Is America a Christian Nation?

A Dialogue On Religion And Politics In The 21st Century 

The Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy leads the national nonpartisan grassroots and educational organizations, The Interfaith Alliance and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, and serves as Pastor for Preaching and Worship at Northminster (Baptist) Church in Monroe, La. 

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn is Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and a member of the Supreme Court bar. 

GADDY: Well, is this a Christian nation? The correct answer to that question is of profound importance for every phase of our corporate life -- commerce and community, education and environment, public policy and private liberty -- as this, the most religiously pluralistic nation in the world, moves into the 21st century. 

Let me direct your attention to Article 11 of the Barbary Treaties signed in Tripoli on Nov. 4, 1796, approved by President John Adams, and ratified by the United States Senate. Drawn up to protect the country’s merchant ships from Barbary pirates, this agreement -- interestingly, written in Arabic -- begins with these words: “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….” 

In 1797, the founders of our nation were eminently clear that the United States is not and was not intended to be a Christian nation. Rather, it is a nation in which government is appreciative of religion but resistant to any entanglement with religion. Wise people who understood and valued religion rejected the very idea of a government-established national religion or even the slightest possibility of a religion-controlled government. 

A very unlikely coalition of Baptists, Unitarians, Secularists, and Deists gave us the First Amendment’s two-pronged guarantee barring laws “respecting an establishment of religion” or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 

LYNN: Our earliest Presidents really took this idea to heart. Thomas Jefferson refused to even sign bills declaring national days of prayer or thanksgiving. James Madison even objected to counting “clergy” in the 1790 census. 

This separation of church and state, though, didn’t run absolutely smoothly, of course. There were literally riots in Philadelphia prior to the Civil War over which version of the Christian Bible should be used for daily readings in the public schools. Members of unpopular religious groups were frequently told they could not preach in public and, indeed, non-believers were barred from holding many elective offices. 

Finally, in l947, the United States Supreme Court put real teeth into that phrase “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Justices made it clear that this prohibition did not just mean that Congress could not set up one “national religion,” but that it couldn’t give some religions preference over others or even promote religion over non-theistic beliefs. 

For several decades, the Supreme Court used that standard to declare unconstitutional a variety of practices by governments including government-written or government-selected prayers that public school students were expected to recite, bans on teaching evolution, and direct government funding of private religious education. It also struck down most restrictions on reproductive choice, which had, as a practical matter, been implemented primarily because of powerful religious interest groups. 

Although some of these protections have been watered down over the past 25 years, the essential principles remain strong. They are, however, under relentless attack from those who ignore our history. 

GADDY: General respect for our first freedom persisted, with broad-based support within and outside the religious community, until about the 1960s and 1970s. Then, individuals skilled in the manipulation of religion began to attack the religion clauses in the Constitution in order to advance a very narrow political agenda. A shotgun marriage took place between ambitious politicians and religious clerics eager for more recognition and power. 

Politicizing religion and religi-o-fying politics as a matter of strategy, the Religious Right launched a campaign to demonize secularism and to warn people that, apart from one particular kind of religion, the nation was in trouble. 

LYNN: Perhaps two events encapsulate what Welton has just described. First, some powerful religious interest groups, including the Southern Baptist Convention, which had historically actually provided leadership to preserve religious freedom, found itself “taken over” by far-right members of its own denomination -- people who were openly hostile to the separation of church and state and to governmental neutrality in matters of religion. 

And at the same time, the Rev. Jerry Falwell had been recruited as the dogmatic leader of a membership organization known as the “Moral Majority,” the original lynchpin of what has become known as the “Religious Right.” The Moral Majority tried to get governments to actively promote specific religious ideas and viewpoints on a variety of contentious social issues. These included unsuccessful efforts to amend the Constitution to bring back government-promoted prayer in school and to completely outlaw all reproductive choice. Over that period of time, we also found that they were interested in censorship of books in libraries and finding ways to fund their own religious institutions. 

During 2005, the ten largest Religious Right advocacy groups took in over $500 million. They continue to treat the Constitution as if it were the first draft of a freshman political science paper, and although they resist the idea that they should be called theocrats, what else do you call someone who tries to orchestrate government policy along narrow religious lines? 

GADDY: Today, protecting religious freedom and guarding against entanglement of the institutions of religion and government are more important than ever. The founders bequeathed to us an absolutely brilliant formula for sustaining diversity and providing for religious pluralism without destroying freedom for or from religion. 

