Founders Designed Establishment Clause to Protect Religion, McConnell Says
October 31, 2005
Judge Michael W. McConnell of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals gave the Meador Lecture on Law and Religion last week.
The nation's founders included the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to protect and promote the church's inculcation of public virtue, rather than to protect the federal government from the influence of religion, said Judge Michael W. McConnell at the Oct. 27 Meador Lecture on Law and Religion.
McConnell, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, delivered his speech to an overflowing audience in Caplin Pavilion.
He noted that the separation of church and state often has been a provocative issue in American history. "We seem to be at one of those times again in American public life when these questions of how to adjust the spheres are on many people's minds," he said.
McConnell challenged popular explanations of the separation of church and state.
"The conventional wisdom goes something like this: that the creation of a liberal democratic order requires or at least presupposes the secularization of the civic culture, and that this secularization is embodied in the establishment clause of the First Amendment, the separation of church, which protects the private practice of religion from government but also, it is said, protects government from the device of any irrational powers of religion," he said. "It's necessary according to this view to base public policy and public affairs on the neutral grounds of reason rather than the superstitious sway of priests and bishops or the fulmination of fundamentalists.
"To many religious intrusion into politics is an offense against their cherished ideal of a secular public sphere," McConnell said. "They speak darkly of betraying the principles of the founding and dismantling the wall of separation created by the founders."
Although McConnell said he believes the issue is overblown on both sides, he thought it was advantageous to rekindle interest in the role of religion in a democratic republic. "The founding was quite different and in many ways more interesting than this conventional wisdom."
Although the First Amendment prohibited the federal establishment of religion, he said, approximately half of the founding states had some form of religious establishment when the amendment was ratified and others were exploring the possibility.
"The 1780s were actually a time of renewed interest in and support for state religious establishments," McConnell said.
Founding fathers such as John Adams, George Washington, Patrick Henry, and John Marshall were among those who supported some kind of establishment of religion, according to McConnell.
