Establishment and Religious Tests

It's now old news, but Mitt Romney's peculiar speech about his religious orientation and the American constitution deserves analytical attention. (View the speech here on Youtube.) Rhetorically, Romney achieved brilliance several times. For instance, Romney pointed out the Founders' insistence on religious freedom for the sake of religion and inverted it immediately, suggesting that religion cannot survive without freedom means that freedom cannot survive without religion. Whatever one thinks of this proposition, one must admire the ease with which it rolled off Romney's tongue.

Many before me have commented on Mitt Romney's speech and its relationship historically to John F. Kennedy's speech on the same subject, given at the same comparative time in their candidacies. Gary Wills wrote an incisive essay on it for the New York Review of Books. I do not wish to comment again on the rather tired, albeit imporant, issue of religion in modern politics. Nor do I want to comment on Romney's generic religious comments ("I believe in Jesus Christ"; "my religion is the religion of our fathers"; etc.). These are well-worn subjects that have received enough attention from intellects more formidable than my own.

Instead, I want to address the question of religious pluralism, secularism, and its place in constitutional history. Romney mentioned more than once that the Founders forbade religious tests (Article VI, if anyone cares to look) but he suggested in virtually the same breath that the Founders did not want to remove religion from public life. God should be on our currency, said Romney, in our pledge of allegiance, and nativity scenes in the public square during Christmas season. Those who argue otherwise (one would assume this includes Supreme Court justices), opined Romney, are intent on establishing the "religion" of secularism in America, and are wrong.

There is evidence aplenty of religion and its place in both the legal and constitutional traditions of America. But understanding this history requires something more than collecting armfuls of quotes about it from the eighteenth century and heaping them upon people of the twenty-first century. To understand what the Founders achieved when they wrote a Constitution that does not mention God once (much criticized at the time), when the only mention of religion was that no religious test could be required for officeholding, and an immediate amendment to that Constitution forbade the congressional establishment of an official religion, we must understand the larger historical context.

It is a long and complicated history. One must consider the advent of religious pluralism brought on by the protestant revolt in the sixteenth century, the wars of religion in Europe ended by the Treaty of Westphalia, and the motivations for the religious radicals (Pilgrims and Puritans) who attempted to establish a godly commonwealth--a shining city upon the hill--in North America. These people, our forebears no doubt, banished heretics, executed witches, and attempted to limit the suffrage to people of their church only. Religious radicalism and intolerance is part of their heritage. But so too must we understand the equally radical experiment of Roger Williams, who established the first official colony that disestablished the church and allowed freedom of conscience. (Click here for a link to the colonial charter.) Rhode Island was not unique, though. Pennsylvania would follow in the tradition of religious freedom and create one of the wealthiest shelters for religious refugees in the world.

And the Atlantic world to which the American colonies belonged was not one of increasing tolerance in the eighteenth century. The European Enlightenment occurred against the backdrop of political tyranny and religious persecution. Tolerance was on the wane, and even England maintained religious tests for officeholding. It was in this climate that the Founders wrote the Constitution and the people of the states debated it.

Romney acknowledged this history in his speech. Remarkably, he connected Christianity to a kind of modern cosmopolitanism. He emphasized the brotherhood of all humankind, a commitment to human dignity, and respect for others' belief as the central tenets of all religion. These are essentially humanist values, regardless of what Romney thinks of secularists. But the real question raised by his speech is what precisely we would like the relationship of church and state to be in this country. Romney is essentially pitching for more outward shows of piety by our public leaders. He is also positing that political liberty requires religion for its sustenance and that secularism is not a belief system equal to those of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Mormonism.

Whatever one makes of this last proposition, it is worth thinking the question through historically. Religious radicalism is infused in our past, as is a contradictory commitment to pluralism and (contra Romney) secularism. Understanding the moments of conflict between these different visions in our past might clue us into understanding precisely what problems religion and politics pose in our country and abroad. It might even give us the needed perspective to address these same problems.