The Glass Wall

Rev. Roberta Finkelstein October 7, 2007

Today is the first Sunday after the first Monday in October, the day that marks a new session of the Supreme Court. For many of us, this is a time of anticipation. What will the court take onto it’s docket? What dramatic decisions will be handed down? So, far, the most interesting news has been the cases they have decided not to hear; in particular two cases with obvious church-state implications. What does it mean? Is the court, perhaps, coming back towards the center? Is there hope that reason will once again prevail over ideology?

And why should we care? I don’t mean as citizens of this nation. Of course we care. But as people of faith, at worship on Sunday morning? Well, we are a church. And we practice our religion in a nation that many of us believe has come to be unduly influenced by a particular version of a particular religion. We hope for a return to the traditional values of our founders – values that recognized the validity of both religion and statecraft, but recognized also that they are best practiced separately. And to be honest, we hope that our religious values – the affirmation of the worthy of every person, the celebration of diversity, the commitment to universal understanding – could have some influence in matters of national deliberation.
Living here in New Hampshire, we cannot help but look ahead to the next Presidential inauguration. Who will stand with his or her hand on the bible? Who will speak the inaugural prayer. (We clergy all secretly hope to be invited to do that one!) At the first inauguration of George W. Bush, the Rev. Kirbyjohn Caldwell spoke the benediction at the swearing-in ceremony, ending with these words. “We respectfully submit this humble prayer in the name that’s above all other names, Jesus the Christ. Let all who agree say, ‘Amen.’” Remember that his words of prayer concluded an incredibly divisive time in our nation. An election so close that it took weeks to determine the outcome – in fact the Supreme Court cast the final vote. I cringed. An inauguration is, after all, a public and civic event, not a private Christian worship service. Stating that the name of Jesus was above all other names may have been bad enough, but to then issue an invitation only to those who agreed. Not the way I would do it if asked.

I suspect that Rev. Caldwell may have crafted his benediction with a mistaken assumption in mind, an assumption that many but not all evangelical Christians seem to be making these says: the assumption that the United States of America is a Christian nation and has been since it’s founding.

The Rev. Forrest Church, minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, is something of an expert on this mistaken assumption. He has written extensively on the philosophical and theological issues around the separation of church and state. He says that the assumption that our founders were Christians and established a Christian government is one of two major mistakes that Americans make today when we debate church/state issues. I’ll get to the other major mistake in a few minutes; let’s look first at mistake number one.

Though most of the Founding Fathers were nominally Christians of some stripe or other, they recognized how valuable it would be to establish religious freedom and diversity as basic tenets of the new nation they were crafting. George Washington, for instance, practiced an eclectic approach to his personal religious experience. According to Forrest Church, “When (Washington)  attended church he was not particular about the house of worship – attending Quaker, German Reformed, and Roman Catholic services as well as those conducted by mainline Protestants. He was just as inclusive in his personal hiring, welcoming (in Washington’s own words) ‘Mohammedans, Jews, or Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists, as long as they are good workmen.’ As Commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary forces he rejected a request by other army chaplains to preclude John Murray, a Universalist minister, from serving . . .”

Samuel Adams (of beer fame) wrote in 1772, “In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof is what all good and candid minds in all ages have practiced, and both by precept and example, inculcated in mankind.” James Madison, who is said to have been the most devout of the Founding Fathers, went even further. When the first Colonial Declaration of Rights was being drafted, he objected to the phrase “ . . . all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience . . . “ His objection was, again according to Church, to the word toleration which could be understood to mean, ‘to abide with repugnance.’ Instead he proposed using the simpler phrase, “ . . . the free exercise of religion..”

(I need to say at this point that I owe a great deal to the writing and spoken presentations of Forrest Church for this sermon. I highly recommend to you 2 books by Forrest: The Separation of Church and State and The American Creed – a lovely paean to the Declaration of Independence.)

So we dispense with the assumption that our Founding Fathers intended to establish a Christian nation. They had seen the damage that can be done when one religion is given special status in a nation’s political life. James Madison wrote, “If the Church of England had been the established and general religion in all the northern colonies as it has been among us here (in Virginia), and uninterrupted tranquility had prevailed throughout the continent, it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us. Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence, and ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption; all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.” The church, when it gets too cozy with the state, loses it’s prophetic voice and becomes the apologist for all kinds of dreadful things. And the state, made comfortable by the imprimatur of the church, fails to recognize it’s own failures.

One of the two purposes of erecting the wall between church and state was to free the state from the ill-effects of established religion. This concept of protecting the political process from religion reflects the ideals of the Enlightenment, the major philosophical influence of the American revolution. John Locke, the most well known of the Enlightenment philosophers, intended for his work to transform the way nations were built. He urged politicians to look beyond the basic law of nature that had always been applied to nation building: the law of self protection. “This is not enough for our enlightened human capacity,” he said. He then talked about the now famous notion of life, liberty and property. Every individual is born entitled to these three things, and the purpose of the state should be to act on behalf of it’s individual citizens to protect those natural rights. Locke’s vision is repeated over and over again in the writings of our founders – with one variation that you have probably already picked up on. Thomas Jefferson changed the word property to the phrase ‘pursuit of happiness.’

