March 3, 2024

Exodus 20:1-17

This morning, I will begin with a bit of history.

On October 7, 1801, the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut sent a letter to then President Thomas Jefferson. Baptists in early America had been the subject of religious difficulties and frequent persecution. Other religious groups were more integrated into society and were often directly supported by the government. Those churches received money; their minister’s salaries were paid using tax dollars. Not the Baptists. So, the Baptists, perhaps sensing a kindred spirit in Mr. Jefferson, sought to convey their concerns.

The Danbury authors wrote: “Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty: that Religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals, that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions, [and] that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor.”

Jefferson wrote back.

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature would “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Jefferson was invoking the then recent language of the First Amendment to the United States’ Constitution. The government was to make no laws regarding the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. A few very words charged with great meaning and enduring importance.

I mention this on a Sunday when we heard the Ten Commandments. This is a related subject because one recurrent flashpoint in has been an effort to get displays of the Ten Commandments installed at public buildings, like courthouses and statehouses. Some object because of a desire to maintain a distinction between matters of church and state. Sometimes that sensibility is to keep religion from interfering with questions of state. But another long-standing concern is that the state will intrude upon questions of religion. That is arguably why the rule was set down in the first place. And that worry about what the state will do with religion, and to religion, remains.

This reminds me of the debate Jesus had with some of his detractors. They were trying to trick him into saying something that would have caused trouble. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, to Caesar?

Why would that have caused trouble? Paying taxes to the empire was not a popular activity, though I am guessing paying taxes to anyone was and is far down the list of our favorite things to do. The trap for Jesus was either to declare those taxes unlawful, an open act of rebellion, or to declare those taxes legal, an implicit act of collaboration. Jesus called the men hypocrites, as they were asking a question they would dared not answer.

Looking at a Roman coin, with the image of the emperor stamped on to it, Jesus said to those gathered, “Render…unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Keep it simple, keep it separate. Now you might argue that Jesus had dodged another unspoken question, whether was Caesar owed anything? But a line was drawn, a line between the social and the religious.

The Baptists are an interesting example. Over a span of centuries, Baptists have supported separation between church and state because they were often excluded from being considered the church by the state. One group or another usually rose to the top of the religious heap, in Europe or the United States. And Baptists typically were at the bottom, in the minority, and therefore they generally sought to encourage religious freedom and to avoid state supported churches, also called state established churches. First Amendment protection of religion therefore was of great interest to the Baptists. Less so now that they have become more in the majority.

Jefferson coined the phrase about having a wall of separation between church and state. Funny thing about walls, however. They are intended to mark a border between one place and another. But other than drawing that line, what will the walls keep out, what will the walls keep in? How high is the wall? How thick? How well-guarded? Should there even be a wall?

For example, Jefferson noted in his letter that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions. And that sounds good. It sounds good that opinions are to be protected. But again, that may depend upon where you build the wall.

Religious opinions should be protected according to Jefferson, but what about religious actions, religious behaviors? An opinion could be I believe that violence is never the answer to life’s problems and that killing another human being is always a sin: a desire for pacifism. But then what if I am required by society to serve in the military, to go to war, and perhaps even to kill someone in defense of the nation? My opinion is mine alone, but what does that matter if different actions are required by law, actions squarely against my sincerely held beliefs? What if I am not allowed to object, even as a matter of conscience?

And it is not so simple to say that Jefferson did not intend it that way. He ended his letter to the Danbury Baptists with this line: “I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

No natural right in opposition to social duties–for Jefferson, social duties could not be in opposition to natural rights. And social duties are created and imposed by duly elected governments.

Many state constitutions in the time of Jefferson had religious freedom clauses, like the First Amendment, but they also contained exceptions to those freedoms. For example, the early New York State Constitution contained a provision quite similar to the First Amendment, but a proviso was added: “liberty of conscience hereby secured shall not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness, or justify practices inconsistent with the peace or safety of this state.”

 

Peace and safety–no disruptions, no violence, no troubles. Acts of licentiousness are harder to pin down. Black’s Law Dictionary defines licentiousness as “[t]he indulgence of the arbitrary will of the individual, without regard to ethics or law, or respect for the rights of others.”

