No Religious Test

Harry T. Cook

10/03/08

Two hundred twenty one years and 16 days ago a convention in Philadelphia adopted the first seven articles of the U.S. Constitution, thus setting this newly independent nation upon a path down which most of the world’s people at that time could scarcely dream of walking, and which would seem to many of Earth’s citizens today, well, revolutionary. I am supposing that most Americans went about their ordinary business this past September 17, either not knowing or not remembering the significance of Constitution Day.

The Fourth of July is one thing — and a good thing it is, too, for the intention to achieve independence and to fight a war to win it was a daring and noble thing to do. Yet our Founding Parents had a huge task on their hands once King George’s troops had been sent back to Britain for good. The Parents had to create a whole new nation in some part ex nihilo. The kind of nation envisioned by the colonial intellectual elite of the late 18th Century had never existed, though perhaps it had been in some ways implicit in the Magna Carta 572 years earlier. One of the Articles in our founding document has to do with religion, which has proven over time to be both bane and blessing to those of the human race who have taken it seriously. George Washington and James Madison of Virginia, Alexander Hamilton of New York and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania – among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention – were acutely aware of what had been the place of religion in the countries from which their parents and grandparents had hailed. To be sure, they were anxious to honor religion but to have it occupy a different place in the emerging American scheme of things. They knew — these late 18th Century intellectual and political giants — that religion, perhaps more than any other element or institution, had the potential to divide and, if not to conquer, then to confuse a body politic. They knew better than we how the wedding of church and state in Britain and on much of the European continent had both undermined religion and made government less responsive. Even after the advent of modern science during and after the Enlightenment, when the concept of God was unmasked as a human construct, religion and its powerful institutions still held sway in unhealthy and corrupting relationships with monarchies and oligarchies. Our Founding Parents seemed to have understood that leaders and proponents of religious beliefs had as a matter of course used their ecclesial and governmental authority to exercise undue control over the lives and minds of people. Thus were they determined to create a nation in which religious practice could be freed from government and government from religious practice. Clearly stated in Article VI of the Constitution is this principle that has yet to be repealed or amended, but which is violated again and again in our political process: No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public trust under the United States. That principle was fleshed out in what must be a locus classicus of clear and concise prose: the first line of the First Amendment to the Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

With that amendment ratified, the United States of America became the first nation in human history to set clear boundaries between religious authority and government authority. It was explicit that the sway of religious authority stopped at the door of the church and could only be applied to people inside the door and otherwise offered to people outside the door, who were free to embrace or ignore it with impunity. Contrary to what the ranting television evangelists say about the alleged abridgment of religious freedom when the ACLU raises concerns about sectarian invocations before Friday night football games and at high school graduation ceremonies, the First Amendment aided and abetted the creation of the most overtly religious nation in the world — sometimes here and there as fiercely religious as some Islamic sects are thought to be.

The oft-forgotten or ignored other half of the bargain is that no religious test shall be applied to office holders or to those who seek office. Yet it is axiomatic that no person honest about his or her philosophical doubts as to whether there is a God or whether he or she believes in God could ever be elected President of the United States or of any other significant jurisdiction in this country. And when most American people say “God,” they definitely do not mean “Allah.” Small wonder, then, that there is so much effort put forth by the right wing to spread the stupid rumor that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim. So what if he is or is an openly practicing Muslim? I should think that in a rational society the electorate would want to know in some detail how Sen. McCain or Sen. Obama as President of the United States would have handled the recent economic tsunami that still beats upon the shores of the Republic, not whether either of them espouses belief in the absurd idea that Jesus Christ died for their sins.

Speaking of death: A lot of people, many of them Americans, died between Paul Revere’s midnight ride “On the eighteenth of April in Seventy-five” and when the muskets were laid down just under eight years later on April 11, 1783. They died in the struggle for independence, and not only from the British Crown but from the oppressive authority of religion in government. Why all these years later do we dishonor their sacrifice by, in one way or another, imposing unconstitutional religious tests upon office-seekers? It’s not only unconstitutional but un-American.

 © Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.