“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. ~George Washington, Farewell Address

Do me a favor. Pause for just a minute and consider your answer to this question: If a religious person is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, do they need to check their religious beliefs at the Capital door before going in to make laws?

I’ve been teaching the U.S. Constitution to High Schoolers for eighteen years now, and every year when we get to the First Amendment, I ask students this same question. And every time, without fail, all of the students emphatically answer, “Yes! The representative must not take their religious beliefs into the building where they are about to make laws.”

So here is my next question: Why?

Students are usually less confident? in their answer to this question, with many of them unsure until someone eventually raises their hand and states, “Because of the separation of church and state.”

And there it is. The answer I get. Every. Single. Time.

Perhaps this is a bit of hyperbole, but I am not sure if there is a greater misunderstanding of a significant governmental topic than this one, even among educated individuals. Even amidst religious people, who should arguably be the most concerned with this topic. I believe this is because we have been conditioned to reject any intermingling of what is deemed the “church” and the state. It brings to mind uncomfortable, if not downright repulsive, thoughts of how governments have intertwined themselves with organized religion over history in order to justify the actions of a state. Henry VIII of England, you may recall, created the Church of England, with himself as its head, in order to justify his several divorces and the execution of two of his wives. France’s Catholic government waged a domestic war against Protestant denominations. Iran’s theocratic government executes those who don’t follow Shi’i Islam to the literal letter of the law. Even during America’s early years, some colonies and states endorsed official denominations of Christianity and chose to discriminate against those who were not of the same denomination.

Given all this history (and much more that we don’t have the time to get into), do not take anything of what comes next to be an endorsement of some sort of government-sanctioned religion. That would, simply put, be a gross violation of people’s God-given rights. This always ends in the use and abuse of the religion in the name of the state.

Here’s my point. Most Americans today have a fundamentally distorted view of what the separation of church and state means. So let’s take a brief moment to explore both the history of the phrase as well as its logical (and illogical) conclusion.

For the sake of those who, when I mentioned “history,” let out an audible groan and had horrific flashbacks to school, I’ll be as quick as possible. But the context and timing matter if we are to understand how this phrase was intended to be applied then and how we should employ it in modern times.

You are likely familiar with Thomas Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence, the third president of the United States, and the founder of the University of Virginia. However, Jefferson was also known during his lifetime for something else that doesn’t quite get the same attention: as the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. And so when he was elected President in 1800, many people throughout the states who belonged to minority denominations of Christianity were ecstatic because, in Jefferson, they saw a defender of religious liberties.

So when a congregation of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, who were in their view being subjugated by the majority of Congregationalists in their state, heard of Jefferson’s victory, they sent a flattering letter to him congratulating him on his win and praying that this would promote religious liberty in the states (at this time, the First Amendment only limited the federal government’s actions on religious activity).

Jefferson personally wrote a letter back to the Danbury Baptists thanking them for their kind words and assuring them that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” For his part, he understood that as president, he had no power over what Connecticut did or did not do concerning religion but instead was musing philosophically regarding his belief that no government should prefer one religion over another.

However, the Baptists were actually quite concerned with the wall analogy. While Jefferson may have meant it as an assurance that government should not meddle in or endorse specific religions, it could also be interpreted that religion should have no influence on government, which is exactly how it has been interpreted and applied today.

However, this was clearly not the intention of the First Amendment, and I can prove it easily:

• The very day after the Bill of Rights was adopted, George Washington was asked to declare a day of prayer and thanksgiving for the nation, which he did.
• The Declaration of Independence displayed exactly where our founders believed our rights came from: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
• Jefferson recommended that Congress approve a treaty that gave a $100 stipend to a Catholic missionary ministering to Native Americans.
• Jefferson signed into law three times an act whose sole purpose was to “propagate the Gospel among the Heathens.”
• Thomas Jefferson regularly attended worship services that were held in the House of Representatives.
• Jefferson ordered the Marine Band to play at worship services.
• Jefferson approved churches in the War Office and the Treasury building.
• Eventually, a church even began meeting in the Supreme Court’s chambers.
• Go to D.C., and you’ll see Biblical references nearly everywhere in and around the buildings and monuments.

To be clear, we should not have a government that, for example, forces everyone to go to church or participate in communion. No one desires this. But it must also be stressed that the intent of the First Amendment’s religious clauses was to ensure that government did not infringe on religion. However, this intention has been turned on its head largely due to Chief Justice Hugo Black’s opinion in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), where he elevated the personal correspondence of Jefferson to law, all the while misinterpreting the history behind it to suit his desire.

Because of this faulty logic by Chief Justice Hugo Black (which later Chief Justice William Rehnquist would shred apart in his dissent opinion in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), today many of us often have a default kneejerk reaction to this erroneous modern view of separation of church and state. This demand that religion and government do not have anything to do with each other.

But forget the historical context for a moment. Does this modern view of an impenetrable wall even hold up to logic?

Let’s answer this question by revisiting the question we began with: If a religious person is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, do they need to check their religious beliefs at the Capital door before going in to make laws?

Someone with Hugo Black’s reasoning would say, “Yes! We must keep religion out of our laws!”

But what are laws? They are simply societal rules designed to ensure justice. Justice is a term we use to determine what is right and fair. But exactly how is that to be determined except through the use of our morals and values, which are informed by our worldview. For Christians, our worldview is to be a Biblical one, just as an atheist might say that their worldview is informed by a materialistic view. Do we ask atheists to leave their morals at the door when entering government? Of course not. It is illogical to ask anyone to make laws that ensure justice without using some form of moral guidance. I would actually argue that an atheist, philosophically speaking, has no fixed moral standards when attempting to determine what is right and wrong unless they borrow one from God. (But that’s a subject for a different conversation.)

Let me end with this thought: We should not seek to make people into Christians through governmental action. That in and of itself would be immoral and unbiblical. Salvation does not lay with any government. But we can and should engage with the world in a way that is consistent with Biblical values. And we should desire that our government act in a way that does this as well. Because at the end of the day, someone is using moral judgments to decide what is law. It's up to a self-governing people—You—to decide whose morals that should be.

Tags: values, church, word of god, law, politics, state, morals, first amendment, government, christians, atheists, separation of church and state