The First Liberty

QUESTION: Do Christians believe in the separation of church and state? Read Chuck Colson’s response below, taken from Answers to Your Kids' Questions: Yes, Christians believe in the separation of church and state. In fact, it’s disastrous for the church to reduce the Gospel to a political agenda. But some background on the original meaning of “separation of church and state” needs to inform our full answer. The original meaning of the First Amendment, that Congress shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion,” was simply intended to keep Congress from preferring one religion over another, with the distinct possibility that individual states might choose to adopt state churches. Indeed, many of the individual states continued to support established expressions (official state churches) of the Christian faith well into the 1830s. The Constitution says nothing about “separation of church and state”—the phrase comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote a decade after the Constitution was adopted. In setting forth the First Amendment, the American founders sought to protect religious freedom as the first liberty. They understood that without the liberty to express our most fundamental beliefs, all other liberties inevitably crumble. But the point cannot be emphasized too strongly that the First Amendment was intended to protect the church from government interference; it in no way intended that religious influence should be kept out of public life. In fact, America’s founding fathers were well aware that limited government could succeed only if there were an underlying consensus of values shared by the populace. In 1798 John Adams eloquently acknowledged the understanding of our constitutional framers: “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” I’m always reminded of the extent to which we relied on Christian truth at our founding when I visit the House of Representatives. A beautiful fresco on the upper walls of the chamber itself contains portraits of history’s great lawmakers. Standing at the speaker’s desk and looking straight ahead over the main entrance, one’s eyes meet the piercing eyes of the first figure in the series: Moses, the one who recorded the law from the original Lawgiver. What greater witness could there be to the Judeo-Christian heritage that John Adams was counting on?

08/20/07