John M. Swomley: Religious Liberty and the Secular State: the Constitutional Context. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1987.
Originally published in the New York Tribune, July 22, 1987.
Having led a war for American liberty, George Washington never imagined liberty to be self-maintaining. Like a country, like a homestead, liberty needs defensible borders, limits. In his Farewell Address, he urged his friends and fellow-citizens to cherish not only their liberty but also their government’s unity, “a main pillar in the edifice of real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize.”
To maintain governmental unity, Americans need a degree of national unity. National unity requires several things: patriotism; shared commercial advantages; a Constitution both respected and amendable; the mitigation of extreme factional spirit by public opinion favoring the Union. But in any republic, such popular sentiments, interests, and opinions themselves require a foundation. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” Washington wrote, “religion and morality are indispensable supports… [the] firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” “The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them,” as the rule of law itself requires oaths backed “the sense of religious obligation.”
Washington denies that “morality can be maintained without religion” in the public mind. “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure”—one might say, for example, certain philosophers—”reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Here Washington denies a cardinal assumption of the ‘Enlightenment’: that thoroughgoing secularism may replace religion without harming, and probably by greatly benefiting, the public morality.
While dismissing ‘Enlightenment’ presumptions, Washington appropriates ‘Enlightenment’ language. “Promote… as an object of primary importance, institutions for the diffusion of general knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion be enlightened.” Washington can use this language precisely because he firmly identifies knowledge and enlightened opinion with religion and morality. In his time, churches and church-supported schools educated substantial numbers of Americans.
John Swomley never mentions the Farewell Address, and understandably so. A member of the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union and a retired professor of “social ethics” at a theology school, he speaks for the ‘Enlightenment’ in one of its contemporary forms—the one that mistakes the New Testament for a ‘social gospel,’ the polite forerunner of the violent ‘theology of liberation.’
According to Swomley, the United States Constitution establishes a “secular state,” that is, a state “not hostile to religion” but not religious, either—a state whose authority derives from “civil and natural law,” not “religious doctrine or… divine revelation.” This is only partially correct. The Declaration of Independence refers not only to the laws of nature but to the laws of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths of Creator-endowed natural rights. The Declaration and the Constitution artfully blend Biblical teachings with modern natural right, revelation with reason, all put into practice by statesmen whose prudence recalls the best of classical political thought.
This fundamental error, committed on the book’s first page, forces Swomley into committing numerous absurdities in defense of his doctrinaire civil libertarianism. Tax deductions for parochial schools are unconstitutional, he says, because not all churches sponsor schools—an argument that overlooks a church’s liberty to sponsor or not sponsor schools. “The state has no responsibility to support or aid religion in any way” because this would compel “those who support no religion to support what they do not believe”—a sad condition familiar to every American whose taxes go to support institutions animated by principles he does not believe or, to put it differently, every American. The Constitution cannot “be construed as creating the authority to enact laws benefiting religion financially”—as it cannot, if you presume that tax deductions and credits for contributions to religious institutions somehow deprive governments of monies rightfully belonging to itself, instead of allowing citizens to use their own money the way they want. If Americans consent to laws granting tax exemptions to religious institutions, there is nothing in the Constitution to prevent them from doing so.
Swomley laments, “The original intent that government was not empowered in any way to deal with religious matters”—an intent unknown to Washington or to any other Framer—”has been changed… so that government may aid religion so long as it doesn’t seem to the [Supreme] Court to be a step in the direction of establishing a state church.” But that is exactly what the Framers themselves thought.
Having drunk so deep of confusion and hypocrisy, Swomley cannot but declaim more and more incoherently as his diatribe continues. America has a dangerous “civil religion,” really an “ideology… founded on myths” and seen in such “slogans” as “In God We Trust.” Speaking of myths, Swomley advances a number of them himself: The American founders were narrow-minded defenders of economic interests; Lincoln was a pious fraud; Wilson’s speech on national self-determination and Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” were nothing but “war propaganda.” What is more, Marxism has contributed usefully to “the process by which society has moved away from control by the church.” Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics “are collaborating not only to achieve their mutual interests”—which would be horrifying enough, in Swomley’s view—”but also to assist right-wing political candidates friendly to their religious beliefs.” I suppose we can all thank God that Leftists never do anything like that.
In sum, Swomley can’t decide whether to revere the Constitution or to denigrate its authors. This silly little tract will perish with other ephemera spawned in the flow of Constitutional-Bicentennial publishing. Such decent oblivion remains a true blessing of liberty in the American republic.
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