones, is appreciated but not
required.

Contents

I. U.S. Constitutions, U.S. Treaties
II. Founding Fathers -- National Leaders and Thinkers from the
Revolutionary Era
III. Presidents (and Other National Political Leaders) Since
the Revolutionary Era
IV. U.S. Supreme Court and Other Judicial Rulings
V. Other Famous Americans
VI. Foreign Sources

Introduction

The quotations presented here, drawn in every case directly from
the most original source available to the compilers, may prove
useful to those arguing, in a variety of ways or contexts, in
favor of separation of church and state, religious freedom, and
the rights of religious or, especially, irreligious minorities.
Quotations supporting atheism, deism, or unorthodox religious
views are included to the extent that they might be useful in
debating against those who argue that the United States was
established as a Christian nation or that the "founding fathers"
would have accepted government support of any religious
orthodoxy. Not all the quotes are from humanists or freethinkers
nor even from people committed to complete separation of church
and state, but the quotes are all, as far as we can determine,
genuine, accurate, and not distorted by being taken out of
context.

All the text shown in each entry in larger sized typeface is a
direct quote from the source specified in a smaller font
thereafter. Ellipses (...) are shown wherever material has been
omitted (in some cases by another compiler) and brackets [ ] are
used to show any added material; material is never omitted or
added by us to distort the sense of the fuller text. Statements
must be more than eloquent, forceful arguments for separation of
church and state or liberty of conscience to be included; they
must also carry weight in terms of history or of who it was that
wrote or spoke them.

The quotations are arranged in six major sections, with some
subsections within those. Quotations are arranged in approximate
order of historical significance in Sections I and II, with
separate subsections in Section II for major leaders (Jefferson,
Madison, Washington, John Adams, Franklin, and Paine) followed by
a subsection of others from the era, then by a subsection of
historians and others about the era in general. Sections III
though VI are arranged in approximate chronological order (though
with all material from or about a particular source kept
together) within each section. An index is at the end of the
document.

Any suggested appropriate additions, corrections of any errors,
or improvements of other kinds will be appreciated.

The compilers (Ed Buckner and his son, Michael E. Buckner) are
humanists and freethinkers who support strict separation of
church and state and freedom of conscience, if only to protect
our own rights to be free of government-imposed dogma. We
dedicate this to the best editor and thinker in our family, Diane
(Ed's wife and Michael's mother).

I. U.S. Constitution and U.S. Treaties and State Constitutions

The Constitution of the United States (1787-1788; 1st Ten
Amendments ["Bill of Rights"] ratified 1791; no reference to any
god is to be found in the body or in the amendments to the
Constitution)

The senators and representatives before mentioned, and the
members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and
judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several
states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this
Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a
qualification to any office or public trust under the United
States. (Article VI, Section 3, The Constitution of the United
States.)

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 freedom of press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
government for a redress of grievances. (Amendment 1,The
Constitution of the United States.)

Treaty of Peace and Friendship Between the United States and the
Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary, 1796-1797

As the government of the United States of America is not in any
sense founded on the Christian Religion--as it has itself no
character of enmity against the law, religion or tranquility of
Musselmen [Muslims], ... ("Article 11, Treaty of Peace and
Friendship between The United States and the Bey and Subjects of
Tripoli of Barbary," 1796-1797. Treaties and Other International
Acts of the United States of America. Edited by Hunter Miller.
Vol. 2, 1776-1818, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington,
D.C., 1931, p. 365. From George Seldes, ed., The Great
Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 45.
According to Paul F. Boller [George Washington & Religion,
Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, pp. 87-88]
the treaty was written by Joel Barlow, negotiated during
Washington's administration, concluded on November 4, 1796,
ratified by the Senate in June, 1797, and signed [see below] by
John Adams [2nd U.S. President] on June 10, 1797. Boller
concluded that "Very likely Washington shared Barlow's view,
though there is no record of his opinion about the treaty ..."
[p.88]. Jefferson was Secretary of State in Washington's first
administration but had resigned when the treaty was written.
Jefferson was Vice-President when the treaty was ratified and
signed. Barlow, identified in The American Heritage Dictionary as
an American "poet and diplomat," 1754-1812, knew and corresponded
extensively with Jefferson. Among many letters Jefferson wrote
Barlow was one written on March 14, 1801, just ten days after
Jefferson's first inauguration as President.)

Now be it known, that I, John Adams, President of the United
States of America, having seen and considered the said treaty do,
by and within the consent of the Senate, accept, ratify and
confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. ("Treaty
of Peace and Friendship between The United States and the Bey and
Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary," 1796-1797. Treaties and Other
International Acts of the United States of America. Edited by
Hunter Miller. Vol. 2. 1776-1818. U.S. Government Printing
Office, Washington, D.C., 1931, p. 383; from George Seldes, ed.,
The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983,
p. 45.)

II. Founding Fathers: National Leaders & Thinkers from the
Revolutionary Era

Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826; author, Declaration of Independence and the Statute
of Virginia for Religious Freedom; 3rd U.S. President,
1801-1809)

Convinced that religious liberty must, most assuredly, be built
into the structural frame of the new [state] government,
Jefferson proposed this language [for the new Virginia
constitution]: "All persons shall have full and free liberty of
religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or
maintain any religious institution": freedom for religion, but
also freedom from religion. (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our
Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1987, p. 38. Jefferson proposed his language in 1776.)

I may grow rich by an art I am compelled to follow; I may recover
health by medicines I am compelled to take against my own
judgment; but I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve and
abhor. (Thomas Jefferson, notes for a speech, c. 1776. From
Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of
American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 498.)

Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on
their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to
their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and
manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making
it altogether insusceptible to restraint; that all attempts to
influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil
incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and
meanness, 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 coercions on either, as was in his Almighty
power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone;
that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as
well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and
uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others,
setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only
true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on
others, hath established and maintained false religions over the
greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a
man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of
opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and
tyrannical; ... that our civil rights have no dependance on our
religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or
geometry; ... that the opinions of men are not the object of
civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the
civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on
supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous falacy [sic],
which at once destroys all religious liberty ... ; and finally,
that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she
is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing
to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed
of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing
to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be
compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or
ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested,
or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on
account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men
shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their
opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no
wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities ...
(Thomas Jefferson, "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in
Virginia," 1779; those parts shown above in italics were,
according to Edwin S. Gaustad, written by Jefferson but not
included in the statute as passed by the General Assembly of
Virginia. The bill became law on January 16, 1786. From Edwin S.
Gaustad, ed., A Documentary History of Religion in America, Vol.
I (To the Civil War), Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 259-261. Jefferson was prouder of
having written this bill than of being the third President or of
such history-making accomplishments as the Louisiana Purchase.
He wrote, as his own full epitaph, "Here was buried Thomas
Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of
the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, And Father of the
University of Virginia.")

Where the preamble [of the Statute of Virginia for Religious
Freedom] declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of
the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by
inserting the words "Jesus Christ," so that it should read, "A
departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our
religion;" the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in
proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its
protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and
Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.
(Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography; from George Seldes, ed., The
Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p.
363)

Our [Virginia's] act for freedom of religion is extremely
applauded. The Ambassadors and ministers of the several nations
of Europe resident at this court have asked me copies of it to
send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in
several books now in the press; among others, in the new
Encyclopedie. I think it will produce considerable good even in
those countries where ignorance, superstition, poverty and
oppression of body and mind in every form, are so firmly settled
on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can
never be hoped. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Wythe from
Paris, August 13, 1786. From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American
Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free
Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 311.)

The Virginia act for religious freedom has been received with
infinite approbation in Europe, and propagated with enthusiasm. I
do not mean by governments, but by the individuals who compose
them. It has been translated into French and Italian; has been
sent to most of the courts of Europe, and has been the best
evidence of the falsehood of those reports which stated us to be
in anarchy. It is inserted in the new "EncyclopŽdie," and is
appearing in most of the publications respecting America. In
fact, it is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length
erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind has been
held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles; and it is
honorable for us, to have produced the first legislature who had
the courage to declare, that the reason of man may be trusted
with the formation of his own opinions.... (Thomas Jefferson,
letter to James Madison from Paris, Dec. 16, 1786. From Lloyd S.
Kramer, ed., Paine and Jefferson on Liberty, New York: Continuum,
1988, pp. 87-88.)

... Justly famous among these important bills [written or revised
by Jefferson for Virginia's legislature] in the revisal of 1770
was the Bill for establishing religious freedom, a bill called by
Julian Boyd "Jefferson's declaration of intellectual and
spiritual independence." Unlike some of his other great bills,
this one was at long last enacted into law in 1786, the first
piece of legislation ever to provide expressly for full religious
freedom. In this contribution alone, Jefferson advanced far
beyond his revered John Locke whose philosophy of toleration
"stopped short," as Jefferson said, of the full freedom required
by the independent intelligence and conscience of man. (Adrienne
Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the
American Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George
Braziller, 1965, p. 280.)

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth
can stand by itself. (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782;
from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New
Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 363)

Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors?
Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as
public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce
uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than
of face and stature. (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782;
from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New
Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 363)

Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and
children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been
burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one
inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To
make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To
support roguery and error all over the earth. (Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on Virginia, 1782; from George Seldes, ed., The Great
Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 363.)

No man complains of his neighbor for ill management of his
affairs, for an error in sowing his land, or marrying his
daughter, for consuming his substance in taverns ... in all these
he has liberty; but if he does not frequent the church, or then
conform in ceremonies, there is an immediate uproar. (Thomas
Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782; from George Seldes, ed., The
Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p.
364.)

In the Notes [on the State of Virginia] Jefferson elaborated his
views on government's keeping its distance from all religious
affairs and religious opinions. "The legitimate powers of
government," he wrote, "extend to such acts only as are injurious
to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there
are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks
my leg." (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and
the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 42-43. )

Life is of no value but as it brings us gratifications. Among
the most valuable of these is rational society. It informs the
mind, sweetens the temper, cheers our spirits, and promotes
health. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, February 20,
1784. From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The
Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York:
George Braziller, 1965, p. 305.)

[W]e have solved by fair experiment the great and interesting
question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in
government and obedience to the laws. (Thomas Jefferson, letter
to James Madison, December 16, 1786, according to Albert Menendez
and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious
Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 47.)

... shake off all the fears of servile prejudices under which
weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat,
and call to her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question
with boldness even the existence of a god because, if there be
one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of
blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine first the religion
of your own country. Read the bible then, as you would read Livy
or Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their favor in
one scale, and their not being against the laws of nature does
not weigh against them. But those facts in the bible which
contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care,
and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the
pretensions of the writer to inspiration from god. Examine upon
what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that
evidence is so strong as that it's [sic] falshood [sic] would be
more improbable than a change of the laws of nature in the case
he relates.... Do not be frightened from this enquiry by any fear
of it's [sic] consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is
no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and
pleasantness you feel in it's [sic] exercise, and the love of
others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe
there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his
eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional
incitement. If that there be a future state, the hope of a happy
existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that
Jesus was also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his
aid and love. In fine, I repeat that you must lay aside all
prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing
because any other person, or description of persons have rejected
or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by
heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but
uprightness of the decision.... (Thomas Jefferson, letter to his
young nephew Peter Carr, August 10, 1787. From Adrienne Koch,
ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American
Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965,
pp. 320-321.)

I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring
about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another. (Thomas
Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799. From
Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of
American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 499.)

To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the
press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to
martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as
we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.
(Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Green Mumford, June 18,
1799. From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The
Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York:
George Braziller, 1965, p. 341.)

"I know," Jefferson had written, ... "that Gouverneur Morris, who
pretended to be in his [George Washington's] secrets & believed
himself to be so, has often told me that Genl. Washington
believed no more of that system [Christianity] than he himself
did." (Paul F. Boller, George Washington & Religion, Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, p. 85. Jefferson's
comments were written in his journal, Anas, in February, 1800,
according to Boller, p. 80.)

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though
the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will,
to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess
their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate
which would be oppression. (Thomas Jefferson, "First Inaugural
Address," March 4, 1801; from George Seldes, ed., The Great
Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 364.)

... And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that
religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and
suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political
intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and
bloody persecutions. ... error of opinion may be tolerated where
reason is left free to combat it. ... I deem the essential
principles of our government . ..[:] Equal and exact justice to
all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political;
... freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of
person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by
juries impartially selected. (Thomas Jefferson, "First Inaugural
Address," March 4, 1801. From Mortimer Adler, ed., The Annals of
America: 1797-1820, Domestic Expansion and Foreign Entanglements,
Vol. 4; Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1968, pp. 144-145.

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole
American people which declared that their legislature should make
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the
free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between
church and state. (Thomas Jefferson, as President, in a letter to
the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802; from George Seldes,
ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press,
1983, p. 369)

I will never, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of
intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious
opinions of others. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Dowse,
April 19, 1803. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The
Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988,
p. 499.)

It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for
himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or
their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
(Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803. From
Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale
Research, Inc., 1990, p. 189.)

Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to
assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to
the General Government. It must then rest with the States, as far
as it can be in any human authority. But it is only proposed that
I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting and prayer.
That is, that I should indirectly assume to the United States an
authority over religious exercises, which the Constitution has
directly precluded them from. It must be meant, too, that this
recommendation is to carry some authority, and to be sanctioned
by some penalty on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and
imprisonment, but of some degree of proscription, perhaps in
public opinion. And does the change in the nature of the penalty
make the recommendation less a law of conduct for those to whom
it is directed? I do not believe it is in the best interests of
religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises,
its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies,
that the General Government should be invested with the power of
effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting
and prayer are religious exercises; the enjoining them an act of
discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for
itself the times of these exercises, and the objects proper for
them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right
can never be safer than in their own hands, where the
Constitution has deposited it. (Thomas Jefferson, just before
the end of his second term, in a letter to Samuel Miller--a
Presbyterian minister--on January 23, 1808; from Willson Whitman,
arranger, Jefferson's Letters, Eau Claire, Wisconsin: E. M. Hale
and Company, ND, pp. 241-242.

But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer
[Jesus] of the Jewish religion, before his principles were
departed from by those who professed to be his special servants,
and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and
aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State. (Thomas
Jefferson, in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, 1810; from George
Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel
Press, 1983, p. 370)

History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade
of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious
leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.
(Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Baron von Humboldt, 1813; from
George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey:
Citadel Press, 1983, p. 370)

The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and
ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very
formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.
(Thomas Jefferson, as quoted by Saul K. Padover in Thomas
Jefferson on Democracy, New York, 1946, p. 165, according to
Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
48.)

In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his
abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to
acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving
them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion
ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to
all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes. (Thomas
Jefferson, in a letter to Horatio Spofford, 1814; from George
Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel
Press, 1983, p. 371)

Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may
be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize
religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the
measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest
to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set
up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we
must disbelieve? (Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief,
Philadelphia bookseller, 1814, on the occasion of prosecution for
selling De Becourt's "Sur le CrŽation du Monde, un Syst me
d'Organisation Primitive"; from George Seldes, ed., The Great
Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 371)

If M. de Becourt's book be false in its facts, disprove them; if
false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us
freely hear both sides, if we choose. (Thomas Jefferson, in a
letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814, on the
occasion of prosecution for selling De Becourt's "Sur le CrŽation
du Monde, un Syst me d'Organisation Primitive"; from George
Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel
Press, 1983, p. 371)

I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of
America, a fact like this can become a subject to inquiry, and of
criminal inquiry, too, as an offence against religion; that a
question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil
magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? (Thomas
Jefferson, letter to N. G. Dufief, April 19, 1814. From Gorton
Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American
Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 492.)

... If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief
that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the
Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such thing
exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those
we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasonings
in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that
while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic
Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries
they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet,
are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their
virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than love of
God. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814.
>From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping
of the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George
Braziller, 1965, p. 358.)

Across the ages, clergy have been interested [according to
Jefferson] not in truth but only in wealth and power; when
rational people have had difficulty swallowing "their impious
heresies," then the clergy have, with the help of the state,
forced "them down their throats." Five years later, he
[Jefferson] wrote of "this loathsome combination of church and
state" that for so many centuries reduced human beings to "dupes
and drudges." (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion
and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 47.
According to Gaustad, the first quotes are from a letter from
Jefferson to William Baldwin, January 19, 1810; the second source
is a letter from Jefferson to Charles Clay, January 29, 1815.)

A professorship of Theology should have no place in our
institution [the University of Virginia]. (Thomas Jefferson,
letter to Thomas Cooper, October 7, 1814. From Gorton Carruth and
Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New
York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 492.)

I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives....
It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion
must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this
does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a
declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion
is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had
never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on
the the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving
from it pence and power, revolt those who think for themselves,
and who read in that system only what is really there. (Thomas
Jefferson, letter to Mrs. M. Harrison Smith: Mrs. M. Harrison,
August 6, 1816. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The
Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988,
p. 492.)

"I never told my own religion, nor scrutinized that of another,"
Thomas Jefferson once remarked, adding that he had "ever judged"
the religion of others by their lives "rather than their" words.
(Richard B. Morris:Richard B., Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny: The
Founding Fathers as Revolutionaries, Harper & Row, 1973, p. 269.
The Jefferson quote is from his letter to Mrs. M. Harrison Smith:
Mrs. M. Harrison, 1816.)

He [Jefferson] rejoiced with John Adams when the Congregational
church was finally disestablished in Connecticut in 1818;
welcoming "the resurrection of Connecticut to light and liberty,
Jefferson congratulated Adams "that this den of priesthood is at
length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to
disgrace American history and character." (Edwin S. Gaustad,
Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987, p. 49.)

In 1820 as he described his plans for the University of Virginia
to his former private secretary, William Short, Jefferson
acknowledged that his plan for the first truly secular university
would have opposition: weak opposition (in his view) from the
College of William and Mary, but strong opposition from "the
priests of the different religious sects, to whose spells on the
human mind its improvement is ominous." (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith
of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987, p. 48. The letter to Short was dated 13 April
1820.)

Jefferson bemoaned the pattern of church life that gave the
unenlightened and bigoted clergy "stated and privileged days to
collect and catechize us, opportunities of delivering their
oracles to the people in mass, and of moulding their minds as wax
in the hollow of their hands." Despite this enormous advantage,
however, Virginians are liberal enough, reasonable enough, to
"give fair play" to a university [the University of Virginia] set
free from dogmatisms and fixed ideas. (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of
Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1987, p. 48.)

This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the
human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever
it may lead, nor to tolerate error so long as reason is free to
combat it. (Thomas Jefferson, to prospective teachers, University
of Virginia; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations,
Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 364.)

If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory,
can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of
public opinion, [then and only then will truth] prevail over
fanaticism. (Thomas Jefferson, as quoted by Edwin S. Gaustad,
Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987, p. 49. Jefferson's words are, according to
Gaustad, from his letter to Jared Sparks, 4 November 1820.)

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by
the supreme being as his father in the womb of a Virgin Mary,
will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in
the brain of Jupiter.... But we may hope that the dawn of reason
and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with]
all this artificial scaffolding. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to
John Adams, 11 April 1823, as quoted by E. S. Gaustad,
"Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A
Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p.
287.)

... Jefferson expressed himself strongly on that larger
apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, in a letter to Alexander
Smyth of 17 January 1825: it is "merely the ravings of a maniac,
no more worthy, nor capable of explanation than the incoherences
of our own nightly dreams." Apocalyptic writing deserved no
commentary, for "what has no meaning admits no explanation";
therefore, apocalyptic prophecies associated with Jesus deserved
and would receive no attention from Jefferson in his Life and
Morals of Jesus. (E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D.
Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p. 287.)

