DEL.ICIO.USThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/30/08
Ongoing arguments over government entanglements with faith have striking parallels and differences from the debates in the days of the founding fathers, says Steven Waldman.
He is a former religion reporter, editor for U.S. News and World Report and founder of Beliefnet.com, a Web site dedicated to religion.
 Kent D. Johnson/AJC | ||
| Steven Waldman is a former religion reporter, editor for U.S. News and World Report and founder of Beliefnet.com, a Web site dedicated to religion. | ||
|
His new book, "Founding Faith: Providence, Politics and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America" (Random House, $25.95) follows the men, history and arguments that laid the foundation for America's unique relationship between the courthouse and the meeting house.
Waldman concludes that neither strict separationists of today nor those who argue that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian nation" get it right. The truth is in the middle, he says: The founding fathers affirmed religion's importance and most practiced their faith publicly, but they created a nation where faith would not be polluted by politics, and politics would have no say in an individual's faith.
Waldman stopped by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this month for a talk. Here are excerpts of the conversation.
Waldman: One of the most important parts of my research was about how different the approach of 18th century evangelicals was from 21st century evangelicals. In the 18th century, they were the most hard-line advocates of separation of church and state. ...21st century evangelicals have tended to take the view that if we want to encourage godliness, we need to have more involvement of religion in politics and in public places and public spaces. ...And I think their ancestors wouldn't have agreed with that.
Q: Why not?
Waldman: Part of it is, they were persecuted a lot [by state-supported churches] and came to be highly suspect of government involvement in any way, because they thought it would eventually evolve into persecuting them...and they saw that the churches and system that had grown up in colonial times didn't work that well. We had 150 years of experimentation with having varying degrees of state support of religion in most of the colonies by the time we got to the Constitution.
[Many colonies were founded on the philosophy of establishing Christian societies, but the founding fathers] were looking back at these experiments in state and church and said they backfired in a big way. They led to persecution or poor quality religion or led to divisiveness, and they said we need to find a better way.
They came up with a free market approach to religion, that it will flourish if you leave it alone. They did want to encourage religion. All the founders believed that the republic was not going to work unless you have a religiously vibrant society. So that was true, but they came to this paradoxical decision that the best way to encourage religion was to get out of its way.
...Some of the debates we are having now are around very similar issues that they were trying to figure out more than 200 years ago, what is the right role of religion in the public square?
[The country held the National Day of Prayer in April]. And one of the big things the founders disagreed over was whether or not to have presidential prayer proclamations. Washington and Adams both had religious, vivid prayer proclamations. ...Jefferson tended to look at it in terms that it was so bad for the political system. ...Madison said it was also bad for religion. If you have a prayer uttered by a politician, people are going to come to think the prayer is political. So instead of ennobling politics, you degrade religion...
This is one of the biggest insights from Madison, and he really got it from 18th century evangelicals, who were his allies, that sometimes government help actually hurts.
We tend to think about the religious freedom question as [freedom from] persecution. They all agreed we should get rid of religious persecution. ...Some took it a step further and said even well-meaning attempts to aid religion were dangerous, and they thought that for a number of reasons. One was that if you got government involved in helping religion, you have all the problems of bureaucracy intruding into religion.
If you want to provide funds to assist you have to create a tax and give money to churches and that means government has to get into the business of assessing what is a good church and what is not a good church. ...and they came to believe that one consequence of government helping religion that it would lower the quality of religion and you would have incompetent ministers and less worship. They felt like government assistance of religion sapped the spirit out of religion.
[Evangelicals from then and now] both start with the premise that encouraging religion would be a good thing. What they would disagree with now, is whether or not it's a good idea to have government nudge it along.
You see this cycle in history all the time, that the new generation forgets its previous history and so they don't know what their predecessors were reacting against. So modern Christians, when they start pushing for more church-state mingling were not as aware of the downsides of it as 18th century evangelicals were, who were living in the midst of unintended consequences [of persecution].
Modern Christians were focused on the negative consequences of the separation of church and state...and I think they didn't have the awareness of the risks to religion that were going in the other direction.
I think there is a little more awareness now, in part, I think really for a very practical reason. That is that a lot of Christians hitched their cart to President Bush [an evangelical] and felt within themselves that they had a Christian man and that his Christian values would somehow translate into governance, and that has not happened to the degree that they wanted. Or there is a lot of disappointment about it and a reassessment of what that means. What does it mean to be a Christian in politics? What does it mean that you vote your values? I think those people are a little less sure than five years ago as to what that means.
Q: So President Bush has changed the evangelical-political movement?
Waldman: There is a book called "Unchristian" [co-authored by Atlantan Gabe Lyons, which has polls showing] Christian involvement in politics has hurt the Christian brand. It has made young people have a less positive view of Christianity.
I think that part of what is happening is an awareness of, if you step back and say was it good for Christianity, and people will look at its association with a political movement and say, maybe this didn't put Christianity's best face forward.
There are plenty of people who would disagree with that, but there is, among young Christians that awareness that involvement in politics has not necessarily made it easier to win people over to Christianity.
Vote for this story!
