Religious Liberty and the Genius of the American Founding

I’m on a break between college quarters and recovering from an eye injury.  The following condensed article is the best I’ve ever read on the origins of religious liberty- the true American Dream. 

We are in danger of losing the precious gift of religious liberty, which took almost 2,000 years for the West to put into practice.

It’s up to you and me to keep it alive.

Religious Liberty and the Genius of the American Founding

By Glenn Ellmers

Prior to Christianity, all religions were emphatically political.

We read in the Old Testament of God’s special covenant with the Jews, who are repeatedly described as a “chosen people.” In fact, in the ancient world, all tribes or nations considered themselves chosen—and protected—by their gods. Whether it was Apollo and the other Olympian gods in Greece, Marduk and Nabu for the Babylonians, Rah and Isis and Osiris in Egypt, or Jehovah among the Jews—the gods of the ancient world were always the gods of a particular people. That is what it means to say religion in the ancient world was political.

All ancient nations were closed societies in which civil and religious obedience were identical. All law was divine law. There was no such thing as religious toleration or religious pluralism. Priests were public officials, and there was no distinction between church and state.

To defeat another nation in war meant defeating its gods. Even this militant aspect of ancient life appears in the Old Testament. Consider the following from Deuteronomy:

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you.

This kind of rhetoric was perfectly normal in the ancient world. Every people saw its enemies as unclean heretics who had to be destroyed because they worshipped false gods.

With this in mind, let’s consider the twelfth century confrontation between King Henry II and St. Thomas Becket. Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury—the highest ranking religious figure in England—and he and the King were close friends and confidants. But their friendship was strained when Becket refused to submit to the King’s authority over the church, a dispute that at its heart concerned the question of whether the church could be independent of the King.

When Henry II rejected any distinction between political and religious authority, he was relying on the old tradition. He thought that piety and citizenship go together because his authority came directly from God—that it was impossible to separate the obligations of piety from the obligations of citizenship. Good citizens obey the law, which was seen to be issued ultimately by God.

The solution to this dilemma was an agreement that the king and the church would have their own separate spheres of authority. The king would oversee worldly or political matters, while the church would have sovereignty in the spiritual or ecclesiastical realm. Each would recognize the independence of the other, and this would lead to harmony and peace. This solution marked the beginnings of religious liberty. 

When Julius Caesar brought an end to the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire that took its place became “the universal city.” Many tribes and nations that had previously been independent were incorporated into a single empire. Then, when Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380, the ancient unity between citizenship and piety was restored: one regime, one God, one law.

However, after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, three dilemmas emerged.

First, there was one God, but many regimes. For the first time in the history of Western Civilization, religious and civil authority were separated. To put it another way, divine and civil law were no longer the same. All of Europe belonged to one church, but it was split into many principalities. Citizens confronted the challenge of dual allegiances for the first time: they were required to obey both their king and their pope. But what if the king and the pope disagreed? This was something new.

Second, following the split between divine and civil law, what was the source of political authority? In the ancient city, laws came directly from God. But where did, for instance, the Prince of Bavaria get his authority? The solution the Europeans came up with is the theory of the divine right of kings, which was an attempt to reconnect civil and divine authority as in the ancient world.

The third dilemma was that the content of belief, or doctrine, became incredibly important in a way it was not in the ancient world. There was little investigation into matters of conscience prior to Christianity. It was the outward expression of piety—demonstrating loyalty to the community and its gods by obeying the divine law and participating in the public ceremonies and rituals—that mattered in the ancient world. It is only with Christianity that belief becomes paramount. And this opened the door to persecution.

These three dilemmas emerged because Christianity was the first non-political religion in the West. Being a Christian was not a question of what political community you belonged to, it was a matter of faith or belief. While that was incredibly liberating—because it meant salvation was open to every human being—it created unprecedented challenges for politics and citizenship.

In order to establish republican self-government, the American Founders had to solve these complicated problems. The solution they came up with is famously stated in the Declaration of Independence: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This revolutionary truth, combining human reason and divine revelation, provided the basis for establishing religious liberty for the first time in human history.

By looking to the laws of nature (or laws of reason) and nature’s God as the ultimate justification for their revolution, the Founders were asserting that there was an objective moral order in the world because that world was created by a benevolent and reasonable God. Since our minds are a gift from God, and He intended us to use them, we can perceive much of this moral order through our own rational faculties.

This natural moral order exists outside of our will—it exists whether we like it or not. We are born into both a physical and a moral world that we do not create. Today’s Leftists think they can alter human nature—for example, by allowing children to choose “gender reassignment surgery”—but this will never work and will never lead to true happiness because we cannot change our nature.

By contrast, the laws of nature and nature’s God are fixed and unchanging. They serve as the ground for political authority and supply conventional or everyday law with sacred and transcendent authority. In establishing this foundation for American politics, the Founders addressed the three problems mentioned above.

First, they solved the split between piety and citizenship by supplying a common ground for morality. Because the morality of the Bible and the morality of reason are compatible, one can be both a pious believer and a good citizen, while avoiding the contentious sectarian disputes that tore Europe apart.

Second, the separation of church and state becomes possible for the first time. The Declaration’s teaching about the laws of nature and nature’s God establishes a kind of political theology, a non-sectarian ground of legitimacy that makes the laws “sacred” without getting the government involved in theological disputes about the Trinity, faith versus works, etc. According to many Protestant ministers of the Founding era, this also allowed true Christianity to flourish for the first time because Christianity could be practiced by choice rather than by coercion.

Third, the Founders solved the problem of religious persecution. Because the government and the churches can agree on a moral code that is compatible with both reason and revelation, each can operate in its proper realm without intruding on the other. It becomes possible to institutionalize religious liberty by prohibiting religious tests for office and keeping government out of the business of punishing heresy.

The American Founders’ invocation of the transcendent moral authority of nature is one of the most remarkable acts of statesmanship in human history. The question which we and all American patriots confront today is whether we still understand and appreciate this incredible gift of religious liberty bequeathed to us by the Founders.

Do we still have the knowledge and courage to keep alive the sacred fire of liberty?