The hard life of a circuit preacher in the 1860s.

Is America losing its faith? Recent polls show less than half of us belong to any organized religion. The percentage of Americans regularly attending church is even smaller (about 25 percent), and this figure continues to drop.

We seem to have come a long way from the early 1800s, when European visitors remarked how much religion influenced the conduct of Americans. The country seemed immersed in the Christian ethic back then. Its cities were crowded with churches; its art and literature filled with references to God, salvation, and the Bible.

Yet the religious influences in American society were probably not as great as they seem now. In many American communities, church membership never rose much higher than 50 percent. And though the national average reached 75 percent by the 1950s, it had been climbing slowly from the turn of the century. In those days, ministers and pastors had been alarmed at the poor church attendance which, they argued, had been caused by science, the modern novel, and Ford’s new Model T.

In those years, Rebecca Harding Davis regularly contributed articles to the Post about the changes she’d seen in her 73 years. In 1906, she wrote that nothing reflected the change in modern America like the decline of Christianity as her grandparents had practiced it. Recalling her youth in western Virginia in the 1830s, she wrote, “The dominant fact about a man at that time was his religion. … It was the important fact then about every man—as it is not today.”

An open-air, gospel camp meeting of the 1840s.

Religion then possessed every man’s thoughts, partly because there was not much else to possess them. Living was simple and cheap. … Each individual worked his way alone upon his narrow path. There were no guilds or leagues or unions to absorb his thoughts. Hence his brain was busied with his own little life and the two agents at work in it—God and the devil. You felt them near you at every turn. You heard of them every moment of the day.

The God, of whom our forefathers talked … was no awful or unknown Creator. … Blacksmiths and ditch-diggers talked as familiarly of [God’s] acts and intentions, as if they had been in His cabinet of advisers when the world was made. They gave Him the human qualities that were most admirable in their own eyes—chief of all, an unreasoning will, and inexorable, merciless justice.

This grim Deity was a real fact to these people. Religion in their souls was not so much a glad, absolute trust in a loving Father, or a brotherly kindness for their neighbors, as a perpetual terror and fearful expectation of judgment.

Strange, horrible ideas grew up out of this ignorance and fear, and made their lives miserable. One of these was the unpardonable sin: an undefined, nameless crime that God never pardoned, even when the sinner had borne eternities of hell. In almost every village there were slow-witted men or starved, anemic girls who believed that they had been guilty of this mysterious crime.

To her grandfather, Christianity was a matter of dogma; to her peers it was a matter of deeds. The older generation believed it could avoid hell only by holding fast, without question, to certain doctrines. Its grandchildren were more likely to ignore creeds “and strive for a life of honesty, purity and brotherly love.”

But the religion of her grandfather was far from heartless and demanded more than belief alone. It directed him to take care of his family and neighbors.

Foreigners counted for nothing to him, but he was loyal to the death to his kin and to his neighbors.
These old forebears of ours built no hospitals, but should one of their neighbors fall ill with typhus they all took turns in nursing him, day and night, for weeks.

If he died and his children had no kinsfolk, they took them home and brought them up as their own. It was simply a matter of course then that these things should be done. There was scarcely a family in our village which had not its orphan child—’to bring a blessing on the house.’

What this faith lacked in flexibility, it made up for in durability—an essential quality in faith for people with hard lives, few comforts, and little security. And if these men didn’t always extend charity to strangers, at least they required integrity in themselves.

Rebecca Harding Davis, 1831-1910.

Our stern old grandfather was as merciless to his own sins as to those of his neighbor. He never had heard of graft. He wronged no man of a penny.

He might berate his old wife, but he was true to her. You heard of no divorces then. His life was narrow and hard, perhaps, but it was clean and true. He had an intense, jealous love for his own kin … but I confess he had not much for outsiders. None of his hard-earned money went to the help of unknown strangers.

