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In the May issue of First Things, Antonin Scalia published some of his views on the intersection of his Catholicism and his job as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Scalia made the case that the Vatican's general opposition to the death penalty is not a "binding" teaching requiring adherence by all Catholics. This is important to Scalia because as a Supreme Court Justice, he is often called upon to make the final decision to impose capital punishment.

In July, Sean Wilentz, a distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, responded with an op-ed in The New York Times, decrying Scalia's "Chilling Vision of Religion's Authority in America." According to Wilentz, Scalia "seeks to abandon the intent of the Constitution's framers and impose views about government and divinity that no previous justice, no matter how conservative, has ever embraced." This is a startling assertion, and deserves some careful attention.

What exactly is this "view about government and divinity" that Wilentz finds so chilling? It is simply this: that in Scalia's view Catholic judges ought to resign rather than uphold laws that directly contradict church doctrine. (Hence, Scalia's attempts to reconcile his own judicial support for the death penalty in the face of general Catholic disapproval of capital punishment.) Wilentz can portray this seemingly logical and simple proposition as dangerously radical because he is a passionate advocate for a public square from which considerations of faith have been banished. Above all, Wilentz cannot stomach the notion that American judges (and citizens for that matter) ought to be mindful of what Scalia calls the "divine authority behind government."

Such views of religion—that it belongs "at home" or "in church"—are certainly not a rarity these days. What makes Wilentz's piece in the Times noteworthy is the way he distorts both American history and Christian theology to support his argument. Given his stature as a historian—and as the director of the American Studies Program at Princeton—this distortion is no small matter.

Exhibit A in Wilentz's case in favor of a "naked public square" is Roger Williams. As founder of Rhode Island and the grandfather of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, Williams was a man both passionately Christian and passionately insistent on keeping the affairs of church and state separate. It is true, as Wilentz says, that Williams believed that government was "merely human and civil." In perhaps his clearest exposition of that subject, Williams wrote in 1644 that:

[F]rom this grant I infer (as before hath been touched) that the sovereign, original, and foundation of civil power lies in the people (whom they must needs mean by the civil power distinct from the government set up). And, if so, that a people may erect and establish what form of government seems to them most meet for their civil condition; it is evident that such governments as are by them erected and established have no more power, nor for no longer time, than the civil power or people consenting and agreeing shall betrust them with. This is clear not only in reason but in the experience of all commonweals, where the people are not deprived of their natural freedom by the power of tyrants.

But what "grant" is Williams referring to? In the paragraph immediately preceding, Williams made himself clear: "I acknowledge the proposition to be most true, both in itself and also considered with the end of it, that a civil government is an ordinance of God."

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August (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46