Discrimination Cloaked in Piety

A well done piece here discusses Sally Kern's new legacy – and her misinformed understanding of the intent behind the 1st Amendment.

“What made us great,” said Kern, “is that we were a nation founded on Christian principles. OK, that’s just the bottom line. If you go to the primary sources and read our Founding Fathers, what they had to say, they gave preferential treatment to Christianity.

“So what’s destroying this nation?” Kern continued. “The fact that we’re leaving the roots upon which we were founded. We are crumbling from within because of the bankruptcy that we have in the moral fiber of this nation and leaving the principles of our Founding Fathers.”

Let's go to a couple of sources then. The First Amendment has its roots in the Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke where Locke says among other things:

Now that the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate reaches only to these civil concernments, and that all civil power, right and dominion, is bounded and confined to the only care of promoting these things; and that it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls, these following considerations seem unto me abundantly to demonstrate.

First, because the care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men. It is not committed unto him, I say, by God; because it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another as to compel anyone to his religion. Nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people, because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave to the choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace. For no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another. All the life and power of true religion consist in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; and faith is not faith without believing. Whatever profession we make, to whatever outward worship we conform, if we are not fully satisfied in our own mind that the one is true and the other well pleasing unto God, such profession and such practice, far from being any furtherance, are indeed great obstacles to our salvation. For in this manner, instead of expiating other sins by the exercise of religion, I say, in offering thus unto God Almighty such a worship as we esteem to be displeasing unto Him, we add unto the number of our other sins those also of hypocrisy and contempt of His Divine Majesty.

In the second place, the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgement that they have framed of things.

The founders did not intend for the civil form of government to give preference to any religion nor did they think it wise or good for a state. Sally Kern missed something in her lesson on the problems the Baptists had in New England who were under the governance of the Congregationalists. As Jefferson's wrote to the Danbury Baptists:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Perhaps she missed the lesson on the plight of the Puritans where,

In 1593, the English parliament outlawed independent congregations. Attendance of English (Anglican) church services was made obligatory. But across the country, groups of Puritans continued to gather.

She clearly is not familiar with Rodney Stark's work on the very topic of the effects of state religion on religious belief or Chris Eisgruber's argument that the 1st Amendment protects equal regard for all religions.  She must not be aware that this very principle of equal regard has created an unusual environment in the world where minority religions and sects can flourish since they cannot be oppressed.

If her preference is to turn back the dial of time a few decades if not more in order to live in a more homogeneous Christian nation, then perhaps she would do well to relieve herself of her office. For what good wife of a Baptist preacher would ever serve as a state representative in those days?  Such an idea would certainly be un-bibilical or at least un-becoming of a good wife.

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