The arbitrary will of the individual, something like an opinion. What does liberty of conscience mean if it must be limited in keeping with the ethics, the laws, and the rights of others? Whose ethics, which laws, and how many of the rights of others? Is there anything left to the right to religious freedom when it is hemmed in by such exceptions? What good is it to be able to hold opinions when those opinions cannot be lived in the world?

Jefferson once wrote, “[I]t 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. … Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” What would happen, however, if a firmly held religious belief clashed with some social duty, a rationally determined expectation, something of great importance to society?

For example, what if there was a court case and someone was called to testify on a particular day? And that particular day happened to be Saturday? Saturdays had no significance as a day off, there being no notion of a weekend in early America. Courts were open for business.

More specifically, what if a Jewish witness were to be called to testify on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. What should happen? In crisp Jeffersonian logic, the witness would be required to testify and could be subject to punishment if he did otherwise. In this way, religious observances could not and should not, per Jefferson, overrule social duties within a democratic society.

In case you were wondering, this was not a hypothetical situation. It was an actual court case in Pennsylvania in 1793, Stansbury v. Marks. The Jewish witness was fined for failure to testify on Saturday. Courts, by the way, were not open on Sundays.

On occasion I will be speaking to people and they will lament the fact that the Bible is no longer recited in public schools. The concern is that children now do not have exposure to the Bible, even as a cultural touchstone. As the Bible has significantly influenced American culture and the English language, students should be taught about the Bible, or so that is the argument.

The Bible, particularly in its King James Version, is a cornerstone of the English language. It is woven throughout English literature, European history, and world music. The Bible would therefore be crucial to many aspects of learning in the United States.

But there is a problem: we decided as a nation that we were not going to choose one religion over the other. We were not going to establish one national religion and conversely the national government was not going to interfere with the free exercise of anyone’s religion. So how then could we teach the Bible, and only the Bible, in publicly funded schools?

Perhaps then we should teach more, rather than teach less. I have a shelf full of sacred texts in my office. The Qu’ran, the Mahabharata, the Tao Te Ching, the Analects of Confucius, the Book of Mormon: many books from many religions could be taught so as not to lift one religion over any other.

Now, it might be suggested that the Mahabharata of Hinduism, for example, is not a cultural resource broadly common to American culture. Quite true–but if you want to have one book versus another, how exactly do you choose when we as a nation agreed not to choose?

But, wasn’t the United States founded as a Christian nation? And weren’t the vast majority of Americans indeed Christians at the time the Constitution was written and adopted? I would generally agree that this was true, with a few points of explanation. The nation was founded by people who were generally Christians, Christians who had endured decades of religious persecution, who had survived centuries of openly religious warfare.

The Thirty Year War had ended a century before the American Revolution. It was a war between competing Protestant and Catholic powers that led to the deaths of millions of people in Europe, roughly 10 percent of the population of the continent. This war inspired the Enlightenment Period, a move away from religious dispute into a new era guided by reason and free enquiry–exactly what Jefferson was seeking.

When you look back at the discussions leading up to the formal adoption of parts of the First Amendment dealing with religion, it is a difficult study. Why? Because there were no discussions. When presented with language prohibiting a national religion and forbidding the government from interfering with the exercise of religion, there was no debate. The Founding Fathers when drafting the Constitution were in complete agreement about very few matters. But it seems by the lack of discussion that they at least agreed that they did not want to start off as a nation fighting about religion.

And to say that the United States was founded as a Christian nation at that time in history is a bit like saying the United States was founded as a nation of people who ate food and breathed air. There were few religions evident in the United States other than European varieties of Christianity. There were approximately 2,000 Jews in the whole United States at the time of the Revolutionary War, out of a population of 2.5 million, less that one tenth of one percent.

And, to be accurate, there may actually have been hundreds or even thousands of Muslims in the United States in 1776. But this would not have been a major consideration for the Founding Fathers, I am guessing, because those hundreds or thousands of Muslims would have been enslaved West African. Their views on religion most likely were not taken into account.

The First Amendment seems to have been designed to keep everyone from arguing about religion at least on the national level. The states could do what they wanted, but the federal government was to steer clear. So, in Pennsylvania, a Jewish man could be forced to testify on the Sabbath. In Massachusetts, taxpayers could be and were forced to pay the salaries of Congregational ministers, not Baptist ministers. And Catholics could be required to pay for public schools that taught America’s brand of generic Protestantism.