He strove with God without ceasing all of his life for the salvation of his own family. It was a common custom for these old fathers and mothers to rise long before the day to wrestle alone in prayer for their boys and girls.

There was, too, more outward reverence shown then by children to parents than there is today. [A father] was apt to impress upon his boys several times a day his conviction of his divine right to rule them. There was seldom any intimacy between them, however deep the affection might be. [And] often, with the purest and highest motives, [these fathers] made home so bare of comfort or pleasure that their sons were driven outside to find it.

American religion had grown more compassionate, Ms. Davis believed, because less was demanded of it. Life had become easier. Americans now lived with prosperity and peace their grandparents had never known. Fewer tragedies and disasters forced them to seek explanation or solace from religion.

But when tragedy returns, as it did on September 11, 2001, so does the need for faith.

The Decline of Old-Time Religion The Saturday Evening Post

Jonathan Haidt The Saturday Evening Post

School prayer was a standard part of schooling until June 1962. In that month, the Supreme Court, in its Engel v. Vitale decision, ruled that public-school praying was unconstitutional.

It was just as Billy Graham had feared. In February, he had warned Post readers—

The issue of prayers in public schools is now before the Supreme Court and, if the Court decrees negatively, another victory will be gained by those forces which conspire to remove faith in God from the public conscience.

American democracy rests on the belief in the reality of God and His respect for the individual. Ours is a freedom under law. But it is also a freedom that will evaporate if the religious foundations upon which it has been built are taken away.

As he wrote in “Our Right To Require Belief,” the elimination of school prayer was part of—

Billy Graham on the cover of the Post.

a movement gathering momentum in America to take the traditional concept of God out of our national life. If this movement succeeds, IN GOD WE TRUST will be taken from our coins, the Bible will be removed from our courtrooms, future Presidents will be sworn into office with their hand on a copy of the Constitution instead of the Bible, and chaplains will be removed from the Armed Forces.

Graham believed the United States had grown and prospered because of an alliance, rather than a separation, of church and state. The leaders of the new country intended the United States to be essentially Christian.

The Great Seal of the United States is our complete acknowledgment that we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Our national emblems testify to the fact that we are a people “under God.”

The Preamble of our national Constitution speaks of “the blessings of liberty.” The men at Philadelphia could never have written that document if they had not had faith in God.

Reverend Graham was far from alone in his belief. A great number of Americans had grown up with the idea that Christian faith was a necessary part of the country’s government. In “Our Right Not To Believe,” which appeared in the Post a week before Graham’s article, Robert Bendiner showed how personal faith had become a requirement for civic participation. Eight states required office holders to believe not only in a Supreme Being but also a “future state of rewards and punishments.”

Eleven states call for official oaths ending with the phrase “So help me God,” and congressional statues require the same words for Federal jobholders—except for the President of the United States. His oath of office is prescribed in Article II of the Constitution itself, the only one so imposed, and in it, significantly, there is no reference to a Supreme Being.

Still other states have so-called blasphemy laws, forbidding the public casting of doubt on the fundamentals of religious belief, though such laws are very rarely invoked.

With state governments so invested in religious beliefs, it’s not surprising they made prayer a part of the daily schedule. How could a student hope to hold office or appear in court without a spiritual life?

In a number of states atheists may not serve as either witnesses or jurors. As the Maryland law runs, a witness or juror must believe that he “will be held morally accountable for his acts, and be rewarded or punished therefore, either in this world or in the world to come.” Contradictory testimony is nevertheless as common in Maryland as it is elsewhere, the threat of consequences in the next world notwithstanding.

Unlike Graham, Bendiner believed the Founding Father did not envision a faith-based nation.

The fundamental nature of the United States was not religious but rationalist.

The prevailing spirit among them was that of deism.  Forerunners of modern Unitarianism, the deists were selective concerning the Bible—insofar as they accepted it at all—and they believed a Supreme Being to be vaguely inherent in Nature but very different from the personal God of the Scriptures.

