Dr. Herb Silverman is the Founder of the Secular Coalition for America, the Founder of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and the Founder of the Atheist/Humanist Alliance student group at the College of Charleston. He authored Complex variables (1975), Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt (2012) and An Atheist Stranger in a Strange Religious Land: Selected Writings from the Bible Belt (2017). He co-authored The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (2003) with Kimberley Blaker and Edward S. Buckner, Complex Variables with Applications (2007) with Saminathan Ponnusamy, and Short Reflections on Secularism (2019).
Here we talk about the drafts of the American Constitution and personal beliefs behind it.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: During the writing of the
American Constitution in its first drafts, and after its completion after the
Declaration of Independence, when considering the histories of the framers,
what statements in these documents contradicted the personal beliefs or the
individual biographies of the framers?
Dr. Herb Silverman: The religious faith of our founders is irrelevant because
they erected a wall of separation between religion and the government they
created in our founding documents, the
Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. However, since
you ask, and since there is curiosity about the personal beliefs of our
founders, here are some interesting tidbits.
Many
of our founders were anti-Catholic. John Adams called Catholicism “nonsense, a
delusion, and dangerous in society.” Thomas Jefferson called Catholicism “a
retrograde step from lightness to darkness.” (I agree with these founders and
would add, as Thomas Paine did, all the other religions.) John Jay, the first Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, drafted language for the New York Constitution
proposing tolerance for everyone except Catholics who refuse to renounce papal
authority. At the time of the American revolution only about 1.6 percent of the
population in the colonies were Catholic. It wasn’t until the immigration waves
of the nineteenth century that Catholics began arriving in America in large
numbers. This led to the aptly named “Know Nothing” party, formally called the
American Party, an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant party formed in 1850. I was
raised in Philadelphia, home of the 1844 “Bible riots” where both Catholics and
Protestants were clubbed to death over which version of the Lord’s Prayer should
be recited in public school. Protestants won the political battle, and
Catholics responded by forming Catholic schools nationwide by 1860.
In
a letter to John Adams in 1823, Thomas Jefferson said: “And the day will come
when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in
the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of
Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” He told his nephew in 1787 to “question with
boldness even the existence of God.” Jefferson considered reason and science,
not superstition and supernaturalism, to be his guides. He wrote his own
version of the Christian Bible, leaving out miracle stories and including only
what made sense to him. Jefferson referred to what remained as “Diamonds in a
dunghill.”
Deism
was a rational challenge to orthodox Christianity. Deists believed that the
world was the work of a non-intervening Creator. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,
and other founders expressed religious views that were strongly deistic. Many
founders reflected Deist language in their writings. Thomas
Paine, in The Age of Reason, argued
that Deism should replace all revelation-based religion. Most of our Founding
Fathers were religiously liberal for their time, and thought of the new country
as an experiment in secular democracy. Producing a God-free Constitution showed
their disdain for intermingling religion and government. George Washington refused
to take communion (even though his wife did), reflecting his Deistic tendency
to avoid supernatural ritual. He did make some religious gestures to conform to
the religious expectations of the times, though he refused to have a priest or
religious rituals at his deathbed.
Christian Deism
stressed morality and rejected the orthodox Christian view of the divinity of
Christ, often viewing him as a
sublime, but entirely human, teacher of morality. Instead of accepting the entire Bible as
divinely inspired, many believed that reason was the ultimate standard for
determining which parts of the Bible were legitimate revelations from
God.
The Declaration of Independence
was a call for rebellion against the British Crown. It does mention a higher
power four times, as in Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, Supreme Judge of
the world, Creator, and divine Providence. In each case it is an appeal to
human dignity. It emphasizes people having inalienable rights. No appeal is
made in this document to a god that has authority of any kind. No powers are given
to religion in the affairs of man. The founders never cited biblical principles
during the Constitutional Convention and ratifications. Both the Declaration
and the Constitution source the legitimacy of political rule exclusively in the
consent of the governed. Benjamin Franklin, a co-author of the Declaration of
Independence with Thomas Jefferson, decried Christian church services for
promoting church memberships instead of “trying to make us good citizens.”
Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, believed
that the Christian religion should be preferred to all others, and that every
family in the United States should be furnished, at public expense, with a copy
of the Bible. The founders rejected this idea. Orthodox
Christians among the Founders include the Calvinistic Samuel Adams, John Jay (who served as president of the American Bible Society), Elias Boudinot (who wrote a book on the imminent second coming of
Jesus), and Patrick Henry (who believed
in Evangelical Christianity and distributed religious tracts while riding
circuit as a lawyer).
As a member of the Constitutional
Convention, George Mason strenuously opposed the compromise permitting the
continuation of the slave trade. Although he was a Southerner, he called the
slave trade disgraceful to mankind. “God” stayed out of the Constitution, but
slavery remained in order to keep the Southern colonies as part of this new
nation.
The forces opposed to
adoption of the Constitution argued that the “no religious test
clause” would lead to Catholics, Jews, Mahometans (Muslims), and pagans
obtaining office. That is the point of including the clause.
The phrase a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and
the wilderness of the world” was first used by Baptist theologian Roger
Williams, founder of the colony of
Rhode Island. It was later employed by Jefferson as a commentary on the First Amendment
and its restriction on the legislative branch of the federal government. Thomas
Jefferson refused to issue Proclamations of Thanksgiving sent to him by
Congress during his presidency. After retiring from the presidency, James Madison
argued for a stronger separation of church and state, opposing the very
presidential issuing of religious proclamations he himself had done, and also
opposing the appointment of chaplains to Congress. James Madison said, “Religion
and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed
together.”
The absence of
an establishment of religion did not necessarily imply that all men were free
to hold office. Most colonies had a Test Act. Charles Carrol from
Maryland, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration, guaranteed full rights
to Protestants and Catholics, but not to Jews, Freethinkers, or Deists. He
said, “When I signed the Declaration of Independence I had in mind not only our
independence of England, but the tolerations of all sects professing the
Christian religion, and communicating to them all equal rights.” Several states
had these religious tests for a short time. In my state of South Carolina,
Protestantism was recognized as the state-established religion. This
stood in contrast to the Federal Constitution, which explicitly prohibits the
employment of any religious test for federal office, and which, through the
Fourteenth Amendment, later extended this prohibition to the States.
There
were many attempts by state ratifying conventions to amend the Constitution and
subvert the intent of the preamble by declaring that governmental power was
derived from God or Jesus Christ, but the proposed religious amendments were
defeated.
Though
there was some debate about possibly including “God” in the congressional oath,
the nation’s first lawmakers instead decided on strictly secular language. It
was signed into law by George Washington on June 1, 1789, making it the first
law passed by the new United States government.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dr. Silverman.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
