Is Religion Threatening American Democracy?

One of the grandest achievements of America’s Founding Fathers was the establishment of a political regime dedicated to the securing the rights granted to all human beings by both nature and God, including the right to the “free exercise” of religion. While the right to the freedom of religious belief and practice was expressly stated in the First Amendment, which also prohibited Congress from establishing a national church, it was nowhere more beautifully expressed than in George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jewish Congregation of Newport, RI.

Washington celebrated that under America’s policy, “All possess alike liberty of conscience,” and it was “no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Rather, America’s government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” requiring only those that those “who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Some 40 years after Washington’s letter, the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, attributed our country’s success in no small measure to a harmony we had established, unparalleled in the France of his time (and elsewhere in Europe) between “the spirit of liberty” and that of religion. Neither did people of faith seek to use government (or their informal power) to impose their religion on others, nor did the most fervent advocates of liberty try to overthrow the practice of religion.

Rather, Tocqueville contended, the “natural tendency” of a democracy was to favor the practice of religion, since its advocates would wish to advertise its benefits to their unbelieving fellows, while the latter, regardless of their private skepticism, if they were intelligent, would see in religion a powerful incentive to civic morality. Hence, he observed the eagerness of Americans to provide for ministers of religion to set up shop in newly settled frontier areas, as a guarantor of morality and law-abidingness.

(In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 the Continental Congress had specified that land should be reserved in each district for the establishment of public schools, given the necessity of “religion, morality, and knowledge” for “good government and the happiness of mankind.”) And numerous states had established churches (without any coercion of membership in them) in the early decades of the 19th century. Yet Tocqueville attributed the very flourishing of religion in this country at that time, in contrast to France, to the voluntary character of church membership.

Not until the mid-20th century was any significant conflict found to exist, at the level of law, between the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion and the American people’s right of self-government. This conflict arose as a result of the Supreme Court’s “incorporation” of the First Amendment’s prohibition on the “establishment of religion” and guarantee of its free exercise to apply against state governments.

Even though formal state establishments had ended by 1833, the Court increasingly adopted an extreme interpretation of the establishment clause that treated any public encouragement of religion as such as a violation of the Constitution’s supposed “wall between church and state.” (In fact, that phrase is found nowhere in the Constitution, but derives from a letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury [CT] Baptist Association, which was shocked by its radicalness.)

In other words, per current judicial doctrine, to avoid “establishing” religion, state as well as federal governments must avoid any activity that might be thought to encourage religion as such over atheism. In consequence, courts have ruled unconstitutional such practices as a nondenominational blessing being bestowed by clergy of alternating congregations at middle-school graduations in Danbury, CT, or a display of the Ten Commandments at a courthouse. (They haven’t yet got around to outlawing the exhortation with which judicial proceedings customarily begin, “God save this honorable court!”)

Theocracy in America

But those steps, it would appear, are insufficient to preserve America from the danger of “theocracy” — at least in the judgment of an organization called the Freedom from Religion Foundation. On March 4, in one of the periodic, full-page ads it runs in the New York Times, the foundation, which boasts 40,000 “atheists, agnostics, humanists, and skeptics” as members, exhorted readers to “help stem the Christian Nationalist Tidal Wave,” since “our revered constitutional principle of separation between religion and government has never been under greater assault,” along with “many [unspecified] liberties predicated on a secular government.”

As evidence of this threat, the ad cited such statements by newly elected public officials as President Trump’s claim that he “was saved [from an assassin’s bullet] to make America great again” and “conservative Christian attorney general Pam Bondi’s” assignment to execute Trump’s order “eradicating anti-Christian bias.” It added to the threat the fact that “Trump and many members of Congress are backing a national universal voucher program” that would come “at the expense of our secular public schools.”

In other words, by the foundation’s account, the risk is that if parents who are dissatisfied (as they often should be) with the current intellectual or moral environment of the “regular” public schools use their funding allocation to pay tuition at private schools that are religiously affiliated, we are on the verge of theocracy!

(In fact, Catholic schools in urban areas have long been noted for providing a superior education in secular subjects compared with their public counterparts, particularly for children from disadvantaged families — but have been declining in number owing largely to the decrease in parish populations that traditionally donate to their support. But note that the foundation’s objection would apply no less to the use of vouchers to support yeshivas — when the large size of Orthodox Jewish families often makes religiously based education particularly expensive for them.)

To set matters straight: under current constitutional law, purveyors of pornography (with limited exceptions, such as its transmission to children) enjoy an almost unlimited right under the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and the press to purvey their wares in both public and private. Public libraries should offer drag shows for kids. Traditional morality should similarly be challenged by having public school teachers encourage pupils starting as early as kindergarten to rethink their “gender identity,” with a view to considering hormonal treatments while still in elementary schools, without their parents even being notified.

But public institutions should in no way encourage religious belief over atheism! (This is at a time when the percentage of Americans attending religious services is at a record low, according to Gallup.)

The antireligious campaign of the Freedom from Religion Foundation would have appalled even the most skeptical members of America’s founding generation, such as Franklin and Jefferson. (In his Farewell Address Washington expressly warned against the notion that morality and hence the nation’s political freedom could long survive in the absence of widespread religious belief, which should therefore be encouraged — contrary to the Foundation’s unsubstantiated claim that our liberties are “predicated on a secular government.”)

And has often been noted, the fanaticism displayed by the most militant and extreme members of today’s “Green” movement gives evidence of its having turned into a secular, but far less rational, substitute for moderate religion.

But serious as this matter is, readers of the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s ad may nonetheless be amused by the titles given to the two highest categories of membership dues it invites. Beyond “Life Member” ($1,000), those truly dedicated to combating theocracy are invited to participate in groups labeled “After Life” ($5,000) or “Beyond After Life” ($10,000). So there may be an afterlife — or something beyond even that — after all!

As the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton is supposed to have said, when people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they believe in nothing, but rather that they will believe in anything. This need not be universally true, but the tenets of the Freedom from Religion Foundation might well be cited in evidence of it.

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