Men had to determine for themselves a basis for rational morality, and they had little use for theology or the ceremonials of organized religion.

Jefferson, he stated, was certainly not a church-going man and Franklin, as characterized by one noted biographer, was a “pagan skeptic.” And then there was Thomas Paine, the militant atheist, who no one would ever accuse of being a ‘man of faith.’

Yet faith was essential in modern American government, Graham asserted. Our ‘right to require belief’ didn’t apply to students. We needed to require belief in lawmakers so they would be guided by principles higher than self-interest. Such an idea, Bendiner argued, would be meaningless ultimately.

In the end, if the state can demand officially—or public opinion unofficially— that office-holders acknowledge a conventional religious belief, then state and public are entitled to examine credentials… to demand that a candidate’s conviction be genuine, not just a matter of political convenience. And there’s the rub. For who is to be entrusted with the inquisition required to winnow out the real from the synthetic in religious conviction?

Happily the thought is preposterous as well as illegal.

But it’s easy to talk about the beliefs that shouldn’t be imposed. People need some belief to face the future. Can we preserve our freedoms and our tradition of reason and law guided only by a desire for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? As Graham asks,

What good does it do to become the wealthiest nation in the world if we are spiritually bankrupt? What would we have to offer the world?

We need a vision, he argues: faith in a greater goal, something to keep us moving forward when the way is uncertain and the old solutions no longer seem to work.

Faith… is not the way a coward flees from reality. It is the projection of reason beyond the limits of present knowledge.

Our beliefs make us what we are.

This is the prayer that sparked the Supreme Court challenge:

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”

Had the Supreme Court decided that school prayer was consistent with the Constitution, the United States would be a different country today. But then, the country would have had a different Constitution.

Atheists v. Evangelists: The School Prayer Decision of 1962 The Saturday Evening Post

Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali, now 70 years old, is one of America’s most admired athletes. He has received an honorary doctorate at Princeton University, the Spirit of America award, the Presidential Citizens Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

All these honors in late life could obscure the fact that Muhammad Ali, in his youth, was a highly controversial figure—a racial revolutionary, some feared.

Ali had been generally popular up to the day he beat Sonny Liston in 1964 to become boxing’s heavyweight champion. Shortly afterward, though, he announced that he’d joined the Nation of Islam, and changed his name from Cassius Marcellus Clay.

The Nation of Islam was then widely regarded by the American media as a highly dangerous group. There were fearful rumors that the Black Muslims would forcibly create a separate nation for black Americans. So when Ali announced his conversion, the media reacted as if they had been betrayed. A Post editorial from ’64 captures the tone of dismissal and fear.

For a time, when he was confining himself to bad poetry, Cassius was a loudmouth but a likable character who seemed to be harmless in or out of the ring. Then he won the championship and became, in his own estimation, “The Greatest.” After the fight, he acknowledged that he was a Black Muslim, converted by the arch-extremist, Malcolm X, the man who crowed that President Kennedy’s assassination was “a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” Malcolm X was separated from the Black Muslim movement after that remark and is now attempting to organize his own black nation. He wants to arm all the Negroes in the U.S. and ultimately take them back to Africa.

One Post writer went so far as to hint that Ali was simply using his status as a Black Muslim to increase ticket sales.

Muhammad Ali training in 1964.

Clay’s history of calculated deceptions now prompts the suspicion, of course, that his present case of galloping religion is but another decoy to serve who knows what end. Clay himself strengthened the suspicion when he declared, “Just by my being a Muslim, that should draw a bigger gate…”

On re-examination, however, Clay’s remarks were nothing more than cute verbiage. He well knows… that his commitment to Islam has cost him roughly two million dollars in commercial endorsements.

The quote came from a ’64 Post article, “Muslim Champ,” by Myron Cope, which generally overlooked Ali the boxer to focus on Ali the Muslim. Cope regarded Ali’s new faith with frank derision.