... our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and
prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to
the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to
others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to
burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition
had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the
blessings and security of self-government. That form which we
have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded
exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened,
or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light
of science has already laid open to every view the palpable
truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on
their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride
them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of
hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day
[Fourth of July] forever refresh our recollections of these
rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.... (Thomas
Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826
[Jefferson's last letter, dated ten days before he died]; from
Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of
the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George
Braziller, 1965, p. 372.)

Jefferson wrote voluminously to prove that Christianity was not
part of the law of the land and that religion or irreligion was
purely a private matter, not cognizable by the state. (Leonard W.
Levy, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy,
New York: Schocken Books, 1981, p. 335.)

So much is Jefferson identified in the American mind with his
battle for political liberty that it is difficult to entertain
the possibility that he felt even more strongly about religious
liberty. If the letters and activities of his post presidential
years can be taken as a fair guide, however, he maintained an
unrelenting vigilance with respect to freedom in religion, and an
unrelenting, perhaps even unforgiving, distrust of all those who
would seek in any way to mitigate or limit or nullify that
freedom. (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and
the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 46-47.)

... Jefferson, who as a careful historian had made a study of the
origin of the maxim [that the common law is inextricably linked
with Christianity], challenged such an assertion. He noted that
"the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans,
at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ
pronounced or that such a character existed .... What a
conspiracy this, between Church and State." (Leo Pfeffer,
Religion, State, and the Burger Court, Buffalo, New York:
Prometheus Books, 1984, p. 121.)

... The most revealing writings concerned the commonly repeated
maxim that Christianity was part of the common law. In two
posthumously published writings, an appendix to his Reports of
Cases Determined in the General Court and a letter to Major John
Cartwright, Thomas Jefferson took issue with the maxim. He traced
the erroneous interpretation to a seventeenth-century law
commentator who, Jefferson argued, misinterpreted a
fifteenth-century precedent. He then traced the error forward to
his favorite b te noire, Lord Mansfield, who wrote that "the
essential principles of revealed religion are part of the common
law." Jefferson responded with a classic, positivistic critique:
Mansfield "leaves us at our peril to find out what, in the
opinion of the judge, and according to the measures of his foot
or his faith, are those essential principles of revealed
religion, obligatory on us as part of the common law." (Daniel R.
Ernst, "Church-State Issues and the Law: 1607-1870" in John F.
Wilson, ed., Church and State in America: A Bibliographic Guide.
The Colonial and Early National Periods," New York: Greenwood
Press, 1986, p. 337. Ernst gives his source as Thomas Jefferson,
"Whether Christianity is Part of the Common Law?")

It was what he did not like in religion that gave impetus to
Jefferson's activity in that troublesome and often bloody arena.
He did not like dogmatism, obscurantism, blind obedience, or any
interference with the free exercise of the mind. Moreover, he
did not like the tendency of religion to confuse truth with
power, special insight with special privilege, and the duty to
maintain with the right to persecute the dissenter.
Ecclesiastical despotism was as reprehensible as despotism of the
political sort, even when it justified itself, as it often did,
in the name of doing good. This had been sufficiently evident in
his native Virginia to give Jefferson every stimulus he needed to
see that independence must be carried over into the realm of
religion. (E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson,
ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1986, p. 279.)

... If this [extending religion's influence on the basis of
"reason alone"] is the path chosen by Omnipotence and
Infallibility, what sense can there possibly be in "fallible and
uninspired men ... setting up their own opinions and modes of
thinking as the only true and infallible"? No sense at all,
argued Jefferson, who found compulsion in religion to be
irrational, impious, and tyrannical. If such compulsion is bad
for the vulnerable citizen, its consequences are no more
wholesome for the church: "It tends also to corrupt the
principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by
bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those
who will externally profess and conform to it." (E. S. Gaustad,
"Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A
Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p.
280.)

A final example of Jefferson's separationism may be drawn from
his founding of the University of Virginia in the last years of
his life. Prepared to transform the College of William and Mary
into the principal university of the state, Jefferson would do so
only if the college divested itself of all ties with sectarian
religion--that is, with its old Anglicanism now represented by
the Protestant Episcopal Church. The college declined to make
that break with its past, and Jefferson proceeded with plans for
his own university well to the west of Anglican-dominated
tidewater Virginia. In Charlottesville this new school ("broad &
liberal & modern," as Jefferson envisioned it in a letter to
[Joseph] Priestly of 18 January 1800) opened in 1825 with
professorships in languages and law, natural and moral
philosophy, history and mathematics, but not in divinity. In
Jefferson's view, as reported in Robert Healey's Jefferson on
Religion in Public Education, not only did Virginia's laws
prohibit such favoritism (for divinity or theology was inevitably
sectarian), but high-quality education was not well served by
those who preferred mystery to morals and divisive dogma to the
unities of science. Too great a devotion to doctrine can drive
men mad; if it does not have that tragic effect, it at least
guarantees that a man's education will be mediocre. What is
really significant in religion, its moral content, would be
taught at the University of Virginia, but in philosophy, not
divinity. If Almighty God has made the mind free, one of the ways
to keep it free is to protect young minds from the clouded
convolutions of theologians. Jefferson wanted education separated
from religion because of his own conclusions concerning the
nature of religion, its strengths and its weaknesses, its dark
past and its possibly brighter future. (E. S. Gaustad,
"Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A
Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, pp.
282-283.)

Moving well beyond the traditional deistic triad of God, freedom,
and immortality, Jefferson revealed his strongest feelings and
convictions with regard to the ecclesiastics. On two counts he
found them critically deficient. In the realm of politics and
power, they were tyrannical; in the realm of theology and truth,
they were perverse. Jefferson's strongest language is reserved
for those clergy who, as he said in a letter to Moses Robinson of
23 March 1801, "had got a smell of union between church and
state" and would impede the advance of liberty and science. Such
clergy, whether in America or abroad, have so adulterated
religion that it has become "a mere contrivance to filch wealth
and power to themselves" and a means of grasping "impious
heresies, in order to force them down [men's] throats" (letter to
Samuel Kercheval, 19 January 1810). In his old age, Jefferson
softened his invective not one whit: "The Presbyterian clergy are
the loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most
tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the lawgiver, if
such a word could be obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and
to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere, the flames in which their
oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not
find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that
three are one, and one is three." And if they cannot revive the
holy inquisition of the Middle Ages, they will seek to mobilize
the inquisition of public opinion, "that lord of the Universe"
(letter to William Short, 13 April 1820). Jefferson, the enemy of
all arbitrary and capricious power, found that which was clothed
in the ceremonial garb of religion to be particularly despicable.
Even more disturbing to Jefferson was the priestly perversion of
simple truths. If "in this virgin hemisphere" it was no longer
possible to burn men's bodies, it was still possible to stunt
their minds. In the "revolution of 1800" that saw Jefferson's
election to the presidency, the candidate wrote to his good
friend Rush that while his views would please deists and rational
Christians, they would never please that "irritable tribe of
priests" who still hoped for government sanction and support. Nor
would his election please them, "especially the Episcopalians and
the Congregationalists." They fear that I will oppose their
schemes of establishment. "And they believe rightly: for I have
sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form
of tyranny over the mind of man" (23 September 1800). It was
this aspect of establishment that Jefferson most dreaded and most
relentlessly opposed--not just the power, profit, and corruption
that invariably accompanied state-sanctioned ecclesiasticism but
the theological distortion and intellectual absurdity that passed
for reason and good sense. We must not be held captive to "the
Platonic mysticisms" or to the "gossamer fabrics of factitious
religion." Nor must we ever again be required to confess that
which mankind did not and could not comprehend, "for I suppose
belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible
proposition" (letter to John Adams, 22 August 1813). (E. S.
Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas
Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1986, p. 291.)

I take to heart Jefferson's aspiration that the idea of
church-state separation "germinate and take root among [the
American people's] political tenets." (Kenneth S. Saladin,
"Municipal Church-State Litigation and the Issue of Standing," in
the "Church and State" issue of National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi
Journal, Winter, 1988, p. 23.)

To conclude this discussion of the religious clauses of the First
Amendment, let's talk some more about Thomas Jefferson and his
"wall." Some TV preachers, as well as writers, politicians, and,
worst of all, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, have
sought to pull down the wall by disparaging Jefferson's influence
on the First Amendment. A popular bit of historical revisionism
that floats around these days goes something like this: Jefferson
served as ambassador to France during the writing of the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He had no hand in their
preparation and passage because he was out of the country.
Therefore, his metaphor about the "wall of separation" is
misplaced and ill-informed because he was living in France and
was out of touch. Tommyrot! Thomas Jefferson was James Madison's
mentor. Madison as the chief architect of both the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights drew heavily from Jefferson's ideas and
kept in regular contact with his fellow Virginian even though the
latter lived in France. Volumes of correspondence exist between
the two men as they discussed the day's crucial events. Jefferson
understood that the First Amendment created a separation between
church and state because he, more than most of the Founders, gave
form and substance to the nation's understanding of how the two
institutions should best relate in the new nation. Some
politicians, lawyers, and preachers subject us to mental cruelty
when they disparage Jefferson's interpretation simply because he
lived in France during the years of the Constitution's framing.
(Robert L. Maddox, Baptist minister and speech writer and
religious liaison for President Jimmy Carter, Separation of
Church and State: Guarantor of Religious Freedom, New York:
Crossroad Publishing, 1987, pp. 67-68.)

James Madison
(1751-1836; principal author, U. S. Constitution and Bill of
Rights; 4th U.S. President, 1809-1817)

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it
for every noble enterprize [sic], every expanded prospect. (James
Madison, in a letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774, as
quoted by Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and
the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 37.)

Who does not see that the same authority which can establish
Christianity in exclusion of all other religions may establish,
with the same ease, any particular sect of Christians in
exclusion of all other sects? That the same authority which can
force a citizen to contribute threepence only of his property for
the support of any one establishment may force him to conform to
any other establishment in all cases whatsoever? (James Madison,
"A Memorial and Remonstrance," addressed to the General Assembly
of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785; from George Seldes, ed.,
The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press,
pp. 459-460. According to Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers:
Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987,
pp. 39 ff., Madison's "Remonstrance" was instrumental in blocking
the multiple establishment of all denominations of Christianity
in Virginia.)

... Congress, in voting a plan for the government of the Western
territories, retained a clause setting aside one section in each
township for the support of public schools, while striking out
the provision reserving a section for the support of religion.
Commented Madison: "How a regulation so unjust in itself, so
foreign to the authority of Congress, and so hurtful to the sale
of public land, and smelling so strongly of an antiquated
bigotry, could have received the countenance of a committee is
truly a matter of astonishment." (Richard B. Morris, Seven Who
Shaped Our Destiny: The Founding Fathers as Revolutionaries,
Harper & Row, 1973, p. 206. The Congress here referred to was the
Continental Congress; the Madison quote is from his letter to
James Monroe, May 29, 1785, according to Morris.)

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger
of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the
majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is
chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government
contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which
the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the
constituents. (James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17,
1788; from Michael Kammen, The Origins of the American
Constitution: A Documentary History, 1986, pp. 369-370. )

"In a free government," Madison declared, "the security for civil
rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It
consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in
the other in the multiplicity of sects." (James A. Henretta, The
Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815: An Interdisciplinary
Analysis, Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1973, p. 136.
According to Henretta, the quote is from Number 51 of the
Federalist Papers.)

Here [in the Virginia statute for religious liberty] the
separation between the authority of human laws, and the natural
rights of Man excepted from the grant on which all authority is
founded, is traced as distinctly as words can admit, and the
limits to this authority established with as much solemnity as
the forms of legislation can express. The law has the further
advantage of having been the result of a formal appeal to the
sense of the Community and a deliberate sanction of a vast
majority, comprizing [sic] every sect of Christians in the State.
This act is a true standard of Religious liberty; its principle
the great barrier agst [against] usurpations on the rights of
conscience. As long as it is respected & no longer, these will be
safe. Every provision for them short of this principle, will be
found to leave crevices, at least thro' which bigotry may
introduce persecution; a monster, that feeding & thriving on its
own venom, gradually swells to a size and strength overwhelming
all laws divine & human. (James Madison, "Monopolies.
Perpetuities. Corporations. Ecclesiastical Endowments," as
reprinted in Elizabeth Fleet, "Madison's Detatched Memoranda,"
William & Mary Quarterly, Third series: Vol. III, No. 4 [October,
1946], pp. 554-555. The "Detatched Memoranda" is a manuscript,
written sometime after Madison left office in 1817, in Madison's
own hand, with notes he made in preparation for the arrangement
and publication of his public papers, a task he did not complete
before his death in 1836.)

Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in
the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment
by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already
furnished in their short history. (See the cases in which
negatives were put by J. M. on two bills passd by Congs and his
signature withheld from another. See also attempt in Kentucky for
example, where it was proposed to exempt Houses of Worship from
taxes. (James Madison, "Monopolies. Perpetuities. Corporations.
Ecclesiastical Endowments," as reprinted in Elizabeth Fleet,
"Madison's Detatched Memoranda," William & Mary Quarterly, Third
series: Vol. III, No. 4 [October, 1946], p. 555. The
parenthetical note at the end, which lacks a closed parenthesis
in Fleet, was apparently a note Madison made to himself regarding
examples of improper encroachment to use when the "Detatched
Memoranda" were edited and published, and seems to imply clearly
that Madison supported taxing churches. )

On Feb. 21, 1811, Madison vetoed a bill for incorporating the
Episcopal Church in Alexandria and on Feb. 28, 1811, one
reserving land in Mississippi territory for a Baptist Church.
(James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents
[Washington, 1896-1899], I, 489-490, as cited in a footnote,
Elizabeth Fleet, "Madison's Detatched Memoranda," William & Mary
Quarterly, Third series: Vol. III, No. 4 [October, 1946], p.
555.)

Chaplainships of both Congress and the armed services were
established sixteen years before the First Amendment was adopted.
It would have been fatuous folly for anybody to stir a major
controversy over a minor matter before the meaning of the
amendment had been threshed out in weightier matters. But Madison
did foresee the danger that minor deviations from the
constitutional path would deepen into dangerous precedents. He
took care of one of them by his veto [in 1811] of the
appropriation for a Baptist church. Others he dealt with in his
"Essay on Monopolies," unpublished until 1946. Here is what he
wrote: "Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of
Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure
principle of religious freedom? In strictness the answer on both
points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U. S.
forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion.
The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for
the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of
religion, elected by a majority of them, and these are to be paid
out of the national taxes. Does this not involve the principle of
a national establishment ... ?" The appointments, he said, were
also a palpable violation of equal rights. Could a Catholic
clergyman ever hope to be appointed a Chaplain? "To say that his
religious principles are obnoxious or that his sect is small, is
to lift the veil at once and exhibit in its naked deformity the
doctrine that religious truth is to be tested by numbers, or that
the major sects have a right to govern the minor." The problem,
said the author of the First Amendment, was how to prevent "this
step beyond the landmarks of power [from having] the effect of a
legitimate precedent." Rather than let that happen, it would "be
better to apply to it the legal aphorism de minimis non curat lex
[the law takes no account of trifles]." Or, he said (likewise in
Latin), class it with faults that result from carelessness or
that human nature could scarcely avoid." "Better also," he went
on, "to disarm in the same way, the precedent of Chaplainships
for the army and navy, than erect them into a political authority
in matters of religion." ... The deviations from constitutional
principles went further: "Religious proclamations by the
Executive recommending thanksgivings and fasts are shoots from
the same root with the legislative acts reviewed. Altho'
recommendations only, they imply a religious agency, making no
part of the trust delegated to political rulers." (Irving Brant,
The Bill of Rights: Its Origin and Meaning, Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965, pp. 423-424. Brant gives the
source of "Essay on Monopolies" as Elizabeth Fleet, "Madison's
Detatched Memoranda," William & Mary Quarterly, Third series:
Vol. III, No. 4 [October, 1946], pp. 554-562.)

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every
past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both
exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
(James Madison, letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822;
published in The Complete Madison: His Basic Writings, ed. by
Saul K. Padover, New York: Harper & Bros., 1953.)

The only ultimate protection for religious liberty in a country
like ours, Madison pointed out--echoing Jefferson;--is public
opinion: a firm and pervading opinion that the First Amendment
works. "Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect
separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of
importance." (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion
and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 56.
Madison's words, according to Gaustad, are from his letter of 10
July 1822 to Edward Livingston.)

Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess
and observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin,
we cannot deny equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet
yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom
be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man: To
God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.
(James Madison, according to Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against
God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy, New York: Schocken
Books, 1981, p. xii.)

This assertion [that Madison was committed to total and complete
separation of church and state] would be challenged by the
nonpreferentialists, who agree with Justice Rehnquist's dissent
in the Jaffree case. Contrasted with the analysis set forth
above, Rehnquist insisted that Madison's "original language Ônor
shall any national religion be established' obviously does not
conform to the Ôwall of separation' between church and state
which latter day commentators have ascribed to him." Rehnquist
believes Madison was seeking merely to restrict Congress from
establishing a particular national church. There are three
problems with this contention. First, nothing in Madison's acts
or words support such a proposition. Indeed, his opposition to
the General Assessment Bill in Virginia, detailed in the
"Memorial and Remonstrance," contradicts Rehnquist directly.
Secondly, all of Madison's writings after 1789 support the
Court's twentieth-century understanding of the term "wall of
separation." Third, the reference to Madison's use of "national"
simply misses his definition of the word. Madison had an
expansive intention when he used the term national. He believed
that "religious proclamations by the Executive recommending
thanksgiving and fasts ... imply and certainly nourish the
erroneous idea of a national religion." He commented in a similar
way about chaplains for the House and Senate. Historical evidence
lends no support to the Rehnquist thesis. And clearly Jefferson,
even though absent from the First Congress, seems a far more
secure source of "original intent" than Justice Rehnquist.
(Robert S. Alley, ed., The Supreme Court on Church and State, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 13.)

Late in his life [therefore in the 1830s?] he [Madison] wrote to
his friend Robert Walsh with whom Madison conducted a steady
correspondence: "It was the Universal opinion of the Century
preceding the last, that Civil Government could not stand without
the prop of a Religious establishment, and that the Christian
religion itself, would perish if not supported by a legal
provision for its Clergy. The experience of Virginia
conspicuously corroborates the disproof of both opinions. The
Civil Government, tho' bereft of everything like an associated
hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability and performs its
functions with complete success; whilst the number, the industry,
and the morality of the Priesthood, and the devotion of the
people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of
the Church from the State." (Robert L. Maddox, Separation of
Church and State: Guarantor of Religious Freedom, New York:
Crossroad Publishing, 1987, p. 39.)

At age eighty-one [therefore, in 1832?], both looking back at the
American experience and looking forward with vision sharpened by
practical experience, Madison summed up his views of church and
state relations in a letter to a "Reverend Adams": "I must admit
moreover that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to
trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and
the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions
and doubts on unessential points. The tendency of a usurpation on
one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance
between them, will be best guarded by an entire abstinence of the
Government from interference in any way whatever, beyond the
necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect
against trespass on its legal rights by others." (Robert L.
Maddox, Separation of Church and State: Guarantor of Religious
Freedom, New York: Crossroad, 1987, p. 39.)

