Founding Fathers' religious intent refereed

The battle over the religious pedigrees of the Founding Fathers is usually an "are too, are not" kind of schoolyard fight. Over here, waving the Bible, we have the Christian right, insisting that George Washington et al. wanted a Christian-based government. Over there, waving the First Amendment, are those who insist the Founding Fathers wanted, above all, to keep church and state separate.

Now, into the fray like a kindly recess monitor comes Forrest Church and his book, "So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State." Church (the man, not the institution) is a religious historian and a minister of All Souls Church in Manhattan. He was in Salt Lake City earlier this week to speak at First Unitarian Church.

Church's conclusion: The religious right and secularists "are each 100 percent half right" about the Founding Fathers. In other words, some of the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution and ran the fledgling country were practicing Christians, and some of those Christians wanted a state religion, or at least a government founded on religion. Others wanted to make sure government and religion were two distinct entities, neither influencing the other. And the two sides duked it out from day one.

According to a recent Beliefnet.com poll, 55 percent of Americans believe that the Constitution created a Christian nation, when in fact the only mention of God in the text was "the Year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven," Church notes. In "So Help Me God," he wanted to dispel that notion of the Constitution's Christian roots but also wanted to dispel "the myth among secular humanists that there was no religious momentum at the time of the founding."

His goal, he said in an interview this week, was "a book of history, not a polemic."

The tension between Christians and secularists in the years between George Washington's inaugural and the aftermath of the War of 1812 was fierce, he writes; the first great culture war in American political history, "a vigorous, sometimes savage, yet nearly forgotten 30-year conflict to redeem the nation's soul." The vitriol expressed by both sides was enough to make a modern-day talk-show host blush, he says.

And the roles of the players were not what you might suspect.

The Unitarians, Congregationalists and Episcopalians — who tend to be more liberal today — were champions of a Christian Commonwealth ideal at the end of the 18th century. The Baptists were the ones who championed the separation of church and state. In fact, it was the Baptists' passion for freedom of conscience, Church writes, that led directly to the First Amendment's "establishment clause."