Cassius Marcellus Clay, who now calls himself Brother Muhammad Ali… is convinced he is a beacon of righteousness in a wicked world.

Having succeeded Malcolm X as the loudest [sic] Black Muslim, Clay has been fighting a socio-religious battle with the Christian world, and this, more than anything else, seems to have taken away his former exuberance. He still acts the clown for TV cameras but only to sell fight tickets.

Ali in Harlem.

Reading the article today, it’s clear that Cope’s preconceptions were obscuring his view of Ali. He claimed that Ali had “completely severed communication with whites,” even though Ali spoke freely with Cope for this article. Ali also proves himself to be more tolerant than Cope concerning the use of his old name.

“Call me Muhammad or call me Ali,” Clay advised as we drove to his house, “but if you forget and call me Cassius, that won’t bother me none.”

Cope didn’t forget. He deliberately referred to him throughout the article as Cassius Clay. And though he portrayed Ali as a zealot of his new “cult,” the champion voiced rather middle-of-the-road political opinions.

Cruising along, the new Clay discussed politics. “Kennedy,” he said, “just seemed so nice, he didn’t seem like a President.” He expressed an admiration for Barry Goldwater, saying that “he say what he thinks.”

In fact, Ali showed himself to be little changed from the spirited, sociable boxer Cope had traveled with in his pre-championship days.

I had been unwilling to believe that a young man with so bright a gift for teasing the world could hate. Henry H. Arrington, a Negro attorney and adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., told me; “I can assure you I have never seen any indication whatsoever of Cassius disliking white people generally.”

Muhammad Ali in 1964.

Whatever the actual teaching propounded in the Muslim meetings, Clay denies that he considers all whites to be devils. “I’m stressing just the works that the whites generally have been doing,” he said in his dressing room. “They blow up all these little colored people in church, wash people down the street with water hoses. It’s not the color that make you a devil, just the deeds that you do.

“It’s as our leader Elijah Muhammad teaches us. Couldn’t nobody argue it. I’m no authority on Islam. I am just a follower. If you be a blue race, and you do the works of the devil, then we can call you a devil. You got white people who died under demonstrations, died under tractor wheels for colored people. I wouldn’t call them no devil.”

He was attracted to the cult, he explained, because its people neither drank nor smoked, and they deported themselves well.

“I am an American; I was born here,” he said softly, trying to make himself understood. “Our leader and teacher will tell you himself, we respect America and respect whites for coming here and making a paradise from nothing. It’s not hate or fighting or arguing. We just want freedom.”

Ali’s religion was still a hot issue in 1965, when he fought former heavyweight champion Floyd Paterson. In an unpublished story, Post writer Bill Bridges described how the Ali-Patterson bout was being regarded as a test of Christianity and Muslim faiths. Some of Ali’s supporters, who had become estranged when he joined the Nation of Islam, were hoping that a Patterson victory would convince Ali to return to his old faith. After Patterson was defeated, however, there was no more talk about the match proving which was the superior faith.
 
The following photos were taken for Bill Bridges’ unpublished Post feature and were never printed.

Photo at top left: Ali exchanges angry looks at his former trainer, who had departed after Ali joined the Nation of Islam. Bottom left: the trainer can be seen mid-picture, with the arm of sports writer George Plimpton around his shoulders. He had hoped a defeat would return Ali to the Christian faith. Instead, with Ali victorious, the trainer returned to Ali who forgave him and rehired him as trainer.

Religion Steps into the Boxing Ring: Ali in ’64 The Saturday Evening Post

You can learn more at The Biologos Foundation: http://biologos.org/blog/an-afternoon-with-john-polkinghorne

An Afternoon with John Polkinghorne The Saturday Evening Post

There are several reasons why Protestant Christians still rely on a translation made four centuries ago. There is tradition and familiarity. But there is also the power of the English language used in this work.

