By Gary Galles
Professor of Economics
The Supreme Court has announced it will accept the appeal of Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, and decide whether “one nation, under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance makes it an unconstitutional intrusion on the separation of church and state.
This adds to a year of unusual foment in church-state relations, ranging from whether the Ten Commandments can be displayed in state courthouses to President Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative, which would provide funding to grassroots leaders of select faith-based organizations. The timing is appropriate, given that 2003 marks the 400th birthday of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who first and most forcefully argued for the separation of church and state in America.
Roger Williams’ then “heretical beliefs” and “dangerous opinions” that civil authorities had no power over matters of conscience but that all religious sects had the right to equal protection from persecution under the laws, got him banished from Salem, Mass. That led him to establish Providence in 1636, which became America’s democratic refuge for those persecuted for their religious beliefs.
Williams wrote, “Enforced uniformity confounds civil and religious liberty and denies the principles of Christianity and civility. That cannot be a true religion which needs carnal weapons to uphold it. No man should be required to worship or maintain worship against their will.”
Later, the 1663 royal charter for the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations granted absolute liberty of conscience, stating that no one could be oppressed “for any difference of opinion in matters of religion.” And that charter was put into practice. Williams founded First Baptist Church in Providence, and Rhode Island was the site of the first Jewish synagogue in America, as well as a safe haven for dissenters and Quakers who were persecuted in other colonies.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Williams’ path-breaking stand to America. At a time of government sponsorship of state churches with mandatory tax support, historian Cyclone Covey said, “Roger Williams…was the first American to advocate and activate complete freedom of conscience, dissociation of church and state, and genuine political democracy … Providence … formed the first genuine democracy, as well as the first church-divorced and conscience-free community in modern history … the freedom of all religion, along with non-religion, from the state.”
Under Williams, Rhode Island, along with Connecticut, enjoyed greater freedom from government intrusion than any other American colony.
Then Rhode Island Senator William Sprague stated in 1872, ‘Roger Williams … successfully vindicated the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, and effected a moral and political revolution in all governments of the civilized world.”
Even Thomas Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, in which he said: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people, which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State,” echoed Roger Williams.
In 1644, in “Queries of Highest Consideration,” an argument for the complete separation of church and state, he wrote “When they have opened a gap in the…wall of separation between the Garden of the Church and the wilderness of the world, God has ever made his Church a wilderness.”
Some take the current debate over church-state issues to indicate that the United States is still fighting the battle Roger Williams began four centuries ago. But in fact, it means he has already won. The First Amendment to the Constitution, as well as Article VI’s then heated debate for a religious test as a qualification for office, enshrined Williams’ view in the highest law of our land.
Equally important, despite heated disputes, what we are debating today is orders of magnitude removed from an establishment of a state religion.
Williams’ legacy for America is safe. We maintain our freedom to worship as our conscience leads us, and we are near no slippery slope toward a state religion. Nothing we are fighting over today, even when conducted at a very high volume, provides any prospect of carrying us back to what he spearheaded the fight against.
Rather than primarily focusing on our current disagreements, we should celebrate Williams’ 400th birthday by recalling how much we have benefited from the victory he has already won.
November 13, 2003