George Washington
(1732-1799; "Father of His Country"; 1st U.S. President,
1789-1797)

The following year [1784], when asking Tench Tilghman to secure a
carpenter and a bricklayer for his Mount Vernon estate, he
[Washington] remarked: "If they are good workmen, they may be of
Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mohometans, Jews or
Christians of any Sect, or they may be Atheists." As he told a
Mennonite minister who sought refuge in the United States after
the Revolution: "I had always hoped that this land might become a
safe and agreeable Asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of
mankind, to whatever nation they might belong...." He was, as
John Bell pointed out in 1779, "a total stranger to religious
prejudices, which have so often excited Christians of one
denomination to cut the throats of those of another." (Paul F.
Boller, George Washington & Religion, Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press, 1963, p. 118. According to Boller, Washington
wrote his remarks to Tilghman in a letter dated March 24, 1784;
his remarks to the Mennonite--Francis Adrian Van der Kemp--were
in a letter dated May 28, 1788.)

Government being, among other purposes, instituted to protect the
consciences of men from oppression, it is certainly the duty of
Rulers, not only to abstain from it themselves, but according to
their stations, to prevent it in others. (George Washington,
letter to the Religious Society called the Quakers, September 28,
1789. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper
Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p.
500.)

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by
the indulgence of one class of the people that another enjoyed
the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the
Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no
sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that those
who live under its protection should demean themselves as good
citizens in giving it, on all occasions, their effectual support.
(George Washington, letter to the congregation of Touro
Synagogue Jews, Newport, Rhode Island, August, 1790. From Gorton
Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American
Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 500.)

Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those
which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear
to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be
deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal
policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have
reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should
never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as
to endanger the peace of society. (George Washington, letter to
Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792; from George Seldes, ed., The
Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p.
726.)

In the Enlightened Age and in this Land of equal Liberty it is
our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the
protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining
and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United
States. (George Washington, letter to the members of the New
Church in Baltimore, January 27, 1793. Quoted in Richard B.
Morris, Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny: The Founding Fathers as
Revolutionaries, Harper & Row, 1973, p. 269.)

... Bird Wilson, Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, was one
of the first openly to challenge in public the pietistic picture
of Washington that was being built up by [Mason Locke] Weems and
his followers. In a sermon delivered in October, 1831, which
attracted wide attention when it was reported in the Albany Daily
Advertiser, Wilson stated flatly that "among all our presidents
from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at
least not of more than unitarianism." Washington, he went on to
say, was a great and good man, but he was not a professor of
religion; he was really a typical eighteenth-century Deist, not a
Christian, in his religious outlook. (Paul F. Boller, George
Washington & Religion, Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 1963, pp. 14-15.)

... Like his father before him, he [George Washington] served
actively for many years as one of the twelve vestrymen for Truro
parish, Virginia, in which Mount Vernon was located. According
to Charles H. Callahan, "The regularity of his attendance at the
meetings of the vestry and the progress of church work throughout
the parish during his incumbency is a striking testimonial of the
religious zeal and activity of him and his associates." Actually,
under the Anglican establishment in Virginia before the
Revolution, the duties of a parish vestry were as much civil as
religious in nature and it is not possible to deduce any
exceptional religious zeal from the mere fact of membership. Even
Thomas Jefferson was a vestryman for a while.* [Boller's footnote
is shown at the end of this selection.] Consisting of the leading
gentlemen of the parish in position and influence (many of whom,
like Washington, were also at one time or other members of the
County Court and of the House of Burgesses), the parish vestry,
among other things, levied the parish taxes, handled poor relief,
fixed land boundaries in the parish, supervised the construction,
furnishing, and repairs of churches, and hired ministers and paid
their salaries. *As Bishop William Meade put it, somewhat
nastily, in 1857: "Even Mr. Jefferson, and [George] Wythe, who
did not conceal their disbelief in Christianity, took their parts
in the duties of vestrymen, the one at Williamsburg, the other at
Albermarle; for they wished to be men of influence." (William
Meade, Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia, 2 vols.;
Philadelphia, 1857, I, 191). (Paul F. Boller, George Washington &
Religion, Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, p.
26.)

Unlike Thomas Jefferson--and Thomas Paine, for that
matter--Washington never even got around to recording his belief
that Christ was a great ethical teacher. His reticence on the
subject was truly remarkable. Washington frequently alluded to
Providence in his private correspondence. But the name of Christ,
in any correspondence whatsoever, does not appear anywhere in his
many letters to friends and associates throughout his life. (Paul
F. Boller, George Washington & Religion, Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1963, pp. 74-75.)

... if to believe in the divinity and resurrection of Christ and
his atonement for the sins of man and to participate in the
sacrament of the Lord's Supper are requisites for the Christian
faith, then Washington, on the evidence which we have examined,
can hardly be considered a Christian, except in the most nominal
sense. (Paul F. Boller, George Washington & Religion, Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, p. 90.)

[on Washington's first inaugural speech in April 1789] . .. That
he was not just striking a popular attitude as a politician is
revealed by the absence of of the usual Christian terms: he did
not mention Christ or even use the word "God." Following the
phraseology of the philosophical Deism he professed, he referred
to "the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men," to
"the benign parent of the human race." (James Thomas Flexner,
George Washington and the New Nation [1783-1793], Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1970, p. 184.)

Washington's religious belief was that of the enlightenment:
deism. He practically never used the word "God," preferring the
more impersonal word "Providence." How little he visualized
Providence in personal form is shown by the fact that he
interchangeably applied to that force all three possible
pronouns: he, she, and it. (James Thomas Flexner, George
Washington: Anguish and Farewell [1793-1799], Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1972, p. 490.)

No citizens ... were more sensitive to Washington's role as an
upholder of liberties than the religious minorities. These
groups were less anxious to cultivate what they had in common
with other Americans than to sustain what kept them apart.
Washington recognized this, just as he recognized the tenacity of
regional and economic interests, and he took pains to explain
precisely what national unity meant to him. He carried to his
countrymen a vision of "organic" rather than "mechanical"
solidarity, a union based on difference and interdependence
rather than uniformity of belief and conduct. Washington's
understanding of the kind of integration appropriate to a modern
state was not shared by the most powerful Protestant
establishments, the New England Congregationalists and
Presbyterians; but other religious groups could not have been
more pleased.... Acknowledging in each instance that respect for
diversity was a fair price for commitment to the nation and its
regime, Washington abolished deep-rooted fears that would have
otherwise alienated a large part of the population from the
nation-building process. For this large minority, he embodied not
the ideal of union, nor even that of liberty, but rather the
reconciliation of union and liberty. (Barry Schwartz, George
Washington: The Making of an American Symbol, New York: The Free
Press, 1987, pp. 85-86.)

George Washington's conduct convinced most Americans that he was
a good Christian, but those possessing first-hand knowledge of
his religious convictions had reasons for doubt. (Barry
Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol,
New York: The Free Press, 1987, p. 170.)

Following a tradition transmitted from Cicero, through
Machiavelli, to their own contemporaries like Paine and
Jefferson, the less pious men of the time saw in religion a
necessary and assured support of civil society. Although guided
in their own conduct by secular traditions, they felt that only
religion could unite the masses and induce their submission to
custom and law. So they joined their orthodox countrymen in
attributing to the hero [George Washington] a deep religious
devotion. (Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an
American Symbol, New York: The Free Press, 1987, p. 173.)

As President, Washington regularly attended Christian services,
and he was friendly in his attitude toward Christian values.
However, he repeatedly declined the church's sacraments. Never
did he take communion, and when his wife, Martha, did, he waited
for her outside the sanctuary.... Even on his deathbed,
Washington asked for no ritual, uttered no prayer to Christ, and
expressed no wish to be attended by His representative. George
Washington's practice of Christianity was limited and superficial
because he was not himself a Christian. In the enlightened
tradition of his day, he was a devout Deist--just as many of the
clergymen who knew him suspected. (Barry Schwartz, George
Washington: The Making of an American Symbol, New York: The Free
Press, 1987, pp. 174-175.)

John Adams
(1735-1826; major leader at Constitutional Convention in 1787;
2nd U.S. President , 1797-1801)

In his youth John Adams (1735-1826) thought to become a minister,
but soon realized that his independent opinions would create much
difficulty. At the age of twenty-one, therefore, he resolved to
become a lawyer, noting that in following law rather than
divinity, "I shall have liberty to think for myself without
molesting others or being molested myself." (Edwin S. Gaustad,
Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987, p. 88. The Adams quote is from his letter to
Richard Cranch, August 29, 1756.)

We should begin by setting conscience free. When all men of all
religions ... shall enjoy equal liberty, property, and an equal
chance for honors and power ... we may expect that improvements
will be made in the human character and the state of society.
(John Adams, letter to Dr. Price, as quoted by Albert Menendez
and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious
Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 1.)

The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first
example of governments erected on the simple principles of
nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse
themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition,
they will consider this event as an era in their history.
Although the detail of the formation of the American governments
is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in
America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will
never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had
interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the
influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or
houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will
forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived
merely by the use of reason and the senses.... (John Adams, "A
Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States
of America" [1787-1788]; from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American
Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free
Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 258.)

Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the
natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of
miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the
northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great
point gained in favor of the rights of mankind. (John Adams, "A
Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States
of America" [1787-1788]; from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American
Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free
Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 258.)

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose.
Superstition and Dogmatism cannot confine it. (John Adams, letter
to John Quincy Adams, November 13, 1816. From Edwin S. Gaustad,
Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987, p. 88.)

We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are
so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of
free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far
are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I
believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes
it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the
books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations.
In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake,
or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by
boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is
not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon
the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most
of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last
century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but
substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers
upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free
inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or
imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the
divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of
translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject,
though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great
embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human
mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to
be established as divine inspiration by penal laws. It is true,
few persons appear desirous to put such laws in execution, and it
is also true that some few persons are hardy enough to venture to
depart from them. But as long as they continue in force as laws,
the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its
investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and
essence of Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and
unchangeable, and will bear examination forever, but it has been
mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear
examination, and they ought to be separated. Adieu. (John Adams,
letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825. Adams was 90,
Jefferson 81 at the time; both died on July 4th of the following
year, on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration
of Independence. From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American
Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free
Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 234.)

Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790; American statesman, diplomat, scientist, and printer)

I am fully of your Opinion respecting religious Tests; but, tho'
the People of Massachusetts have not in their new Constitution
kept quite clear of them, yet, if we consider what that People
were 100 Years ago, we must allow they have gone great Lengths in
Liberality of Sentiment on religious Subjects; and we may hope
for greater Degrees of Perfection, when their Constitution, some
years hence, shall be revised. If Christian Preachers had
continued to teach as Christ and his Apostles did, without
Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine Tests would never
have existed; for I think they were invented, not so much to
secure Religion itself, as the Emoluments of it. When a Religion
is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not
support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that
its Professors are obliged to call for help of the Civil Power,
it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. (Benjamin
Franklin, 1706-1790, American statesman, diplomat, scientist, and
printer, from a letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1780; from
Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of
the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George
Braziller, 1965, p. 93.)

[Benjamin] Franklin drank deep of the Protestant ethic and then,
discomforted by church constraints, became a freethinker. All his
life he kept Sundays free for reading, but would visit any church
to hear a great speaker, no doubt recognizing a talent he himself
did not possess. With typical honesty and humor he wrote out his
creed in 1790, the year he died: "I believe in one God, Creator
of the universe.... That the most acceptable service we can
render Him is doing good to His other children.... As to Jesus
... I have ... some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a
question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and
think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon
an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble." (Alice J.
Hall, "Philosopher of Dissent: Benj. Franklin," National
Geographic, Vol. 148, No. 1, July, 1975, p. 94.)

Though himself surely a freethinker, Franklin cautioned other
freethinkers to be careful about dismissing institutional
religion too lightly or too quickly. "Think how great a
proportion of Mankind," he warned in 1757, "consists of weak and
ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc'd Youth of both Sexes,
who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from
Vice, to support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of
it till it becomes habitual, which is the great Point for its
Security." (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and
the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 61.)

Thomas Paine
(1737-1809; author of Common Sense; key American patriotic
writer)

As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of
government to protect all conscientious protesters thereof, and I
know of no other business government has to do therewith.
(Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776. As quoted by Leo Pfeffer, "The
Establishment Clause: The Never-Ending Conflict," in Ronald C.
White and Albright G. Zimmerman, An Unsettled Arena: Religion and
the Bill of Rights, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1990, p. 72.)

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is
always the strongly-marked feature of all law-religions, or
religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment,
and every religion re-assumes its original benignity. (Thomas
Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791-1792. From Gorton Carruth and
Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New
York: Harper & Row, 1988, pp. 499-500.)

Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance but the counterfeit
of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right
of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.
(Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, p. 58. As quoted by John M.
Swomley, Religious Liberty and the Secular State: The
Constitutional Context, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1987, p.
7. Swomley added, "Toleration is a concession; religious liberty
is a right.")

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian
or Turkish [Muslim], appear to me no other than human inventions,
set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and
profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who
believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I
have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he
be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in
believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to
believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate
the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has
produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and
prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his
professional belief to things he does not believe, he has
prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He
takes up the profession of a priest for the sake of gain, and in
order to qualify himself for that trade he begins with a perjury.
Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?
(Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794-1795. From Paul
Blanshard, ed., Classics of Free Thought, Buffalo, New York:
Prometheus Books, 1977, pp. 134-135.)

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous
debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting
vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it
would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon,
than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has
served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. (Thomas Paine, The Age
of Reason, 1794-1795. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich,
eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper &
Row, 1988, p. 494.)

Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on
which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has
stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book
of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or
of downright lies. (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794-1795.
>From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of
American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 494.)

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and
the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had
their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed
religion. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the
character of the Divinity, the most destructive to morality and
the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since
man began to exist. (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794-1795.
>From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of
American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 494.)

The adulterous connection of church and state. (Thomas Paine, The
Age of Reason, 1794-1795. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich,
eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper &
Row, 1988, p. 500.)

Other Leaders and Thinkers of the Revolutionary Era

"Does not the core of all this difficulty lie in this," Isaac
Backus--a Separatist minister turned Baptist--asked rhetorically
in replying to a detractor in 1768, "that the common people
[justly] claim as good a right to judge and act for themselves in
matters of religion as civil rulers or the learned clergy?"
(James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815:
An Interdisciplinary Analysis, Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and
Company, 1973, p. 136.)

Religious matters are to be separated from the jurisdiction of
the state not because they are beneath the interests of the
state, but, quite to the contrary, because they are too high and
holy and thus are beyond the competence of the state. (Isaac
Backus, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, 1773, as
quoted by Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great
Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline
Press, 1991, p. 7.)

That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner
of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction,
not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally
entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the
dictates of conscience. (Patrick Henry, 1736-1799, American
patriot and statesman, Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776.
>From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale
Research, Inc., 1990, p. 189.)

For the civil authority to pretend to establish particular modes
of faith and forms of worship, and to punish all that deviate
from the standards which our superiors have set up, is attended
with the most pernicious consequences to society. It cramps all
free and rational inquiry, fills the world with hypocrites and
superstitious bigots--nay, with infidels and skeptics; it exposes
men of religion and conscience to the rage and malice of fiery,
blind zealots, and dissolves every tender tie of human nature.
And I cannot but look upon it as a peculiar blessing of Heaven
that we live in a land where everyone can freely deliver his
sentiments upon religious subjects, and have the privilege of
worshipping God according to the dictates of his own conscience,
without any molestation or disturbance--a privilege which I hope
we shall ever keep up and strenuously maintain. (Samuel West,
Dartmouth, MA, Election Sermon, 1776, as quoted by Albert
Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
103.)

Ethan Allen (1739-1789), a hero of the American revolution,
signaled the combustion [of the "explosion of militant deism"]
with the 1784 publication of his Reason the Only Oracle of Man, a
massive (and at times incoherent) denunciation of revealed
religion. (Kerry S. Walters, Elihu Palmer's ÔPrinciples of
Nature': Text and Commentary, Wolfeboro, N. H.: Longwood
Academic, 1990, p. 27. )

Back in Sunderland, Ethan [Allen] busied himself with his
philosophical treatise, which he now called Reason the Only
Oracle of Man. The book was finished, but he was having some
difficulty about its publication. He had taken it down to
Hartford the year before, and several printers had looked and
shuddered. What was Ethan trying to do, they asked, run them all
out of business and get them as well as himself hanged? The book
was a wholesale attack on organized religion. Not so, thundered
Ethan as he moved about Hartford. The book was a philosophical
statement to which Americans and others in the world should be
exposed, to counteract the cant of the ministers of the Gospel.
(Edwin P. Hoyt, The Damndest Yankees: Ethan Allen; & His Clan,
Brattleboro, Vermont: The Stephen Greene Press, 1976, p. 225.)

A Pennsylvania mechanic wrote to the Independent Gazetter in
1784: "All of the miseries of mankind have arisen from freemen
not maintaining and exercising their own sentiments. No reason
can be given why a free people should not be equally independent
in ... their political as well as their religious persuasions."
(James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815:
An Interdisciplinary Analysis, Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and
Company, 1973, p. 136.)

Is conformity of sentiments in matters of religion essential to
the happiness of civil government? Not at all. Government has no
more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with
the principles of the mathematics. Let every man speak freely
without fear--maintain the principles that he believes--worship
according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God,
or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in so doing, i.e.,
see that he meets with no personal abuse or loss of property for
his religious opinions. Instead of discouraging him with
proscriptions, fines, confiscation or death, let him be
encouraged, as a free man, to bring forth his arguments and
maintain his points with all boldness; then if his doctrine is
false it will be confuted, and if it is true (though ever so
novel) let others credit it. When every man has this liberty what
can he wish for more? A liberal man asks for nothing more of
government. (John Leland, "The Rights of Conscience Inalienable,
and Therefore Religious Opinions not Cognizable by Law" [a
pamphlet], New London, Connecticut, 1791. Reprinted in Mortimer
Adler, ed., 1784-1796, Organizing the New Nation: The Annals of
America, Vol. 3, Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1968, pp.
447-448. Leland was a Baptist minister who refused to support the
Constitution until Madison persuaded him that the Constitution
would not undermine religious liberty.)

The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea
of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a
pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence; whereas all
should be equally free, Jews, Turks [Muslims], Pagans and
Christians. Test oaths and established creeds should be avoided
as the worst of evils. (Baptist minister John Leland, 1820, as
quoted by Samuel Rabinove, "Church and State Must Remain
Separate," in Julie S. Bach, ed., Civil Liberties: Opposing
Viewpoints, St. Paul: Greenhaven Press, 1988, p. 53.)