By good luck, or by the grace of God, King James commissioned this translation at a time when the expressive power of English was undergoing an incredible growth. As a 1951 Post article noted, the King’s translators proved highly creative in setting the biblical language of Aramaic and Greek into

the haunting phrases [that have] imprinted so deeply on the thoughts and imagery of all English-speaking people: “apple of his eye,” “powers that be,” “widow’s mite,” “filthy lucre,” “as a lamb to the slaughter,” “pearls before swine,” “worthy of his hire,” “broken reed,” “birds of the air,” “loaves and fishes,” “army with banners,” “clear as crystal,” “thorn in the flesh,” “still small voice,” “salt of the earth” —these are only a few.

The King’s goal was to produce a skilled, consistent, and rigorously edited version of scriptures (an earlier English translation of the Old Testament had included the commandment, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”) In the process, though, his scholars created a masterwork  that influenced all writers of English for centuries. The power of its message, set to its best advantage amid the imagery and cadence of deathless poetry, could reach out beyond the faithful to touch agnostics and non-believers.

Abraham Lincoln is a good example. He openly challenged the teachings of the Christian faith as a young man. He firmly refused offers to pray with others. He purposely eliminated the word “God” from his speeches, preferring the ambiguous term, “Maker.” And he professed no faith in any life after death. Yet as the Post article, “How Well Do You Know the Bible?” notes, Lincoln might have been—

the President who read the Bible most in office was Lincoln; the White House guards used to find him, before he had had breakfast in the morning, turning the pages of his Bible in the small room he used for a library.

He had read the whole Bible and memorized long pas­sages from it. Its words and phrases came frequently and effectively from his lips in speeches, political de­bates, and even casual conversation. Once, at a Cabinet meeting where his advisers were discussing the new green­back dollar bills that were issued during the Civil War, the question came up of what official slogan to print on them.

“In God we trust,” was suggested, but Lincoln had a more whimsical idea. “If you are going to put a legend on the greenbacks,” he said, “I would suggest that of Peter: ‘Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee,”’ quoting Acts iii. 6 verbatim.

Lincoln’s two greatest utterances, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, are filled with the rich word poetry of the King James Version, and we have the almost unanimous word of his biographers that he found the Bible his principal solace at a time when the nation he headed was undergoing its most terrible internal trials. In the summer of 1864, when he was living in a cottage at the Soldiers’ Home on the outskirts of Washington, a friend named Joshua. Speed entered his room unexpectedly and found the President sitting near the window, read­ing his Bible by the light of failing day.

“I am glad to see you so profitably engaged,” remarked Speed, with a touch of lightness. .

“Yes,” said Lincoln. “I am profit­ably engaged.”

“Well,” said Speed, “if you have recovered from your skepticism I am sorry to say I have not.”

The tall President rose from his chair, placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and looked him earnestly in the eye. “You are wrong, Speed,” he said. “Take all of this book upon rea­son that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a hap­pier and better man.”

The King James Bible: A Best-Seller Turns 400 The Saturday Evening Post

To learn more about prayer shawls, visit shawlministry.com.

Prayer Shawls The Saturday Evening Post

“Please, God, I need your help. I have a son at home, clothes to wash, and lunch to make. Please send me help.”

Through her tears, she noticed a young man standing in front of her. He bent down, picked up the hanger, and within six seconds opened the door.

“Thank you very much, sir,” said the grateful mom. “Are you a Christian?”

“No,” he said. “I just got out of prison.”

Sitting in the front seat of her car, she looked up to the sky and said, “Thank you, Lord, for sending me a professional.”

