First Amendment protects, doesn't bar, religion

After my column on the resurgence of atheist books attacking religion, a reader wrote that I should "stop trying to shove (my) beliefs down everyone else's throats." He also noted that he has "a feeling that separation of church and state is something (I) loathe."

Our reader is making a mistake, common at least since the 1960s, that because the First Amendment prohibits state-sponsored churches and protects religions from government interference that there can or should be no discussion of religion in the public square. The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were deeply concerned that state-supported churches and laws requiring certain types of belief in God would give religions the power of the state to enforce particular doctrines. Undergirding the framers' thinking is a strong commitment to a religiously pluralistic society in which all ideas, including religious ideas, compete in the marketplace.

Thomas Jefferson, speaking about the conflict of religious beliefs, argued that "reason and free enquiry are the natural enemies of error." Jefferson believed that religion itself would benefit from open public discourse. Jefferson noted, for example, that "had the Roman government not permitted free enquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced." Alexander Hamilton believed that one of the principal attractions of the United States to prospective immigrants was that instead of "mere religious toleration" there existed under the new Constitution "a perfect equality of religious privileges."

Far from wishing to exclude religion from the public square, the Founders had a deep understanding that not giving government sanction to a particular church would lead to religious diversity which would strengthen the religious impulse of the citizenry. George Washington understood this, and, speaking for many of his colleagues, said that "of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." Paul Johnson in his exhaustive "A History of the American People," (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997) concluded that "America had been founded primarily for religious purposes, and the Great Awakening had been the original dynamic of the continental movement for independence."