In two months, Americans will be celebrating the two-hundreth anniversary of the United States Constitution. Already the media are saturated with stories about the history of this brief but monumental document. Complicated historical and theological questions, concerning the relation of religion and public life, are being debated. The anniversary is an occasion to reflect on matters that demand better public understanding.
American Christians probably have two central questions about the Constitution. First, Was it a Christian document? Second, Can an understanding of its intentions resolve contemporary conflicts involving religious values and public policies?
Constitutional And Christian Principles
In many particulars, the Constitution comports fairly well with Christian values. The system of checks and balances established by the Constitution coincided with several important Christian teachings. Most important, the founders recognized, as Christians have always held, that humans are capable of great good (because they are made in God’s image), but also of great evil (because they are fallen).
James Madison’s famous “Tenth Federalist” expressed it most clearly. Madison recognized that “the propensity of mankind, to fall into mutual animosities” arises from basic human character: the “latent causes of faction are … sown in the nature of man.” No government that overlooked this bent toward selfishness would ever succeed, no matter how noble its sentiments or lofty its aims. The republicanism of the Constitution was meant to impede this drive for selfish power while at the same time allowing citizens the freedom to fulfill more positive human desires—for peace, order, and prosperity.
Another aspect of the Constitution that comports well with Christian values requires more explanation. The Constitution was a secular document, but in the context of its time, that amounted to a virtue. The Constitution was “secular,” not in the sense of the term meaning a repudiation of religion, but in the sense of the word meaning “of this world.” The founders, in other words, recognized that government was not religion and that it had the task of promoting justice and fairness for all citizens.
In fact, one of their main goals was to avoid the confusion of religious and governmental categories that had prevailed in Europe and to some extent in colonial America. This confusion had led to political tyranny and religious persecution. It was an entanglement which, as the founders saw it, always harmed religion and always tempted authorities to exert more power than they rightfully possessed. It could even be argued that under the Constitution, government came closer to acknowledging the dignity of the political “sword,” “kingdom,” or “sphere” (to use words from Reformation traditions) than had ever before occurred in the world.
To recognize that the Constitution, in part, fit well with Christian beliefs is not to claim that a special divine miracle lay behind its ratification. It is rather to say that the perceptions of believers and the political experience of Americans, many of whom were not professed Christians, led the Constitution to principles conforming roughly to general Christian principles. This recognition should be an occasion, not for congratulating the United States on its special status under God, but for praising him that in his general providence a full measure of political wisdom informed the founding of the United States.
Where The Constitution Falls Short
The Constitution was written by people who held to a more-or-less Christian morality. Among the founders, even the deists or the worshipers of the Christ-less God of Nature upheld a positive morality largely compatible with Christian values. Thomas Jefferson is perhaps the best example. He had abandoned belief in the supernatural character and mission of Jesus, but he was still devoted to “The Life and Morals of Jesus” (as he called one of his two abridgements of the New Testament).
Jefferson’s character manifested a high order of “Christian” morality. What was true for Jefferson was even truer for many of his contemporaries. When they thought of public virtue, public justice, or public responsibilities, they thought in terms informed by Christian assumptions.
Precisely at this point, however, a difficulty arises. Christian morality may have been a common assumption of the founding generation, but the language of the Constitution was the language of experience and science. As the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention debated the new Constitution, their frame of reference was experience: What had happened under the British to abridge liberty? How might the Constitution rectify abuses of power witnessed over the past 40 years?
The other explicit guide was “the science of politics,” a term that both Madison and Alexander Hamilton used in The Federalist Papers. In this respect, the American Founding Fathers showed that they were participating wholeheartedly in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. “The science of politics” showed Madison that a large republic might work where small ones failed. It told Hamilton that a modern nation needed sound fiscal management if it were to gain the respect of other nations.
The difficulty with resting so heavily on experience and “the science of politics” was a difficulty for the future more than for the time of the Constitution itself. The founders’ “science of politics” was put to use in a social setting where the dominant assumptions about public virtue and political morality were more or less Christian. In addition, they acted in a political setting where the primary motivation was to prevent the repetition of past evils. The result was to leave in limbo several important conclusions about politics in general, and about the nature of the government in particular.
