On Evangelicals and Theocrats
The example of James Madison shows why liberals who continue to
conflate the Taliban with religious conservatives are wrong.
by Claudia Winkler 01/22/2002 12:01:00 AM
Claudia Winkler, managing editor
A CHRONIC annoyance in the media these days is the casual
equation of religious conservatives with the Taliban. One
example from the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian is a
doozy.
In a January 15 editorial mocking a prominent conservative
Southern Baptist on the occasion of his death at 92, the paper
managed to refer to the Taliban in the second sentence, then
went on to say of its subject (W. A. Criswell, warmly praised
by President Bush and Billy Graham, a member of his Dallas
congregation) that he "gave lip service to the constitutional
separation of church and state."
The generous explanation for this slur is ignorance: Maybe the
Guardian really doesn't know the difference between an
evangelical and a theocrat. If it wanted to know, the antidote
might be a series of new writings that highlight the religious
roots--closely entwined with the Enlightenment roots--of that
pivotal American invention, the separation of church and state.
Consider James Madison's early exposure to religious
persecution. Growing up in Virginia, the future Father of the
Constitution and author of the First Amendment was himself a
member of an established church, the Church of England--and he
witnessed its intolerance in action. None other than the
Baptists, as it happens, were a growing nonconformist minority
in the years after the Great Awakening. Their pastors refused
to seek licenses from the Commonwealth, asserting that their
warrant to preach came from God.
One ugly episode occurred when Madison was 20. Here's how
Michael Novak, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
recounts it in "On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at
the American Founding" (Encounter Books, 2002):
"In the summer of 1771 in Caroline County in Virginia, an
unlicensed Baptist preacher was preaching outdoors when from
across the fields a priest of the Church of England galloped up
at the head of the Sheriff and other men, thrust a horsewhip in
the preacher's mouth, dismounted, and then subjected the
preacher to a thorough flogging in an open field, in plain
sight of the assembled crowd."
Between 1765 and 1778, Virginia jailed over 45 Baptist
ministers, according to Novak, and Madison often defended them.
But his studies, as well as unpleasant events in his
neighborhood, were making him a devotee of religious freedom.
Madison attended the College of New Jersey, later Princeton,
during the heyday of its president John Witherspoon, a
Presbyterian minister who had arrived from Scotland in 1768 and
would shortly become the only clergyman to sign the Declaration
of Independence. First he would turn Princeton into what
English detractors called a "seminary of sedition." Journalist
Joseph Loconte begins his essay "Minister to Freedom" (the 2001
"President's Essay," available from the Heritage Foundation) by
recounting that on July 30, 1776, British troops on Long Island
burned two men in effigy: George Washington and John
Witherspoon.
Rev. Witherspoon's "Lectures on Moral Philosophy" were a
required course at Princeton, drawing on the Scottish realists,
but also on the truths of scripture. Witherspoon championed the
principle of freedom of conscience and the model of what
Loconte calls "the engaged citizen of faith." "The greatest
service which magistrates or persons in authority can do with
respect to the religion or morals of the people," wrote Rev.
Witherspoon, "is to defend and secure the rights of conscience
in the most equal and impartial manner."
His students included not only Madison, a future president, but
also a vice president, 12 members of the Continental Congress,
5 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, 49 U.S.
Representatives, 28 U.S. senators, 3 Supreme Court justices, a
secretary of state, 3 attorneys general, 2 foreign ministers,
and a great many more who held state and local office.
For one more fresh and fascinating treatment of the positive
contributions of evangelical religion to American principles of
liberty, see the chapter on American democracy in "Christianity
on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry" (Encounter
Books, 2002)--like "On Two Wings" and the Witherspoon essay,
the work of authors who have published in The Weekly Standard,
journalists Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett.
Carroll and Shiflett remind us that the pioneers of religious
freedom in the Colonies--notably the Puritan Roger Williams and
the Quaker William Penn--arrived at this arrangement not out of
deist rationalism or indifference to religious truth but from a
fierce devotion to it. Later, during the Revolution, dissenting
minorities who had experienced oppression displayed a special
zeal for independence. Persecution had bred "hardy independence
of spirit. The more devout they were, the more vehement their
support of the Revolution."
More than a generation later, Alexis de Tocqueville could still
observe, "The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and
of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible
to make them conceive the one without the other."
But the editorial writers at the Guardian haven't figured this
out--even with what should have been a recent refresher course.
Didn't they notice the response of leading Southern Baptists to
President Bush's cherished initiative to open government
social-service contracts to "faith-based" providers? The heirs
of those Virginia nonconformists, fearing government strings
attached to government dollars, said they wouldn't touch public
money with a ten-foot pole.
Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
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