the Establishment (Clause)

[quarrel]

“What erudite reading have you dived head first into this time?”

“Ahem. ‘Support or refute: the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.’”

“Hoo-boy.”

“What? This looks like an easy one.”

“Oh. Does it, now?”

“It sure seems so. I mean, it’s right there in the First A—”

“Not so fast! What, exactly, do you mean by ‘a Christian nation’?”

“One whose laws are modeled after Christian moral values and where Christians and Christianity receive official sanction and societal privilege.”

“Okay. Continue.”

“Well, I was just going to point out the whole obvious First Amendment thing. You know: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’.”

“That prohibited only the federal government from inhibiting or encouraging religion on a nationwide level. It didn’t apply to governments in general.”

“What about Article VI and its ‘no religous test’ clause?”

“Same deal: that’s for the federal government only. In those days, cities, counties, even whole states could and did ban books, censor the press, and sanction specific religions. At the time the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, about seven of the thirteen states had official state religions, and all but two had religious restrictions on who could participate in state government.”

“They don’t now.”

“So what? The issue at hand is what the people who originally made this country wanted it to be when they made it. How it changed later is irrelevant. States didn’t seriously start being held to the same general restrictions as the federal government until the advent of the Fourteenth Amendment, which happened ninety years later, and the specific issue of State-sponsored religion didn’t reach its modern condition until 1947.

“Also, remember that early America was a union of largely self-sufficient pre-existing colonies. The people who first made country-level rules for the U.S. were trying to add a thin shell around those existing political structures, not assemble an entire nation from scratch for a formless clump of three million people. In fact, the more power the Founding Fathers proposed giving their new federal government, the more they risked states refusing to unify out of fear they’d lose too much of their existing authority. The Constitution is full of compromises — it was the only way all the states would ratify it.”

“So what’s your point?”

“My point is that you cannot use the fact that the Founders wrote laws prohibiting government from endorsing religion as evidence that they felt government shouldn’t endorse religion. It doesn’t logically follow.”

“That’s crazy!”

“Not really. More to the point, what are you going to do next now that I’ve provided an alternate, plausible explanation for your observations? Are you going to adjust your views to fit the facts, or are you going to dig for more facts that fit your existing views?”

“You really think I was wrong?”

“Oh, I never said that. I’m just pointing out how weak and simplistic your argument is. I wonder how you’re going to address my counter-claims. I wonder how you’re going to handle the fact that every single Founding Father believed God existed — even Benjamin Franklin, who was not an atheist like some legends say. I wonder how you’re going to handle the fact that the phrase ‘wall of separation between Church and State’ doesn’t come from a legal document and refers to one specific case that only involved insulating a religion from the government, not vice-versa. Those are the basics as I see them. You need to be able to handle all those, at the very least, if you want a chance in this fight.”