A Positive Role For Government?
Two problems resulted. First, the Constitution contained little consideration of the positive role of government. It was an admirable instrument for preventing dangerous accumulations of power, but was less successful in stating the positive purposes of the state. A common theme in many Christian theories about the positive purpose of government is that government should insure justice for all citizens. That is, because God has created the state to act on behalf of all people, the state must promote the human dignity that God through the creation bestowed on all people. But this sort of purpose is present only implicitly in the Constitution. For the slaves in early America, it was absent altogether.
A second issue concerns the relationship of the Constitution to the values of United States citizens. The founders relied upon traditional, largely Christian values as a framework for the Constitution. They did not, however, address the question of how the Constitution was to function if the supporting culture changed. By defining itself so closely as an instrument to protect individual liberties, and avoiding the issue of where those liberties were rooted, the Constitution possessed no real means to check a trend in the population toward secularization (here meaning the rejection of religion).
Although the Constitution made it difficult for the whim of the moment to change the law, in the end it was dependent upon the will of the people. As a protection of individual liberties, this was all to the good. Both before 1787 and since, the world has witnessed a parade of horrors stemming from rulers who felt they had some kind of divine, natural, or proletarian right to rule without popular consent. At the same time, since the concepts of liberty and freedom are not rooted in some larger philosophy (for example, that individuals have rights because God has made people in his image), the meaning of crucial terms like “freedom” and “liberty” in the Constitution always remain subject to majority opinion, or to the opinion of those who exploit the majority to secure their own power.
So long as the culture in which the Constitution functioned was largely traditional in its values, the absence of explicit statements on these points was not a major problem. Christian ideas of justice, while never entirely dominant in early America, were nonetheless an accepted part of the cultural landscape. The day came, however, when this residual Christianity faded in American culture. Both “experience” and “the science of politics” harkened to impulses alien to the Christian faith. When that day arrived, the intuitive character of the Constitution became a bane instead of the substantial blessing it had been in its own generation.
In addition, the founders chose to incorporate very little of their political philosophy in the document. The result seems to have been a conscious choice of the founders: the touchstone of our national lives today remains the Constitution itself, not the substantially Christian frame of reference in which it was written.
The Intention Of The Founders
The very reticence of the Constitution about larger matters of public philosophy makes questions of its modern application especially momentous. Nowhere is this more the case than on matters having to do with the relation between religion and public life. Sixteen simple words in the First Amendment of 1791 are the focal point: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.…”
Almost from the beginning it was recognized that the precise meaning of these principles could pose a difficulty. James Madison, who promoted a strict separation between the institutions of government and those of the church, confessed as an old man in 1832, “I must admit … that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points.”
At least four matters complicate the process of determining what the writers of the Constitution intended to be the relation between religion and politics:
- Religious and political values are both so encompassing that it is difficult to separate them at their points of contact.
- The founders self-consciously chose to prepare a document stressing general concerns rather than specific solutions for all possible problems.
- The founders held their sessions in secret, and they authorized only the barest record of their own proceedings with the intention, it would seem, of leaving the document itself rather than its legislative history as the foundation for future national policy.
- The question of the Constitution’s intent is also complicated by the great number of its “authors.” To whom did the original document belong? To Madison and others who drafted it? To the delegates at Philadelphia who approved it? To the voters who elected representatives to the state-ratifying conventions?
In the end, the question of the Constitution’s interpretation poses a more complicated hermeneutical question than even the interpretation of Scripture. The job of the biblical exegete is to determine the meaning of biblical words in the setting where they were written and the intent of the human author who spoke by inspiration of the Holy Spirit. This is often a difficult task. Yet, although it concerns less important matters, the interpretation of the Constitution is in fact more complicated.