Despite his pre-eminent role in early American deism, [Elihu]
Palmer (1764-1806) is scarcely remembered today. He has been
overshadowed by his friend and associate Thomas Paine
(1737-1809).... But Palmer was of an entirely different stripe,
both personally and intellectually, and his success in
disseminating deistic thought to the American public was not the
flash-in-the pan Paine variety.... Palmer was a tireless and
eloquent orator, and during the last decade of his life he
stumped from urban New York to the backwaters of Georgia to
proselytize for deism. As a result, he reached a far larger
audience than did Paine, who relied almost exclusively on the
written word to communicate his message. (Kerry S. Walters, Elihu
Palmer's "Principles of Nature": Text and Commentary, Wolfeboro,
N. H.: Longwood Academic, 1990, pp. 5-6. )

[Elihu] Palmer's first major public address after moving to New
York was given on Christmas Day 1796. He came out swinging,
rejecting the divinity of Jesus as a "very singular and
unnatural" event, and condemning as both immoral and
incomprehensible the doctrines of original sin, atonement, faith
and regeneration. The lecture was well attended and widely read
when published. Reaction from the Christian establishment was
swift and predictably hostile, but something in Palmer's message
caught on with many of his auditors and readers. Invitations to
speak poured in from Baltimore, Newburgh and even Philadelphia.
Palmer accepted them all, and in each place he visited he helped
organize sister organizations to the New York Deistical Society.
>From New England to the Middle Atlantic states, Palmer's campaign
against the infamies of ecclesiastical superstition and political
authoritarianism inflamed the imaginations of some and outraged
the sense of propriety of others. But an increasing number of
people knew of him and what he stood for. (Kerry S. Walters,
Elihu Palmer's ÔPrinciples of Nature': Text and Commentary,
Wolfeboro, N. H.: Longwood Academic, 1990, p. 11. )

Twelve centuries of moral and political darkness, in which Europe
was involved, had nearly completed the destruction of human
dignity, and every thing valuable or ornamental in the character
of man. During this long and doleful night of ignorance, slavery,
and superstition, Christianity reigned triumphant; its doctrines
and divinity were not called in question. The power of the Pope,
the Clergy, and the Church were omnipotent; nothing could
restrain their frenzy, nothing could control the cruelty of their
fanaticism; with mad enthusiasm they set on foot the most bloody
and terrific crusades, the object of which was to recover the
Holy Land. Seven hundred thousand men are said to have perished
in the two first expeditions, which had been thus commenced and
carried on by the pious zeal of the Christian church, and in the
total amount, several millions were found numbered with the dead:
the awful effects of religious fanaticism presuming upon the aid
of heaven. It was then that man lost all his dignity, and sunk
to the condition of a brute; it was then that intellect received
a deadly blow, from which it did not recover until the fifteenth
century. From that time to the present, the progress of knowledge
has been constantly accelerated; independence of mind has been
asserted, and opposing obstacles have been gradually diminished.
The church has resigned a part of her power, the better to retain
the remainder; civil tyranny has been shaken to its centre in
both hemispheres; the malignity of superstition is abating, and
every species of quackery, imposture, and imposition, are
yielding to the light and power of science. An awful contest has
commenced, which must terminate in the destruction of thrones and
civil despotism; in the annihilation of ecclesiastical pride and
domination.... Church and State may unite to form an
insurmountable barrier against the extension of thought, the
moral progress of nations, and the felicity of nature; but let it
be recollected, that the guarantee for moral and political
emancipation is already deposited in the archives of every school
and college, and in the mind of every cultivated and enlightened
man of all countries. It will henceforth be a vain and fruitless
attempt to reduce the earth to that state of slavery of which the
history of former ages has furnished such an awful picture. The
crimes of ecclesiastical despots are still corroding upon the
very vitals of human society; the severities of civil power will
never be forgotten. (Elihu Palmer, Principles of Nature; or, a
Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the
Human Species, 3rd ed., 1806; as reprinted in Kerry S. Walters,
Elihu Palmer's ÔPrinciples of Nature': Text and Commentary,
Wolfeboro, N. H.: Longwood Academic, 1990, pp. 82-83. )

Historians and Others about the American Revolutionary Era (or
about several Founding Fathers)

E PLURIBUS UNUM ... is the Latin motto on the face of the Great
Seal of the United States; .... This phrase means one out of the
many. It refers to the creation of one nation, the United States,
out of 13 colonies. It is equally appropriate to today's federal
system. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson,
members of the first committee for the selection of the seal,
suggested the motto in 1776. It can be traced back to Horace's
Epistles [65-8 BCE]. Since 1873, the law requires that this motto
appear on one side of every United States coin that is minted.
(Donald H. Mugridge,World Book Encyclopedia, Volume 6 (E),
Chicago: Field Enterprises Educational Corporation, 1976, p.2. "E
Pluribus Unum" has appeared on most U. S. coins, beginning in the
late 1790s. The motto "In God We Trust" did not appear on any U.
S. coin until 1864, when "Its presence on the new coin was due
largely to the increased religious sentiment during the Civil War
Crisis," according to R. S. Yeoman, A Guide Book of United States
Coins, 38th ed., Racine, Wisc.: Western Publishing Co., p. 89.
The religious motto did not appear regularly on U. S. paper money
until the 1950s.)

[The] manifest object of the men who framed the institution of
this country, was to have a State without religion and a Church
without politics--that is to say, they meant that one should
never be used as an engine for the purposes of the other.... For
that they built up a wall of complete partition between the two.
(Jeremiah S. Black, noted constitutional advocate, Essays and
Speeches, D. Appleton and Co., 1885. As quoted by Leo Pfeffer,
"The Establishment Clause: The Never-Ending Conflict," in Ronald
C. White and Albright G. Zimmerman, An Unsettled Arena: Religion
and the Bill of Rights, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990, p. 72.)

Social radicalism in America had long been tinged with
anticlericalism. The old alliances of church establishments with
local aristocracies, and the widespread assumption of the clergy
that God was a disciple of Alexander Hamilton, had antagonized
men of liberal inclination; and European deism obligingly
provided plausible arguments from history and philosophy for
detesting the clergy and spurning revealed religion. The French
Revolution sharpened the issue when its antireligious excesses
provoked preachers throughout the country to warn against too
much democracy. The writings of Ethan Allen, Joel Barlow and
Elihu Palmer, and the free-thinking societies which dotted the
young nation in the seventeen nineties, were notable expressions
of this republican anticlericalism. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
American historian, The Age of Jackson, Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1945, p. 136. Schlesinger won the Pulitzer Prize for
History for The Age of Jackson.)

Live-and-let-live, worship-and-let-worship was the essence of
religion in this land of vast distances and a hundred religions,
of which the most important in terms of politics was the vaguely
Christian rationalism that governed the tolerant minds of men
like Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, and Washington. (The last
and least skeptical of these rationalists loaded his First
Inaugural Address with appeals to the "Great Author," "Almighty
Being," "invisible hand," and "benign parent of the human race,"
but apparently could not bring himself to speak the the word
"God.") (Clinton Rossiter, American historian, "The United States
in 1787," 1787: The Grand Convention, New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1987 (first ed., 1966), p. 36.)

Religion. Whatever else it might turn out to be, the Convention
would not be a "Barebone's Parliament." Although it had its share
of strenuous Christians like Strong and Bassett, ex-preachers
like Baldwin and Williamson, and theologians like Johnson and
Ellsworth, the gathering at Philadelphia was largely made up of
men in whom the old fires were under control or had even
flickered out. Most were nominally members of one of the
traditional churches in their part of the country--the New
Englanders Congregationalists and Presbyterians, the Southerners
Episcopalians, and the men of the Middle States everything from
backsliding Quakers to stubborn Catholics--and most were men who
could take their religion or leave it alone. Although no one in
this sober gathering would have dreamed of invoking the Goddess
of Reason, neither would anyone have dared to proclaim that his
opinions had the support of the God of Abraham and Paul. The
Convention of 1787 was highly rationalist and even secular in
spirit. (Clinton Rossiter, American historian, "The Men of
Philadelphia," 1787: The Grand Convention, New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1987 (first ed., 1966), pp. 147-148.)

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century
champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first
six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.
(Mortimer Adler, 1902- , American philosopher and educator, ed.
"Chapter 22: Religion and Religious Groups in America," The
Annals of America: Great Issues in American Life, Vol. II,
Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1968, p. 420.)

Many of the states [in the period between the Revolution and the
adoption of the U. S. Constitution], in order to obviate any
suggestion of a religious establishment, prohibited all clergymen
from sitting in the legislation. (Gordon S, Wood, The Creation of
the American Republic, 1776-1787, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1972 [orig. publ. 1969], pp. 158-159 [footnote]. Wood cites the
state constitutions of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware,
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, New York, South Carolina,
and New Hampshire.)

At the time of the Revolution all the colonies, including Rhode
Island, imposed restrictions and disabilities upon some sects,
thus practicing at best only a limited form of toleration, not
freedom of religion--much less separation of Church and State.
Moreover, Roger Williams' cogent and prophetic arguments in
behalf of religious freedom were forgotten in the eighteenth
century; they could not exert any influence on those who finally
worked out the doctrine of religious freedom enshrined in the
national Constitution. In any case, it would have been
exceedingly difficult for Williams to have spoken to Jefferson
and the other Virginians who fought for religious freedom. To
Williams the Puritan, the great justification for freedom of
religion was the preservation of the purity of the Church; to the
deistic Virginians, the important goal was the removal of a
religious threat to the purity and freedom of the State. (Carl N.
Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America
[Revised ed.], New York: Harper & Row, 1970, p. 20.)

In the eighteenth century the American principle of separation of
Church and State was indeed an audacious experiment. Never before
had a national state been prepared to dispense with an official
religion as a prop to its authority and never before had a church
been set adrift without the support of the state. Throughout most
of American history the doctrine has provided freedom for
religious development while keeping politics free of religion.
And that, apparently, had been the intention of the Founding
Fathers. (Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped
Modern America [Revised ed.], New York: Harper & Row, 1970, p.
96.)

So fluid had been the conditions of American life toward the end
of the eighteenth century, and so disorganizing the consequences
of the Revolution, that perhaps as many as ninety percent of the
Americans were unchurched in 1790. (Richard Hofstadter,
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1974, p. 82.)

In the mid-eighteenth century, America had a smaller proportion
of church members than any other nation in Christendom. American
religious statistics are notoriously unreliable, but it has been
estimated that in 1800 about one of every fifteen Americans was a
church member ... (Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in
American Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, p. 89.)

The group which, along with Calvinist Congregationalists, made
the greatest contribution to American cultural and political
development was one that in 1787 could be called religious only
by a most generous definition of the term. Variously called
deists, humanists, and rationalists, they accepted the existence
of God so long as He kept His hands out of human affairs.
Strongly anti-clerical, they were at best indifferent to
organized religion. One indication of their influence on the
course of American development is the fact that none of the first
seven Presidents was at the time of his election a member of any
church, and, perhaps even more important, that the two basic
documents of American freedom, the Declaration of Independence,
and the Bill of Rights, breathe the spirit of deistic humanism.
(Leo Pfeffer, God, Caesar and the Constitution: The Court as
Referee of Church-State Confrontation, Boston: Beacon Press,
1975, pp. 7-8.)

The phrase "establishment of religion" must be given the meaning
that it had in the United States in 1791, rather than its
European connotation. In America there was no establishment of a
single church, as in England. Four states had never adopted any
establishment practices. Three had abolished their establishments
during the Revolution. The remaining six states--Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, South Carolina; and
Georgia--changed to comprehensive or "multiple" establishments.
That is, aid was provided to all churches in each state on a
nonpreferential basis, except that the establishment was limited
to churches of the Protestant religion in three states and to
those of the Christian religion in the other three states. Since
there were almost no Catholics in the first group of states, and
very few Jews in any state, this meant that the multiple
establishment practices included every religious group with
enough members to form a church. It was this nonpreferential
assistance to organized churches that constituted "establishment
of religion" in 1791 and it was this practice that the Amendment
forbade Congress to adopt. (C. Herman Pritchett, Constitutional
historian, 1977, as quoted by John M. Swomley, Religious Liberty
and the Secular State: The Constitutional Context, Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1987, pp. 26-27.)

>From the start the [American] colonies had been alive with
religious controversies, doctrinal disputes, sectarian splits and
secessions, revivalism and evangelism, the importation of new
creeds and dogmas from Europe, along with their carriers--alive
also with rationalistic, deistic, and atheistic counterattacks on
religion. Roman Catholics early gained a foothold in Maryland and
elsewhere, but could not win their political and religious rights
against the overpowering Protestant majority. Only one force
united all these believers, disbelievers, mystics, pietists,
schismatics, dissenters, establishmentarians and
disestablishmentarians: a belief in religious liberty. (James
MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: Vineyard of Liberty New
York: Vintage Books, 1983, pp. 7-8.)

There had been a "very wintry season" for religion everywhere in
America after the Revolution. Ninety percent of the people lay
outside the churches. Political events eclipsed religion, as
people concentrated on establishing the new nation and winning
the War of 1812. The outstanding men of the country such as
Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were statesmen, not ministers.
Embracing the rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment, the
Founding Fathers instituted religious freedom and welcomed
conflict among the churches as a positive good--as the way to
differentiate truth from error. (James MacGregor Burns, The
American Experiment: Vineyard of Liberty New York: Vintage
Books, 1983, p. 493.)

The authors of our present Constitution and our Bill of Rights
were extremely concerned with [separation of church and state]
.... So much so, that I believe it would generally go undisputed,
that the major political contribution of our constitutional
system, which they fashioned, is the concept of separation of
Church and State. (Robert L. Cord, "Church-State relations: Where
is the Supreme Court; Going?," speech at Northeastern University,
Boston, June 28, 1985; from Vital Speeches of the Day, October 1,
1985, p. 752.)

To answer these questions [regarding separation of church and
state], the United States Supreme Court has, without significant
deviation, looked to American history. If little else about
Supreme Court Church-State cases is clear, there should be no
disagreement about the fact that all of the Court's precedent
setting Church-State opinions invoke the intentions of the
Founding Fathers and our nation's early history to justify the
meaning and scope which the Court assigns to the First Amendment.
Playing historian, the Court has determined what the concept of
Church-State separation meant to those constitutional giants who
made it part of our Supreme Law. (Robert L. Cord, "Church-State
relations: Where is the Supreme Court Going?," speech at
Northeastern University, Boston, June 28, 1985; from Vital
Speeches of the Day, October 1, 1985, p. 752. It is only fair to
note that Cord goes on to assert that the Court has misjudged the
intentions of the founders and misinterpreted history. Many of
the passages quoted in this compilation appear to contradict his
conclusion. )

Of the eleven states that ratified the First Amendment, nine
(counting Maryland) adhered to the viewpoint that support of
churches should be voluntary, that any government financial
assistance to religion constituted an establishment of religion
and violated its free exercise. (Thomas Curry, The First
Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First
Amendment, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986, p. 220. As cited
by Leo Pfeffer, "The Establishment Clause: The Never-Ending
Conflict," in Ronald C. White and Albright G. Zimmerman, An
Unsettled Arena: Religion and the Bill of Rights, Grand Rapids,
Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990, p. 73
[footnote].)

Preachers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell should not forget
that, in the colony of Virginia, Baptist ministers were beaten
and imprisoned and run out of town for preaching their dissenting
faith, while Anglican ministers were paid with tax funds from the
state treasury. (John Buchanan, Southern Baptist minister and
former eight-term Republican Congressman from Alabama, who heads
People for the American Way, as quoted by Samuel Rabinove,
"Religious Liberty and Church-State Separation: Why Should We
Care?," speech on April 10, 1986, Vital Speeches of the Day, June
15, 1986, p. 527.)

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention [in 1787] took ...
only two modest steps with respect to religion, both of these
being designed to avert problems, not raise them. First, the
delegates agreed that "no religious test" should ever be required
of federal officeholders, and, second, that one could "affirm"
rather than "swear" in taking the oath of office--a clear
concession to the tender consciences of Quakers. Other than that,
however, the Constitution was totally silent on the subject of
religion: no national church, of course, but no national
affirmations of faith, either, not even those of the most
generalized sort. (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers:
Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987,
p. 43.)

Those of our "founding fathers" who participated in the drafting
of the Constitution never intended their use of religious
illustrations in speeches as more than rhetoric. They knew the
dangers of giving constitutional or legal sanction either to
civil religion or to Christianity or to any denominational
expression. They knew that religious liberty requires freedom
from any identification of religion with state action. They were
intent on avoiding more than 100 years of religious intolerance
and persecution in American colonial history and an even longer
heritage of church-state problems in Europe. (John M. Swomley,
Religious Liberty and the Secular State: The Constitutional
Context, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1987, p. 114.)

If we glance back at our early history, the reasons for placing
religious freedom in the First Amendment may become clearer. The
quest for that freedom was one of the motives for emigration to
America, but not just for those who wanted to be free to practice
their own faith. A surprising majority of colonial Americans were
not part of any religious community. Even in New England,
research shows, not more than one person in seven was a church
member. It was one in fifteen in the middle colonies and fewer
still in the South, according to the historian Richard
Hofstadter. (Milton Meltzer, The Bill of Rights: How We Got It
and What It Means, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1990, p. 71.)

Recognizing the evils of man acting like God or of man's using
government to help God out in managing the world, the traditional
religionists, such as disciples of Roger Williams, Isaac Backus,
and John Leland, joined with the deists in fashioning a system in
which neither belief nor disbelief in God was to be a matter
within the jurisdiction of human government. Both groups sought
to secure a government that neither aided nor injured religion,
and for this both the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of
the First Amendment were adopted. (Leo Pfeffer, "The
Establishment Clause: The Never-Ending Conflict," in Ronald C.
White and Albright G. Zimmerman, An Unsettled Arena: Religion
and the Bill of Rights, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990, p. 73 [footnote].)

In 1791 there was no establishment of a single church. Four
states never had establishment practices: those colonies had
ended their establishments during the Revolution. The remaining
six states had "multiple" establishments, aiding all churches in
each state on a nonpreferential basis. It was this
nonpreferential aid to religion that the Establishment Clause was
intended to prevent. It is a mistake to assume that established
churches and religious tests for public office holders in some of
the colonies and early states show approval of state support for
religion. In each such state the people, including church members
and the unchurched, were engaged in a revolution against such
practices that, without prodding by the federal government, led
to the complete abandonment of established churches and religious
tests for holding office. The concept of separation of church
and state is generally attributed to Jefferson and Madison, but
it was really a product of popular resistance, in every state, to
state support of religion. In a Massachusetts state referendum in
1833, for example, the people voted ten to one to disestablish
all of their churches (Jacob C. Meyer, Church and State in
Massachusetts from 1740 to 1833). The Free Exercise Clause was
not intended as a check on the Establishment Clause. Both clauses
arose from the same problem: a union of church power with state
power. They are complementary in that they reinforce and support
each other. (John M. Swomley, "Education in Religious Schools:
The Conflict Over Funding" in the "Church and State" issue of
National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Winter, 1988, p. 13.)

III. Presidents (and Other National Political Leaders) Since the
Revolutionary Era

All religions united with government are more or less inimical to
liberty. All separated from government, are compatible with
liberty. (Henry Clay, 1777-1852, Speech in the House of
Representatives, March 24, 1818. From Daniel B. Baker, ed.,
Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p.
190.)

[Though it would be] rash to assert that civil liberty and an
established church cannot exist together in the same State, it
may be safely affirmed that history affords no example of their
union when the religion of the State has not only been
established, but exclusive. (Henry Clay, 1777-1852; in 1826, as
Secretary of State in the administration of John Quincy Adams.
>From Mary W. M. Hargreaves, The Presidency of John Quincy Adams,
Lawrence, Kansas: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1985, p.157.)

Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason
which will not at the same time demonstrate the right to
religious freedom. (John Quincy Adams, 6th U.S. President
[1825-1829], letter to Richard Anderson, May 27, 1823. From
Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale
Research, Inc., 1990, p. 190.)

There is in the clergy of all Christian denominations a
time-serving, cringing, subservient morality, as wide from the
spirit of the Gospel as it is from the intrepid assertion and
vindication of the truth. (John Quincy Adams, 6th U.S. President
[1825-1829], in his diary, May 27, 1838. From Gorton Carruth and
Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New
York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 485.)

It is not the legitimate province of the legislature to determine
what religion is true, or what is false. (Richard M. Johnson,
1780-1850, Vice President of the U. S. under Martin Van Buren,
1837-1841, in his second Report on the Transportation of the Mail
on Sundays, 1830. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds.,
The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row,
1988, p. 492.)

