Charlotte Allen outraged scores of loyal tothesource readers last week by asserting in the opening line of her article Faith Matters to Public Life that:

"Although the Constitution explicitly requires separation of church and state…"

Here is just a sampling of your responses:

“Shame on you! I was ready to bail out, without going past the first sentence. Your article started with, "Although the Constitution explicitly requires separation of church and state..." That, sir, is a lie. Apparently, you've bought into the secular culture's idea of what they 'think' the Constitution says.” B. R.

“I'm appalled at this blatant opening.  Please have future contributors at least not start with a fallacious statement.” T. A.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! I read my copy of the Constitution regularly.” W. M.

“Having read Ms. Allen's column, I am disappointed that your editor chose to publish this slanted, biased piece as thoughtful, intelligent journalism.  Ms. Allen ignores the oblivious!” J. C.

“I am saddened to see the propagation of this legal myth through your reprinting of this erroneous statement.” L. W.

“I was unaware the words, "Separation of Church and State" appeared anywhere in the Constitution.  Could you identify the "explicit" reference you mentioned?” J. S.

“…how can 'tothesource' mindlessly repeat their rhetoric.  The constitution says nothing remotely like 'separation of church and state' no matter how much you contort and twist the words.” C. B.

“I doubt very much that Ms. Allen has bothered to read the Constitution.”  M. M.

So, we forwarded all of your emails to Charlotte to get her response. This is what she had to say:

"The First Amendment to the Constitution states: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…' That is an explicit requirement of separation of church and state. As I made clear in my article, separation of church and state does not mean that the government is supposed to be hostile to religion or to erase all reference to God from public life as some advocacy groups demand (and some judges have ruled)."

It seems we are in a bit of an standoff!

Even though many of you were (saddened, outraged, disappointed, dumbfounded) that tothesource would even run an article suggesting a constitutional demand for the separation of church and state, Charlotte Allen has refused to retract her assertion.

tothesource would like to propose the following clarification. The U.S. Constitution does insist upon a separation: the separation of church
from state.

Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The U.S. Constitution is clear. Our founders did not want the federal government to interfere with religious life by establishing a national church. America was, after all, a nation founded by people seeking religious liberty. Liberty is not only negative; the freedom not to do or believe in something. It can also be positive; the freedom to do or believe in something. It was our founder’s intention that people of faith should be free from a national church but equally free to express their religious beliefs.

The founders concern was also strategic. They wanted to get the U.S. Constitution signed. States with existing established churches would not sign the U.S. Constitution if it allowed a national church to trump the established church of the state they represented such as the Congregationalist Church which was still legally established in Connecticut into the 19th century. In fact, half of the original thirteen states not only had established state churches but continued to have these established state churches after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution and after the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately, this decision that the federal government should be non-sectarian has evolved, by judicial mandate, into the common misconception that it and all state and local governments must be exclusively secular.

How did this happen? Some blame Jefferson’s famous “wall”. Others point to Everson v. Board of Education, the 1947 U.S. Supreme Court rejection of New Jersey’s state-subsidized busing of students to parochial schools.

No one can deny the recent successes of the A.C.L.U. in limiting religious expression by use of judicial intimidation. They seek to control this dispute solely from the bench.

So our founder’s fear that the church may yield its unique (dare we say set-apart) influence on the government by allowing the government to limit religious expression is in many ways more of a concern today than it was at our nations founding.

Government has a natural tendency to amass power. Because of this, it must not assert its considerable influence over religious congregations. What’s more, the church’s mission must not be hijacked by the state.

In contrast, only reasonable restrictions should be applied to our religious institutions asserting their influence on the government. On many moral issues, the church must lead. Because the church does not have established power in our governments, it must speak up (with all of its diverse voices) to be heard or it will be relegated to irrelevance.

Many in our culture reject this role for the church. They have turned the constitutional mandate of the separation of church from state on its head. They seek the isolation and the constraint of the church by the state.

This was never the founder’s intention. Charlotte Allen was not supporting this intention with her article. In fact, she seeks to discredit it. And it most certainly is not the goal of tothesource. We hope to bring confidence to people of faith to express their beliefs freely and openly without fear of state repression.

Philip Hamburger, noted legal historian, hit a raw nerve with his book, Separation of Church and State. His historical account of the separation of church and state is a helpful vehicle for us to better understand this complex issue.

Cheers and Jeers from reviewers include:

Cheers from Alan Wolfe for Hamburger's persuasive questioning of conventional wisdom. But Wolfe also raises some questions himself about Hamburger's conclusions.

