In his latest book, "So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State," the Rev. Forrest Church examines the origins of a culture war still being fought today.
Church has been a minister of All Souls Church in New York City for almost three decades. He earned a doctorate in church history at Harvard University and has written nearly two dozen books. He is the son of Bethine Church of Boise and the late Idaho Sen. Frank Church.
Church spoke in Boise on Wednesday and will be in Garden City Thursday to talk about his book and "how our past can instruct our present and guide us into the future." Church also talked with the Idaho Statesman about the origins of the church-state divide.
What motivated you to write this book at this time?
9/11 — being a New York minister led me to begin to reflect on the essence of Americanism, what the higher patriotism was. ... I've noticed that the political landscape is more and more littered with cartoons about the founding. It's as if the religious right and the secular left are both 100 percent half right in their characterization of the republic.
Explain why you framed the debate over church-state separation as order vs. liberty.
The two themes that are sounded from the beginning to the present are the Puritan ideal of the Christian commonwealth and the enlightenment ideal of sacred liberty. There is a tension between the unum, one nation under God, and pluribus, one nation for all. The real challenge in our history is how to we creatively bring these two streams together, where individual liberty is honored and there remains a strong moral center to our governance.
The U.S. swung from Washington to Adams, the "churchgoing animal" to Jefferson ... was this the result of swings in popular opinion about the separation of church and state?
No. The nation was divided right down the middle as it is today. The division was very, very pronounced.
How many branches of Christianity are we talking about at this time?
The vanguard of the religious left were the Baptists. They were the proponents of church- state separation. The champions of God in government were the Episcopalians, Congregationalists and Unitarians.
Religious insiders, those people who have the power, don't fear the mixture of church and state because they know it will be their church. Religious outsiders rightfully fear church-state union because experience has taught them that they might be persecuted by a church that is not their own.
One of the ironies of this debate is the presence of enslaved Africans, of slavery.
The greatest irony is that it was their own liberty they were championing, not that of their neighbors.
This is a very nuanced story. The champions of ... order had little respect for the religious freedom of others, but had a profound moral platform at the center of their philosophy.
The sacred liberty people, in advocating freedom, did not, at the same time, leave room for moral teaching. They believed the government should not legislate morality.
In a strange strange way, the champions of liberty walked hand in hand with slavery from the founding to the Civil War.
You write that James Madison "sought to protect the state from the church by encouraging sectarian competition." This sounds like a free-market approach to religion.
Madison was the great pluralist. He believed competition of ideas would keep any idea from getting a hammerlock on the nation. He thought if you gave the marketplace of ideas the free-est latitude ... then no single set of ideas would gain control. He was the most wary of the danger that religious corporations, religious wealth and power might pose to American freedoms.
There were eight years of religious truce under James Monroe. How do you explain that?
I could not find a single sermon attacking the president while Monroe was president ... even though he was probably as secular a president as we've ever had. ... He had a deep respect for the moral contribution that religious people made to society.
Church and state were finally, clearly separated. The New England clergy shifted their focus to saving the nation one person at a time, and the churches flourished.
In one of his books, Jimmy Carter wrote that the nation wasn't divided between Democrats and Republicans but between people who go to church and people who don't.
Here's an interesting thing. In the post-election polls three years ago, three-quarters of those people who went to church every Sunday voted Republican, and three-quarters of those who never went to church voted Democratic. We were in danger of having a state religious party. What I sense now is that the divide is closing. ... Whenever we go too far in (one direction) there is a natural correction. Today, the two leading candidates of the Democratic party are people of faith who speak their faith with ease and confidence. The two leading Republicans are not participating in their churches. The evangelical voters are divided.
The fundamentalist right are now the religious insiders, so they don't have a problem with God in government because they know it will be their God.
Bethann Stewart: 377-6393