The presidency of Andrew Jackson [7th U. S. President, 1829-1837]
had its effect on religious life. An ardent church/state
separationist, Jackson dissociated himself from any religious
denomination, though he had been reared a Presbyterian. On
numerous occasions he made pronouncements that fostered religious
liberty and toleration in the new country. (Robert L. Maddox,
Separation of Church and State: Guarantor of Religious Freedom,
New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1987, p. 75.)

President Andrew Jackson did refuse to order a national day of
prayer during a cholera epidemic (1832). (Charles Rosenberg, The
Cholera Years, Chicago, 1962, as cited by Oscar and Lilian
Handlin, Liberty in America, 1600 to the Present; Volume Two:
Liberty in Expansion, 1760-1850, New York: Harper & Row, 1989, p.
341.)

Total separation of church and state was considered the best
safeguard for the health of each. As [President Andrew] Jackson
explained, in refusing to name a fast day, he feared to "disturb
the security which religion now enjoys in this country, in its
complete separation from the political concerns of the General
Government." (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., American historian, The
Age of Jackson, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945, p. 354.
Schlesinger won the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of
Jackson. Jackson's statement is from his letter to the General
Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church, June 12, 1832, according to
Schlesinger's footnote.)

Let it be henceforth proclaimed to the world that man's
conscience was created free; that he is no longer accountable to
his fellow man for his religious opinions, being responsible
therefore only to his God. (John Tyler, 10th U. S. President
[1841-1845], as quoted by Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, Treasury
of Presidential Quotations [Follett, 1964], p. 38, according to
Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
94.)

... and the Democrats backed movements to end remuneration to
chaplains of the legislature and to exclude clergymen from the
public schools. Wherever religious tests survived, they were
under fire from Democrats, while Whigs, in general, sought to
sustain the authority of religion. The Democratic theory of the
relations of church and state did not necessarily imply a weaker
personal faith. Some who insisted most strongly on separation,
like O. B. Brown and Elder John Leland, were ministers
themselves. The evangelical sects in many states were
predominantly Democratic, and many of the leading Jacksonians
were deeply religious. Benjamin F. Butler was celebrated for his
piety, [President Andrew] Jackson himself was a regular
churchgoer though not a communicant till 1839, and James K. Polk
[11th U. S. President, 1845-1849] was faithful in his Sunday
observance. But they all firmly opposed the political aspirations
of religion. Polk, infuriated by a Presbyterian minister who came
to see him as President, told him, "that, thank God, under our
constitution there was no connection between Church and State,
and that in my action as President of the U.S. I recognized no
distinction of creeds in my appointments to office." He had met
no one in these first two years of his administration, Polk later
wrote, who so disgusted him. "I have a great veneration and
regard for Religion & sincere piety, but a hypocrite or a
bigotted fanatic without reason I cannot bear." (Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., American historian, The Age of Jackson, Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1945, p. 355. Schlesinger won the
Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson.)

Early in July [1849] Taylor [Zachary Taylor, 12th President of
the U.S., 1849-1850] proclaimed Friday, August 3, as a day of
fasting and prayer over the cholera victims. It was one of the
earliest, if not the first, national days of thanksgiving
proclaimed in the country. In Taylor's mind the celebration
undoubtedly held little religious significance. He was not a
churchman, either formally or privately, insofar as surviving
evidence evidence allows us to judge. He never formally joined a
church and seems not to have attended services with any
regularity. Nevertheless, the day of thanksgiving drew attacks
from free thinkers as "political religious canting" not
sanctioned by the Constitution or law. Most Americans supported
the plan. Throughout the country businesses closed for the day
and churches held prayer sessions. Nonchurchgoers joined in
celebration with a day of relaxation and drinking. (K. Jack
Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old
Southwest, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985,
p. 268.)

I am tolerant of all creeds. Yet if any sect suffered itself to
be used for political objects I would meet it by political
opposition. In my view church and state should be separate, not
only in form, but fact. Religion and politics should not be
mingled. (Millard Fillmore, 13th U. S. President [1850-1853], in
an address during the 1856 Presidential election, according to
Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
35.)

Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers
who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion
have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty
of others? (Robert E. Lee, 1807-1870, Confederate general, letter
to his wife, December 27, 1856. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene
Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York:
Harper & Row, 1988, p. 498.)

When the Know-Nothings get control, it [the Declaration of
Independence] will read: "All men are created equal except
negroes, foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this I
should prefer immigrating to some country where they make no
pretence of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where
despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of
hypocrisy. (Abraham Lincoln, 16th U. S. President [1860-1865],
letter to Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855, according to Albert
Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, pp.
59-60.)

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's
my religion. (Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President [1861-1865].
>From Henry O. Dormann, compiler, The Speaker's Book of
Quotations, New York: Ballantine Books, 1987, p. 127.)

Herndon [William H., Abraham Lincoln's law partner] tells us that
as a young man Lincoln was a skeptic and associated with fellow
skeptics in New Salem. In 1834 he supposedly wrote an essay
showing that the Bible was not God's inspired word nor Jesus
God's divine son. An employer, either scandalized or fearing its
effects on Lincoln's future, threw it into the stove. Lincoln's
first law partner told Herndon that Lincoln was "an avowed and
open infidel, and bordered on atheism." Herndon did not believe
that Lincoln's skeptical opinions ever changed. As he put it:
"Lincoln was very politic, and a very shrewd man in some
particulars. When he was talking to a Christian, he adapted
himself to the Christian ... he was at moments, as it were, a
Christian, through politeness, courtesy, or good breeding toward
the delicate, tender-nerved man, the Christian, and in two
minutes after, in the absence of such men, and among his own
kind, the same old unbeliever." Lincoln never belonged to a
church, although he sometimes attended with his wife. (Glen E.
Thurow, Abraham Lincoln and American Political Religion, Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1976, p. 12. It should be
noted that Thurow goes on to indicate that he finds evidence of
genuine religious belief in Lincoln's eloquent religious
references, although he views them as an example more of
"political religion" than of church religion).

... many years after Lincoln's death, Father Charles Chiniquy
reported that Lincoln made the Son-of-Mary statement [a long
peroration on Jesus's divinity] to him in an interview in the
White House on June 9, 1864. But Lincoln scholars do not accept
Chiniquy's book as a reliable source. And Lincoln himself (whom
Chiniquy quotes, improbably, pages at a time) shared neither
Chiniquy's hatred of Roman Catholicism nor his belief in the
divinity of Christ. (Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George,
"Abraham Lincoln," They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes,
Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987, p. 87.)

Let us labor to add all needful guarantees for the more perfect
security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure
morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and
privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or
religion. (Ulysses S. Grant, 18th U.S. President [1869-1877],
speech before the Army of the Tennessee, Des Moines, Iowa, 1875;
from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New
Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, pp. 287-288)

Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar of money
shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school.
Resolve that neither the state nor nation, or both combined,
shall support institutions of learning other than those
sufficient to afford every child growing up in the land the
opportunity of a good common school education, unmixed with
sectarian, pagan, or atheistical tenets. Leave the matter of
religion to the family altar, the church, and the private
schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the
church and state forever separated. (Ulysses S. Grant, 18th U.S.
President [1869-1877], speech before the Army of the Tennessee,
Des Moines, Iowa, 1875; from George Seldes, ed., The Great
Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 288)

I would call your attention to the importance of correcting an
evil that, if permitted to continue, will probably lead to great
trouble in our land before the close of the Nineteenth century.
It is the acquisition of vast amounts of untaxed church
property.... In a growing country, where real estate enhances so
rapidly with time as in the United States, there is scarcely a
limit to the wealth that may be acquired by corporations,
religious or otherwise, if allowed to retain real estate without
taxation. The contemplation of so vast a property as here alluded
to, without taxation, may lead to sequestration without
constitutional authority, and through blood. I would suggest the
taxation of all property equally, whether church or corporation.
(Ulysses S. Grant, 18th U.S. President [1869-1877], Message to
Congress, December 7, 1875; Congressional Record, Vol. 4, part 7,
page 175; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations,
Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 288)

We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties
ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that
religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or
with political parties. We believe that the cause of good
government and the cause of religion suffer by all such
interference. (Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th U. S. President
[1877-1881], statement as Governor of Ohio, 1875, according to
Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
44.)

The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It
ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any
state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for
if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that
extent you impose a tax upon the whole community. (James A.
Garfield, 20th U.S. President [1881]; as a Congressman in 1874;
Congressional Record, vol. 2, part 6, p. 5384; from Gene Garman,
America's Real Religion: Separation Between Religion and
Government in the United States of America, Pittsburg, Kansas:
America's Real Religion Publishing, 1991, p. 104)

To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he
belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham
Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an
outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the
foundations of American life. (Theodore Roosevelt, 26th U. S.
President [1901-1909], letter to J. C. Martin, November 9, 1908,
according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great
Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline
Press, 1991, p. 83.)

If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is
for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of
this right to cross-examine a man on his religion before being
willing to support him for public office. (Theodore Roosevelt,
26th U. S. President [1901-1909], letter to J. C. Martin,
November 9, 1908, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr,
compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach,
CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 83.)

Because we are unqualifiedly and without reservation against any
system of denominational schools, maintained by the adherents of
any creed with the help of state aid, therefore, we as
strenuously insist that the public schools shall be free from
sectarian influences, and, above all, free from any attitude of
hostility to the adherents of any particular creed. (Theodore
Roosevelt, 26th U. S. President [1901-1909], as quoted by Reuben
Maury, The Wars of the Godly, New York, 1928, p. 213, according
to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations
on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
83.)

There is nothing so despicable as a secret society that is based
upon religious prejudice and that will attempt to defeat a man
because of his religious beliefs. Such a society is like a
cockroach--it thrives in the dark. So do those who combine for
such an end. (William Howard Taft, 27th U. S. President
[1909-1913], in an address on December 20, 1914, according to
Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
94.)

It does not become America that within her borders, where every
man is free to follow the dictates of his conscience, men should
raise the cry of church against church. To do that is to strike
at the very spirit and heart of America. (Woodrow Wilson, 28th U.
S. President [1913-1921], in an address on November 4, 1915,
according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great
Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline
Press, 1991, p. 104.)

In the experiences of a year of the Presidency, there has come to
me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious
intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to
be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish. (Warren
G. Harding, 29th U. S. President [1921-1923], address on March
24, 1922, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers,
The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA:
Centerline Press, 1991, p. 43.)

The fundamental precept of liberty is toleration. We cannot
permit any inquisition either from within or from without the law
or apply any religious test to the holding of office. The mind
of America must be forever free. (Calvin Coolidge, 30th U. S.
President [1923-1929], Inaugural Address on March 4, 1925,
according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great
Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline
Press, 1991, p. 22.)

I come of Quaker stock. My ancestors were persecuted for their
beliefs. Here they sought and found religious freedom. By blood
and conviction I stand for religious tolerance both in act and in
spirit. (Herbert C. Hoover, 31st U. S. President [1929-1933], in
New Day [1928], p. 36, according to Albert Menendez and Edd
Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long
Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 45.)

I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and
equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the
law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe
in the absolute separation of church and state and in the strict
enforcement of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof. I believe that no tribunal of any church has
any power to make any decree of any force in the law of the land,
other than to establish the status of its own communicants within
its own church. (Alfred E. Smith, Governor of New York and
Democratic candidate for President in 1928; in Atlantic Monthly,
April, 1927, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr,
compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach,
CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 89.)

The lessons of religious toleration--a toleration which
recognizes complete liberty of human thought, liberty of
conscience--is one which, by precept and example, must be
inculcated in the hearts and minds of all Americans if the
institutions of our democracy are to be maintained and
perpetuated. We must recognize the fundamental rights of man.
There can be no true national life in our democracy unless we
give unqualified recognition to freedom of religious worship and
freedom of education. (Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd U. S.
President [1933-1945], letter to the Calvert Associates, 1937,
according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great
Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline
Press, 1991, p. 82.)

Religious and racial persecution is moronic at all times, perhaps
the most idiotic of human stupidities. (Harry S. Truman, 33rd
U.S. President [1945-1953], Where the Buck Stops; The Personal
and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman, ed. by Margaret Truman;
New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1989, p. 126.)

As I say, not all of Jefferson's ideas were popular, though most
of them were absolutely right.... He was also called an atheist
because he didn't believe in a state church, an official church
of the government, and in fact made it clear that he didn't much
like any church at all, though he did admire many, though not
all, of the teachings of religion.... And you'll recall that it
was Jefferson, as governor of Virginia, who wrote the Statute of
Religious Liberty in 1786, which said that "no man shall be
compelled to frequent or support any religious worship" but that
all people "shall be free to profess ... their opinion in matters
of religion." He summed up very bluntly one time his view that no
man harmed anyone else in choosing and practicing his own
religion, or no religion. "It does me no injury," he said, "for
my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no god. It
neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." (Harry S. Truman,
33rd U.S. President [1945-1953],Where the Buck Stops; The
Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman, ed. by Margaret
Truman; New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1989, pp. 212-213.)

It is my firm belief that there should be separation of church
and state in the United States--that is, that both church and
state should be free to operate, without interference from each
other in their respective areas of jurisdiction. We live in a
liberal, democratic society which embraces wide varieties of
belief and disbelief. There is no doubt in my mind that the
pluralism which has developed under our Constitution, providing
as it does a framework within which diverse opinions can exist
side by side and by their interaction enrich the whole, is the
most ideal system yet devised by man. I cannot conceive of a set
of circumstances which would lead me to a different conclusion.
(John F. Kennedy, 35th U.S. President [1961-1963]; letter to
Glenn L. Archer, February 23, 1959, according to Albert Menendez
and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious
Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 54.)

I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State
is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President
(should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister
would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or
church school is granted any public funds or political
preference--and where no man is denied public office merely
because his religion differs from the President who might appoint
him or the people who might elect him. (John F. Kennedy, 35th
U.S. President [1961-1963], speech to the Greater Houston
ministerial Association during the Presidential campaign, 1960.
As quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and
William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic [7th
ed.], Vol. 2 , New York: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 744.)

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs.
Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others. (John
F. Kennedy, 35th U.S. President [1961-1963], letter to the
National Conference of Christians and Jews, October 10, 1960.
>From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale
Research, Inc., 1990, p. 191.)

I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and
state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the
Constitution. By my office--and by my personal conviction--I am
sworn to uphold that tradition. (Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th U. S.
President [1963-1969]; interview, Baptist Standard, October,
1964, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The
Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA:
Centerline Press, 1991, p. 50.)

I believe strongly in the Constitutional principle of separating
church and state. Our founders were right in fearing that
religious freedom would be threatened in the long run by a
departure from governmental neutrality in spiritual matters. (R.
Sargent Shriver, Democratic candidate for U. S. Vice-President,
1972; in an address in Washington, D. C., in January 1976,
according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great
Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline
Press, 1991, p. 88.)

I believe that prayer in public schools should be voluntary. It
is difficult for me to see how religious exercises can be a
requirement in public schools, given our Constitutional
requirement of separation of church and state. I feel that the
highly desirable goal of religious education must be principally
the responsibility of church and home. I do not believe that
public education should show any hostility toward religion, and
neither should it inhibit voluntary participation, if it does not
interfere with the educational process. (Gerald R. Ford, 38th
President [1974-1977], in an interview with Los Angeles
Herald-Examiner, October 9, 1976 [p. A-8], according to Alan F.
Pater and Jason R. Pater, compilers and editors, What They Said
in 1976: The Yearbook of Spoken Opinion, Beverly Hills, CA:
Monitor Book Co., 1977, p. 522.)

What James Madison and the other men of his generation had in
mind when they wrote the First Amendment was that there should be
no official relationship of any character between government and
any church or many churches, and no levying of taxes for the
support of any church, or many churches, or all churches, or any
institution conducted by any of them. (Sam J. Ervin, Jr.,
1896-1985, U.S. Senator from North Carolina who directed the
Senate "Watergate" investigation; in an address to the Senate,
April 23, 1973, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr,
compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach,
CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 32.)

Government is contemptuous of true religion when it confiscates
the taxes of Caesar to finance the things of God. (Sam J. Ervin,
Jr., 1896-1985, U.S. Senator from North Carolina, in an "Open
Letter to President Reagan," Congressional Record, April 29,
1982, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The
Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline
Press, 1991, p. 33.)

Many sincere persons charge that the school-prayer cases show the
Supreme Court to be hostile to religion. This charge is untrue
and unjust. In these cases the Supreme Court was faithful to its
judicial duty. It enforced the First Amendment, which commands
government to maintain strict neutrality respecting religion,
neither aiding nor opposing it. (Sam J. Ervin, Jr., 1896-1985,
U.S. Senator from North Carolina, in Free Inquiry, Summer 1983;
as quoted by Leo Pfeffer, "Prayer in Public Schools: The Court's
Decisions," in the "Church and State" issue of National Forum:
The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Winter, 1988, p. 26.)

If religious freedom is to endure in America, the responsibility
for teaching religion to public school children must be left to
the homes and churches of our land, where this responsibility
rightfully belongs. It must not be assumed by the government
through the agency of the public school system. (Sam J. Ervin,
Jr., 1896-1985, U.S. Senator from North Carolina, in Preserving
the Constitution, Michie, 1984, according to Albert Menendez and
Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty,
Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 33.)

If any provision of the Constitution can be said to be more
precious than the others, it is the provision of the First
Amendment; which undertakes to separate church and state by
keeping government's hands out of religion and by denying to any
and all religious denominations any advantage from getting
control of public policy or the public purse. This is so because
the history of nations makes this truth manifest: When religion
controls government, political freedom dies; and when government
controls religion, religious freedom perishes. (Sam J. Ervin,
Jr., 1896-1985, U.S. Senator from North Carolina, in Church &
State, February 1985; as quoted by Samuel Rabinove, "Church and
State Must Remain Separate," in Julie S. Bach, ed., Civil
Liberties: Opposing Viewpoints, St. Paul: Greenhaven Press, 1988,
p. 55.)

I believe in the separation of church and state and would not use
my authority to violate this principle in any way. (Jimmy
Carter, 39th U. S. President [1977-1981], in a letter to Jack V.
Harwell, August 11, 1977, according to Albert Menendez and Edd
Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long
Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 17.)

We believe in separation of church and state, that there should
be no unwarranted influence on the church or religion by the
state, and vice versa. (Jimmy Carter, 39th President [1977-1981],
in a news conference in Warsaw, Poland, reported by New York
Times, December 31, 1977 [p. 2], according to Alan F. Pater and
Jason R. Pater, compilers and editors, What They Said in 1977:
The Yearbook of Spoken Opinion, Beverly Hills, CA: Monitor Book
Co., 1978, p. 479.)

I think the government ought to stay out of the religious
business. (Jimmy Carter, 39th U.S. President [1977-1981], The New
York Times, April 8, 1979. From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political
Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p. 191.)

I'm a Southern Baptist, and I have always believed in a total
separation of church and state. And I think the interjection of
religion into politics is not good for this country....I don't
accept human definitions of what I have to believe, you know, to
be a Christian. (Jimmy Carter, 39th President [1977-1981],
interview, USA Today, May 12, 1986, p. A-11, according to Alan
F. Pater and Jason R. Pater, compilers and editors, What They
Said in 1986: The Yearbook of Spoken Opinion, Beverly Hills, CA:
Monitor Book Co., 1987, p. 458.)

[Defending Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in re to the
Pledge of Allegiance]: I have a great respect for the flag, [but]
if the government ... passed a law saying that I had to pledge
allegiance to the flag, I don't think I would do it. I've always
felt that I lived in a country ... where if I wanted to worship
God as a Baptist I could do so. If I were an atheist, I could be
one. If I wanted to be a Catholic but was born a Jew, there's no
condemnation ... from a government authority. (Jimmy Carter, 39th
President [1977-1981], at Emory University, Atlanta, September
14, 1988, as reported in the Los Angeles Times on September 16,
1988, p. I-17, according to Alan F. Pater and Jason R. Pater,
compilers and editors, What They Said in 1988: The Yearbook of
Spoken Opinion, Beverly Hills, CA: Monitor Book Co., 1989, p.
217.)

Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others
unless the decent people connected to them recognize that
religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make
their views known without trying to make their views the only
alternatives. (Barry Goldwater, 1909- , American politician, in a
speech,1981. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The
Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988,
p. 498.)

That wall, embodied in the First Amendment, is perhaps America's
most important contribution to political progress on this planet.
(Lowell Weicker, U. S. Senator [and later Governor] of
Connecticut, in Free Inquiry 3 [Summer 1983], according to Albert
Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
103.)

The time has come to knock off this religion business in American
politics. There's no end to the mischief that can occur. It is
like putting nitroglycerine in a Waring blender. (Lowell
Weicker, U. S. Senator [and later Governor] of Connecticut, in
remarks in August 1984, according to Albert Menendez and Edd
Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long
Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 103.)

The more times it's [prayer in school] voted on, the more times
the television preachers talk about what Congress ought to do,
the more people realize it's these people who are bringing
government into religion, and they don't want it. (Lowell
Weicker, U. S. Senator [and later Governor] of Connecticut, as
reported by Washington Post, September 11, 1985 [p. A-3],
according to Alan F. Pater and Jason R. Pater, compilers and
editors, What They Said in 1985: The Yearbook of Spoken Opinion,
Beverly Hills, CA: Monitor Book Co., 1986, p. 477.)

Today, the religion clauses of the First Amendment do not need to
be fixed; they need to be followed. (Walter F. Mondale, U. S.
Vice-President [1977-1981], in an address in Washington, D. C.
on September 6, 1984, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr,
compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach,
CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 71.)

The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain
absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and
practices. (Bill Bradley, U. S. Senator from New Jersey, letter
to Herbert G. Schapiro, June 27, 1990, according to Albert
Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
13.)

IV. U.S. Supreme Court and Other Judicial Rulings

Christianity is not established by law, and the genius of our
institutions requires that the Church and the State should be
kept separate....The state confesses its incompetency to judge
spiritual matters between men or between man and his maker ...
spiritual matters are exclusively in the hands of teachers of
religion. (U. S. Supreme Court, Melvin v. Easley, 1860, as quoted
by Samuel Rabinove, "Church and State Must Remain Separate," in
Julie S. Bach, ed., Civil Liberties: Opposing Viewpoints, St.
Paul: Greenhaven Press, 1988, p. 53.)

The law knows no heresy, and is committed to the support of no
dogma, the establishment of no sect. (U. S. Supreme Court, Watson
v. Jones, 1872, as quoted by John M. Swomley, Religious Liberty
and the Secular State: The Constitutional Context, Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1987, p. 7.)

[Chief Justice Morrison Waite, in Reynolds vs. U.S., a Supreme
Court decision in 1878] cited Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance
of 1785, in which, said Waite, "he demonstrated Ôthat religion,
or the duty we owe the Creator,' was not within the cognizance of
civil government." This was followed, said Waite, by passage of
the Virginia statute "for establishing religious freedom,"
written by Jefferson, which proclaimed complete liberty of
opinion and allowed no interference by government until ill
tendencies "break out into overt acts against peace and good
order." Finally, the Chief Justice cited Jefferson's letter of
1802 to the Danbury Baptist association, describing the First
Amendment as "building a wall of separation between church and
state." Coming as this does, said Waite, "from an acknowledged
leader of the advocates of the measure, it may be accepted almost
as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the
amendment thus secured." (Irving Brant, The Bill of Rights: Its
Origin and Meaning, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1965,
p. 407.)

Congress was deprived [by the First Amendment] of all legislative
power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which
were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.
(Chief Justice Morrison Waite, Reynolds vs. U.S.,1878, as quoted
by Robert S. Alley, ed., The Supreme Court on Church and State,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 353.)

... the First Amendment of the Constitution ... was intended to
allow everyone under the jurisdiction of the United States to
entertain such notions respecting his relations to his maker, and
the duties they impose, as may be approved by his conscience, and
to exhibit his sentiments in such form of worship as he may think
proper, not injurious to the rights of others, and to prohibit
legislation for the support of any religious tenets, or the modes
of worship of any sect. (U. S. Supreme Court, 1890, Darwin v.
Beason, as quoted by Samuel Rabinove, "Religious Liberty and
Church-State Separation: Why Should We Care?," speech on April
10, 1986, Vital Speeches of the Day, June 15, 1986, p. 528.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,
it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall
be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters
of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their
faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an
exception, they do not now occur to us. (Justice Robert H.
Jackson, U. S. Supreme Court, West Virginia State Board of
Education v. Barnette, 1943. From Robert L. Maddox, Separation of
Church and State: Guarantor of Religious Freedom, New York:
Crossroad Publishing, 1987, p. 115.)

Supreme Court Justice Rutledge stated in 1947 that the First
Amendment was not designed merely to prohibit governmental
imposition of a religion; it was designed to create "a complete
and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and
civil authority...." (Martha M. McCarthy, A Delicate Balance:
Church, State, and the Schools, Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta
Kappan Educational Foundation, 1983, p. 11.)

The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment
means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government
can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one
religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.
Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or remain away
from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or
disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for
entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for
church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large
or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or
institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they
may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the
Federal Government, can openly or secretly, participate in the
affairs of any religious organization or groups and vice versa.
In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of
religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation
between church and State." (Justice Hugo Black, U. S. Supreme
Court, Everson v. Board of Education, 1947. Quoted by John M.
Swomley, Jr., Religion, The State, & The Schools, New York:
Pegasus, 1968, pp. 21-22.)

The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state.
That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve
the slightest breach. (Justice Hugo Black, U. S. Supreme Court,
Everson v. Board of Education, 1947. From Samuel Rabinove,
"Church and State Must Remain Separate," in Julie S. Bach, ed.,
Civil Liberties: Opposing Viewpoints, St. Paul: Greenhaven
Press, 1988, p. 53.)

In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened
to be on top and in league with the government of a particular
time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail,
cruelly tortured, and killed. Among the offenses for which these
punishments had been inflicted were such things as speaking
disrespectfully of the views of ministers of
government-established churches, nonattendance at those churches,
expressions of nonbelief in their doctrines, and failure to pay
taxes and tithes to support them. (Justice Hugo Black, U. S.
Supreme Court, Everson v. Board of Education, 1947, as quoted by
Robert S. Alley, The Supreme Court on Church and State, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 41-42, according to Victoria
Sherrow, Separation of Church and State, New York: Franklin
Watts, 1992, pp. 15-16.)

As the momentum for popular education increased and in turn
evoked strong claims for state support of religious education,
contests not unlike that which in Virginia had produced Madison's
Remonstrance appeared in various forms in other states. New York
and Massachusetts provide famous chapters in the history that
established dissociation of religious teaching from
state-maintained schools. In New York, the rise of the common
schools led, despite fierce sectarian opposition, to the barring
of tax funds to church schools, and later to any school in which
sectarian doctrine was taught. In Massachusetts, largely through
the efforts of Horace Mann, all sectarian teachings were barred
from the common school to save it from being rent by
denominational conflict. The upshot of these controversies, often
long and fierce, is fairly summarized by saying that long before
the Fourteenth Amendment subjected the states to new limitations,
the prohibition of furtherance by the state of religious
instruction became the guiding principle, in law and in feeling,
of the American people.... (Justice Felix Frankfurter, U. S.
Supreme Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, the 1948
decision that forbid public schools in Illinois from commingling
sectarian and secular instruction; as quoted by Paul Blanshard,
ed., Classics of Free Thought, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus
Books, 1977, pp. 61-62.)

The nonsectarian or secular public school was the means of
reconciling freedom in general with religious freedom. The sharp
confinement of the public schools to secular education was a
recognition of the need of a democratic society to educate its
children, insofar as the state undertook to do so, in an
atmosphere free from pressures in a realm in which pressures are
most resisted and where bitterly engendered. Designed to serve as
perhaps the most powerful agency for promoting cohesion among a
heterogeneous democratic people, the public school must keep
scrupulously free from entanglement in the strife of sects. The
preservation of the community from division conflicts, of
government from irreconcilable pressures by religious groups, of
religion from censorship and coercion however subtly exercised,
requires strict confinement of the state to instruction other
than religious, leaving to the individual's church and home,
indoctrination in the faith of his choice.... The extent to
which this principle was deemed a presupposition of our
Constitutional system is strikingly illustrated by the fact that
every state admitted into the Union since 1876 was compelled by
Congress to write into its constitution a requirement that it
maintain a school system "free from sectarian control." ...
(Justice Felix Frankfurter, U. S. Supreme Court, in McCollum v.
Board of Education, the 1948 decision that forbid public schools
in Illinois from commingling sectarian and secular instruction;
as quoted by Paul Blanshard, ed., Classics of Free Thought,
Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1977, pp. 62-63.)

We find that the basic Constitutional principle of absolute
separation was violated when the State of Illinois, speaking
through its Supreme Court, sustained the school authorities of
Champaign in sponsoring and effectively furthering religious
beliefs by its educational arrangement. Separation means
separation, not something less. Jefferson's metaphor in
describing the relation between church and state speaks of a
"wall of separation," not of a fine line easily overstepped. The
public school is at once the symbol of our democracy and the most
pervasive means for promoting our common destiny. In no activity
of the state is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in
its schools, to avoid confusing, not to say fusing, what the
Constitution sought to keep strictly apart. "The great American
principle of eternal separation"--Elihu Root's phrase bears
repetition--is one of the vital reliances of our Constitutional
system for assuring unities among our people stronger than our
diversities. It is the Court's duty to enforce this principle in
its full integrity. We renew our conviction that "we have staked
the very existence of our country on the faith that complete
separation between the state and religion is best for the state
and best for religion." (Justice Felix Frankfurter, U. S. Supreme
Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, the 1948 decision that
forbid public schools in Illinois from commingling sectarian and
secular instruction; as quoted by Paul Blanshard, ed., Classics
of Free Thought, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1977, p.
64.)

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it
will cease to be free for religion--except for the sect that can
win political power. (Justice Robert H. Jackson, dissenting
opinion, U. S. Supreme Court, Zorach v. Clausor, April 7, 1952.
>From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale
Research, Inc., 1990, p. 190.)

We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a state nor the federal
government can constitutionally force a person "to profess a
belief or disbelief in any religion." Neither can
constitutionally pass laws nor impose requirements which aid all
religions as against non-believers, and neither can aid those
religions based on a belief in the existence of a God as against
those religions founded on different beliefs. (Justice Hugo
Black, U. S. Supreme Court, in Torcaso v. Watkins, the 1961
decision that Torcaso could not be required by Maryland to
declare a belief in God before being sworn in as a notary public;
as quoted by Paul Blanshard, ed., Classics of Free Thought,
Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1977, p. 10.)

The [U. S. Supreme] Court also has noted that the "first and most
immediate purpose" of the establishment clause rests "on the
belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy
government and degrade religion." (Martha M. McCarthy, A Delicate
Balance: Church, State, and the Schools, Bloomington, Indiana:
Phi Delta Kappan Educational Foundation, 1983, p. 170. According
to McCarthy, the quote is from Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421, 431
[1962].)

It is a matter of history that this very practice of establishing
governmentally composed prayers for religious services was one of
the reasons which caused many of our early colonists to leave
England and seek religious freedom in America. ... By the time
of the adoption of the Constitution, our history shows that there
was widespread awareness among many Americans of the dangers of a
union of Church and State. These people knew, some of them from
bitter personal experience, that one of the greatest dangers to
the freedom of the individual to worship in his own way lay in
the Government's placing its official stamp of approval upon one
particular kind of prayer or one particular form of religious
service.... The First Amendment was added to the Constitution to
stand as a guarantee that neither the power nor the prestige of
the Federal Government would be used to control, support or
influence the kinds of prayer the American people can say--that
the people's religions must not be subjected to the pressures of
government for change each time a new political administration is
elected to office. (Justice Hugo Black, U. S. Supreme Court, in
Engel v. Vitale, 1962 decision on school prayer, as quoted by
Alan Barth, "The Roots of Limited Government," The Rights of Free
Men: An Essential Guide to Civil Liberties, ed. James Clayton,
New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1984, p. 123.)

These men [the authors on the Constitution and First Amendment]
knew that the First Amendment, which tried to put an end to
government control of religion and prayer, was not written to
destroy either. They knew rather that it was written to quiet
well-justified fears which nearly all of them felt arising out of
an awareness that governments of the past had shackled men's
tongues to make them speak and to pray only to the God that
government wanted them to pray to. It is neither sacrilegious nor
antireligious to say that each separate government in this
country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning
official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the
people themselves and to those the people choose to look to for
religious guidance. (Justice Hugo Black, in Engel v. Vitale, U.
S. Supreme Court 1962 decision on school prayer, as quoted by
Alan Barth, "In Behalf of Religion," The Rights of Free Men: An
Essential Guide to Civil Liberties, ed. James Clayton, New York:
Alfred A Knopf, 1984, p. 128.)

First, this Court has decisively settled that the First
Amendment's mandate that "Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof" has been made wholly applicable to the States by the
Fourteenth Amendment.... Second, this Court has rejected
unequivocally the contention that the Establishment Clause
forbids only governmental preference of one religion over
another. (Justice Tom C. Clark, majority opinion, U. S. Supreme
Court, School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S.
203 (1963), as quoted in Robert S. Alley, ed., The Supreme Court
on Church and State, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp.
210-211.)

Finally, we cannot accept that the concept of neutrality, which
does not permit a State to require a religious exercise even with
the consent of the majority of those affected, collides with the
majority's right to free exercise of religion. While the Free
Exercise Clause clearly prohibits the use of state action to deny
the rights of free exercise to anyone, it has never meant that a
majority could use the machinery of the State to practice its
beliefs. Such a contention was effectively answered by Mr.
Justice Jackson for the Court in West Virginia Board of Education
v. Barnette: "The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to
withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political
controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and
officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied
by the courts. One's right to ... freedom of worship ... and
other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they
depend on the outcome of no elections." (Justice Tom C. Clark,
majority opinion, U. S. Supreme Court, School District of
Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), as quoted in
Robert S. Alley, ed., The Supreme Court on Church and State, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 210-211.)

The place of religion in our society is an exalted one, achieved
through a long tradition of reliance on the home, the church and
the inviolable citadel of the individual heart and mind. We have
come to recognize through bitter experience that it is not within
the power of government to invade that citadel, whether its
purpose or effect be to aid or to oppose, to advance or retard.
In the relationship between man and religion, the state is firmly
committed to a position of neutrality. (Justice Tom C. Clark,
majority opinion, U. S. Supreme Court, June 17, 1963, as quoted
by Alan Barth, April 21, 1968, "Permission to Pray," The Rights
of Free Men: An Essential Guide to Civil Liberties, ed. James
Clayton, New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1984, pp. 130-131.)

... the problem to be considered and solved when the First
Amendment was proposed was not one of hazy or comparative
insignificance, but was one of blunt and stark reality, which had
perplexed and plagued the nations of Western civilization for
some 14 centuries, and during that long period, the union of
Church and State in the government of man had produced neither
peace on earth, nor good will to man. (Justice Prescott of the
Maryland high court, Horace Mann League of the United States v.
Board of Public Works, 220 A.2d 51, 60 (Md. 1966), as quoted by
Martha M. McCarthy, A Delicate Balance: Church, State, and the
Schools, Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappan Educational
Foundation, 1983, p. 1.)

Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral
in matters of religious theory, doctrine and practice. It may
not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of nonreligion;
and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious
theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The
First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion
and religion, and between religion and nonreligion. (U. S.
Supreme Court, Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 103 [1968], as
quoted by Martha M. McCarthy, A Delicate Balance: Church, State,
and the Schools, Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappan
Educational Foundation, 1983, p. 173.)

A certain momentum develops in constitutional theory and it can
be a "downhill thrust" easily set in motion but difficult to
retard or stop.... The dangers are increased by the difficulty of
perceiving in advance exactly where the "verge" of the precipice
lies. As well as constituting an independent evil against which
the Religion Clauses were intended to protect, involvement or
entanglement between government and religion serves as a warning
signal. (Chief Justice Warren Burger, U. S. Supreme Court, Lemon
v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 624-25 [1971], as quoted by Martha M.
McCarthy, A Delicate Balance: Church, State, and the Schools,
Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappan Educational Foundation,
1983, p. 175.)

The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward
religion. (John Paul Stevens, majority opinion, U. S. Supreme
Court, Wallace v. Jaffree, June 4, 1985. From Daniel B. Baker,
ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p.
191.)

Protecting religious freedoms may be more important in the late
twentieth century than it was when the Bill of Rights was
ratified. We live in a pluralistic society, with people of widely
divergent religious backgrounds or with none at all. Government
cannot endorse beliefs of one group without sending a clear
message to non-adherents that they are outsiders. (Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor, in a speech to a Philadelphia conference on
religion in public life, May 1991, according to Tom Flynn, "The
Supreme Court Battle: Preserving Civil Liberties in the Era of a
Hostile Judiciary," Free Inquiry, Fall 1991, Vol. 11, No. 4, p.
4.)

Religious beliefs and religious expression are too precious to be
either proscribed or prescribed by the state. (Justice Anthony
M. Kennedy, according to Mark S. Hoffman, editor, "Notable Quotes
in 1992," The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1993, New York:
Pharos Books, 1992, p. 32.)

V. Other Famous Americans

In response to criticisms of Providence's policy of religious
tolerance, [Roger] Williams issued in 1644 (forty-five years
before Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration) his classic defense
of religious liberty, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause
of Conscience Discussed. "God," Williams forthrightly maintained,
"requireth not an uniformity of Religion." The civil power, he
argued, is incapable of touching the inner life of the spirit,
which is the paramount concern of religion. "The civil sword," he
wrote, "may make a nation of hypocrites and anti-Christians, but
not one true Christian." If the church accepts establishment by
the state, it puts itself in the position of "appealing to
darkness to judge light, to unrighteousness to judge
righteousness, the spiritually blind to judge and end the
controversy concerning heavenly colors." The argument that a
non-Christian state cannot effectively carry out its secular
functions is simply false. Statecraft, like seacraft, is a
practical skill, unrelated to religious faith. "A pagan or
anti-Christian pilot may be as skillful to carry the ship to its
desired port as any Christian mariner or pilot in the world, and
may perform that work with as much safety and speed." (A. James
Reichley, Religion in American Public Life, Washington: Brookings
Institution, 1985, p. 66.)

I must profess while heaven and earth last, that no one tenent
that either London, England, or the world doth harbor is so
heretical, blasphemous, seditious, and dangerous to the corporal,
to the spiritual, to the present, to the eternal good of all men
as the bloody tenent ... of persecution for cause of conscience.
(Roger Williams, 1603?-1683, founder of Rhode Island, as quoted
by Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New
Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 23.)

It is the will and command of God that ... a permission of the
paganish, Jewish, Turkish [Muslim], or anti-Christian consciences
and worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries;
and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is
only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of
God's spirit, the Word of God. (Roger Williams, 1603?-1683,
founder of Rhode Island, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 1644.
>From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of
American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 500.)

The doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience is most
evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus
the Prince of Peace. (Roger Williams, 1603?-1683, founder of
Rhode Island, The Bloudy Tenant of Persecution for Cause of
Conscience, 1644. From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political
Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p. 189.)