But that guarantee is now in serious danger. 

In recent years, people have sought to redefine both religion and government -- measuring the authenticity of religion by policy positions on four or five issues and evaluating government by its support for sectarian views, programs, and institutions. The result has been a blurring of the lines between what is religion and what is government. As a result, we have seen threats to government because blurring those lines represents bad government and bad religion. 

Ignoring religious liberty and church-state separation threatens, in the long run, to compromise the integrity of religion and to blunt the vitality of democracy -- thus creating a crisis relating to our nation’s commitment to our first freedom, and raising serious concerns about our support for other freedoms and rights. 

LYNN: Many of you are perhaps familiar with some of the recent efforts to use religious dogma to supplant sound science, curtail fundamental fairness in American institutions, and also intrude into deeply personal decisions from the moment of conception until the moment of death. 

And here are just a few examples: In 2003, the Dover, Pa., school board passed a resolution requiring that ninth-grade biology teachers provide a verbal “disclaimer” before they taught about evolution. The statement indicated that there was a so-called “scientific” alternative called “intelligent design” which was discussed in a book that students could look at in the library. Conveniently, 60 copies of that book had been donated by the local fundamentalist church. 

A lawsuit, sponsored in part by Americans United, led to a decision late last year that prohibited such a disclaimer as an effort to slip religion, not genuine science, back into public school classrooms. 

Second, in 2005, we issued a report demonstrating systemic religious discrimination at the United States Air Force Academy by evangelical Christian officers against cadets from other religious traditions. How bad did this get? 

We found that the football coach had festooned the locker room with a banner reading “Team Jesus.” And we found a Mormon cadet who was repeatedly assigned to the lowest floors of the barracks -- told in this way, he would be closer to Hell, the place he would end up anyway, if he didn’t convert to “real” Christianity. 

And finally, in an issue affecting literally every American family, the Religious Right actually convinced Congress to pass legislation that would have nullified 10 years of lawsuits in the state of Florida that had finally permitted Michael Schiavo, the husband of Terri Schiavo, to carry out her wishes and remove a feeding tube as she lay in a persistent vegetative state. Wisely, the federal courts themselves ruled that Congress had no such power to try to alter the outcomes of the deliberations of these state court proceedings. 

GADDY: It is time for us to renew our national commitment to this nation’s first freedom and to state in unequivocal terms our support for religious liberty and for the separation of church and state. Some people will do this out of their love for religion and others, quite frankly, will do it out of their fear of religion, and still others will do it out of respect and appreciation for secular government -- government free from the competition, controversy, and violence that often erupts in the absence of religious freedom and in the presence of a merger between religion and government. 

That is the intent of First Freedom First. The Interfaith Alliance Foundation and Americans United for Separation of Church and State aim to call the nation back to its first freedom and to encourage individuals to engage in a tangible expression of a renewed commitment to religious liberty by signing a petition of support for this precious treasure. 

LYNN: First Freedom First is using a variety of methods to tell the common-sense story of why separation of church and state was the right model for America over 200 years ago, and is still the right model in 2006 when we find 1,500 different religions and 20 million freethinkers, humanists, and non-believers all working and living together in our country. Indeed, this principle of separation may be the greatest intellectual contribution of the United States to thinking around the globe, an exemplar of what other nations might follow.

We “previewed” this campaign at some old fashioned house parties on the Fourth of July; we have just unveiled a new internet website which informs visitors about the core issues of the project, and enables them to sign a petition with very specific objectives - a petition to be presented to the heads of major political parties before the 2008 Presidential election cycle. While absolutely avoiding the endorsement of any candidates, we want these issues to become a significant part of the public policy debate. 

GADDY: So much is at stake in this effort that is of essential importance in the preservation of the uniqueness of our national experience -- every person free to worship or not to worship, to believe or not believe, with no political advantage or denial of access to civil rights assigned to either one of those postures, and assurance of civil and social respect, liberty and justice for all. 

My first day on the job of being president of The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, the great American icon -- still known as “the most trusted man in America” -- took me aside to speak to me of the challenge of my work. Walter Cronkite, who, I am delighted to say, is one of the first signers of the petition, said to me: “Nothing less is at stake in this work which you do than the fate of democracy as we have known it.” 

And so it is in our work to reclaim the priority of protecting and guaranteeing our nation’s First Freedom. We need every one of you to be supportive of First Freedom First and to be involved.