There we have not one author, but a whole host of authors under the banner of “we the people.” In addition, if a biblical text is interpreted correctly, we hear the word of God in the words of humanity. With the Constitution, even if we succeed in coming up with a solid idea of what the founders intended, since the founders did not speak by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we have no particular guarantee that a correct interpretation of the Constitution provides an infallible guide for political action.
Where Intent Is Clear
Despite these difficulties, it simply is not the case that the Constitution, or its First Amendment, may mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. On one level, in fact, the interpretation of the First Amendment is a relatively easy matter. The “free exercise” clause meant that citizens of the United States were to have their own choice in religious belief and practice. One after another of the new state constitutions had spelled out this principle. The states clearly held that the right of “free exercise” was absolute, provided only that people, as New Hampshire put it, “not disturb the public peace, or disturb others, in their religious worship.”
The framers in Philadelphia had an equally clear opposition to “an establishment of religion,” at least in general terms. When the first Congress was debating the Bill of Rights in August 1789, a representative wondered if the proposed wording of the First Amendment might ever be twisted “to abolish religion altogether.” James Madison spoke up immediately to set the record straight. As he saw it, the provision in the First Amendment meant “that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.” The United States, in other words, would never authorize public support for one denomination in the way that the British Parliament supported the Church of England.
Where Intent Poses Problems
At the outer boundaries the issue is clear enough. But what of the “intention” of the words for complicated cases? One conclusion, at least, is indisputable: different founders intended different things by the words.
The views of Thomas Jefferson are well known. Jefferson was not present at the Constitutional Convention, but he was an influential expounder of the Constitution’s intent through his influence on key delegates, his role in Virginia’s ratification process, and his constitutionally significant decisions as chief executive from 1801 to 1809. He wrote his famous words about “a wall of separation between Church and State” to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, but they merely summarize his lifelong opinion.
Other interpreters, however, saw the matter differently. With Chief Justice John Marshall, Joseph Story, a Supreme Court justice and the author of an influential commentary on the Constitution, was the most important interpreter of the Constitution in the years before the Civil War. Story did not think the First Amendment made nearly as sharp a break as Jefferson thought it did. “The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion,” Story wrote in his 1833 commentary on the First Amendment, can “never be a matter of indifference to any well ordered community.”
Especially “a republic” needed “the Christian religion, as the great basis, on which it must rest for its support and permanence.” The First Amendment therefore allowed “Christianity … to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of public worship.”
Story’s opinions were probably part of the majority view of the early nineteenth century. The Constitution left a wider sphere of responsibility to the states than they have enjoyed since the passage of the Civil War Amendments and the expansion of national judicial power in the twentieth century. Unlike the national Constitution, several of the early state constitutions did in fact require religious oaths for office holders.
In addition, a mild establishment of the Congregational church (but with full toleration for all other faiths) prevailed in Connecticut until 1818 and Massachusetts until 1833. During those antebellum days, neither the national Congress nor the national courts ever took exception to these provisions of the state constitutions. Opinion was never unified on the subject, but at least many citizens of the early United States agreed with Justice Story in seeing a close bond between the interests of religion and the interests of the state.
James Madison had yet another view, closer to Jefferson’s than Story’s, yet with a difference. Madison believed that church and state should be separated to the point of prohibiting public payments for chaplains in the military and Congress and of vetoing acts of Congress that incorporated churches in the District of Columbia. Although he “recommended” days of public prayer while president, Madison felt he had no authority to authorize or mandate them. In these particulars he stood quite close to Jefferson. At the same time, Madison also felt that it was quite appropriate for chaplains and other religious professionals to work in public areas and play a role in public events, if they were supported by voluntary contributions.
To summarize: Jefferson, Story, and Madison all believed in separating the institutions of the state from the institutions of the denominations. They all believed that no citizen should be forced to act against conscience in supporting religious beliefs or practices. Yet beyond this, the three were different. Jefferson went much further to conceive a hard and fast general division between religion and politics. Story felt that government should promote religion, so long as it did not support any particular denomination or religious institution. Madison, while siding generally with Jefferson, also held that voluntarily supported religious activities should be allowed in the public arena.