Michael Annese

Apple Valley, California

Door Jam The Saturday Evening Post

Jefferson’s no-skin-off-my-nose attitude is so thoroughly modern that it’s hard to remember just how radical his view was in its day. Despite the fact that America was colonized partly by settlers looking to practice their beliefs without discrimination, the Founders still lived in a world where government-sanctioned and supported religion was the norm, where differences of faith and conscience could lead to seizure of property, bodily harm, and worse. By guaranteeing freedom of worship as a basic Constitutional right for all Americans, Jefferson and the rest of the Framers were attempting something entirely new. Almost miraculous, in fact.

Consider that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written and ratified by a group composed exclusively of white, male landowners (many of them slaveowners), most with ties to just one specific religion — more than 50 percent of the Founding Fathers were affiliated with the Episcopal church, according to some historians. Not exactly the diverse dream team you or I might have chosen to safeguard the religious freedom of a new nation.

But that’s exactly what they did, and in the first lines of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” Known forever after as the Establishment Clause, this pronouncement — and the entire amendment — has over time proven to be a versatile tool that does more than separate church and state. It protects America’s faithful and faithless alike, providing both freedom of religion and freedom from it, as appropriate.

To be sure, the Founding Fathers couldn’t foresee how their efforts would one day help to make America the most religiously diverse nation in the world, nor anticipate how the Establishment Clause would come into play on future issues, from the teaching of evolutionary theory in schools, to the displaying of the Ten Commandments in public buildings, to the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance.

For more than 200 years, the balance between religious liberty and the rule of law has been constantly renegotiated. To understand how that balance has been maintained both then and now, we need to look back at the influences that shaped the Founders and the documents they created to serve their country and — ultimately — us.

Founding Faith

Christ Church in Philadelphia contains the Liberty Window, which depicts the opening prayer in the first Continental Congress.
Courtesy of Christ Church Philadelphia, Photo by Will Brown

The traditional idea of the Founding Fathers as conventionally pious Christian gentlemen is a myth, of course. But neither were they actively hostile to religion. John Adams, to pick one, remained a regular churchgoer throughout his long life. Jefferson, meanwhile, was skeptical of religion, yet revered Jesus as a great moral philosopher, even assembling a personal edition of the New Testament with scissors and a glue-pot, retaining the ethical teachings of Christ while editing out the miracles. (You can see the Jefferson Bible today at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.)

The time was ripe for change. This was the Age of Enlightenment, when advances in the sciences forced philosophers to reconsider humanity’s place in the universe. Educated men of the day, including Jefferson and other Founding Fathers, were attracted to Enlightenment ideals and beliefs, including Deism: the notion of a Creator whose existence could be deduced from His handiwork, but who took no active part in human affairs — God as absentee landlord.
Another Enlightenment ideal that exerted a powerful influence over the Framers was the social contract. “Social contract theory holds that government doesn’t descend from on high, but from voluntary agreements among ordinary citizens,” says Gary Kowalski, author of Revolutionary Spirits, an account of the philosophical foundations of the Constitution. This all but flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which held that government derived its authority from God, from the top down.

As if that wasn’t enough to lay the ground for revolutionary change, there was also an upswell of religious devotion among the colonial populace, with Evangelicals preaching that all men are created equal, and that each person’s value is determined not by social class, but by moral behavior. Sound familiar?

The Declaration of Independence, then, served not just as the founding document of the American Revolution, but as a balance of the influences of the Founders and the average citizen. It asserted our unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator. But this truth was not handed down in a mystical vision; rather it was self-evident, revealed by rational observation.

The declaration makes no further mention of God. The Founders strove to emphasize that separation from England was an expression of human rights, rather than Divine Right. “The Founders believed that religion could be a healthy force in society — if it were exercised within a zone of personal autonomy,” says Kowalski.

There were practical reasons, too. Different Christian sects held majorities in different colonies — some as established churches, with taxpayer support — and religious language that appeared to favor one faith over another might have jeopardized the early union entirely. “In some respects, we bungled into religious liberty,” says Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center and author of several books on religion in public life. “Early on, the religious divisions in the colonies gave us little choice. So, in a way, we have religious diversity to thank for religious liberty.”

