(RNS) — Vice President Kamala Harris is a Baptist whose faith has been influenced by the nonviolent principles of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the social justice movement for women’s rights. In the weeks since she became the Democrats’ choice for president, her views have been attacked by Christians on the right who claim to want Christian leaders to lead the United States — as long as it’s not Harris’ brand of Christianity.
When the right starts talking about “Christians,” we must always respond by asking, “Which Christians?”
With Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths present before the founding, there has never been a unified religious culture in the United States. Nor has there been a monolithic Christianity. Rather, more than 200 Christian sects, with sometimes conflicting beliefs, might all be considered “minority” religions.
The founders recognized this, and it was the multiplicity of Christianity that inspired the separation of church and state. As James Madison, who wrote the First Amendment, sagely warned: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”
All the founders, in fact, seemed to foresee the power grab that today’s conservatives are attempting in equating the term “Christian” with any one set of beliefs.
President George Washington, an Episcopalian, attended Quaker, German Reformed and Roman Catholic services and wrote to Baptists, Methodists and Jews to quell their concerns about religious oppression. His support for the separation of church and state was based on the reality that, in his words, “Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.” The United States has experienced a civil war, but no religious ones, because of the separation of church and state.
Washington and the founders saw too how Christian sects established oppressive fiefdoms that imposed the same tyranny the founders had come to America to escape. President William Howard Taft once made the point that the Puritans “came to this country to establish freedom of their religion, and not the freedom of anybody else’s religion.”
The Puritans and Congregationalists in Massachusetts persecuted the Baptists and Quakers with beatings, fines, whippings, imprisonment, mutilation and murder for practicing a “wrong” kind of baptism and other “false” beliefs. Many were expelled, and all were taxed to support Massachusetts’ official church.
Maryland was founded as a safe haven for Catholics, but when Episcopalians came to power they established their sect as the state’s official church, to which public officeholders were required to pledge an oath and all taxpayers contributed. Papists were regularly persecuted.
It is no overstatement to say that separation of church and state is the most original constitutional principle the United States has introduced to the world. In Europe the religious will to power was accepted as a feature of governance. British monarchs executed Protestant or Catholic dissenters, depending on who was in power. Inquisitions, hardly restricted to Catholics or to Spain, were common tools of religious oppression. It took the diversity of religious believers here for the founders to see a new order, one where no religion controls the government.
The evolution of this brilliant innovation can be traced at least as far back as Anne Hutchinson, who was convicted in Massachusetts in 1637 for heresy and sedition for her theological critique of Puritan pastors. After being excommunicated, Hutchinson and her family joined Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who had also been ejected from Massachusetts. In a 1644 pamphlet, he had called for a “hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernesse of the world.”
The Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, said in 1675 that when it comes to religion, “force makes hypocrites; ’tis persuasion only that makes converts,” and in 1680, “Religion and Policy … are two distinct things, have two different ends, and may be fully prosecuted without respect one to the other.” Pennsylvania would become the most religiously diverse colony.
Yet for all the advocacy for religious tolerance, in 1773, the New England Baptist preacher Isaac Backus felt moved to issue “An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Against the Oppressions of the Present Day.” Railing against religious persecution being waged against Baptists, he painstakingly laid out why the civil authority must not dictate anyone’s faith, while the faithful must respect civil authority.
Twelve years later, Madison, in his landmark argument to the Virginia Legislature, “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” argued that faith must not be mandated by government, because it is a “fundamental and undeniable truth that religion … can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”
Virginia’s bill to tax all citizens for Christian education, he concluded, “degrades from the equal rank of citizens all those whose opinions in religion do not bend to those of the legislative authority. Distant as it may be, in its present form, from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other is the last in the career of intolerance.”
Madison’s argument applies to Christian supremacists of today: “If religion be not within the cognizance of civil government, how can its legal establishment be necessary to civil government?” A just government, he wrote, “will be best supported by protecting every citizen in the enjoyment of his religion with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property; by neither invading the equal rights of any sect, nor suffering any sect to invade those of another.”
Christian nationalists, née supremacists, claim the United States once had a unitary Christian polity to sell their crass historical revisionism. They have taken to undercutting the Constitution itself by flaunting John Adams’ statement that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” Yet as President Adams, writing to recommend that the Senate ratify the Treaty of Tripoli, declared, the U.S. government is “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
Yet 30% of Americans have fallen for the Christian supremacists’ word games, with more than half of Republicans embracing the Christian nationalist movement.
A key tactic has been to refer to anyone opposed to their Christian beliefs as “secular.” In October 2022, Federalist Society don Leonard Leo, who helped engineer the current conservative Supreme Court, told an audience in Washington, “Catholicism faces vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots.” The Becket Fund, a legal group that focuses on religious liberty cases, sees itself as a bulwark against “secular” culture.
The reality is that millions of opponents to the nefarious Christian nationalist movement are religious believers. Secularism is a political worldview that holds that no one religion should be in control of the government, and as the history above shows, secularists can be legitimately religious. But for the religious right, true religion and secularism are opposites, and they are sacred believers battling infidels. Their dominance in arguments about religious liberty, which not long ago meant defending small sects’ practices against the majority, pushes other believers into the background.
Nowhere has this dynamic been more effective than in the abortion debate. Millions of American Christians are pro-choice people of faith. More than half of the nation’s 31.6 million Black Protestants believe abortion should be legal. Six in 10 U.S. Catholics back abortion rights. In the Southern Baptist Convention, seen as a monolith against abortion, 30% believe abortion should be legal. A high percentage of white mainline Protestants, from Presbyterians to Episcopalians, also support abortion, not to mention Jews, Muslims and Hindus, among others.
The U.S. has always been a religiously diverse country, and some believers have always grasped for political power to impose their faith on others. Today’s religious right, which has co-opted the Republican Party, would like us to believe they are restoring a bright and shining past of religious consensus. In fact, they are emulating those who sought to establish their own sect of Christianity despite their ugly record.
(Marci A. Hamilton is a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
