The retiring and bookish Madison bristled with indignation at the “diabolical Hell-conceived principle of persecution.” He ended a letter to his friend William Bradford with a lament: “So I leave you to pity me and pray for Liberty and Conscience to revive among us.”
Though well known to Madison historians, the above tale escapes the notice of most students of the American founding. It shouldn't. Last Friday marked the 250th anniversary of Madison's birth and, while his role as the major architect of the Constitution is widely understood, his fight for religious freedom is not. Liberals make Madison into an anti-religious rationalist out to quarantine the republic from the disruptive effect of faith. Conservatives, when not trying to Christianize him, invoke Madison's faith-friendly rhetoric to justify the latest attempt to insert religion into the public square.
The truth about Madison is more complicated. What is nearly indisputable is that his religious instincts fueled much of his political activity. And one of the major thrusts of that activity was an attempt to establish unprecedented protections for the freedom of religion. “There is no principle in all of Madison's wide range of private opinions and long public career,” writes biographer Ralph Ketcham, “to which he held with greater vigor and tenacity than this one of religious liberty.”
It is a mistake for historians to skip over Madison's early education. Rather than studying closer to home, Madison chose the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), an evangelical seminary known as both a citadel for republicanism and a haven for dissenting Presbyterianism. President John Witherspoon — who would later sign the Declaration of Independence and under whom Madison studied directly — set this goal: “In the instruction of the Youth, care is to be taken to cherish the spirit of liberty…and not only to permit, but even to encourage their right of private judgment.”
Witherspoon's influence at the college is difficult to overstate. One of the assigned topics in graduation exercises in Madison's senior year was to find support for the proposition that “every religious profession, which does not by its principles disturb the public peace, ought to be tolerated by a wise state.” In a widely circulated pastoral letter, Witherspoon argued that “the greatest service that magistrates or persons in authority can do with respect to the religion or morals of the people is to defend and secure the rights of conscience in the most equal and impartial manner.”
This position is virtually indistinguishable from the one Madison took throughout his life. Madison's political record began in May 1776, when the state constitutional convention wrote a new constitution for the newly independent Commonwealth of Virginia. The document contained a Declaration of Rights with a clause on religious liberty, written by George Mason. The original clause declared that “all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience…”.
Madison didn't like it. “Mason's proposal went further than anything ever before adopted in Virginia,” writes Michael Malbin, “but it didn't go far enough to satisfy James Madison.” Madison objected to Mason's use of the word “toleration,” because it implied that the exercise of faith was a gift from government, not an inalienable right. Madison's substitute — “all men are entitled to the full and free exercise” of religion — essentially won the day. This put Madison far ahead of Locke, who generally mustered no more than grudging toleration for religious belief.
Over the next decade, Madison would be involved in various religious liberty battles in the Virginia legislature, from repealing penalties against dissenters to suspending taxpayer support for Anglican clergymen. Those struggles came to a head in 1784, when — religious conservatives take note — the General Assembly tried to pass a General Assessment bill to collect tax money for all Christian churches in the name of “public morality.” Madison and others saw the bill for what it was, an attempt to prop up the Protestant Episcopal (Anglican) Church with taxpayer money. Prompted by Baptist leaders and others, Madison penned his now-famous Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments in July 1785.
Memorial and Remonstrance represents Madison's most complete and cogent argument for freedom of religion. Historian Irving Brant calls the 15-point document “the most powerful defense of religious liberty ever written in America.” One reason is that Madison made freedom of conscience — i.e., one's belief or conviction about religious matters — the centerpiece of all civil liberties. He called religious belief “precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”
Hardcore separationists and others claim that the Memorial's pious rhetoric masks an antipathy to religion. “I find Madison hostile not only to religious establishments,” says one scholar, “but also to religion itself.” But that assessment relies on just a few private letters in which Madison's main lament concerns the tendency of state-supported religions to become oppressive establishments. That's not anti-religious. And consider Madison's appeals in the Memorial: He argues that the misuse of religion would lead to “an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” He reasons that government support would “weaken in those who profess this Religion a pious confidence in its innate excellence and the patronage of its Author.” He recalls that ecclesiastical establishments of the past have done great damage to the “purity and efficacy” of religion. Do those sound like the arguments of a religious scoffer?
Other evidence suggests Madison's abiding respect for religious belief. In his youth, Madison considered becoming a minister and encouraged his friend, William Bradford, to season his law studies “with a little divinity now and then.” In the fight to pass the Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty, he shamed Christian conservatives — who had tried to insert the words “Jesus Christ” into an amended preamble — with these words: “The better proof of reverence for that holy name would be not to profane it by making it a topic of legislative discussion…”. At age 65, in retirement at his estate in Virginia, Madison praised the separation of church and state because by it “the number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, & the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased…”.
Thanks largely to Madison, free exercise replaced toleration as the national standard for protecting religious liberty. His proposed language for the First Amendment was among the most ambitious offered, and the final version unmistakably bears his stamp. Neither version was motivated by anything resembling an animus toward religion. Writing at the twilight of his life, Madison agreed with religious author Frederick Beasley that “belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.”
Only in a culture that “bristles with hostility to all things religious” (as Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist recently put it) could such a common-sense view fall into controversy or neglect. Today is a time to consider the cost of that neglect.
(This article can also be found on National Review Online.)