"In 1947, the U. S. Supreme Court decided the case of Everson v. Board of Education and thereby officially enshrined into American constitutional law the principle of separation of church and state. New Jersey had passed a law providing state-subsidized busing to all students, those who attended parochial schools as well as those who attended public ones. In his opinion for the majority, Justice Black invoked the metaphor of a "wall" of separation (used once or twice in earlier Court decisions) that Thomas Jefferson had coined in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, written in 1802. All of our contemporary debates over separation—whether they involve crèches in public places or the recent effort by the Ninth Circuit Court to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance—trace themselves back to Everson.

Immediately after the Everson decision, The Washington Post editorialized that "the principle at issue is one of the most fundamental in the American concept of government—the separation of church and state." Philip Hamburger's book is dedicated to proving that just about every word in that editorial's sentence is incorrect.

Far from having roots in the American past, almost none of our early writers and politicians, Hamburger shows, accepted the notion of separation of church and state. When the term was used at all, it meant simply that politics and religion were different kinds of activities, not that the one should be kept entirely out of the other. Early theorists generally held that a good society required religion and its attendant morality, so that, when they used the term separation of church and state, they were not defending an ideal but launching an attack on those who denied such a self-evident truth."

Cheers from Frontpage Magazine for raising unsettling answers to a most Americans have accepted with too few questions.

"How did the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment, barring Congress from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," become equated with language that appears nowhere in the Constitution: "separation of church and state"?

To a lot of Americans, that is a nonquestion. They have so thoroughly amalgamated the idea of separation of church and state with the idea of constitutional freedom from a religious establishment that they can scarcely discern the difference. But for Philip Hamburger, John P. Wilson professor of law at the University of Chicago, the history of this amalgamation is a question of the first order, and one for which he has proposed some rather unsettling answers."

Cheers & Jeers from Thomas G. West. He welcomes Separation of Church and State and Hamburger's key assertion that today's predominant version of separation of church and state is not only hostile to the founders' understanding, but hostile to religion. But West also thought he was too hard on Jefferson and didn't give an adequate theoretical framework for his argument.

"To what extent government should promote religion was a matter of controversy among the founders, as is well known. Hamburger's book (with the partial exception of the treatment of Jefferson) brings out what is not so well known: that in spite of their conflicts over the proper extent of government support of religion, all sides agreed that the right kind of religion was vital for the success of republican government, and that government should in some appropriate ways take a stand in favor of religion rightly understood. That is why in spite of their differences on the "establishment of religion" question, Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and George Washington could all agree on this provision of the Northwest Ordinance, passed in the same year as the First Amendment: "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

Jeers from Mark D. McGarvie. He thinks Hamburger wrongly limits his constitutional argument to the First Amendment

"Just as serious a problem is Hamburger's misunderstanding of the history of disestablishment--the process of separating church and state in the Early Republic. Establishment laws were found in eleven of the thirteen colonies before the Revolution and in a majority of the states when the Constitution was framed in 1787.

Churches functioned as semi-public institutions to instill morality and moral values into the public, to care for people's souls, to educate the young, and to tend the poor and the sick. Creatures of colonial and later state law, the established churches were not directly affected by the federal Constitution, though the document did give expression to ideas and values that ultimately would prove irreconcilable with established religion.

Disestablishment occurred during a period spanning more than five decades (1776-1833) and on a state-by-state basis. Disestablishment embroiled the citizenry in an emotionally intense and intellectually exciting debate over the new society's values and institutions as it redefined churches as private corporations. In these state disestablishment struggles, Hamburger could find many references to the separation of church and state and the necessity of making that separation. In the process, he would have learned from that evidence that "separation" as much as "religious freedom" was a vital concern early in the nation's history."

"Ironically, even as religion has been separated from politics, politics has become, in a sense, religious."

Thomas G. West

In other words: because politics has become separated from the influence of religion, politics must become, in a sense, religious.

How to think about secularism:

"Under the influence of thinkers such as Max Weber, the dominant assumption of modernity has been that secularization will continue to pervade all aspects of social and individual behavior, with religion increasingly pushed to the margins.

In the last two or three decades, however, it has become evident that secularization (or, as some prefer, progressive modernization) faces severe problems. The thoroughly secularized social order gives rise to a feeling of meaninglessness: there is a vacuum in the public square of political and cultural life, and this invites violent outbreaks of dissatisfaction.

As a consequence, it is hard to predict the future of the secularist society. It depends in part on how long most people will be willing to pay the price of meaninglessness in exchange for the license to do what they want.

So long as people feel sure of the comforts of affluence, they may be willing to tolerate these tensions indefinitely. On the other hand, irrational reactions are unpredictable, especially when there is a sense that the institutions of society are not legitimate. The circumstance of modern secular society is more precarious than we may want to recognize. Those who recognize the danger call for a reaffirmation of the traditions by which the culture is defined, and most specifically for the reaffirmation of the religious roots of those traditions."

by Wolfart Pannenberg

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