The Baptist Standard / By Ken Camp & Daniel Wallace
WACO—Contemporary Americans who cite isolated quotes by the nation’s founders to buttress arguments in favor of a Christian nation or a secular society without religious influences misinterpret history and do injustice to those who framed the U.S. Constitution, law professor and author Michael Meyerson told a Baylor University audience.
“The cherry-pickers have forced people into camps” and created a false division the founders never intended, said Meyerson, author of Endowed by Our Creator: The Birth of Religious Freedom in America.
Meyerson, professor of law and Piper and Marbury Faculty Fellow at the University of Baltimore, delivered the Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State at Baylor University. The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty sponsors the annual lecture series.
While some early American patriots, such as Patrick Henry, advocated state support for religion, the key founders—George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—held a sophisticated view that saw the value of religious commitment by citizens but the danger of sectarian division that would emerge from a wedding of church and state, he noted.
Equilibrium to avoid patisanship
The founders sought to strike equilibrium on the issue and compromised to produce a solution that avoided partisanship.
“They understood the complexity of this issue better than we do,” Meyerson said. “They understood the solution had to be nuanced and had to be complicated—not beyond understanding, but not a simple ‘never or always.’ And that’s what they worked on—that compromise.”
Founders of the nation agreed on a respectful vision that religion is scarred with unbelievable evil, yet also graced with equally unbelievable good, he noted. Their goal was to formulate a standard on the issue of church and state relations that united the nation, rather than creating a mandate that brought division.
“They wanted to separate church and state but not necessarily God and state,” he said. “They were most afraid of sectarianism, but they never intended to eliminate all discussion of God and religion from the public sphere.”
Furthermore, deeply religious Americans—such as Virginia Baptist preacher John Leland—voiced strongest support for separation of church and state as the best way to protect liberty of conscience, Meyerson said.
Leland possessed an “extraordinarily inclusive” vision of religious liberty for all people, including those with whom he disagreed, and an aversion to receiving any benefits from government to advance his own religious views, he said.
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