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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
Yet the Times remains the paper of record. If you don’t read it, you miss a lot. Their large stable of talented writers regularly comes up with information most of us would not discover on our own.
Peter Steinfels is the latest example. In the July 6th issue, in his regular column, he reviewed a study by Philip Hamburger, John P. Wilson professor of law at the University of Chicago, titled “Separation of Church and State.” Hamburger documents what many Catholics have intuited for decades now; that anti-Catholicism has much to do with the modern interpretation of the First Amendment. We weren’t paranoid, after all. Hamburger’s thesis? It is that the much-quoted notion of a separation of church and state is a “modern myth,” a notion never propounded by the Founding Fathers.
Hamburger reminds us that the phrase was first used by Thomas Jefferson in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, wherein he described the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between church and state.” But here’s the rub. It was an idea that did not sell even then. The Connecticut Baptists, who were hoping that Jefferson would provide them with ammunition to use in their efforts against Connecticut’s Congregationalist majority, felt uncomfortable with the phrase. They did not use Jefferson’s letter in their cause, sensing that it would lead to a secular understanding of society out of touch with their own. While they did not want an established church in the United States, with authority comparable to that of the Anglican Church in Great Britain, they did want the laws of the land to reflect Christian values. What they were opposed to was the imposition of narrow sectarian beliefs unique to Congregationalists.
Then how, asks Seinfels, did a rigid separation of church and state “become virtually synonymous with religious freedom in the 19th century?” It was because, by 1840, says Hamburger, Catholic immigrants were demanding access to public school funds in New York City. This “presumptuous demand shocked Protestants, many of whom responded by asserting separation of church and state as a constitutional principle.” In contrast, blue laws, Bible reading in the schools, Sabbath laws, oaths of office sworn on the Bible and military chaplains continued to be seen as acceptable, because they worked for the benefit of the members of the many Protestant denominations in the country.
What followed was a classic case of unintended consequences. Militant secularists pushed the understanding of a separation of church and state farther than the Protestant majority of the era had wanted. Steinfels: “Eventually, nonreligious and openly anti-Christian secularists protested this kind of inconsistency. Genuine separation, they insisted, should rule out chaplains in legislatures, prisons and the armed forces, require taxation of church property, forbid restrictions on Sunday commerce and so on.”
Here’s where things get interesting. According to Hamburger, there was a powerful, but unmentioned, force behind this secularist drive, a group with many Protestant members, but one nevertheless willing to accept restrictions on Protestant groups, if that was the price that had to be paid to hamstring Catholicism. “The modern myth of separation omits any discussion of nativist sentiment in America and, above all, omits any mention of the Ku Klux Klan,” which “exerted profound political power in states across the country and, probably more than any other national group” in the first half of the 20th century “drew Americans to the principle of separation.”
In a phone conversation with the Times’ reporter, Hamburger insists that “I wouldn’t want to suggest that one should not argue for separation because bad people did,” proposing that “separation may offer a plausible legal solution to a wide range of issues” in our multicultural society. (By the way, this is a notion that I suspect Catholics may also begin to consider favorably in the near future, as religious groups hostile to Christianity grow in size and influence.)
Hamburger maintains that his intention was only to set straight the historical record by making clear that the modern understanding of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom “has simplified and impoverished discussions of religious liberty in ways that have obscured the necessarily complex and textured relationships between civil and religious societies.”
“Complex and textured” indeed. Hamburger’s study makes clear why it was not until the last quarter of the 20th century that there was support for the notion that it violated anyone’s religious freedom to have laws against abortion and pornography, or to allow Nativity scenes in public places; why we still have military and Congressional chaplains; why sessions of Congress open with a prayer, why oaths are still taken on the Bible, why presidents routinely end their addresses with the words “and God bless America.”
Modern secularizers are entitled to argue that our society would be better with Christian religious values removed from the public arena. But Hamburger’s study reinforces the claim our side has been making for the last half century. That understanding of the relationship between Christianity and our laws and public policy is not what the Founding Fathers intended.
His analysis of the issue also illustrates why financial aid to religiously affiliated colleges has never been as objected to as much as aid to church-related high schools and elementary schools. When the government makes funds available to college students, they are just as likely to use them to pay the tuition at Southern Methodist University or Texas Christian University as at Notre Dame or Fordham. There are a lot of colleges affiliated with Protestant churches, but not as many high schools and elementary schools, which still tend to be mainly Catholic. That makes a difference.
Look: One can see why Protestant groups would not want what they consider an excessive share of tax funds to go to Catholic institutions. It would clear the air if the debate over vouchers took place on those terms, instead of flawed claims about First Amendment guarantees of freedom of religion.