The Use Of Original Intent Today
The “intentions” of the founders with respect to the First Amendment, therefore, are clear on several main points, but ambiguous on others. None of the founders seem to have interpreted the First Amendment as prohibiting religious-based arguments for public policies. None seemed to worry about incidental benefits coming to religious institutions from legislation passed for the good of the citizenry as a whole. None anticipated a day when a theory of “rights” would lead to the legalization of practices considered immoral by almost all of them.
From the other side, however, none of the framers thought it an easy matter to support religion generally without giving unfair advantage to one group of citizens. Even Justice Story wanted the public arena left as wide open as possible. To him, it was important that “the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Jew and the Infidel,” be able to “sit down at the common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into their faith, or mode of worship.”
As for Madison, social scientist Jack N. Rakove may stretch matters a trifle to say that “almost certainly Madison would find ‘nauseous’ the current conservative claim, backed only by the most tendentious and selective scholarship, that the First Amendment permits non-discriminatory federal support of religion.” But what Madison himself said was almost as strong. In 1822 he spoke of “a strong bias” lingering in some areas “toward the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Government and Religion neither can be duly supported. Such indeed is the tendency to such a coalition, and such its corrupting influence on both the parties, that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded against.”
Ten years later he spoke just as vividly on the danger of mixing religion and politics: “The tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded against by an entire abstinence of the Government from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect against trespasses on its legal rights by others.”
Altered Circumstances
The joker in the deck of “intention” is change of circumstances. Madison, Jefferson, and Story feared abuses from sources of power they had experienced firsthand: the overweening grasp of bishops, the passage of laws requiring individuals to pay taxes for the support of one particular denomination, the use of religious tests to bar “dissenters” from public office.
They did not even know about, much less write the Constitution to cover, later developments in American public life. It is too easy to forget, especially during litigation over such issues, that the founders had no experience with mass public education; that they did not realize how electronic communications could be beamed through the air to every residence in the nation; that the dominance of Protestants from a northern European background would give way to a religious pluralism unimagined in the early nineteenth century; that a bloody Civil War would be necessary to root out the protection of slavery, which they themselves had written into the Constitution; or that one consequence of this uprooting would be a vast expansion of the national judicial authority over the lingering power of the states. If it is reasonably clear what the First Amendment meant for the founders, the question has grown more complicated with the passage of time.
Christian Conclusions On The Constitution
What then of the Constitution? Three conclusions are appropriate. First, Christians, with their fellow citizens, should be grateful for the Constitution. At a difficult, uncertain period in our history, it established a stable foundation for national government. It represented a constructive reaction to the problems of self-rule. And it showed particular wisdom by adjusting political institutions to the realities of human nature. The Constitution is not the last word on government or governing, but it is an excellent first word.
Second, since the Constitution is not the last word, American Christians should constantly promote a searching interchange between specifically Christian values—from Scripture and our ecclesiastical traditions—and the principles of the Constitution. Why should we, self-consciously as Christians, approve some aspects of the Constitution and disapprove others? How should we, self-consciously as students of Scripture, bring biblical insight to bear on our political times and places?
For Christians, the kingdom of God must always take priority over deference to country. But where it is possible to shape the course of a country by the values of the kingdom, Christians enjoy a wider opportunity for serving their king. Kingdom values can strengthen a country’s values, but only if Christians remember the difference between kingdom and country, and also recall that only the kingdom is forever.
Finally, even a sketchy study of the Constitution sheds some light on the situation today. The intentions of the founders do provide broad and general guidelines concerning the organization of public life. On at least some controversial public issues, Christian values are clearly aligned with broad intentions of the Constitution. Christians should exploit such alignments, not in order to accumulate power for themselves, but because Christian values, if properly grasped and promoted, encourage justice and equity for all citizens. Because significant aspects of the Constitution promote a social order approved by both natural and special revelation, Christians may look with favor upon it. The same kind of reasoning demands that when in public controversy Christians take a stand on the Constitution, they do so for the public good.
