by Sarah Palin
In fairness, Kennedy was speaking at a different time. His repeated assertions that he would heed no “instruction on public policy from the Pope” may very well have been politically necessary in an America that had had only one previous (and unsuccessful) Catholic nominee for president, New York governor Al Smith. Still, his vaunted speech didn’t represent a successful reconciliation of faith and public office, but an articulate and unequivocal divorce of the two. It is perhaps not surprising, in light of this fact, that his brother Ted Kennedy would go on to have a long career advocating positions directly at odds with his Catholic faith (which was by all accounts sincere).
In any case, JFK’s famous speech did not resolve the issue—perhaps because it dodged the crucial question—and it is still very much with us today. Thus in the 2008 Republican primary, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith was likewise perceived as an issue by some voters. Claiming that many would be reluctant to pull the lever for a person of his beliefs, some pundits and political advisors urged him to “do a JFK.” Just give a speech, they told him, and reassure the voters that your faith will have nothing to do with your presidency. To his credit, Mitt refrained from “doing a JFK.” Instead, he gave a thoughtful speech that eloquently and correctly described the role of faith in American public life.
Unlike JFK, who essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are, Romney declared that our religious liberty is “fundamental to America’s greatness.” And he spoke openly of “how my faith would inform my presidency, if elected.”
Like Kennedy, Mitt praised all Americans’ freedom to worship as they choose. Like Kennedy, he also declared that “no authority of my church, or of any other church, for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions.” But unlike Kennedy, he spoke out strongly for America’s religious heritage, and how it continues to define us as a nation:
America faces a new generation of challenges. Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us. An emerging China endeavors to surpass our economic leadership. And we are troubled at home by government overspending, overuse of foreign oil, and the breakdown of the family. . . .
There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams’ words: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.”
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
Mitt went straight back to the words of the Declaration of Independence—that we are all men who “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—to describe a “great moral inheritance” we all share that is not unique to any religion or denomination.
We believe that every single human being is a child of God—we are all part of the human family. The conviction of the inherent and inalienable worth of every life is still the most revolutionary political proposition ever advanced. John Adams put it that we are “thrown into the world all equal and alike.”
The consequence of our common humanity is our responsibility to one another, to our fellow Americans foremost, but also to every child of God. It is an obligation which is fulfilled by Americans every day, here and across the globe, without regard to creed or race or nationality.
Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government. No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty.
The difference is striking: where Kennedy seemed to want to run away from religion, Mitt Romney forthrightly embraced it. The contrast is attributable not just to the political distance between the two men, but to the distance our country has come since 1960. We are blessed to live in a land that is reawakening to the gift of our religious heritage. To be sure, there are still lots of voices that reject this gift and regard it as somehow divisive. Where we see tolerance, they see intolerance. Where we see wholesome purpose, they see a sinister agenda. Violence and bigotry committed in the name of religion surely exist in the world. To this extent, the modern critics of religion have a point. We are rightly appalled, for example, at the stoning of adulterers and the domestic abuse of women that still occur in some Muslim societies. Too many also justify their political hatreds and deflect blame for their backwardness by abusing religion. But the critics are wrong to turn these admitted excesses into an indictment of religion per se. For in America, faith has been central to a strikingly different result: the most prosperous, generous, peace-loving, and free nation in history. We fail to acknowledge this profound historical truth at our peril, and that of future generations. For as Mitt correctly said, “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.” This stirring quote is taken from a letter John Adams wrote to the officers of the Massachusetts militia in 1798, at a time when the United States was on the verge of war with France. With antireligious fervor on the rise in Europe, and France still staggering from the bloody horrors of its own revolution, Adams, who had been a leading participant at the Constitutional Convention, reminded the officers that our founding documents were uniquely unsuited for a similar uprising. Instead, they took for granted the existence of abiding habits of decency and civility that were in turn firmly grounded in religious faith:
. . . we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Adams wrote these words more than twenty years after the Declaration and more than ten years after the Constitution was drafted. But even before these great and enduring Charters of Liberty were drawn up, faith played a decisive role in the creation of America.