Footing the Bill

Like the declaration before it, the Constitution is also relatively free of religious-speak. It does not solicit God’s blessing; instead, it begins with an invocation of “We, the People.” Indeed, the Constitution’s only mention of religion is negative — in Article Six, where it expressly commands that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

“The lack of God-language in the Constitution is not an oversight,” Kowalski says. “It provoked protest among more orthodox Christians, who thought that government needed some divine sanction.” But in the end, a majority voted to keep the Constitution faith-neutral. Meanwhile, some signatories felt that the Constitution did not go far enough to guarantee basic human rights. In response, James Madison proposed a number of amendments; of the ten that comprise the Bill of Rights, the First demarcates our religious freedoms in the plain language of the Establishment Clause which, incidentally, only applies to the federal government. Several states still had established churches, while others prided themselves as havens of conscience. The Establishment Clause split the difference by throwing the issue back to the states. Those with established churches could continue to favor them, while disestablished states were free to remain so.

The true vindication for the Establishment Clause came over the years, as a sense of common American identity began to grow, and states with official churches began, one by one, to disestablish them by acts of legislature.

Moving the Frontier

Since its beginnings, America has been extraordinarily religiously diverse. Although it’s true that, as of 1800, the majority of white Americans were Protestants of some kind, that formulation misrepresents the religious landscape of the time and the strained, even hostile relations between various congregations. The American Protestant identity — the tendency of many mainline denominations to downplay their differences and to think of themselves as “Protestant” first and foremost — only developed as immigration and expansion allowed for growth among minority faith groups. The years 1800-1850 saw U.S. population quadruple as Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews arrived from Europe, and as the country acquired territories from France, Spain, and Mexico, making their inhabitants — mostly Catholics — into newly minted U.S. citizens.

Today, as then, the country is experiencing a boom in immigration; and again, immigrants are bringing their faiths with them. Islam is considered to be one of the fastest growing religions in America. According to at least one survey, there are more Buddhists in America now than Evangelical Episcopalians. Some projections indicate that by mid-century, Protestant Americans will be the ones in the minority, a notion that makes many anxious, even now.

Over our country’s history, different groups have been singled out as threats to national unity. In the 1800s, Catholics were the bogeyman of choice. Anti-papist preachers warned that we were losing our country to those who did not share American values. Catholics, they claimed, could never be real Americans; they owed their true allegiance to a foreign tyrant and alien laws, and were too superstitious and backward to ever blend into our society.

If that rhetoric has a familiar ring to it, it’s because those same words have been used recently against other immigrant religious groups, particularly Muslims in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “Every time we come to a period in our history when we are traumatized, when we are afraid, this anxiety returns us to the idea of recovering the America that’s been lost,” says Haynes. But Catholics managed to assimilate within a generation or two, and the American Catholic Church proved to be a different sort of institution than the European church, simply because of the cultural and political conditions on the ground. Just so, there’s reason to believe that Islam in our democratic, pluralistic society will be unlike Islam practiced elsewhere.

Homegrown Hallelujahs

In the 19th century, new denominations founded in the United States would prove vital to the cause of religious freedom — both for their minority status and for doctrines that brought them into conflict with the legal system.

In 1879 the Supreme Court ruled that civil laws trumped the Mormon doctrine of polygamy as a religious duty. Nasty lawsuits and countersuits raged for years, threatening the continued existence of the church itself. In the end, American identity proved so important to the Mormon church that it officially revised its religious doctrine to bring it in line with U.S. law.

But there have been times, too, when the law favored the dictates of religious conscience. In 1943 the Supreme Court reversed a ruling that originally upheld a Pennsylvania school board’s expulsion of Jehovah’s Witness schoolchildren who refused to salute the flag, but not before the controversy touched off a firestorm in communities across the country, where Witnesses were beaten, run out of town, or even jailed for sedition.

