The Seeds of Secularism or State Irreligion

According to the First Amendment: "Congress shall pass no law respecting the establishment of religion." In the view of our Founding Fathers, state religion posed a threat to a democratic national government. But that's not all the First Amendment says: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." We as citizens can freely choose and exercise our religion, but we as a nation cannot promote a particular religion for all. State promoted religion was banned, if only at the national level (six out of the thirteen states still had a state religion at the time of the founding, and Massachusetts would be officially Congregational until 1833).

Congress did not want to get into the religion business, so they confined it to the private sphere. Our national leaders did not take responsibility for promoting true religion among the citizens. They thought they could run the city of man and leave the city of God to private individuals and churches. In St. Augustine's thinking, the city of man is a distinct sphere from the city of God, but its calling under God is to actively promote the city of God among its people. To the extent that the city of man operates apart from the city of God, it is moving in a secular direction.

It appears that the Founders thought you could keep Christian morals in the public sphere while separating church and state. It now appears, to me at least, that they were wrong. Instead of state promoted religion, we have, in effect, state promoted irreligion.

Perhaps Christians should be glad the founders didn't try to establish a state religion because most of them were Deists. But it turns out that Jefferson thought he was establishing Deism by promoting freedom of religion. He debated whether or not to create a department of religion at the University of Virginia. He finally decided that he would, because he believed that students from all the religious sects would destroy the boundaries between each other and create a non-sectarian religion. He believed that they would all unite over their least common denominator. What was that least common denominator? The death and resurrection of Jesus? No, it was Deism. He said that there was “not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.” Thus the disestablishment of religion would lead the the establishment of Unitarianism among the populace.

He also said: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" ("Notes on Virginia"). As long as religious beliefs don't do physical harm, they are harmless, and we shouldn't care about them. Jefferson skipped the Thanksgiving Day proclamation started by Washington, because he believed that the government shouldn't endorse a religious observance. Unlike Washington, Jefferson did not consider religion one of the "indispensable supports" of "political prosperity," but defended the French atheists Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet. He said that they "are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue then must have had some other foundation than the love of God" (The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, VI, 260).

The seeds of secularism are also seen in article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli:

As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This was received by President Washington, unanimously ratified by Congress, and passed into law by President Adams. Thus the seeds of secularism were already growing in the garden of our founding.