Rethinking America: Separation is for the church's protection
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I confess — I’m the one who keeps moving the flag at church.
I don’t think it’s an appropriate thing to have in the sanctuary, because I believe in separation of church and state, the same way the founders did.
In 1977, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an atheist activist and the founder of American Atheists, sued the city council in my hometown of Austin, because they opened their meetings in prayer, offending her deep commitment to the separation of church and state.
She filed nine other suits in the name of “Separation of Church and State” during her activism career. She made some really big wins, even winning a case in the Supreme Court.
Often, when we think about the separation of church and state, we think about what O’Hair described as the “unalienable right to freedom from religion as well as freedom of religion.”
The mission statement of the organization she founded, American Atheists, was to “defend the civil rights of non-believers, work for the separation of church and state, and address issues of First Amendment public policy.”
O’Hair, and the activists that followed her, thought of the separation of church and state as a doctrine designed for protecting the state from the church’s interference. But that isn’t where the concept came from. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
James Madison, who authored the Bill of Rights, said about the Separation of Church and State, “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 church and state.”
The man who wrote the First Amendment’s establishment clause believed a separation wasn’t to benefit the health of the state. He thought it was necessary for the good of the church.
His mentor, Thomas Jefferson, penned the Declaration of Independence, and was one of the most influential thinkers in the founding of our country. He was also the third president of the United States, and the first person to explicitly associate the First Amendment with the concept of church-and-state separation.
When he was elected, the Danbury Baptist Association wrote Jefferson a letter expressing concern that their state government might interfere with their church.
Jefferson sent them a letter assuring them that the First Amendment meant that the state couldn’t influence their church, not the other way around. In this letter, he reveled in the “act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Jefferson expressed his belief that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God.” It is none of the state’s business.
According to the founders of our nation, the church should be protected from interference by the state for the good of both.
Nowhere in all the writings of the founders does the separation of church and state cut the other way. The founders and early congress prayed at the beginning of their meetings. They studied the Bible together. The signed a document declaring that human rights are given by God.
The people who came up with the idea of separation of church and state believed religion would inevitably influence the state and that the state should be prevented from influencing religion.
And I agree. In the original sense, I believe in the separation of church and state.
In Acts, when the authorities tried to interfere with Peter and John’s exercise of their religion, Peter said, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to give heed to you rather than to God, you be the judge; for we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19-20)
Christians have never tolerated the state’s interference. For the next 2,000 years, Christians would continue to defy the state only when it tried to limit the worship of the one true and living God.
Christians in the Roman Empire, the Waldensians, the Reformers, the Anabaptists and the Puritans, just to name a few, all defied government interference with worshiping God.
Their ideological children crossed the Atlantic and founded a country, and they wove into the fabric of that country a protection from the same persecution as part of their endeavor to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to [themselves] and [their] Posterity."