One of the more overlooked aspects of our history is the significant role that the clergy played in the Revolutionary War. Ministers were usually the most educated people in colonial American towns. And they had a captive audience once a week. Not only did they preach revolution, they also organized militias and fought in the war. For daring to reject the European belief in the “divine right of kings”—the notion that power flows from God to the king or queen, who then decides what rights to grant the people—American loyalists dubbed the black-robed patriot clergy the “Black Regiment.”
The Library of Congress’s wonderful exhibit on “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic” features one of the more prominent members of this Black Regiment, the Reverend John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg of Woodstock, Virginia. Muhlenberg was the son of a German immigrant, and is considered the founder, along with his brother Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, of the Lutheran Church in America. The story goes that Reverend Muhlenberg preached a particularly heated sermon to his congregation one Sunday in January 1776. In his conclusion, he is said to have quoted Ecclesiastes:
The Bible tells us there is a time for all things, and there is a time to preach and a time to pray—but the time for me to preach has passed away, and there is a time to fight, and that time has come now. Now is the time to fight!
With that, Muhlenberg threw off his clerical robes to reveal the uniform of a Virginia military officer. Then the good
Reverend marched off to join the Continental Army. He served with distinction, commanding a brigade that successfully stormed the British at Yorktown, and eventually rose to the rank of major general. His brother, also a pastor, at first opposed the idea of a man of the cloth serving in the military—until the British army burned down his church! After the war Frederick became a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention and was the first person to sign the Bill of Rights. He later served three terms in Congress and became the first speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Another member of the Black Regiment—a hero of the American founding who may have been overlooked because he combined faith with patriotism—was John Witherspoon, the only member of the clergy to sign the Declaration of Independence. He also signed the Articles of Confederation and took part in ratifying the Constitution. This largely forgotten figure is most known today for being the direct ancestor of the actress Reese Witherspoon. But at a critical point in American history, he contributed mightily to the fight for independence. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian pastor, an outstanding educator, and a practiced politician. As president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), he mentored a generation of young men who would go on to lead the Revolution and dominate the political life of the young republic, including James Madison and Aaron Burr. He later served in Congress and advised Alexander Hamilton on public finance. He also personified what John Adams meant when he said, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”
Here is part of a sermon Witherspoon preached on Thanksgiving Day, 1782:
It is a truth of no little importance to us in our present situation, not only that the manners of a people are of consequence to the stability of every civil society, but that they are of much more consequence to free states, than to those of a different kind. In many of these last, a principle of honour, and the subordination of ranks, with the vigour of despotic authority, supply the place of virtue, by restraining irregularities and producing public order. But in free states, where the body of the people have the supreme power properly in their own hands, and must be ultimately resorted to on all great matters, if there is a general corruption of manners, there can be nothing but confusion. So true is that, that civil liberty cannot be long preserved without virtue. A monarchy may subsist for ages, and be better or worse under a good or bad prince, but a republic once equally poised, must either preserve its virtue or lose its liberty. (emphasis mine)
In other words, tyranny can thrive whether people are good or bad, but preserving freedom takes preserving virtue. You can look, but you would have trouble finding an American from the founding generation who didn’t share this belief. This sentiment, so controversial today, was simply taken for granted at the time. The Founders deliberately and self-consciously constructed a government based on the belief that religion was at the root of the personal and public virtues necessary to sustain freedom. And they weren’t just being pragmatic. Despite the identification of many with Enlightened Deism, an eighteenth-century belief that strove to reconcile religion with reason, they all had genuine faith and genuinely believed that following its dictates was for the better, both in this life and the next.