Religious freedom comes in two forms, freedom to and freedom from. I am free to hold my own religious opinions and to act accordingly. And I should be free from being forced to follow religious opinions to which I do not ascribe or having the government support any one religion over any other. Freedom to and freedom from.

It is easy to string together a sentence of high-sounding words about rights. But it becomes far more difficult to balance running a government against not running over the sensibilities of hundreds of diverse religions. Even neutral sounding rules can lead to conflict. There are laws against the use of various drugs and there are religions that use those very drugs in religious services: Native Americans and peyote mushrooms, Jamaican Rastafarians and marijuana.

There are boring laws about land use and zoning which often collide with religious requirements for building tall steeples, running noisy soup kitchens, and sponsoring programs for the homeless and recovering addicts in suburban bedroom communities. How does the government stay out of religion when religion keeps popping up where government tends to hang out?

And then there is the question of religion staying out of government. Do we place stone tablets with the Ten Commandments on the steps of the courthouse? So far that seems to be mostly no. Can we start public meetings in prayer? That has recently come down as yes.

Can citizens be required by law to say the Pledge of Allegiance? To salute the American flag? By long standing tradition, no and no. The Supreme Court has long held that it would be illegal to require anyone to make that pledge or to salute the flag. Jehovah’s Witnesses filed the lawsuit in question because their religion forbids them from makes oaths or pledges, except to God, or bowing down to any worldly symbol, including saluting the flag. That was in the 1940s, during the Second World War.

What should we do? What should be our guidelines, our marching orders for protecting religious liberty, supporting civic symbols and institutions, and keeping a religiously neutral government running? To be perfectly honest with you, I have no idea. I have taught an entire course on this subject at a local law school and I could not with any great confidence predict how to navigate these choppy waters to avoid completely any and all controversy.

I do, however, think I know where to start. And it may sound odd, so bear with me. We need to get into the practice of counting to ten. Take a deep breath when we are presented with some difficulty, some dispute, some social or political affront. Take a deep breath and count to ten. Why am I suggesting grade school anger management techniques in response to complex social problems? Because we as a nation are angry. Angry about religion. Angry about politics.

We often seem angry at everything. We often seem fearful and anxious because we believe that the world is falling apart, that we are less safe, less secure, and less understood. That is how we feel, regardless of whether it is true. It’s not true, by the way. Statistically, we are far safer now than during the entire last century. But I will spare you the statistics. True or not true, that is how many people feel.

And when we are fearful, we jump at noises, we shrink from shadows. When we are anxious, we fret about details large and small, we worry about who’s that parking across the street. Why did that person speak that way, do that thing? Fear and anxiety make it easier for us to be angry, lashing out when something goes wrong or we think something is just not right. Our current culture seems to be fueled by outrage.

Fear and anxiety get mixed up in the blender of my brain. Sometimes it turns into anger when I forget myself, when I have a small annoying moment in which I somehow feel authorized to yell or to lash out, to belittle someone because I am otherwise so broadly upset. This is when some people begin punching down at those without power or money or influence. Releasing all their fear and anxiety in the form of misplaced anger. Anger at that person or, worse those people. People of certain groups.

It used to be fear of and anger toward the Baptists, the Catholics, the Mormons – a nation of Christians does not mean everyone got along. The Thirty Year War was a not minor European example.

Religion is one way of splitting us up into different categories. Muslims over there, Christians over here. Generic anxiety becomes focused into a spear point of anger zeroing in on something not understood. It is not just a problem with religion, but anger takes on one of its ugliest forms when it is broadly used to dehumanize those who follow a different faith.

So, count to ten. Let the anger pass if it wells up from inside. Let the emotions be stilled. Maybe reason and free inquiry will help to smooth the way, but let’s be realistic. Religion will always be an emotional subject. The goal therefore might be to make it less of an angry subject.

We can take a little more time, wait a bit more patiently. Breathe deeply and focus on a conversation rather than imagining perpetual social conflict. Counting to ten may seem like prescribing chicken soup to someone with a cold. But just like chicken soup, what could it hurt? And unlike a lot of other things, it might even help.

We cannot always easily decide what might belong to Caesar and what truly belongs to God. But it is worth remembering that we belong to God. Each and every one of us belongs to God.

Amen.