ddrakeman, Author at LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

Posted on September 7, 2012July 29, 2016 by ddrakeman

Things That Aren’t on Enough Church-State Syllabi: Part III — Federally Funded Evangelism

Colonel Johnson of my last post was not only center stage for the country’s first big law and religion debate, he was also in the middle of the most amazing non-event in American church-state history. Running short of cash, Johnson turned his Kentucky property into the site of one of the many federally-funded boarding schools where young Native American boys would be “Christianized” and “civilized.” Every presidential administration from George Washington until the 20^th century had some sort of effort to “civilize” the Indians, with James Madison helping to launch the school project.

Johnson partnered with the Baptist General Convention for Missionary Purposes, since the schools were invariably run by missionary organizations. At one point, the War Department complained that the Kentucky Colonel’s school wasn’t properly recognizing the Sabbath. After becoming famous for his reports decrying any federal cognizance of religion – especially relating to the Sabbath – what did he do? He wrote to the Baptist minister running the school to complain about the apologies he had to make in Washington. Johnson promised that these “irregularities” had been corrected, and the War Department would get the full Christianizing benefits it was paying for.

Isn’t it remarkable that this civilization process endured for a century without any church-state controversy? Even President Grant, famous for his speech about keeping church and state “forever separate,” awarded control of part of the federal Indian agency to the Society of Friends, saying, “If you can make Quakers out of the Indians it will take the fight out of them.”

Church-state issues didn’t arise until late in the 19^th century, when Catholic schools ended up with the lion’s share of the $3.8 million annual budget. Only then did all the previous Protestant beneficiaries decide to call for an end to funding “sectarian” schools. An interesting account is in R. Pierce Beaver, Church, State and the American Indians (1966).

It seems to me that we simply can’t talk about 20^th century school-aid cases without paying attention to this remarkable history.

Don Drakeman

Posted on September 5, 2012July 29, 2016 by ddrakeman

Things that Aren’t on Enough Church-State Syllabi — Part II: Never on Sunday?

The first major nationwide battle over church and state didn’t take place when the First Amendment was adopted. It happened decades later in the 1830s, and it involved the agency employing 75% of the U.S. government’s civilian workforce – the Post Office. Congress required mail delivery seven days a week, and a coalition of prominent Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist and other churches led the charge to make sure that the nation (in their view, a Christian nation) lived up to its obligations under the 4^th Commandment. Richard John’s beautifully written, Spreading the News (1995), tells the story brilliantly.

The Sabbatarian side can best be found in Jasper Adam’s essay, “On the relation of Christianity to civil governments,” found in Daniel Dreisbach’s excellent, Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate (1996): In light of the “close relation between religion and Government that had always existed” in the states, Adams concluded that it was “unlikely” that the Founders would “lay aside all connection with Christianity in the general institutions to which they gave birth . . . Though a strong aversion had arisen to the national establishment of any one form of Christianity, none had grown up against a distinct recognition of Christianity itself as a religion of the nation.”

Colonel (later, Vice President) Richard Johnson chaired the relevant congressional committees, and he released sharply worded, largely anticlerical, reports that don’t really talk about the establishment clause or any other specific part of the Constitution. The spirit of the Constitution, however, is clearly stated: “The Constitution regards the general government in no other light than that of a civil institution, wholly destitute of religious authority.” In a nice bit of irony, the official congressional reports were actually ghostwritten by Johnson’s Washington landlord, a Baptist minister named Obadiah Brown.

Here was the big church-state fight that we sometimes pretend happened when the establishment clause was adopted. When it finally occurred forty years later, the first round went to the separationists. But, the Sabbatarians never gave up, and they shut down the Sunday mails for good in 1912. American’s competing church-state views seem to be so deeply rooted that these kinds of disputes – perhaps like the 20^th century school prayer arguments – can literally endure for generations, if not centuries.

Don Drakeman

Posted on September 4, 2012 by ddrakeman

Three Things that Aren’t on Enough Church-State Syllabi

Since it’s the start of the school year, I thought I would begin my 30 day blogging career with “Three Things That Aren’t on Enough Church-State Syllabi.” The idea is to help students understand that current efforts to give religion a more prominent place in the public square have deep roots. They aren’t merely a throw-back to a repressive Puritan era or the result of foreign influences arriving with 19^th century Catholic immigrants. Rather, they are part of the mainstream of America political thought since the founding.

Syllabus Supplement, Part I – The aptly named Theophilus Parsons.

Think of Parsons as a James Madison counterpart in Massachusetts – really smart and politically crafty. While Madison led the charge to defeat Virginia’s otherwise popular proposal for a general assessment to support religion in 1785, Parsons had helped ram through the Massachusetts 1780 constitutional provision requiring public support for Protestant ministers, despite not actually having the votes. In course after course, students read Madison’s ringing words from the Memorial and Remonstrance calling the use of religion “as an engine of Civil policy” an “unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.”

An interesting, and quite different, perspective can be found in Chief Justice Parsons’ opinion in Barnes v. Falmouth (1810): “The object of a free civil government is the promotion and security of the happiness of the citizens. These effects cannot be produced, but by the knowledge and practice of our moral duties…. Civil government…is extremely defective, and unless it could derive assistance from some superior power, whose laws extend to the temper and disposition of the human heart, and before whom no offense is secret, wretched indeed would be the state of man…. On these principles, tested by the experience of mankind, and by the reflections of reason, the people of Massachusetts, in the frame of their government, adopted and patronized a religion, which by its benign and energetic influences, might cooperate with human institutions, to promote and serve the happiness of the citizens….”

On a somewhat more topical note, Parsons had little sympathy for exemption-seekers, arguing that, since it was only a tax and did not require church attendance, objectors “mistake a man’s conscience for his money….”

Don Drakeman