The lust for power that the founders feared infects us all, including Christians. The concern for justice that the founders nurtured takes many shapes, including some that are not Christian. The founders’ insights into such questions of power and justice may have been incomplete, but on balance they are sound. And so in this bicentennial year it is fitting to thank God for the privilege of living under the United States Constitution.
Mark A. Noll is professor of history at Wheaton College (Ill.). His books include Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (Harper & Row, 1986).
“Pledged To Religion, Liberty, And Law”
Joseph Story (1779–1845) became in 1811 the youngest jurist ever to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Before that year, he had already established a lucrative legal practice in his native Massachusetts, and he had served in both state and national legislatures. During more than 30 years on the Supreme Court, Story became, with Chief Justice John Marshall, the chief architect of American judicial nationalism. His most notable written decision, Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816), upheld the supremacy of the Supreme Court over the decisions of the state courts and has been called “the keystone of the whole arch of federal judicial power.”
In an incredibly energetic life, Story also acted as a circuit judge for appeals (as all Supreme Court judges of his day did). Without slackening the pace of activities on the Supreme Court, he made an immense contribution to legal education when in 1828 he became the Dane Professor of Law at Harvard and in so doing rejuvenated the law school. As part of his teaching duties, he published 12 lengthy volumes of Commentaries on many aspects of the law. These books made him a wealthy man, earned him an international reputation, and established Harvard as the nation’s premier law school.
Story’s abiding purpose as a jurist was to promote the strength of the United States, as guided by republican principles. He was a conservative Unitarian who felt that religion was extremely important to social well-being. When Thomas Jefferson published his opinion in 1824 that Christianity was not a part of common law, Story responded with the vigorous argument that states should “foster and encourage the Christian religion generally, as a matter of sound policy as well as of revealed truth.” The motto that Story wrote for his home town newspaper, the Salem Register, was also the motto of his life: “Here Patriot Truth her glorious precepts draw, / Pledged to Religion, Liberty, and Law.”
By Mark A. Noll.
The Father Of The Constitution
James Madison (1751–1836) is deservingly known as Father of the United States Constitution. During the Revolution, he helped to frame Virginia’s Constitution and Declaration of Rights. He was a leader in the effort to reform the Articles of Confederation. After the call went forth to convene the Philadelphia Convention, he engineered Virginia’s decision to participate and helped persuade George Washington, the new country’s most respected citizen, to attend. Madison spoke over 200 times to the delegates during the four months of the convention, while also keeping the most complete and useful journal of the convention’s proceedings.
After the convention approved the Constitution, he joined Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in promoting its passage in the states through The Federalist Papers, to this day the most respected interpretation of the document. He played a large role in Virginia’s narrow approval of the new government. When Congress first met under the new Constitution, he both wrote much of George Washington’s inaugural address and, as a member of Congress, composed the House of Representatives’ grateful thanks for the address! In addition, he helped shape the wording of several amendments in the Bill of Rights. And all of this was before his service as secretary of state under Jefferson and then as president (1809–17).
Madison was a man of diminutive stature but giant intellect. Jefferson wrote of him, “I do not know in the world a man of purer integrity, more dispassionate, disinterested, and devoted to genuine Republicanism; nor could I in the whole scope of America and Europe point out an abler head.” Even his political opponents agreed.
Madison was a graduate of the evangelical College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) whose president, John Witherspoon, was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Like many of the Founding Fathers, he was quite reticent about his own religious faith. From his earliest political activity before the Revolution—a defense of the rights of Baptist dissenters in Anglican Virginia—to the end of his days, he was an ardent champion of religious liberty. Madison worked well with orthodox Christians (like John Jay) and sustained lifelong friendships with several evangelicals.
Madison seems to have drifted toward the deism that was so prevalent among men of his station in Virginia during the early history of the United States. But still his attitude was always respectful, and in this he differed from his friend Jefferson. In the words of a biographer, Ralph Ketcham: “Madison took notes on the meaning of the Scriptures, while Jefferson compiled his own condensation of the New Testament. The difference in method and pretension is significant.”
By Mark A. Noll