In recent years, the Mormon Church has cast itself as a defender of traditional marriage laws, leading the opposition to marriage rights for gays and lesbians. And by their very unwillingness to engage in secular politics, Jehovah’s Witnesses have done the nation a great service in helping strengthen the protection of religious practice from government intrusion.

Moving Backward, Moving Forward

While the First Amendment keeps government out of religion, it also protects against the flip side: the injection of religion into government, using the political process to pursue essentially moral goals. To be sure, many of our great social movements — abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights — had religious foundations, beginning with the idea of inalienable, God-given rights. But in trying to reform American society, some movements misstepped, promoting a particular, and even particularly extreme, religious viewpoint under government auspices. Prohibition, for instance, was enacted in 1920 under pressure from a movement led by Protestant sects. Many of the measure’s opponents were also people of faith, who believed that government shouldn’t meddle in moral issues.

We’ll probably never see Prohibition return; but other battles keep flaring up. In 2004 atheists challenged the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion because it contained the words “under God.” (The motto “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency has recently come under fire for the same reason.) The Scopes trial of 1925 challenged a Tennessee law banning instruction in evolutionary theory. Eighty years later, the Kansas Board of Education voted to return creationism — calling it “Intelligent Design” — to the classroom. (The vote was reversed in 2007.)

Today, many Americans are confused and angered about the principle of separation, Haynes says. “For people afraid of losing our identity, it only pushes them to be more hostile to the First Amendment. That’s dangerous because that principle is the core condition for religious freedom that protects the rights of all.”

Proper understanding was just one of the areas addressed at a recent conference on the future of religious freedom in America, cosponsored by the First Amendment Center. There, policy experts identified several concerns for the future, including the consensus that free exercise of religion needs more protection still — especially for minority faiths; ways to prevent future backlash against certain religious groups — especially Muslim Americans in the wake of 9/11; and the need to provide more First Amendment education.

“The challenge is to reaffirm our commitment to religious freedom in a way that allows us to address our differences,” says Haynes. “It will take a real engagement, as individuals and communities, to find a way to protect the rights of people of all faiths and no faith. I think we can do it, but we can’t do it just by hoping for it.”

Or praying for it.

Faith in America The Saturday Evening Post

Religion and politics, faith and government, church and state: They’re strands of our national DNA, and a bit of a paradox — separate yet intertwined. Our freedom to practice any faith (or no faith) without interference from government is a freedom guaranteed by our government. As a nation, we’re far from achieving a perfect balance on church-and-state issues, or even always appreciating how the First Amendment helps maintain that balance. But we’re learning. As writer Jack Feerick shows us in our “Faith in America” feature, just as our Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom has evolved over the years, so we as a people have evolved with it.
I certainly learned a lot from this story, about how different religious groups (or groups who hold to no religion) have challenged and shaped our laws, and how the interpretation of our laws has changed over time. For instance, I always thought that once our Founding Fathers ratified the Bill of Rights, it pretty much laid down the law on separating church and state nationwide. But I was surprised to find out individual states still had established, taxpayer-supported churches well into the next century. Then again, the Framers of the Constitution might be surprised to learn that their efforts would one day make us the most religiously diverse nation in the world, so I guess we’re even.

As we head into a season whose hallmarks are ones of thanksgiving, peace, and goodwill toward others, it’s always inspiring to see examples of people, particularly families, who act according to the dictate of conscience and reach out to those less fortunate than themselves. It’s a theme you’ll find in “Henry’s Christmas,” by author Gary Svee (in our Fiction section), and even more poignantly in our second feature, “Tis the Season for Giving Back.” Reading these true stories of men, women, and children doing good for others, I felt my heart glow — you will, too. It’s more than inspiring, it’s enough to restore your faith in humanity.

Stephen C. George
Editor-in-Chief, The Saturday Evening Post
s.george@saturdayeveningpost.com

Taking It on Faith The Saturday Evening Post