In his wonderful book George Washington’s Sacred Fire, Peter A. Lillback writes about the deeply held faith of our first president and how it left an indelible mark on America. The very first thing Washington did as president was to offer a prayer to God to secure the liberties of the new nation, and his inauguration set two religious precedents that endure to this day. Washington, like all subsequent presidents, put his hand on the Bible as he was sworn in. And he added the words “So help me God” to the presidential oath described in the Constitution. Every president since that time has also ended the oath with “so help me God.” (I ad-libbed “so help me God” every time I was sworn in as an elected official, so Washington’s addition struck a chord with me.)
Washington’s most famous evocation of religion—a point John Adams would repeat when he succeeded him as president—came in his Farewell Address. To understand the impact of Washington’s words, it helps to bear in mind that he had, even then, earned the title Father of His Country. He was so admired that some wanted him to be made king. But the American experiment was based on the notion that only a freely elected government was consistent with the revolutionary idea that our natural and political rights ultimately derive from our Creator. In his Farewell Address, Washington reminded Americans that a people made sovereign by their creation in the image of God could not be ruled without their consent. Nor could they long retain their freedom without the morality and good character that are created and supported by religion.
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
Washington clearly believed that religious faith is the basis for all the virtues on which republican government depends. The private oaths men swear in the conduct of their business, no less than the public oaths they swear before the courts, are worthless without an underlying conviction in the existence of right and wrong. But Washington goes further, asserting that morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious belief. This is not a politically correct notion today. But it remains as true now as it was then.
If you look for it, you will find this sentiment echoed throughout the words of the Founders. Even Thomas Jefferson, widely regarded by contemporary historians as one of the least religious of the Founders, wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
I love those words—and there are echoes of them throughout Jefferson’s voluminous writings. Calvin Coolidge, in his famous Fourth of July speech, said that Jefferson in fact acknowledged that his “best ideas of democracy” had come to him at church meetings.
One of my favorite stories of early Americans turning to God for guidance comes from 1774, when war with Great Britain was looming. The First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia as British ships filled Boston Harbor and British troops occupied the city. The feeling that they would soon be engaged in war consumed the delegates. One of them suggested that they pray for guidance. But some of the delegates objected. There were members of various religious denominations present. Who would lead the prayer?
Then Sam Adams rose and ended the disagreement. The idea he expressed on that day in 1774 remains as valid now as it was then. According to a letter John Adams wrote to Abigail describing the scene, Sam stood up and “said he was no Bigot, and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.” I love the simple, straightforward rejection of religious bigotry in these words. And like most Americans today, I feel exactly the same way. Despite differences in the denomination you may belong to, if you love both God and country, I’ll be happy to pray with you, too. Yes, Sam Adams was correct. So when I recently spotted my nephew, Payton, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo “I’m thinking Sam Adams, not drinking Sam Adams,” I had to grin.
But it wasn’t just the words of our Founders—as important as they are—th
at demonstrate the high value they placed on religious faith. It was their deeds as members of the new government as well.
One of the best compilations of explicitly religious official acts of the Founders that I’ve come across comes from Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. It appears in one of his famous dissents, in a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Ten Commandments could not be displayed at the McCreary County Courthouse in Whitley City, Kentucky. After mentioning Washington’s addition of “so help me God” to the oath of office, Scalia goes on to explain:
The same week that Congress submitted the Establishment Clause as part of the Bill of Rights for ratification by the States, it enacted legislation providing for paid chaplains in the House and Senate. . . . The day after the First Amendment was proposed, the same Congress that had proposed it requested the President to proclaim “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed, by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many and signal favours of Almighty God.” . . . President Washington offered the first Thanksgiving Proclamation shortly thereafter, devoting November 26, 1789, on behalf of the American people “to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that is, that was, or that will be . . .” thus beginning a tradition of offering gratitude to God that continues today. . . . The same Congress also reenacted the Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787, 1 Stat. 50, Article III, of which provided: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” . . . And of course the First Amendment itself accords religion (and no other manner of belief) special constitutional protection.