-
"and though he hoped to see Christians
[in office], yet by the Constitution, a papist, or an infidel was as eligible
as they" – concerns of Amos Singletary, state delegate in Massachusetts
-
"...a papist, a Mohomatan [sic], a deist,
yea an atheist at the helm of government" – a fear expressed in New Hampshire
-
"the exclusion of religious tests" was
"dangerous and impolitic" and "pagans, deists, and Mahometans [sic] might
obtain offices among us." Without a religious test, "to whom will they
[officeholders] swear support – the ancient pagan gods of Jupiter, Juno,
Minerva, or Pluto?" – Henry Abbot, state delegate in North Carolina
-
Proposed Constitution opens door to "Jews
and pagans of every kind" – Rev. David Caldwell, Presbyterian minister,
state delegate in North Carolina.
-
Recoiling "at the idea that Roman Catholics,
Papists, and Pagans might be introduced into office, and that Popery and
the Inquisition may be established in America" – Maj. Thomas Lusk, state
delegate in Massachusetts.
-
A North Carolina state convention delegate
waved a pamphlet suggesting that the Pope of Rome might be elected President,
and that in "the course of four or five hundred years.... Papists may occupy
that [presidential] chair."
-
"as there will be no religious test [Quakers]
will have weight, in proportion to their numbers, in the great scale of
continental government" – writer in the City Gazette, Charleston,
South Carolina, January 3, 1788.
-
Anticonstitutional article in the New York
Daily Advertiser, January 1788, reprinted within days in papers in Connecticut,
New Hampshire, and Massachusetts: No religious test? Then federal offices
will have "1st. Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same
time deprive us of the means of defence – 2dly. Mahometans, who ridicule
the doctrine of the Trinity – 3dly. Deists, abominable wretches – 4thly.
Negroes, the seed of Cain – 5thly. Beggars, who when set on horseback will
ride to the devil – 6thly. Jews etc. etc." and because the President will
have command of all militias, then "should he thereafter be a Jew, our
dear posterity may be ordered to rebuild Jerusalem."
-
A writer calling himself "Philadelphiensis"
(November 1787) complained about the framers' "silence" and "indifference
toward religion."
-
A warning was given of "the pernicious
effects" of the Constitution's "general disregard of religion," its "cold
indifference towards religion" – An anonymous writer, Virginia Independent
Chronicle, October 1787.
-
The "Constitution is de[i]stical in principle,
and in all probability the composers had no thought of God in all their
consultations" – Thomas Wilson, Virginia.
-
In a pamphlet called "The Government
of Nature Delineated or An Exact Picture of the New Federal Constitution"
one pamphleteer "Aristocrotis" of Carlisle, Pennsylvania attacked the supposedly
naturalistic Constitution: "...there has never been a nation in the world
whose government was not circumscribed by religion." The framers were trying
to form "a government based upon nature." To the drafters of the Constitution,
"[what] is the world to the federal government but as the drop of a bucket,
or the small dust of the balance! What the world could not accomplish from
the commencement of time till now, they easily performed in a few moments
by declaring that 'no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification
to any office, or public trust under the United States.'" Such however
"is laying the ax to the root of the tree; whereas other nations only lopped
off a few noxious branches." The "new Constitution, distains...belief of
a deity, the immortality of the soul, or the resurrection of the body,
a day of judgement, or a future state of rewards and punishments" because
of the framers' deism. "If some religion must be had the religion of nature
[Deism] will certainly be preferred by a government founded upon the law
of nature. One great argument in favor of this religion, is that most member
of the grand [Constitutional] convention are great admirers of it [Deism];
and they certainly are the best models to form our religious as well as
our civil belief on."
-
"A Friend of the Rights of the People"
from New Hampshire attacked "the discarding of all religious tests." "Will
this be good policy to discard all religion?" The proposed Constitution
notwithstanding, "it is acknowledged by all that civil government can't
well be supported without the assistance of religion." No one "is fit to
be a ruler of protestants, without he can honestly profess to be of the
protestant religion."
-
One delegate in the New Hampshire state
ratification convention went so far as to argue that under the Constitution,
"congress might deprive the people of the use of the holy scriptures."
-
Another warned that Americans under the
Constitution might be subject to divine judgment as Samuel the prophet
said to Saul, "because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath
also rejected thee" – An Anti-Federalist writing in a Boston newspaper,
January 10, 1788.
-
"without the presence of Christian piety
and morals the best Republican Constitution can never save us from slavery
and ruin" – Charles Turner, Massachusetts Anti-Federalist.
-
"David" in the Massachusetts Gazette, March
7, 1788, praised Massachusetts' "religious test, which requires all public
officers to be of some Christian, protestant persuasion" in contrast to
the federal Constitution's "public inattention" and "leaving religion to
shift wholly for itself." "...it is more difficult to build an elegant
house without tools to work with, than it is to establish a durable government
without the publick protection of religion."
-
Letter to the Virginia ratifying convention
(June 1788) called for Christian academies to be set up "at every proper
place throughout the United States" where youth could be taught "the principles
of the Christian religion without regard to any sect, but pure and unadulterated
as left by its divine author and his apostle." If established, "we would
have fewer law suits, less backbiting, slander, and mean observations,
more industry, justice and real happiness than at present."
-
A motion to amend the Preamble to the Constitution
by William Williams, a state delegate in Connecticut: "We the people of
the United States in a firm belief of the being and perfection of the one
living and true God, the creator and supreme Governor of the World, in
His universal providence and the authority of His laws: That He will requireof
all moral agents an account of their conduct, that all rightful powers
among men are ordained of, and mediately derived from God, therefore in
a dependence on His blessing and acknowledgment of His efficient protection
in establishing our Independence, whereby it is become necessary to agree
upon and settle a Constitution of federal government for ourselves, and
in order to form a more perfect union, etc., as it is expressed in the
present introduction, do ordain, etc." The Connecticut state convention
rejected the motion (1788).
