PRESENT AT THE CREATION

...Indeed—as the new exhibition notes—the day after Congress passed the First Amendment, it requested that the president call for a day of public prayer to acknowledge “the many signal favors of Almighty God...

...Organized by the library’s chief of manuscripts, James H. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic demonstrates with its display of both famous and little-known documents that religion and government were understood by the nation’s founders to be quite close...

...But the direct influence of Enlightenment thinkers turns out to be overstated...

...Jefferson’s wall, it turns out, was originally intended to be permeable...

...Well, you go back to fundamental values...

...It is no exaggeration to say,” Hutson writes, “that, on Sundays in Washington during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the state became the church...

...The Continental Congress was not slow to take advantage of the religious fervor in the new nation...

...Even the three paradigmatic episodes of early secularism to which modern separationists point turn out to teach a different lesson...

...If enough do, no one will ever be able to claim again that Everson represents the thinking of the founders...

...The first Congress under the new Constitution largely patterned itself after the old Congress: hiring chaplains, issuing proclamations, attending religious services, and repassing legislation upholding morality in the military...

...Indeed, soon after Congress moved to the new Capitol building in 1800, various denominations— including Catholics beginning in 1826—held public church services in the House chambers, a practice that continued until after the Civil War...

...There was an overwhelming— and, after this exhibition, undeniable—religious sense to PUBLIC CHURCH SERVICES WERE HELD IN THE HOUSE CHAMBERS UNTIL AFTER THE CIVIL WAR...

...In general, the new government held to the idea that religion, being necessary for morality, was necessary for republican government...

...Services were also held in the Supreme Court chambers...

...Americans should go see this marvelous new exhibition, either now at the Library of Congress or when it travels revival-like around the country...

...They didn’t always find it, of course, as various sects tried to enforce religious uniformity in the American colonies...

...But President Bush couldn’t talk about it later without immediately adding another “fundamental value...

...And it turns out that Jefferson, after consulting members of his cabinet, toned down his language so as not to offend religiousminded supporters in New England: removing references to “temporal power” and the word “eternal” before “wall of separation...

...One of the more eloquent later proclamations—issued under the signature of John Jay, later first chief justice of the United States—asked that God “be our shield in the day of battle, our comforter in the hour of death, and our kind parent and merciful judge through time and through eternity...

...And perhaps even the Supreme Court’s great wall of separation will at last come tumbling down...

...The articles governing conduct in the Army and the Navy called on officers and soldiers to attend divine services and prescribed punishment for those who behaved “indecently or irreverently” in church...

...As Hutson puts it in the book he prepared to accompany the exhibition, The plain fact is that, had American clergymen of all denominations not assured their pious countrymen, from the beginning of the conflict with Britain, that the resistance movement was right in God’s sight and had His blessing, it could not have been sustained and independence could not have been achieved...

...John Adams reported that the clergy of Philadelphia “thunder and lighten every Sabbath” about British tyranny, while Jefferson described how “pulpit oratory ran ‘like a shot of electricity’ through the whole colony” of Virginia...

...the whole American experiment...

...So too, a close examination of the First Amendment reveals not secularism but the intention of Congress to prevent religious favoritism by the national government...

...This religious toleration didn’t mean the decay of religious fervor in colonial America—and the churches contributed greatly to the American Revolution...

...The battle over religious disestablishment in Virginia, the passage of the First Amendment, and President Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists all point—for these modern secularists— to the conclusion that the founders were actually following European Enlightenment figures (especially John Locke) in seeking to defang religion and banish it from the public square...

...Of course I was...

...The real separation of church and state—the one the founders actually intended—must allow and encourage a certain mixing of religion and politics on the level of political action...

...The separation of church and state is so important that God can’t be mentioned in public without it...

...It was in the landmark 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education that the Supreme Court expanded its definition of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to ban all public aid to religion, declaring that government must be absolutely neutral—not just between particular religions but between religion and nonreligion...

...There was also plenty of cooperation between church and state...

...Here is the fundamental, the indispensable, contribution of religion and its spokesmen to the coming of the American Revolution...

...But more telling even than the entanglement of the Continental Congress with religion is the entanglement of religion with the Continental Congress...

...Two days after writing the letter, Jefferson attended religious services in the House of Representatives...

...Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure,” Washington once noted, “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle...

...The disestablishment of religion in Virginia, for instance, derived not from those who opposed religion, but from Christians who thought disestablishment necessary to prevent the subsidizing of one denomination over another...

...It seems almost an article of faith, and it surely must be what the founders themselves intended for the nation: the third in a trinity with God and Country...

...In his survey of the political literature of the American Founding, Donald Lutz discovered that the most cited book between 1760 and 1805 is the Bible— accounting for about one-third of all citations...

...Far from wanting to expunge religion from our public life, they saw it as a necessary and vital part of their novus ordo seclorum...

...When preachers warned of a shortage of Bibles, a congressional committee approved a petition for private publication— and when it was completed in 1782, Congress passed a resolution recommending “this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States...

...PRESENT AT THE CREATION America’s Founders and Religion By Matthew Spalding The Supreme Court’s doctrine of a wall between church and state has become something more in America than merely legal opinion...

...In 1778, Congress ordered that a report to the nation be read by “ministers of the gospel of all denominations . . . immediately after divine services...

...Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” was passed by a coalition assembled, under the leadership of James Madison, to defeat Patrick Henry’s proposed “Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion”—and the majority of votes came from evangelicals, led by the strong efforts of the Baptists...

...Its first proclamation set a national day of “public humiliation, fasting and prayer...

...There are historians and legal scholars who have argued—both before and after Everson was handed down in 1947—that a shift occurred during the Revolution that committed the nation to secularism...

...The library’s exhibition begins by showing the many early immigrants who, faced with religious persecution in the Old World, sought refuge in the New...

...They sought the official separation of church and state in order to build civil and religious liberty on the ground of equal natural rights, but they never intended— indeed, they roundly rejected—the idea of separating religion and politics...

...In 1776, by one estimate, between 71 and 77 percent of Americans attended regular services...

...Even Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists—with its claim of “a wall of separation between church and state”—doesn’t offer unmitigated support for modern secularism...

...While individuals can worship freely according to the dictates of their consciences, there must be a common understanding of morality underlying their religious differences...

...In the words of Jefferson,” noted the majority opinion, “the clause against the establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and state.’” There is now showing at the Library of Congress, through August 22, a powerful counter to the historical amnesia by which we’ve forgotten the way things were before Everson...

...This sense of mission is captured in the proposed Great Seal of the United States devised by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in 1776—which borrowed from Exodus to show God’s intervening to save the Israelites (Americans) from Pharaoh (George III) and his armies...

...But eventually, the multiplicity of religious practices in the New World—Anglican, Baptist, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Shaker, Quaker, even Catholic and Jewish— compelled religious toleration...

...It is a shibboleth, an icon, a touchstone...

...Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” George Washington declared in his 1796 Farewell Address...

...Congress followed its own advice, hiring chaplains, opening its sessions with prayer, and attending religious services...

...One can believe that Lieutenant Bush thought about God back at that moment of deadly danger...

...Previously overlooked documents show that Jefferson regularly attended these services and allowed executivebranch buildings—one document describes a four-hour service in the Treasury building—to be used for similar religious services...

...Saint Paul is quoted as often as Montesquieu and Blackstone, the two most quoted secular authors, while Deuteronomy alone has almost twice as many citations as Locke...

...The odd thing, however, is that this separationist view of church and state is relatively new...

...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...

...It is this consensus that needs to be revived, and government— based on the consent of selfgoverning citizens—cannot remain neutral...

...You can hear what the doctrine has become in that peculiar moment in 1992 when George Bush rambled about his experience of being shot down during World War II: Was I scared floating in a little yellow raft off the coast of an enemyheld island, setting a world record for paddling...

...In preparation for the exhibition, the Library of Congress asked the FBI laboratories to decipher what was written under the inked-out lines of the draft letter...

...The result of this discovery, says Hutson, is an awareness that the letter was political and not intended as a philosophical elucidation of the First Amendment...

...I thought about Mother and Dad and the strength I got from them, and God and faith—and the separation of church and state...

...What sustains you in times like that...

...Nothing in the history of the congressional debates over the Bill of Rights suggests the desire to make the government neutral to religion or prevent non-discriminatory support...

...Matthew Spalding is director of lectures and educational programs at the Heritage Foundation...