“The founders believed that true religion was not something handed down
by a church or contained in a Bible, but was to be found through free,
rational inquiry. They possessed a great confidence in an individual’s
ability to understand the world and its most fundamental laws through the
exercise of his or her reason. This core set of beliefs led the founders,
who constantly engaged and questioned things, to secure their idea of
religious freedom by barring any alliance between church and state.”
–U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, who outlawed the teaching of
“intelligent design” in science class, in his commencement address Sunday
to 500 graduates at Dickinson College, his alma mater.
My goodness, this is just awful. I despise “Christian America” rhetoric, but I despise this sort of revisionism even more. Some of the “founders” were rationalists, many were Deists, and a few outright rejected traditional religion. But most were Christians, and though they intended to establish a secular republic and not a “Christian nation,” they surely would never have accepted the trope that “true religion” is reason freed from the tyranny of quaint artifacts like churches and Bibles.
Nor would they have recognized “religious freedom” as “barring any alliance between church and state.” They viewed the church as fundamentally the ally of the state because they understood that a republican democracy is doomed without an informed, virtuous public, and they further understood that knowledge and virtue come fundamentally from institutions like the church and the home, and not from the government (or from government-run schools). They would have been horrified to learn that the first amendment, which was intended to secure religious freedom in part by prohibiting an official state religion, has been read to require the establishment of a state-run education system scoured of references to God and religion.
More and more it’s clear to me that Judge Jones is no friend of anyone who believes religion and science need not exist in perpetual conflict.
2 replies on “Judge Jones on Anti-Establishment”
How do you define a “founder” of our nation?
Jeff — excellent question, and this is the reason I put “founders” in quotes in the post. Are the “founders” the signers of the Declaration of Independence? The members of the Constitutional Convention? Those who voted to ratify the Constitution? Or do we have to go further back, to the Puritans who first emigrated from England? Are the “founders” only the male monied elites who wrote documents like the Constitution? What about yoeman farmers, small merchants, women, African slaves and Native Americans?
This is a huge problem for the comments Judge Jones made about government and religion, since the Puritans, who must be counted among the original “founders” or at least among their key influences, hardly believed in strict separationism. But it’s also a huge and interesting problem for “originalists,” including most folks in the “religious right.” What does it mean to interpret the Constitution according to the founders’ original intent if we can’t really define who the “founders” were? (Justice Scalia, as I understand it, defines the “founders” as the ratifiers of the Constitution).