Here is one of the complexities about Thomas Jefferson. In Virginia, slaves couldn’t own property; you can’t own property if you are property. In the original Virginia Declaration the Lockian wording (life, liberty and property) would have excluded slaves. But Jefferson, a slave holder himself as we all now know, very deliberately changed the words so that exclusion of slaves was not written into the founding documents of the republic. Unpacking that would be a whole ‘nother sermon – or maybe a lifetime of scholarly work. It is important work that needs to be done. In fact, our UUA President Bill Sinkford encouraged all congregations to do some work on our own histories; to identify the places in our past where our ancestors might have colluded with the practice of slavery, or other racial injustices. I would like to see us do that work here at South Church. If there are any historians out there who would like to work with me, please let me know.

But for this morning, let us go back to the Enlightenment idea that protection of individual liberty is the reason for the state to exist. Bringing into being a new nation built on this assumption, the founders made sure that religious freedom was the first of the liberties to be protected. They wanted to have religious freedom from – an enlightened state free from the constraints of religion But they also wanted freedom for – for all kinds of religious institutions to flourish. America was not founded as an anti-religious nation.

That is why Jefferson is said to have referred to the wall between separation of church and state as a glass wall. Each institution protected from the other, but able to communicate with and influence the other. The founders were determined to prevent exclusivity and the undue influence of religion on state or state on religion. But they didn’t want to prevent religious and spiritual values from being part of the ongoing civic conversation.

And that brings us to the other mistaken assumption in church/state debate: that ours is a secular nation and always has been; that religious influence in the political arena is unacceptable. And the people guilty of this mistaken assumption are more likely to be in our pews than those of the radical religious right.
Reading the words of our founding fathers you cannot help but conclude that while they rejected the establishment of any one religion, and wanted our nation to be born free of undue religious influence (there is no mention of God in the Constitution and this was not be accident!), a strong spirituality under girds many of our founding documents. Our nation was founded on the spiritual principle that, in Forrest Church’s words, “Nature’s God has implanted in us liberty and equality.” We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Do not discount the importance of the first part of that sentence – the assumption that there is a Creator who intends for us to be free. That is why there has always been a prayer spoken at our Inaugurations.

After the 2001 Inauguration, Rev. Caldwell was interviewed about the controversy his words had created. He apologized for the offense his benediction had caused, saying, “If I had to do it over again, I probably would not say, ‘All who agree, say Amen.’ Additionally, I probably would not say, ‘Jesus, the name that’s over all other names.’ That truly could be interpreted as inflammatory or offensive.”

Fast forward four years to the second Bush swearing-in. Same Bush. Same minister. He did get it to do over again. And here’s what he said. “Unto you, O God, the one who always has been and always will be the one King of Kings and the true power broker, we glorify and honor you. Respecting persons of all faiths, I humbly submit this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.” It still is not the prayer I would pray on a national occasion. But it was an improvement. It more accurately reflected the true religious condition of our nation. It acknowledged other faiths, while still allowing Rev. Caldwell to speak from his own personal faith stance.  
There is so much tension around religion right now in this country. Many evangelicals feel that their faith is under attack, that there is an organized movement to remove religion all together from national life. And although that may not be our intention, I am afraid that we have too often been guilty of disrespecting the role of religion in this nation, of advocating for a secular nation, misreading the intentions of the founders as profoundly as do those who argue for the Christian nation from birth.

Defending the separation of church and state means being an advocate for both. Several years ago I attended a workshop with Forrest Church based on his book about the separation of church and state. It was a lovely fall retreat; we struggled with thorny issues during the day, and every evening  we would crowd into my room, turn on the TV and watch the Red Sox on their march to a World Series victory. Poor Forrest, the lone New Yorker, was a good sport about it.
Anyway, one of the things he said was that if you forget your own history, not only are you doomed to repeat it, you have failed to live up to it. Let us resolve together to live up to our history, to defend the separation of church and state from all ideological incursions, to work towards a day when our Inaugural prayer will sound like the prayer for the nation that A. Powell Davies wrote. A prayer that calls for humility rather than grandiosity, that places our nation in a global context, that recognizes the universality of human rights, that ends with, perhaps, these words. “We ask this in the name of all that is holy.” Amen.

Benediction

Our final words also come from the pen of A. Powell Davies. “There once was an idea in this country that Americans are revolutionaries – determined to build a new world on liberty, justice, and equality. It was an idea particularly well documented: a famous declaration of 1776, a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and the constitutions of many individual states, bound together in a federal union. The basis of this revolution was a moral principle: that liberty and justice are universal rights. It was not to be some people who were free, but all people. Nor could justice be restricted; it belonged to everyone. This was the revolutionary idea that set the world aglow with promise. It was a very great idea indeed.

But some of the children of this Revolution do not like it. In their opinion, the only good revolutionaries are dead ones. Revolutionaries make nice ancestors. But the ideas of these ancestors, it is shocking even to consider! It would be no more proper to look into the minds of these ancestors than to wonder what they looked like with their wigs off! I am not exaggerating. Equal justice – really equal, between all classes and all races – is regarded as indecent. And so we have to say it: For many Americans, the ideas of the founding fathers are ideas that got lost.”
As citizens and as people of faith, let us resolve that those lost ideas will be found, and considered, and honored once again in our public life.

So let it be.