-
A motion was proposed in the Virginia state
convention to amend ARTICLE VI itself: "no other religious
test shall ever be required than a belief in the one true God, who is the
rewarder of the good, and the punisher of the evil." Rejected.
|
-
In February 1788, James Madison twice defended
the 'no religious test' clause of ARTICLE VI in the
Federalist
Nos. 51, 56 "as one of the glories of the new Constitution" (Kramnick
& Moore, 1997). "The door of the Federal Government, is open
to merit of every description, whether native or adoptive, whether old
or young, and without regard to poverty or wealth, or to any profession
of religious faith."
-
Tenche Coxe, wealthy Philadelphian merchant,
former member of the Continental Congress, October 1787: "No religious
test is ever to be required" of public officers in America, unlike Spain,
Italy, and Portugal which barred Protestants, or "in England, every Presbyterian,
and other person not of their established church, is incapable of holding
an office." The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia (1787) had "the
honor of proposing the first public act, by which any nation" allowed public
service to "any wise or good citizen." "Danger from ecclesiastical tyranny,
that long standing and still remaining curse of the people can be feared
by no man in the United States" and compared the future US with Holland
"an asylum of religious liberty."
-
James Iredell, North Carolina, future US
Supreme Court associate justice: The Constitution's ban on religious tests
(a form of "descrimination") embodies the "principle of religious freedom"
so that "representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and
Mahometans" may be chosen by the citizenry. "[I]s it possible to exclude
any set of men"? Such exclusion lays "the foundation on which persecution
has been raised in every part of the world."
-
Virginia Baptist leader John Leland praised
ARTICLE VI of the Constitution "as consistent with
his conviction that the integrity of religious faith is best served by
no government involvement" (Ibid., p39).
-
Samuel Spencer, North Carolina called for
religion to stand independent "without any connection with temporal authority."
-
Rev. Samuel Langdon, New Hampshire state
delegate: The 'no religious test' clause was "one of the great ornaments
of the Constitution" and proclaimed that he "took a general view of religion
as unconnected with and detached from the civil power – that [as] it was
an obligation between God and his creatures, the civil authority could
not interfere without infringing upon the rights of conscience."
-
Rev. Daniel Shute, Congregational minister,
state delegate in Massachusetts: "Who should be excluded from national
trusts? What ever bigotry may suggest, the dictates of candor and equity,
I conceive, will be, none" even "those who have no other guide, in the
way of virtue and heaven, than the dictates of natural religion [i.e.,
Deism]."
-
Rev. Isaac Backus, distinguished Baptist,
Massachusetts state delegate: "Nothing is more evident, both in reason
and The Holy Scriptures, than that religion is ever a matter between God
and individuals; and, therefore, no man or men can impose any religious
test without invading the essential prerogatives of our Lord Jesus Christ....
And let the history of all nations be searched... and it will appear that
the imposing of religious tests had been the greatest engine of tyranny
in the world."
-
One "Elihu" wrote an avowedly Deist defense
of the Constitution in Massachusetts and Connecticut newspapers, February
1788 of the Constitution as "a rational document for a wise people and
an enlightened age" (Kramnick & Moore, 1997).
The old times had passed away "when nations could be kept in awe with stories
of God's sitting with legislators and dictating laws" Now no religious
or civil authorities could use religion "to establish their own power on
the credulity of the people, shackling their uninformed minds with incredible
tales." "[T]he light of philosophy has arisen... miracles have ceased,
oracles are silenced, monkish darkness is dissipated.... Mankind are no
longer to be delude with fable." Those assembled at the Constitutional
Convention had refused "to dazzle even the superstitious, by a hint of
grace or ghostly knowledge. They come to us in the plain language of common
sense, and propose to our understanding a system of government, as the
invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, not
even a god appears in a dream to propose any part of it."
-
William Van Murray, Esq., in a 1787
essay in the American Museum, wrote that America "will be the great philosophical
theater of the world," because the Constitution recognizes that "Christians
are not the only people there." Furthermore, religious tests are "A VIOLATION
of THE LAW OF NATURE." Governments are established according to the "laws
of nature. These are unacquainted with the distinctions of religious opinion;
and of the terms Christian, Mohamentan, Jew or Gentile."
-
John Adams, later the second President
of the United States, wrote in 1786 that "the United States of America"
is "the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of
nature." Those who established the governments of the United States had
not "had interviews with the gods [n]or were in any degree under the inspiration
of Heaven." Government is "contrived merely by the use of reason and the
senses." "Neither the people nor their conventions, committees, or subcommittees
considered legislation in any other light than as ordinary arts and sciences,
only more important.... The people were universally too enlightened to
be imposed on by artifice.... [G]overnments thus founded on the natural
authority of the people alone without a pretense of miracle or mystery,
and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter
of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind."
-
"A Landholder" (actually Oliver Ellsworth,
formerly a delegate to the Continental Convention, later in the 1st US
Congress, and also Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court) in the Connecticut
Courant, December 17, 1787 (and reprinted in neighboring states) wrote:
"To come to the true principle. . . . The business of civil government
is to protect the citizens in his rights. . . . civil government has no
business to meddle with the private opinions of the people. . . . I am
accountable not to man, but to God, for the religious opinions that I embrace.
. . . A test law is . . . the offspring of error and the spirit of persecution.
Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the
private opinions of men."
|
