HG - The Separation of Church from State

The Separation of Church from State By Hayes Gahagan Congress is forbidden, by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. State constitutions equally proclaim the policy as well as the necessity of not making any laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Those things which are not lawful under any of the American constitutions are included in Justice Cooley’s chapter on Religious Liberty in his famous “Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations” summarized in part as follows : 1. Any law respecting the establishment of religion. The legislatures have not been left at liberty to effect a union of Church and State, or to establish preferences by law in favor of any one religious persuasion or mode of worship. 2. Compulsory support, by taxation or otherwise, of religious instruction. Not only is no one denomination to be favored at the expense of the rest, but all support of religious instruction must be entirely voluntary. 3. Compulsory attendance upon religious worship. Whoever is not lead by choice or a sense of duty to attend upon the ordinances of religion is not to be compelled to do so by the State. 4. Restraints upon the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of the conscience. No external authority is to place itself between the finite being and the Infinite when the former is seeking to render the homage that is due… 5. Restraints upon the expression of religious belief. An earnest believer usually regards it as his duty to propagate his opinions, and to bring others to his views. To deprive him of this right is to take from him the power to perform what he considers a most sacred obligation. …These are the prohibitions which in some form of words are to be found in the American constitutions, and which secure freedom of conscience and of religious worship. No man in religious matters is to be subjected to the censorship of the State or of any public authority; and the State is not to inquire into or take notice of religious belief, when the citizen performs his duty to the State and to his fellows, and is guilty of no breach of public morals or public decorum. While careful to establish, protect and defend religious freedom and equality, the American constitutions contain no provisions which prohibit the authorities from such solemn recognition of a superintending Providence in public transactions and exercises as the general religious sentiment of mankind inspires, and as seems meet and proper in finite and dependent beings. Whatever may be the shades of religious belief, all must acknowledge the fitness of recognizing the importance in human affairs the superintending care and control of the great Governor of the Universe, and of acknowledging with thanksgiving His boundless favors, of bowing in contrition when visited with the penalties of His broken laws. No principle of constitutional law is violated when thanksgiving or fast days are appointed; when chaplains are designated for the army and navy; when legislative sessions are opened with prayer or the reading of the Scriptures, or when religious teaching is encouraged by a general exemption of the houses of religious worship from taxation for the support of State government…. I wonder how many Maine citizens have read the preamble to the Constitution of the State of Maine:

PREAMBLE Objects of government. We the people of Maine, in order to establish justice, insure tranquility, provide for our mutual defense, promote our common welfare, and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty, acknowledging with grateful hearts the goodness of the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe in affording us an opportunity, so favorable to the design; and, imploring God's aid and direction in its accomplishment, do agree to form ourselves into a free and independent State, by the style and title of the State of Maine and do ordain and establish the following Constitution for the government of the same. The principle of the separation of the Church from the State is the legal separation of church denominational influence in matters of State; it is not to be an attempt by the State to separate the individual citizen from knowledge about or worship of [our] Creator from whom as the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America declares [we] have been endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness… that to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among men…’ The fundamental purpose of the State, the government, and not just the government of the United States, is to secure the universal unalienable rights of the individual that have been endowed by the Creator; these unalienable rights, unlike civil rights that flow from the State, are incapable of being altered or taken away by government edict. Consider Thomas Jefferson, originator of the “wall of separation” phrase: Jefferson authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, enacted by the General Assembly in 1786: Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as it was his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time… There is much we can learn about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from civil documents and writings of Founders of the United States of America. Understanding our unalienable individual rights, including the principle of separation of the Church (as a denomination) from the State is barely a beginning. Some may agree that we should learn more about this kind of thing if only to avoid falling into a false religion of State.

[Hayes Gahagan of Presque Isle is a former Maine State Senator and Member of the Republican State Committee]