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.He recognized that religion provided one basis for a factionalism thatcould destroy a regime.He did not seek to eliminate the causes of faction (religionbeing one), because in his view the polity stood the best chance of survival iffactions (including those based on religion) counterbalanced each other.16 Wemay also view the churches separation from government as in certain formalrespects similar to the deliberate separation of the executive, legislative, andjudicial branches of government so as to use to advantage the checks and bal-ances thus constructed among different centers of power.Religion, as one locusof power in the new United States, was to be respected as such and allowed anappropriate role; it was one among many social institutions and cultural activitiesout of which the new nation would be formed.In proposing an adequate national government with a reasonable chance ofbeing ratified, the founding fathers did not mention many issues that we mightwish they had: provision for education, the status of the family, political parties. Religion, Government, and Power in the New American Nation 87The list is long and the silences of the founders witness to their overridingobjective of achieving a limited national government.In consequence, it has fallento subsequent generations to work out with respect to such issues how theprinciples that underlie the American polity would in fact apply.And althoughthe Constitution was not in the end silent with regard to religion, I suggest wemust approach religion in the same light.To interpret, and finally apply, thereligion clauses, we must look for the strategic or theoretical considerations thatled to the denial, from the first, of the federal government s competence in thearea.What the founding fathers proposed in their minimalist attention to reli-gion was not its wholesale segregation from government the kind of resolutionproposed in the French Revolution for separationist logic opens the way forradical secularization as a social policy.Nor did they propose that the federalregime should take over (and thus make use of ) churches for an Erastianism ofsubstance (if not form) is the outcome of accommodationist logic.Rather, theyproposed that religious institutions should lie beyond the authority or compe-tence of government.Religious activities were a part of the social and cultural lifeof the new nation which the distinctly limited federal government had no man-date to supervise or to depend upon.Such was appropriate for a religiously pluralsocial order in which religion, left free of regulation, could easily be capable ofdestructive, as well as highly constructive, roles.17In my own view, this was also a significant step in the resolution of a long-standing issue in Western cultures.This step was not so much a wholly newscheme, an abstract separation of religion and polity, as it was a new status forreligions, primarily Christianity and by implication Judaism as well that hadnot been possible for the millennium and a half since the Constantinian revo-lution had made Christianity the favored religion of empire and religious uni-formity under its sponsorship had been mobilized to guarantee social unity.The framework I would suggest for understanding the genesis not only ofthe First Amendment religion clauses but also of the religious test clause of theConstitution is that of the broadly political matrix within which the overridingobjective was to secure a more adequate federal government for the new nation.This government would necessarily compromise the sovereignty of the constit-uent states by drawing legitimacy from both them and their constituent citizens.This was a balancing act, requiring that limits be set to those powers the federalregime might exercise.To those skeptical of this polity because it might undulyinfringe on the existing state governments, limitations were promised.Andamong the more prominent was forgoing the authority to require religion to sup-port regime (as in religious test oaths) or to meddle either with existing prefer-ential relationships between the states and particular religious bodies, or with 88 A Protestant Eraliberty of conscience as it had come to be respected in the various sovereign states.But this balancing act certainly did not exclude government acquiescence in re-ligious ministrations to the members of Congress, or to those in the military, nordid it rule out recognizing that the people as a collectivity and as one source offederal authority potentially stood in a relation to higher powers, for example, inexercises of fasting or thanksgiving.18Interpreting the resolution of the church-state question in these contingentterms, seeing it as a product of the political necessities of the new nation ratherthan as a deduction from philosophical and theological doctrines, howeverformulated, makes it more comprehensible than accepting either the modernseparationist or accommodationist paradigms.On one hand, the separationistparadigm finds it difficult to interpret the ease with which practices like appoint-ing congressional chaplains were adopted, or monies appropriated to make goodon relations with the Indian tribes through the agencies of religious communities.Nor does it easily comprehend the recognition accorded to religion and moralityin the new territories.On the other hand, the accommodationist paradigm doesnot readily make sense either of the variety of religious interests in the new nationor the strategic or theoretical grounds for making religion and government, bothconcerned with power, independent of each other.The denominations them-selves had only just begun to organize and in any case had little centralizedauthority.And the young republic offered fertile ground for numerous newreligious movements to use our modern conception that immediately tookadvantage of it and flourished in the next half-century.In sum, the accommo-dationist version of early American religious culture is too Whiggish, readingmore cultural coherence and more thoroughly developed religious institutionsback into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than is warranted.But the other side of this more contingent reading of the place of religion inthe new nation and in the Constitution poses haunting questions
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