By Joe Broadmeadow
Every investigator learns the same lesson early. What people assert about the past and what the record shows are two different things, and only one of them is evidence. That discipline is worth applying to the claim, now common in American politics, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that its government should be governed accordingly.
Rhode Island is an inconvenient place to make that argument, because Rhode Island is where the founding record is most explicit.
Start with Roger Williams. Massachusetts Bay banished him in 1635 for insisting that the civil magistrate had no authority over conscience. He founded Providence the following year on that principle, and in 1663 the colony secured a royal charter promising a lively experiment in which a flourishing civil state could stand with full liberty in religious concernments. That is not a modern reinterpretation of an old document. It is the document.
Williams also gave us the metaphor, roughly a century and a half before Thomas Jefferson borrowed it. Writing in 1644, he described a hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world. His reasoning deserves more attention than it gets. Williams was a devout man, and he did not build the wall to protect government from religion. He built it to protect religion from government, because he had watched what happened to faith when the state took an interest in managing it.
Then there is the letter. In August 1790, three months after Rhode Island became the last of the thirteen states to ratify the Constitution, George Washington visited Newport and wrote to the Hebrew Congregation there. The government of the United States, he wrote, gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. He went further, and the further part is the part usually left out. Washington explicitly rejected the language of toleration, which implies that one class of people permits another to exercise rights the first class controls. He said instead that all alike possess liberty of conscience and the immunities of citizenship. The first president, writing to a synagogue, in the state founded by a Baptist minister exiled by Puritans.
The rest of the record is consistent. The Constitution contains no reference to God. Article VI bars any religious test for federal office, which was a deliberate departure from nearly every state constitution then in force. In 1797 the Senate ratified the Treaty of Tripoli unanimously, and John Adams signed it. Its eleventh article states that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. Unanimously. By men who had been in the room a decade earlier.
An honest accounting has to concede the other side of the ledger. The founding generation was overwhelmingly Christian. The Declaration invokes a Creator and appeals to divine Providence. Congress opened with prayer then and does now. Presidents have called for days of thanksgiving since the beginning. American public culture has been shaped by Protestant assumptions in ways that are impossible to disentangle and pointless to deny.
The government of the United States, he wrote, gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.
George Washington
But that is a description of a population, not a specification for a government. The distinction is the whole argument. A country can be full of believers and still decline to establish what they believe, and the men who wrote the founding documents drew that line on purpose, in writing, repeatedly. They had the example of Europe in front of them, and they had Rhode Island, which by 1790 had been running the experiment for a century and a half without the civil order collapsing.
What the current movement proposes is not a return to the founding. It is a reversal of it. And the appeal to history is doing real work in that argument, which is why the history has to be answered on the evidence rather than waved off.
The Touro Synagogue still stands on Touro Street in Newport, the oldest surviving synagogue building in the country. Washington’s letter is read aloud there every August. Anyone who wants to argue that this nation was built to privilege one faith is welcome to make the case. They will have to make it about two hundred yards from the primary source that says otherwise.
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