Religious Liberty at America’s Founding

An American Calvinist on Church and State

The relationship between church and state and the level of religious toleration that should be granted to various religious groups (almost exclusively Protestant) at America’s founding is not as settled as many might think today. The legacy of Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state, and especially of numerous court cases in the latter half of the twentieth century, often led people to assume that at the founding, there was unanimity in desiring a rigid exclusion of religion from all affairs of state. History by no means supports this supposition. There was much debate on particulars, but where unanimity existed, it was on the point that church and state should be beneficially related, rather than radically separated. Most states had some form of official state support (financial and otherwise) for Protestant churches, even if this had begun to dissipate by the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Virtually no one at America’s founding sought a return to the medieval or reformational era relationship between church and state, where the magistrate was seen as responsible in a comprehensive sense for the propagation of true religion, even though not called to carry out the specific spiritual functions of the church (preaching, administration of the sacraments, etc.). Nonetheless, many advocated for a much more robust level of state support for Protestant churches than would have been desired by Jefferson.

One such individual was Oliver Ellsworth, who was a member of the Constitutional Convention, then a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and eventually the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was also a committed Calvinist and active member of the Calvinist Congregational churches of Connecticut. At the Constitutional Convention, as William Castro writes, Ellsworth “played a particularly influential role in framing the Bill of Rights’ religion clauses.”¹ He did such as “the Senate floor leader for the amendments and the Senate chairman for the Bill of Rights Committee of Conference.” Castro notes that while James Madison famously chaired the House Committee of Conference on the Bill of Rights, “Ellsworth was Madison’s analogue in the Senate.” Madison’s views on the relationship between church and state are well known. Ellsworth’s, however, are known by few. This is a shame because, as Castro further shows, Ellsworth was also very influential regarding the final wording of the First Amendment. This is not to suggest that Madison and Ellsworth agreed on how church and state should be related: they didn’t. Rather, they each had a significant role to play in the consensus statement that was eventually adopted.

At that time, the orthodox Calvinist Congregational church was the formally established church in Connecticut. Everyone in the state was required to pay tax money used to pay the salaries of Congregationalist pastors, though toleration was extended to more and more dissenting groups (though only Protestant) throughout the eighteenth century. The form that religious tolerance took, however, was not Jeffersonian. Roman Catholicism was not tolerated, blasphemy was criminally sanctioned, and there was a ban on speaking against the Trinity and God’s sovereignty. As Castro recounts, Ellsworth’s own law teacher, a judge on the Connecticut Superior Court insisted in 1793 that the state’s requirement that everyone in the state attend (Protestant) public worship “did not violate a person’s freedom of conscience because ‘no man can plead as an excuse, for not worshipping his Maker, that it is against his conscience.’”

This is striking reasoning: it simply is not possible for a refusal to worship God to be necessitated by one’s conscience. There may be reasons why the state should not seek to micromanage the interior spirituality of all citizens, but for this judge, at least, this did not extend to allowing people to refrain from attending public worship. Certainly, this judge did not speak for all Americans at the time. Nonetheless, his views (which were common) show that there was much more comfort on the part of many with the idea that church and state should exist as separate institutions but in a mutually supportive fashion. It was unthinkable for many, including Ellsworth, that they would be hermetically sealed off from each other.

In the early nineteenth century Baptists in Connecticut sought relief from what they deemed unfair, mandatory support for the established Congregational church. Their appeal, in this regard, to Thomas Jefferson prompted him to write his famous letter in which he coined the phrase “a wall of separation between Church & State.” The Baptists received a very different response from the Connecticut legislature, which did not grant them the relief they sought. The state Senate, in fact, appointed Ellsworth to chair a committee to investigate the matter. Ellsworth, “[a]t the Select Committee’s first meeting . . . reaffirmed his support of Connecticut’s establishment when he reportedly threw the Baptist petition under the table, put his foot on it, and declared, ‘This is where it belongs.’”

As humorous (pleading pardon from my many Baptist friends) as this anecdote is, it is what it reveals about Ellsworth’s views of religious liberty that is particularly interesting. The basic conception, building on a phrase in Isaiah 49:23 that had long been a key prooftext for Protestant conceptions of the civil magistrate, Ellsworth saw the state as a “nursing father,” one who had a moral obligation to suppress iniquity, inculcate virtue, and even “foster the Christian religion as a counter to man’s natural depravity.” Ellsworth also believed that the well-being of the state necessitated that the magistrate uphold true religion and the virtue that flows from it.

Ellsworth’s (and that of his fellow Connecticut Congregationalists) understanding of the religious responsibilities of the civil magistrate, however, differed from earlier Protestant views. In Ellsworth’s Senate committee report, he stated that since “the primary objects of government are the peace, order, and prosperity of society . . . institutions for the promotion of good morals, are therefore objects of legislative provision and support: and among these, in the opinion of the committee, religious institutions are eminently useful and important.”

That said, Ellsworth put forward a view of the relation of church and state that was less comprehensive than earlier European Protestant arrangements. In my own series on Christianity and politics, I previously argued that one of the lessons of the English civil wars of the 1640s–1660s was that a wider understanding of tolerance among Christian denominations could have prevented the disastrous bloodletting that occurred among competing Protestant groups. Ellsworth made a similar argument, contending that the result of the English Civil Wars was the exclusion of “protestant dissenters” from the levers of power and positions of influence in public life. The desire of men like Ellsworth was not to reinstitute the more exhaustive forms of earlier religious establishment, but neither was it to eliminate all government support for true religion. A happy balance was necessary, wherein the state granted fairly wide tolerance to Protestant churches and therefore did not seek to enforce proper doctrine or worship while at the same time financially supporting only the Congregational church, insisting that its health was of great benefit to the health of the body politic as a whole. Toleration of others was allowed as long as it did not subvert this basic goal. And that is key: tolerance was not considered an independent good in itself but was recognized as conducive toward preventing civil strife. Tolerance, in other words, was granted, but the aim of government was the good of society, materially, morally, and spiritually. In the end, the Connecticut General Assembly approved Ellsworth’s report by a large majority and rejected the Baptist association’s plea for a lessening of its stated mandated religious obligations.

Ellsworth’s views on these matters are not at all the only ones that existed at the time. But the fact that the views of a man who had such an integral part in the crafting of the wording of the First Amendment is significant for our understanding of what that amendment did and did not allow. The First Amendment was a consensus statement. Both Madison and Ellsworth could get behind it. But it is clear that it was never intended to support the radically secular understanding of the First Amendment so many people assume today. Ellsworth’s view, common enough for much of America’s early history, was that church and state were meant to exist in a mutually supportive relationship, neither usurping the prerogatives of the other. In such a scheme the state could (and should) in certain ways support true Christianity, though not to the extent argued for in earlier Protestant conceptions. This is the true sense of religious liberty at America’s founding, and it is just as legitimate and helpful today as it was then.

---

Image Credit: Unsplash

Share This