Soon after he [Frederick Douglass, circa 1840] took to the field
for antislavery, he wrote a candid letter to his fellow
communicants of the Zion chapel, saying, as [the Rev. Thomas]
James reported, that he had to "cut loose from the church"
because he had found the American church, writ large, to be a
"bulwark of American slavery." (William S. McFeely, Frederick
Douglass, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, p. 85.)

The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from
them. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, American author, Journals,
1872. From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit:
Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p. 190.)

... in churches, every healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself
... checked, cribbed, confined. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882,
American author, in 1878. From Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our
Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1987, p. 135. )

To see how political tides change, the Republican platform of
1876 carried a plank that advocated a constitutional amendment
forbidding the use of public money for any sectarian school.
(Robert L. Maddox, Baptist minister and speech writer and
religious liaison for President Jimmy Carter, Separation of
Church and State: Guarantor of Religious Freedom, New York:
Crossroad Publishing, 1987, p. 102.)

A civil ruler dabbling in religion is as reprehensible as a
clergyman dabbling in politics. Both render themselves odious as
well as ridiculous. (James Cardinal Gibbons, 1834-1921, second
American to be made a Catholic cardinal, in Faith of Our Fathers,
1877. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper
Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p.
487.)

In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the
heads of thieves, called kings. (Robert G. Ingersoll, 1833-1899,
Prose Poems and Selections, 1884. From Daniel B. Baker, ed.,
Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p.
190.)

I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be
introduced into the public schools of the United States. (Thomas
Alva Edison, 1847-1931, American inventor. Attributed according
to Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of
American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 487.)

If we had nothing else to boast of, we could claim with justice
that first among the nations we of this country made it an
article of organic law that the relations between man and his
Maker were a private concern into which other men had no right to
intrude. (David Dudley Field, 1805-1894, American lawyer, first
president of the International Law Association, in an address in
Chicago, 1893. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The
Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988,
p. 487.)

It is not a question of religion, or of creed, or of party; it is
a question of declaring and maintaining the great American
principle of eternal separation between Church and State. (Elihu
Root, in 1894, in urging a New York state constitutional
prohibition against using public funds for sectarian education,
according to U. S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter,
Vashti McCollum v. Board of Education of School District No. 71,
Champaign County, Illinois [1948]; from Gene Garman, America's
Real Religion: Separation Between Religion and Government in the
United States of America, Pittsburg, Kansas: America's Real
Religion Publishing, 1991, p. 82.)

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting
the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
(Clarence S. Darrow,1857-1938, American attorney. From Henry O.
Dormann, compiler, The Speaker's Book of Quotations, New York:
Ballantine Books, 1987, p. 44.)

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands
it. (Albert Einstein,1879-1955, German-born American theoretical
physicist. From William Safire and Leonard Safir, compilers and
eds., Words of Wisdom: More Good Advice, New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1989, p. 68.)

The separation of church and state is extremely important to any
of us who holds to the original traditions of our nation. To
change these traditions by changing our traditional attitude
toward public education would be harmful to our whole attitude of
tolerance in the religious area. If we look at situations which
have arisen in the past in Europe and other world areas, I think
we will see the reasons why it is wise to hold to our early
traditions. (Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962], U. S. First Lady, New
York World-Telegram, June 23, 1949, according to Albert Menendez
and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious
Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 82.)

I do not want church groups controlling the schools of our
country. They must remain free. (Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962],
U. S. First Lady, in a column, My Day, on July 8, 1949, according
to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations
on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p.
82.)

A prescribed prayer, however non-denominational it may be, is a
form of enforced orthodoxy and is therefore an inescapable enemy
to religious liberty. Let children speak to the teachers
appointed to instruct them in the forms and language prescribed
for their education. But let them speak to God in the forms and
language prescribed by their individual consciences. (Alan
Barth, 1906-1979, editorial writer, Washington Post, June 26,
1962, "In Behalf of Religion," The Rights of Free Men: An
Essential Guide to Civil Liberties, ed. James Clayton, New York:
Alfred A Knopf, 1984, p. 128.)

We will be a better country when each religious group can trust
its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith
without assistance from the legal structure of the country.
(Margaret Mead, 1901-1978, American anthropologist, in Redbook
magazine, February, 1963. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich,
eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper &
Row, 1988, p. 499.)

[However, many reputable organizations and prominent individuals
defended the decision {U.S. Supreme Court decision banning
state-composed and mandated school prayer, Engel v. Vitale},]
among them a number of liberal Protestant ministers. Most
prominent of these was The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King,
revered black leader, who called it "a sound and good decision
reaffirming something that is basic in our Constitution, namely
separation of church and state." (Leo Pfeffer, "Prayer in Public
Schools: The Court's Decisions," in the "Church and State" issue
of National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Winter, 1988, p.
26.)

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the
servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.
(Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968, American civil rights
leader, Strength to Love, 1963. From Daniel B. Baker, ed.,
Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p.
191.)

The hope of the world is still in dedicated minorities. The
trail blazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious
freedom have always been in the minority. (Martin Luther King,
Jr., 1929-1968, American civil rights leader, The Words of Martin
Luther King. From Margaret Pepper, compiler and ed., The Harper
Religious & Inspirational Quotation Book, New York: Harper & Row,
1989, p. 190.)

... the General Board of the National Council of Churches
asserted that "neither true religion nor good education is
dependent upon the devotional use of the Bible in the public
school program." The Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs,
which includes the southern Baptists, the largest denomination
not in the National Council of Churches, reaffirmed its
"conviction that laws and regulations prescribing prayers or
devotional exercises do not contribute to a free exercise of
religion and should not be encouraged." The conviction of
Protestant leaders that the disestablishment of cultural religion
is necessary if religious liberties are to be preserved was in
part an outgrowth of careful studies of Church-State issues which
had been undertaken by various denominations. In May, 1963, a
month prior to the Supreme Court decision [Abington School
District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, ruling
unconstitutional Bible reading and recitation of the Lord's
Prayer in public schools], the Presbyterian General Assembly
recommended to all of its churches a group of guidelines that
included the following: that "religious observances never be held
in a public school or introduced into the public school as a part
of its program. Bible reading in connection with courses in
American heritage, world history, literature, the social sciences
and other academic subjects is completely appropriate to public
school instruction. Bible reading and prayers as devotional acts
tend toward indoctrination or meaningless ritual and should be
omitted for both reasons." The Lutheran Church in America and the
Methodist Church also had study commissions at work well before
the Supreme Court decision. The Lutheran statement, published in
1963, shortly after the prayer and Bible-reading decisions, said:
"The Court has clearly made an important contribution to the
cause of religious freedom." The Methodist study commission took
a similar position. (John M. Swomley, Jr., Religion, The State, &
The Schools, New York: Pegasus, 1968, pp. 31-32.)

The present emphasis upon civil religion is a flagrant toying
with the First Amendment. Various trends in national life suggest
that a civil religion of the majority might find religious
liberty something it did not care to preserve. (Robert S. Alley,
in So Help Me God, John Knox Press, 1972, according to Albert
Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on
Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 2.)

The government has leverage on religious groups because of the
tax-exemption privilege. Church leaders, eager for the church to
be free to be the church, should ask for the removal of this
privilege. If there were no tax privilege for religious groups,
hucksters and people who are using religion as a cover for
political movements would be discouraged. (William Stringfellow,
lawyer and lay theologian, as quoted in the Dallas Times Herald,
December 9, 1978, p. A-27, according to Alan F. Pater and Jason
R. Pater, compilers and editors, What They Said in 1978: The
Yearbook of Spoken Opinion, Beverly Hills, CA: Monitor Book Co.,
1979, p. 447.)

... the NEA is not opposed to individual prayer in school. What
we oppose is group-led prayer in the school, which is
un-Constitutional. (Mary Futrell, President of the National
Education Association, interview, Christianity Today, March 15,
1978, p. 32, according to Alan F. Pater and Jason R. Pater,
compilers and editors, What They Said in 1985: The Yearbook of
Spoken Opinion, Beverly Hills, CA: Monitor Book Co., 1986, p.
472.)

The wall of separation ensures the government's freedom from
religion and the individual's freedom of religion. The second
probably cannot flourish without the first. (Leonard W. Levy,
The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, 1986.
>From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of
American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 499.)

The establishment clause separates government and religion so
that we can maintain civility between believers and unbelievers
as well as among the several hundred denominations, sects, and
cults that thrive in our nation, all sharing the commitment to
liberty and equality that cements us together. (Leonard W. Levy,
The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment,
1986.; from Gene Garman, America's Real Religion: Separation
Between Religion and Government in the United States of America,
Pittsburg, Kansas: America's Real Religion Publishing, 1991, p.
viii.)

Religious liberty is a crucial aspect of a free society. People
must be free either to accept or to reject religion or particular
expressions of religion. Otherwise, they have no freedom of
choice to determine their beliefs and the institutions that
embody their beliefs about the universe, human nature, peace,
justice, and comparable matters. Given the fact of strong
religious conviction and competing religious groups, religious
liberty can be guaranteed only in a secular state. A secular
state is not hostile to religion. It can be defined as a state
that is uncommitted to any religious institution or institutions
or to religious beliefs and practices. Its basis for state
authority is in civil and natural law, not in religious doctrine
or in divine revelation. (John M. Swomley, Religious Liberty and
the Secular State: The Constitutional Context, Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1987, p. 7.)

Voluntary, individual, silent prayer has never been banned or
discouraged in the public schools. The Supreme Court has banned
state-sponsored religious services. Those who advocate prayer
services in the public schools do not want voluntary prayer. They
want the government to be officially involved in promoting and
sponsoring prayer services so as to put pressure on children to
engage in public prayer. They apparently do not care whether
parents want their children to engage in public prayer or be
indoctrinated with sectarian religious ideas. The object is to
provide a captive classroom audience that will be exposed to the
prayers of those with a religious message, which they deliver in
the form of a prayer. (John M. Swomley, Religious Liberty and the
Secular State: The Constitutional Context, Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1987, p. 128.)

Both [religion] clauses [of the First Amendment] were applicable
only to the federal government until Congress adopted the
Fourteenth Amendment. Legislative history indicates that the
amendment was intended to guarantee to citizens of every state
the rights "secured by the first eight amendments to the
Constitution" (The Congressional Globe). The Supreme Court,
however, did not begin to apply the religion clauses of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the states until the 1940s. (John M.
Swomley, "Education in Religious Schools: The Conflict Over
Funding" in the "Church and State" issue of National Forum: The
Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Winter, 1988, p. 13.)

I really believe [abortion] should be a religious issue. I
couldn't do it because of my religious beliefs, but who am I to
impose my feelings on someone else? Some religions are not that
strict about it. Also the Constitution calls for separation of
church and state. How can you impose through law a religious
belief on all people. (Rosalyn Carter, U. S. First Lady
[1977-1981], in an interview with Good Housekeeping, February,
1988 [p. 172], according to Alan F. Pater and Jason R. Pater,
compilers and editors, What They Said in 1988: The Yearbook of
Spoken Opinion, Beverly Hills, CA: Monitor Book Co., 1989, p.
21.)

We know that no one should tell a woman she has to bear an
unwanted child. We know that religious beliefs cannot define
patriotism. (Walter Cronkite, former CBS News anchor, in a speech
to People for the American Way, as reported in Newsweek, December
5, 1988, p. 8, according to Alan F. Pater and Jason R. Pater,
compilers and editors, What They Said in 1988: The Yearbook of
Spoken Opinion, Beverly Hills, CA: Monitor Book Co., 1989, p.
218.)

VI. Foreign Sources

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are:
for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the
corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I
say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou
prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door,
pray to thy Father, which is in secret; and thy Father which
seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Jesus, as reported in
Matthew 6:5-6.)

It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that
every man should worship according to his own convictions.
(Tertullian, 160?-230?, Carthaginian church father, Ad Scapulam,
202 C.E., according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers,
The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA:
Centerline Press, 1991, p. 94.)

It is a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it.
(William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English playwright and poet, The
Winter's Tale, Act 2, Scene 3, according to Albert Menendez and
Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty,
Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 87.)

Wee do freely profess that our Lord the King hath no more power
over their [Roman Catholics'] coonsciences [sic] than over ours,
and that is none at all ... let [people] be heretikes, Turks,
Jews, or whatsoever, it apperteynes not to the earthly power to
punish them in the least measure. (Thomas Helwys, regarded as the
founder of the first Baptist church in England, in 1612, as
quoted by Jerry H. Combee, "Evangelicals and the First
Amendment," National Review, 24 October 1986, p. 40, according to
Victoria Sherrow, Separation of Church and State, New York:
Franklin Watts, 1992, p. 20.)

A sanctimonious man is one who under an atheist king would be
atheist. [Un dŽvot est celui qui sous un roi athŽe serrait
athŽe.] (Jean de La Bruy re,1645-1696, French moralist, "De la
mode," Les Caract res, 1688. From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political
Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p. 189.)

But, however, that some may not colour their spirit of
persecution and unchristian cruelty with a pretence of care of
the public weal and observation of the laws; and others, under
pretence of religion, may not seek impunity for their libertinism
and licentiousness; in a word, that none may impose either upon
himself or others, by the pretences of loyalty and obedience to
the prince, or of tenderness and sincerity in the worship of God;
I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the
business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle
the just bounds that lie between the one and the other. (John
Locke, 1632-1704, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689, as quoted
by Glen E. Thurow, Abraham Lincoln and American Political
Religion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1976,
pp. 1-2.)

Both Madison and Jefferson relied heavily on the theory of
church-state separation espoused by John Locke who maintained
that "the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate."
(Martha M. McCarthy, A Delicate Balance: Church, State, and the
Schools, Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappan Educational
Foundation, 1983, p. 4. The Locke quote is from A Letter
Concerning Toleration, 1689, according to McCarthy.)

All religions must be tolerated ... every man must go to heaven
in his own way. [Die Religionen mŸssen alle toleriert werden ...
denn hier muss ein jeder nach seiner Fasson selig werden.]
(Frederick the Great, 1712-1786, Prussian king, note to the
Religious Department, June 22, 1740. From Daniel B. Baker, ed.,
Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p.
189.)

No one should be called to account about his opinions, even
religious ones, so long as their manifestation does not upset
public order as established by law. (Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen, August 27, 1789, France, as quoted by
Constance Rowe, Voltaire and the State, New York: Octagon Books,
Inc., 1968, p. 124.)

... I questioned the faithful of all communions; I particularly
sought the society of clergymen, who are the depositories of the
various creeds and have a personal interest in their survival ...
all thought the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over
their country was the complete separation of church and state. I
have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America
I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.
(Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859, writing of his travels in
America in 1830, as quoted by Samuel Rabinove, "Church and State
Must Remain Separate," in Julie S. Bach, ed., Civil Liberties:
Opposing Viewpoints, St. Paul: Greenhaven Press, 1988, p. 53.)

... It is accordingly on this battlefield [religious belief],
almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society
have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim
of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly
controverted. The great writers to whom the world owes what
religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of
conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a
human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.
Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really
care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been
practically realized, except where religious indifference, which
dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has
added its weight to the scale. In the minds of almost all
religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty
of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves. One person will
bear with dissent in matters of church government, but not of
dogma; another can tolerate everybody, short of a Papist or an
Unitarian; another, every one who believes in revealed religion;
a few extend their charity a little further, but stop at the
belief in a God and in a future state. Wherever the sentiment of
the majority is still genuine and intense, it is found to have
abated little of its claim to be obeyed. (John Stuart Mill,
1806-1873, and Harriet Taylor Mill, ?-1858, "Chapter I:
Introductory," On Liberty, 1859; reprinted in Currin V. Shields,
ed., On Liberty, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1956,
p. 11.)

Let us suppose ... that the government is entirely at one with
the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion
unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But
I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either
by themselves or by their government. The power itself is
illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than
the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in
accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If
all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person
were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified
in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would
be justified in silencing mankind. (John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873,
and Harriet Taylor Mill, ?-1858, "Chapter II: Of the Liberty of
Thought and Discussion," On Liberty, 1859; reprinted in Currin V.
Shields, ed., On Liberty, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company,
Inc., 1956, pp. 20-21.)

... it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be
rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are
rejected by the present. (John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, and
Harriet Taylor Mill, ?-1858, "Chapter II: Of the Liberty of
Thought and Discussion," On Liberty, 1859; reprinted in Currin V.
Shields, ed., On Liberty, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company,
Inc., 1956, p. 23.)

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to
rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove
them unfounded. (John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, and Harriet Taylor
Mill, ?-1858, "Chapter II: Of the Liberty of Thought and
Discussion," On Liberty, 1859; reprinted in Currin V. Shields,
ed., On Liberty, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1956,
p. 26.)

What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public
obtains in modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman
sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private
life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindeness, personal
dignity, even the sense of honor, is derived from the purely
human, not the religious part of our education, and never could
have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth,
professedly recognized, is that of obedience. (John Stuart Mill,
1806-1873, and Harriet Taylor Mill, ?-1858, "Chapter II: Of the
Liberty of Thought and Discussion," On Liberty, 1859; reprinted
in Currin V. Shields, ed., On Liberty, Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1956, p. 61.)

Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood,
which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full
approval of the ecclesiastical authorities. (William E. H.
Lecky, 1838-1903, Irish historian, History of the Rise and
Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (Appleton, 1866)
Volume II, p. 32, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr,
compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach,
CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 58.)

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is
really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
(John E. E. Dalberg, Lord Acton, 1834-1902, British historian,
The History of Freedom and Other Essays, 1907. From Henry O.
Dormann, compiler, The Speaker's Book of Quotations, New York:
Ballantine Books, 1987, p. 43.)

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the
way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
(William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, Irish poet, dramatist, and
statesman; remarks on the adoption of the Irish Constitution of
1937, according to Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The
Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline
Press, 1991, p. 107.)

Intellectual freedom is essential to human society. Freedom of
thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by
mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and
demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships. (Andrei
Dmitrievich Sakharov, 1921- , Russian nuclear scientist. From
Henry O. Dormann, compiler, The Speaker's Book of Quotations, New
York: Ballantine Books, 1987, p. 44.)
--
=kcoc...@nyx.cs.du.edu | B(0-4) c- d- e++ f- g++ k(+) m r(-) s++(+) t | TSAKC=
=My thoughts, my posts, my ideas, my responsibility, my beer, my pizza. OK???=
=Some people claim that Jesus didn't drink alcohol. If not, he certainly =
=wound up bying an awful lot of alcohol for the wedding and His disciples... =

[Davies Stephen Clark]

Trivia question: where did the phrase "separation of church and
state" come from?

The Declaration of Independence? WRONG!

The Articles of Confederation? WRONG!

The U.S. Constitution? WRONG!

The Bill of Rights? WRONG!

True answer: Thomas Jefferson, the most liberal-minded, radical, and atypical
of all of the "founding fathers", who was not even present in America during
the construction or ratification of the Constitution, in 1802 spoke to the
Danbury Baptists and spoke of "the firewall of separation of church and state."
Here, he quoted a fairly obscure pastor who had used the phrase in a sermon a
few years earlier. This pastor (as well as Jefferson) used the phrase to
illustrate how the "garden of the church", where true righteousness and peace
with God was to be found, should always be kept protected from the "wilderness
of the state", where tyrannic rulers could easily corrupt true doctrine and
inflict restrictions on worship of God. The phrase was *never* intended to
mean *anything* like protecting the *state* from the *church*!!!

Not until the 1940's did the Supreme court warp and twist this phrase
and declare that the state must be protected from the church! Ha!

