Our Founding Fathers and Politics

I listened to a fascinating interview today, by Krista Tippett, host of the radio program Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. She spoke with Steven Waldman, author of the book Founding Faith, discussing the spiritual lives of the U.S. founding fathers and how that shaped their varied approaches to religious liberty.

You can read the entire transcript here, or download the broadcast here.

I wanted to share a couple short excerpts that I thought were particularly interesting in this election year. I haven't read Steven's book (yet), and I'm not a historian, but based on what I've seen and heard from people my age these days... I think he (and the founding fathers) were exactly right. The reason they emphasized freedom of religion and separation of church and state is that they had seen national religion oppress all who chose to believe something different. Freedom of religion allows everyone and all faiths the freedom to flourish.

"One thing that researching this book did for me is completely change the way I view the Religious Right and the Evangelical approach to politics right now. One of the elements that they [the Religious Right] ought to consider as part of this discussion is their own history. They should look back at the voices of Evangelicals of the past: Isaac Backus and John Leland and other important founding fathers. These are Baptist preachers, who had tremendous influence on Jefferson and Madison and others. I believe these men would say to the Christian Coalition, 'Look, we agree with you about the utter importance of religion. And we agree with you about the absolute necessity of strong moral values, because if we don't have that, God is going to turn his back on us. But we believe that the best way to have a vibrant Christianity is having more separation of church and state.'

"And interestingly one of the reasons that Madison, in later years, gave for criticizing George Washington's speeches was he said, you know, George Washington put too much religion in his speeches. And the problem with that is not that it's going to turn people against George Washington, it's that it's going to turn people against religion. And people are going to look at his invocations of God as being political, locked into partisan dynamics.

"So if you're an opponent of Washington and you're opposing what he said or opposing his speech, you start to become annoyed or antagonistic to the religious rhetoric itself. And what we are seeing now is polling data that says that one of the effects of the dominance of religious conservatives in the last 20 years is that it's soured a generation, not on politics, it's soured them on Christianity. That's the big issue that religious leaders have to grapple with right now.

"James Madison, I really believe, is the one who brought it all together and created the wise philosophy that gave us this idea of religious freedom — what I call the "founding faith." And that is specifically religious liberty geared toward promoting religion by leaving it alone."

In this next excerpt, Krista asks Steven what he wishes the next president could grasp about the balancing act between religion and state, that we didn't learn in our "great American education. He had two answers.

First, he believes that the president should understand...

"that someone's view on separation of church and state does not necessarily describe their personal faith. What I mean by that is that we've come to think that if you support separation of church and state, you must be secular. Or that if you oppose separation of church and state, that means you're more religious."

Second, the president should understand...

"that both sides in the culture wars have gotten parts of this right and parts of it wrong. None of us have standing to claim that the opponents in the culture war are dumb and immoral and don't understand the founding fathers. Because in fact the founding fathers disagreed with each other, and some of them would agree with the more conservative approach right now, some of them would agree with the more liberal approach right now. And if the founders themselves couldn't agree with each other on this, then we should all cut each other some slack and come to understand that these are important issues, these are difficult issues, but they are gray areas by design. And that we should try to reason through them together without demonizing the people on the other side of the table."

At the end of the interview, Steven expresses a view that I share. That it doesn't really matter to God whether we are free to talk about our faith (whichever faith it is) in the public arena or not. There's certainly no harm in mentioning God in a speech, but this has no significant influence on the way Americans actually practice their faith.

What really matters in all of this is how we live our lives. Freedom of religion is about the freedom to practice our faith in our own private lives. It's about each one of us respecting the right of each other to live and believe and practice the tenets of our faith. How well do you love your neighbor as yourself? Do you love your God with your entire being?