Tea Party Rejoice - Rick Channels Patrick Henry

When candidate Rick Santorum said he "'almost threw up' when he read John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech on the separation of church and state," my ears pricked up. Not because I want to discuss, support or trash any candidate, but because he was talking about a speech I remember rather fondly.

According to the Washington Post:

“Mr. Santorum said Kennedy was arguing that 'faith is not allowed in the public square'...

But Mr. Kennedy wasn’t telling people of faith to stay out of public life. He was restating the constitutional principle that has helped make America a great and resilient country: No faith should be able to dictate government policy, and government shouldn’t dictate theology to any faith.”

Tax to Support Christian Teachers

My thoughts immediately returned not to the Kennedy speech of 1960 (responding to accusations that as a Catholic he would consult the Vatican for his policy decisions) but to Virginia in 1784.

In that critical year, after the success of the American Revolution, James Madison was a delegate to the Virginia Assembly and looking forward to a session of modernizing the laws of the state left over from the colonial period. Instead he was confronted almost immediately with an attempt with "a torrent of eloquence from Patrick Henry…to support 'teachers of the Christian religion' by a general tax." Madison was both surprised and appalled.  "Madison thought it 'obnoxious on account of its dishonorable principle and dangerous tendency.'"

Important men such as George Washington, John Marshall, and others as well as Patrick Henry believed the morals of the state were in decline and believed religion had a positive influence on people. In fact, Madison himself was a religious man and member of a church. His horror at the proposed tax was not from distaste for religion. He argued the tax "would neither make religion more vital nor cure the alleged 'moral decay' in Virginia. It would…violate the natural right to liberty of conscience and involve the state in questions of heresy and orthodoxy entirely outside its province."

Madison, the master politician, supported another bill as a delaying tactic and then supported Patrick Henry’s bid for governor, getting him out of the legislature where he had amassed huge power.

Then Madison went to work, gathering every bit of available information, every book, every tract, and every ounce of data and digesting it. The result was his classic Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments. He used it as a petition to gain support against the bill. His 15 points brilliantly argue for the complete separation of church and state.

 Beating Patrick Henry

At the fall 1785 meeting of the Virginia Assembly, Madison was victorious.

The assessment bill of the previous session died silently and Madison quickly proposed adoption of Jefferson’s eloquent 'Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.' After its enactment, Madison wrote its author that, 'I flatter myself [we] have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.' Of all his accomplishments as a legislator, Madison took greatest pleasure and pride in this victory.

In fact, religious liberty stands out as the one subject upon which Madison took an extreme, absolute, undeviating position throughout his life. The phrases he proposed for the first amendment to the federal Constitution–-'the full and equal rights of conscience [shall not] be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed,' and 'no State shall violate the equal rights of conscience'—were less equivocal than the language final adopted.

In the Memorial he asserted the rights of both believers and nonbelievers. He later opposed paying for a congressional or military chaplain or presidential proclamations on religious holidays.

Religious liberty, Madison wrote, ought to be defined 'as distinctly as words can admit, and the limits to [religious laws] established with as much solemnity as the forms of legislation express…Every provision for [such laws] short of this principle, will be found to leave crevices at least through which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster feeding and thriving on its own venom, gradually swells to a size and strength overwhelming all laws human and define.'...complete separation of church and state saved the church from the inevitable corrupting influence of civil authority.

 Original Intent

In my snarky title to this blog I refer to the tea party folks who want to "return to the US Constitution." They often support an ‘originalist’ approach. It’s hard to get more original than James Madison. He was part of a conspiracy to call the Constitutional Convention in 1787, drafted the Virginia Plan kicking off the debates, defeated Patrick Henry’s attempts to stop the new Constitution in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, and drafted the Bill of Rights and pushed through it the first Congress.

Over time, his views shifted on other aspects of his creations but never on the separation of Church and State. Of course, he did pay a certain political price at the time. Payback is as much a part of politics in the 18^th century as it is today. Under the new Constitution, Senators were appointed by the Governor. Governor Henry blocked Madison’s nomination to the new upper house. He also saw to the gerrymandering of Madison's home congressional district in an attempt to stop him there and supported his opponent, James Monroe. Madison was not thwarted and went into the first Congress as George Washington’s whip to get the president’s agenda through the lower house.

There is no doubt that in the late 18^th century there were those who would blur the lines between religion and republican government. However, the victors at the state and federal level, the founders and framers who shaped the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the new government, where staunchly in the camp that Kennedy reiterated.

Whether Mr. Santorum wins or loses is not the point.

Does the Constitution’s wall of separation between church and state stand or fall.

Do we stand with Madison or Henry?

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© Rebecca Staton-Reinstein and Advantage Leadership, Inc.

References:

1-Washington Post

2-All quotes about Madison: Ralph Ketcham, James Madison, University of Virginia, 1990, pages 162-168.

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Rebecca@AdvantageLeadership.com

Did the founding fathers support smaller government?

Folks often want to find support for their contemporary views by citing our U.S. founding fathers, something like folks quoting from sacred writing. The problem is that the ‘fathers and mothers’ did not share a monolithic point of view as documented in their public and private writings.

I was struck by this recently when I read an otherwise thought-provoking opinion by Carly Fiorina in the Wall Street Journal December 12, 2008. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122904246460000265.html#printMode) It was entitled “Corporate Leadership and the Crisis: CEOs seeking bailouts should be willing to resign.”

Although I agree with much of what Ms. Fiorina said in her article, citing the Founding Fathers as supporting smaller government was off the mark historically.
In fact, the founders and framers of the U.S. Constitution had serious disagreements about the extent of government. And, some of them changed their views over the course of time. For example, when James Madison and Alexander Hamilton allied with others to call the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they both envisioned a strong national government to replace the supreme power of the states under the Articles of Confederation.

A few years after the Revolution, the weak confederation was collapsing under its own weight. Madison's statement on government applies as well today as it did over 200 years ago: "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
Madison and Hamilton argued forcefully, writing as Publius in The Federalist, for the supremacy of the new national government. Hamilton would have gone further and abolished the states themselves according to his critics.

By Washington's second term as President, Madison had moved away from his more nationalist stand and allied with Thomas Jefferson to found a political party to tout the need to have more power in the states and to lobby for smaller national government. When Jefferson defeated John Adams in the 1800 election, he proclaimed a second Revolution and tried to undo as much of the Federalists' initiatives as possible.

As the parties morphed, evolved, disappeared, and sprang to life over our history, they all tried to claim the founders and framers as their own. The truth is somewhere else. The tension between the states and the federal government was built into the Constitution because the framers understood they could never get agreement on a perfect system.

The so-called Great Compromise of the convention was about how states would have power in the new system. The fault lines run directly from the convention to the civil war and on into today.

Essentially, we have agreed to disagree, just as the founders and framers did on how much power government should wield at each level, how big government should be, and how the checks and balances of a republican system should work.
Indeed, we are not angles and our system of government reflects accurately on our human nature.

Want to know more about what the founders and framers were really thinking and how it relates to contemporary strategic leadership questions? Conventional Wisdom: How Today’s Leaders Plan, Perform, and Progress Like the Founding Fathers will be published by TobsusPress at the end of January 2009. Check out the website for pre-publication offers. http://www.advantageleadership.com/conventional-wisdom.html