Incidentally, the answer to the question "Were the Founding Fathers
Christians?" is undoubtedly YES. I have done a fair bit of research in this
area and can readily produce evidence if anyone desires it. Of the founding
fathers that I have researched, without a doubt George Washington, John Adams,
Samuel Adams, Governeur Morris, John Witherspoon, James Madison, Alexander
Hamilton, Patrick Henry, John Jay, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney were very
strong Christians. And I don't mean "they went to church, and they believed
in the Bible because everyone else did at the time." No. These were men who
gave speeches affirming their convictions, who wrote stirring prayers and
recorded daily their faith in the Lord and gave Him the credit for blessing
their new nation so richly. Ben Franklin probably never became a Christian
in the way most of us would define it, although he certainly forsook his deist
outlook on life later in his life and was the one who, during the Philadelphia
discussions about the Constitution, rose and said that if there was one thing
he was sure of, it was that "God governs in the affairs of men." He suggested
that a chaplain be appointed to pray daily for the delegates to the convention,
and, surprise, surprise, from that day on real progress in the formation of the
document that our country rests on was made.

No matter how our public schools attempt to rewrite the history books,
let it *never* be said that our country was not founded on the principles of
freedom, courage, humility and righteousness found in the Christian faith!

- Mouse Davies
(s...@ucsu.colorado.edu)

[T. M. Cuffel]

In article <scd.76...@rintintin.colorado.edu>,

Davies Stephen Clark <s...@rintintin.Colorado.EDU> wrote:
>
> Trivia question: where did the phrase "separation of church and
>state" come from?
>
>The Declaration of Independence? WRONG!
>
>The Articles of Confederation? WRONG!

Irrelevant. Nobody sites these as law.

>The U.S. Constitution? WRONG!

Granted.

>The Bill of Rights? WRONG!

While "separation of church and state" may not be there, one could argue
that this is what the first amendment implies when it forbids the
establishment of a state religion.

You will note that the word "Christian" does not appear in any of these.

>True answer: Thomas Jefferson, the most liberal-minded, radical, and atypical
>of all of the "founding fathers", who was not even present in America during
>the construction or ratification of the Constitution, in 1802 spoke to the
>Danbury Baptists and spoke of "the firewall of separation of church and state."
>Here, he quoted a fairly obscure pastor who had used the phrase in a sermon a
>few years earlier. This pastor (as well as Jefferson) used the phrase to
>illustrate how the "garden of the church", where true righteousness and peace
>with God was to be found, should always be kept protected from the "wilderness
>of the state", where tyrannic rulers could easily corrupt true doctrine and
>inflict restrictions on worship of God. The phrase was *never* intended to
>mean *anything* like protecting the *state* from the *church*!!!

I agree with you. The first amendment was meant to protect churches
(not The Church) from the state. One way of doing this is to prevent any
one church from oppressing another church through the government. Like in
the late 1800's, where Jesus loving Catholics and Protestants killed one
another because the couldn't agree which version of the bible was to be
used in public schools.

It is not the state that is being protected, but religious freedom. You may
think that there is no harm in allowing Christianity and state to intermingle,
say by using the bible in public schools. But what would you say if some
"fringe" Christian group was doing this? What if the Mormons were teaching
your kids about the Lost Tribes in North America? What if the Snake Handlers
came by with their special test of faith? You would want your mainstream
Christianity protected from the state. Just like I want my personal beliefs
protected from your religion using the state as its vehicle.

> Not until the 1940's did the Supreme court warp and twist this phrase
>and declare that the state must be protected from the church! Ha!

>
> Incidentally, the answer to the question "Were the Founding Fathers
>Christians?" is undoubtedly YES. I have done a fair bit of research in this
>area and can readily produce evidence if anyone desires it. Of the founding
>fathers that I have researched, without a doubt George Washington, John Adams,
>Samuel Adams, Governeur Morris, John Witherspoon, James Madison, Alexander
>Hamilton, Patrick Henry, John Jay, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney were very
>strong Christians. And I don't mean "they went to church, and they believed
>in the Bible because everyone else did at the time." No. These were men who
>gave speeches affirming their convictions, who wrote stirring prayers and
>recorded daily their faith in the Lord and gave Him the credit for blessing
>their new nation so richly. Ben Franklin probably never became a Christian
>in the way most of us would define it, although he certainly forsook his deist
>outlook on life later in his life and was the one who, during the Philadelphia
>discussions about the Constitution, rose and said that if there was one thing
>he was sure of, it was that "God governs in the affairs of men." He suggested
>that a chaplain be appointed to pray daily for the delegates to the convention,
>and, surprise, surprise, from that day on real progress in the formation of the
>document that our country rests on was made.

In a country that discriminated against non-Christians, it is hardly surprising
that those who wished power made "stirring" (and public) professions of their
faith. The same is true today. Just compare the ratio of professed
Christians in office to that of the general populous.

> No matter how our public schools attempt to rewrite the history books,
>let it *never* be said that our country was not founded on the principles of
>freedom, courage, humility and righteousness found in the Christian faith!

Perhaps. But you left out a few principles, principles that show through
much more strongly than Christianity. Principles like a black man is only
worth 3/5 of a white one, and that only for purposes of representation.
Or like women being incapable of understanding affairs of state beyond
rearing its children. I'll go on if you like.

Return to the pristine days of yore, if you like, but don't drag the rest
of us with you.

--
T. M. Cuffel "So do you have any experience watching children?"
"Only from my car."

-Some TV show

[John Gregory Miles]

In article <CLB63...@cnsnews.Colorado.EDU> you wrote:
: In article <scd.76...@rintintin.colorado.edu>,

: Davies Stephen Clark <s...@rintintin.Colorado.EDU> wrote:
: >
: > Trivia question: where did the phrase "separation of church and
: >state" come from?
: >
: >The Declaration of Independence? WRONG!
: >
: >The Articles of Confederation? WRONG!

: Irrelevant. Nobody sites these as law.

: >The U.S. Constitution? WRONG!

: Granted.

: >The Bill of Rights? WRONG!

: While "separation of church and state" may not be there, one could argue
: that this is what the first amendment implies when it forbids the
: establishment of a state religion.

While I agree with you that the state has no business prescribing the
manner of prayer, etc., through law, the first amendment states simply

that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of

religion." Thus the Constitution is perfectly amenable to prayers at
graduation exercises, a teacher having a Bible on his/her desk, one
in the library, etc., as long as it is not done through the mandate of
law. Consequently, I don't see how granting a "minute of silence"
could not pass Constitutional muster, or even voluntary prayer in
schools. Note also that the amendment states that no law should be
passed affecting an *establishment* of religion to specifically exempt
those laws based on public morality, but not specifically associated
with an *establishment* of religion. This seems like an entirely
appropriate "wall" to me.

========================
--John
(jgm...@mines.utah.edu)
========================

[Hala'sz Sa'ndor]

A principle is not a law:

In article <CLB63...@cnsnews.Colorado.EDU>, cuf...@spot.Colorado.EDU (T. M. Cuffel) writes:

> Perhaps. But you left out a few principles, principles that show through
> much more strongly than Christianity. Principles like a black man is only
> worth 3/5 of a white one, and that only for purposes of representation.

This is a law found in the original Constitution

> Or like women being incapable of understanding affairs of state beyond
> rearing its children. I'll go on if you like.

Where in the matters of the Framers or in the original "more perfect union" is
this found? The Constitution left all matters of voter-qualifying to the
member-states. (This is not to sai that this was not a widespread opinion,
but at least in the Constitution there is nothing that is derived from it,
unless (I forget) it is the eligibilitie to the prezidensie.)

[Greg Penetrante]

[kcoc...@nyx.cs.du.edu includes vast treatise on religious freedom of
expression in U.S.]

I agree! The KEY here is that Thomas Jefferson wanted religious FREEDOM
of EXPRESSION for ALL religions, not the expungement of all religious
expression from everywhere: "I am for freedom of religion and against all

maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another."
(Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799. From
Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of
American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 499.)

Where most of us mainstream Christians stand is that we disagree with
those poliicians or groups that want to ELIMINATE the FREE EXPRESSION of
religious activity (whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Shinto, etc)
from schools and parks and misc. public institutions. This kind of
activity on the humanists/freethinkers part is similar to the actions
taken by the Chinese communists in banning all 'foreign' religious
expression in China.

But for a teacher or supervisor to STOP a child from praying or
practicing a religious activity in school during recess or lunch is
CLEARLY a violation of his/her civil rights. Again, the KEY here is that
one segment of society wants the freedom of religious expression; another
militant segment of society hates/dislikes/had a bad experience
with/doesn't believe in religion and wants it completely expunged from
society and will stop at nothing to do so, even if it means electing a
President to do it...

Luckily, there is a BIG majority in the world who DOES believe in one
religion or another and loves to have religious expression... :-P

-[greg

[Matthew H. Fields]

In article <gregpen....@crash.cts.com>,

Greg Penetrante <gre...@crash.cts.com> wrote:
>Where most of us mainstream Christians stand is that we disagree with
>those poliicians or groups that want to ELIMINATE the FREE EXPRESSION of
>religious activity (whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Shinto, etc)
>from schools and parks and misc. public institutions. This kind of
>activity on the humanists/freethinkers part is similar to the actions
>taken by the Chinese communists in banning all 'foreign' religious
>expression in China.

Would you please cite at least one example of somebody doing this?
And show how you establish that they're an atheist of some sort?

The only public debate on the matter that I've ever heard was regarding
the "right" of teachers in public schools to require children to say
a specific prayer. Teachers have done this. They did it in public schools
that I attended.

[Matthew H. Fields]

In article <gregpen....@crash.cts.com>,
Greg Penetrante <gre...@crash.cts.com> wrote:

>Where most of us mainstream Christians stand is that we disagree with
>those poliicians or groups that want to ELIMINATE the FREE EXPRESSION of
>religious activity (whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Shinto, etc)
>from schools and parks and misc. public institutions.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. If I'm teaching a music theory
class and somebody won't let me proceed until I let them state their
religious angle on melodic shape, their religious angle on parallel
fifths, their religious angle on tonality and atonality, etc., and I
ask them to kindly postpone the religious discussion until after class,
is this an example of the kind of infraction you have in mind?

Who exactly is supposedly trying to prevent free religious expression?
Do you mean the folks who didn't support a constitutional ammendment requiring
all public school students to recite a prayer in school?
Who exactly is "most of us...?"

[Alan Geist]

In article <gregpen....@crash.cts.com> gre...@crash.cts.com (Greg Penetrante) writes:
>
[deletions about Thomas Jefferson]

>
>Where most of us mainstream Christians stand is that we disagree with
>those poliicians or groups that want to ELIMINATE the FREE EXPRESSION of
>religious activity (whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Shinto, etc)
>from schools and parks and misc. public institutions. This kind of
>activity on the humanists/freethinkers part is similar to the actions
>taken by the Chinese communists in banning all 'foreign' religious
>expression in China.
>
>But for a teacher or supervisor to STOP a child from praying or
>practicing a religious activity in school during recess or lunch is
>CLEARLY a violation of his/her civil rights. Again, the KEY here is that
>one segment of society wants the freedom of religious expression; another
>militant segment of society hates/dislikes/had a bad experience
>with/doesn't believe in religion and wants it completely expunged from
>society and will stop at nothing to do so, even if it means electing a
>President to do it...
>
>Luckily, there is a BIG majority in the world who DOES believe in one
>religion or another and loves to have religious expression... :-P
>
>-[greg
>

I agree with you on every point. I will gladly stand next to you and
fight for the freedom of expression within schools by students of that
school (as long as it doesn't infringe on others rights). Any teacher
who is in any way interferring with a student's prayer (or raindance
for that matter) during recess is seriously violating the most basic of
civil rights. I would do all I could humanly do to get that teacher or
official fired.

BTW, I am an atheist. Also, I would not vote for any official, especially
a president, who supported the behavior you described. I can confidently
say that I speak for many, if not the vast majority of atheists.

Also, there have been many more cases of teachers in the US trying to
force theism (in particular christianity) on students, than there has been
humanist/freethinker teachers forcing non-religion on students *. Will you
join me to stop that behavior as willingly as I will join you to stop the
behavior you and I both deplore? After all, isn't forcing a belief or
teaching a particular religion over all others just as bad as preventing
religious expression?

Alan Geist
al...@ssd.intel.com

* I do not consider teaching science the same as teaching non-religion.
If you do, then we will have to agree to disagree.

The opinions expressed herein are probably not those of my employer.
What they are I may never know.

"I only have intolerance toward the intolerant. I am only prejudiced
against the prejudiced. I am only self-righteous about
self-righteousness." - me
--

[Greg Penetrante]

>Alan Geist
>al...@ssd.intel.com

Alan, your response was well thought out and impassioned; definitely a
quantum leap over the other postings in this newsgroup which are nothing
but mudslinging and namecalling..

As far as teachers forcing Christianity on students, and the stopping of
that activity, I will have to say (as a staunch Christian myself) Yes, I
will join you in promoting the freedom of religious expression throughout
the United States! I will agree that Christiainity isn't for everyone,
and forcing it on people definitely does NOT save souls :-) (and that the
Bible does confirm this). Indeed, the "forcing" of Christianity -- or any
religion thereof -- upon a group will cause more harm than good, and
witnessing is best left to person to person contact on mutually
agreed-upon terms.

(but now I digress here...):
I hope we can agree, though, that the amount of child-upon-child violence
IS increasing, and that more than 10,000 violent deaths last year were
those of Children committing violent crimes (Justice Department figures,
12/15/94). I also hope that we can agree that there just are some values
that transcend both religious and atheistic boundaries; Values such as
trust, personal responsibility, tolerance (not necessarily advocacy),
respect, family unity, peace and I'm sure there's a lot more. In these
times of increasing intolerance and anger, SOMEBODY's JUST GOT TO STEP IN
and start pulling our next generation in-line, whether it be parents or
teachers (although government is certainly no substitute for family :-) ).
I think this is not a case of "forcing" one's morals upon another, but rather
a movement to restore order in an increasingly disorderly society. :-) :-)

-Greg Penetrante
gre...@crash.cts.com

[92...@tayloru.edu]

Since in the intro, the periodical "Freethought Today" was mentioned, I
thought that I might comment on my reading of "Freethought Today".

While it does have some accurate and solid points, it also loves to take Bible
quotes out of context and rally around petty issues like Salvation Army
ringers outside of Post Offices.

For example, they quoted Jesus extensivly with such quotes as Matthew 23:33
"Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of
hell?" with no lead in, no followup, and no context.

After reading it, I see the same bitter, "I'm right and you're wrong" thought
pattern in "Freethought Today" that I see after reading dogmatic
fundamentalist newsletters. Many of the writers in "Freethought Today" seem
to call themselves "militant athiests." Given that anyone with a head on
their shoulders will admit to being at least Partly agnostic, I wonder how
anyone can be militant about atheism. And why would you one want to be
militant about it? Certainly to be militant against the evils perpetuated by
religions, but not against every part of any religion.

To sum up, I think that the people who write and happily subscribe to
"Freethought Today" are the same kind of people who are dogmatic
fundamentalists in religions. They gain their self esteem by proving
themselves (or their beliefs) superior (in their own eyes) to others.

I would recomend reading "The Humanist". It is a pretty good magazine from
what I've seen, and I'm not even a humanist.

--
O /
----X-cut-here-----------------------------------------------------------------
O \ Eric Mathiasen emat...@css.tayloru.edu 92...@tayloru.edu

[edgar pearlstein]

92...@tayloru.edu writes:

>Since in the intro, the periodical "Freethought Today" was mentioned, I
>thought that I might comment on my reading of "Freethought Today".

(some material omitted)

>To sum up, I think that the people who write and happily subscribe to
>"Freethought Today" are the same kind of people who are dogmatic
>fundamentalists in religions. They gain their self esteem by proving
>themselves (or their beliefs) superior (in their own eyes) to others.

The writer makes the mistake of judging a whole class of people
(letter-writers and subscribers to Freethought Today) by the action of
a few. Atheists are no more to be stereotyped than are believers.
.

[Hala'sz Sa'ndor]

In article <2k2t8s$6...@zip.eecs.umich.edu>, fie...@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew H. Fields) writes:
> Who exactly is supposedly trying to prevent free religious expression?
> Do you mean the folks who didn't support a constitutional ammendment requiring
> all public school students to recite a prayer in school?
> Who exactly is "most of us...?"

The quoted is indeed the bestlie known issu, but there also is Christmas.
Not that I find either reallie important, unless a ruckus is raizd.

[Matthew H. Fields]

Ummm, two notes on Greg Penetrante's note:
1), there's nothing in fixing of teen violence that has anything to do
with the issue of religious force or freedom, so pulling it up here looks
mainly like an attempt to accuse some vague horde of "atheists" of being
the cause of teen violence;
2), the sheer number of children in the world may well be part of the
problem.

[Dan Martin]

In article <gregpen....@crash.cts.com>,
Greg Penetrante <gre...@crash.cts.com> wrote:

>In <CLG10...@SSD.intel.com> al...@ssd.intel.com (Alan Geist) writes:
>
>>In article <gregpen....@crash.cts.com> gre...@crash.cts.com (Greg Penetrante) writes:
>>>
>>[deletions about Thomas Jefferson]
>>>

>>> < bunches of deletions >

>>>
>I hope we can agree, though, that the amount of child-upon-child violence
>IS increasing, and that more than 10,000 violent deaths last year were
>those of Children committing violent crimes (Justice Department figures,
>12/15/94). I also hope that we can agree that there just are some values
>that transcend both religious and atheistic boundaries; Values such as
>trust, personal responsibility, tolerance (not necessarily advocacy),
>respect, family unity, peace and I'm sure there's a lot more. In these
>times of increasing intolerance and anger, SOMEBODY's JUST GOT TO STEP IN
>and start pulling our next generation in-line, whether it be parents or
>teachers (although government is certainly no substitute for family :-) ).
>I think this is not a case of "forcing" one's morals upon another, but rather
>a movement to restore order in an increasingly disorderly society. :-) :-)
>
>-Greg Penetrante
> gre...@crash.cts.com
>

As another post in this thread has already pointed out, the
increase in teen violence, etc, has nothing to do with theism /
atheism. This has to do with morality and values. As I've
stated in earlier posts, many people take the need for morality
(often called something like "traditional values") to mean
*Christian* morality. What we need is to discover a morality
suitable to our nature as man, and not based on
collectivist/statist principles. For a good start, try reading
The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand. Our nature as man
requires that we recognize reality. Every "is" (or fact of
reality) implies an "ought". In order to act in our own
rational self interest (what Rand terms selfishness) we must
align our will with reality. In practice, people who understand
these principle can recognize that violent crimes (and the other
problems you describe) are wrong and damaging to them as
people. These principles can be taught in the home, in schools,
and in all aspects of society.

Of the books I've read to date, Rand's "Virtue of Selfishness"
is the most concise explanation of the failures of the popular
altruistic morality and the consequent collectivist/statist
politics. Rand has written a great many more books which
explain her ideas in more depth, but this is a great start. If
you are interested, you should also check out some books by
Leonard Piekoff and George H. Smith.

Dan Martin | Evil is never so perfectly achieved as when it is
martind@spot | done with good will and purity of heart.
.colorado.edu | -- Dictum of Pascal

[Hala'sz Sa'ndor]

I heard that Rand changed her mind and in late years became collectivist.

But "statist" and "collectivist" can join onlie when there is a state.
When a nation is so small that there is no social class, the nation always is
collectivist. Private propertie is limited to that which can be carried