Randall Balmer - Solemn Reverence: The Separation of Church and State in American Life

The First Amendment, with its insistence on the separation of church and state, religion and politics, is under attack as never before. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, the initial clause of the First Amendment reads, and those sixteen words have served both government and faith remarkably well for more than two centuries. And yet various interests have sought in recent years to chip away at what Roger Williams, the founder of the Baptist tradition in America, called the wall of separation between church and state.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, for example, Donald Trump promised to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits the use of contributions to tax-exempt organizations, including religious groups, for the support of political candidates. The family of the Trump administrations secretary of education worked for decades to divert taxpayer money into private and religious schools, an enterprise made infinitely easier by the Supreme Courts misbegotten Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue decision in 2020. In defiance of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, the Religious Right generally has supported public prayer in public schools and the posting of religious symbols and sentiments in public places. And, both ironically and tragically, in 1979 the largest Baptist denomination in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention, effectively abandoned its historic role of patrolling the wall of separation between church and state.

I served as an expert witness defending the First Amendments prohibition against religious establishment. The case took place in Alabama after Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, placed a granite monument emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the judicial building in Montgomery. Had Moore allowed other religious representations in that space or had he honored a request from the Alabama Atheists (both members, no doubt!) I would have had no objection. But Moore had insisted on the Ten Commandments only, a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits an establishment of religion.

My testimony then, and one reiterated in this book, is that the First Amendment is part of the genius of American life. It has protected the common good from religious factionalism, and it has ensured the integrity of faith from too close an alliance with the state.

Although unprecedented, the impetus for religious disestablishment as embodied in the First Amendment grew out of disparate impulses dating back at least to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Martin Luther had emphasized the priesthood of believers, each individuals responsibility before God, which led almost inevitably (if not immediately) to the concession that everyone might approach God differently from his or her neighbor. The very splintering of Christianity after the Reformation demanded some sort of accommodation to its diversity. Several of the American colonies had done just that Thomas Jefferson himself cited the examples of New York and Pennsylvania in his