Sixty-one percent of the party’s base now favors ending the separation of church and state, as do a growing number of prominent Republicans.
Newport, R.I. – Outside the Truro Synagogue in this historic New England community are markers honoring the legacy of one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the United States. See the article : MEMORANDUM: Flags at Half Staff in honor of United States Representative Jackie Walorski. It was to the Jews of Newport that George Washington, in his capacity as the nation’s first president, affirmed the new republic’s commitment to respect all religions and maintain the separation of church and state outlined in the first amendment to the new republic. Constitution.
“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of emulation. All have equal liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington wrote in his 1790 letter to the Newport congregation. Washington relied on Old Testament language in his message, assuring that “children of the seed of Abraham” would, like all believers of all faiths, “sit securely under their own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none that make him afraid.”
Determined to avoid the conflicts that plagued Europe, where monarchs established and maintained favored state churches, Washington made it clear that the United States would not be a country where one religion would be favored while adherents of other faiths would be dismissed as “deviants. ” “It is now no longer that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of men that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for fortunately the government of the United States, which gives adherence no sanction, to prosecute no aid, requires only that those who live under its protection should debase themselves as good citizens by giving it on all occasions their effective support,” the president wrote.
It is the American creed. It is this principle that has led presidents to go out of their way to celebrate all religions, as Dwight Eisenhower did when he inaugurated the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., in 1957 and declared that “under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts this center, this place of worship, is as welcome as can be a similar edifice of any other religion.” And it is this principle that led President Ronald Reagan to use a 1984 speech at Temple Hillel in Valley Stream, New York, to affirm that
[we] in the United States, above all, must remember that lesson, for we were founded as a nation of openness to people of all faiths. And so we must remain. Our very unity has been strengthened by our pluralism. We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we impose no faith, nor ever will. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. Everyone is free to believe or not to believe, everyone is free to practice a belief or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to talk about and act on their beliefs.
Eisenhower and Reagan were Republicans, but on this issue there was a unity of understanding with Democrats like John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.
Separation of church and state was sacred. Both parties could agree on that.
New polling suggests that the majority view of American Republicans is that the United States should declare itself a Christian nation.
A national survey of 2,091 Americans, conducted in May by the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll group, asked, “Would you favor or oppose the United States officially declaring the United States to be a Christian nation?” Sixty-one percent of Republican respondents expressed support for the declaration, while only 39 percent said they opposed it. In other words, the party’s base voters are not divided on the question of whether they should throw the Constitution aside and declare the United States a Christian nation. They overwhelmingly support the concept.
“Most Republicans of all age groups prefer to designate the United States as a Christian nation, but even more so in older generations,” the academics who conducted the survey, professors Stella Rouse and Shibley Telhami, noted in a review of their research for Politico.
What this means is that in a party where leaders have bent over and over again to the most extremist positions of their electoral base, there is a growing movement prepared to tear down the wall of separation between church and state and declare America to be a nation where one religion – their own – reigns supreme.
While prominent conservatives like Reagan and Barry Goldwater once championed religious pluralism and distanced themselves from the far right, former President Donald Trump has often reinforced anti-democratic and white supremacist memes long associated with Christian nationalism—going so far as to pose. with a Bible in Washington’s Lafayette Square after Black Lives Matter activists were violently removed in June 2020. And U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a close Trump ally, has openly declared, “I’m a proud Christian nationalist.”
Christian nationalism has been mainstreamed to such an extent that it is now the accepted belief of the party faithful. And Greene is not the only elected Republican to promote the ideas associated with a movement that Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) denounces as “the American Taliban.”
Shortly after being nominated for a second term in a June primary, Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert appeared at a church in the state for a televised service, where she announced, “I’m tired of this separation of church and state garbage that is not in the Constitution.”
The representative dismissed President Thomas Jefferson’s explicit “wall of separation” letter to Connecticut’s Danbury Baptists as “a stinking letter” that “doesn’t mean what they say it does.”
“The Church,” said Boebert, “shall lead the government.”
Boebert is wrong, as is Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano when he dismisses the separation of church and state as “a myth.” And so is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is promoting a Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative that wants high school students to be taught that the founders of the American experiment didn’t really believe in maintaining the “wall of separation” that Jefferson described.
Unfortunately, the truth is not going to deter outspoken Christian nationalists and their growing cadre of allies from promoting a radical rewriting of history. Nor will their oath to defend the Constitution lead to more “mainstream” leaders of the Republican Party telling their misguided voting base that they are wrong. It didn’t happen after Donald Trump staged a coup attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election; Republicans in Congress turned to Trump and Trumpism. It is foolish to imagine that these same congressional Republicans will suddenly develop a backbone for debates about maintaining the separation of church and state.
The good news is that the vast majority of Americans respect religious pluralism as much as the founding fathers did. By a solid 62-38 margin, respondents to the Critical Issues Poll said they opposed officially declaring the United States to be a Christian nation. That means that if the general electorate recognizes what is at stake in the Republican turn toward Christian nationalism, they will reject it. But for that to happen, Democrats must begin to make an issue of the fact that the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is quickly becoming the party of Lauren Boebert, Doug Mastriano, and the deconstruction of the separation between church and state. .
