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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
“Too often in recent disputes over religion and public affairs, some have insisted that any evidence of religious influence on public policy represents an establishment of religion and is therefore precluded as an improper ‘imposition.’ Such exclusion of religion from public life is historically unwarranted, philosophically inconsistent and profoundly undemocratic. … Many of the most dynamic social movements in American history, including that of civil rights, were legitimately inspired and shaped by religious motivation.”
— The Williamsburg CharterThere is an inclination in some circles in the United States to take umbrage whenever church people address problems of public policy. The inclination seems to be based on the supposition that preachers have no business “intermeddling in politics.” In 1981 Senator Barry Goldwater took offense when Jerry Falwell and other “new rightists” denounced his nominee for the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor. The Senator issued a statement denouncing the “Moral Majority” for “undermining the basic American principles of separation of church and state by using the muscle of religion towards political ends.”
1. New York Times, 09 16, 1981, B9 (emphasis added)Google Scholar.
2. As cited in Dabney, Virginius, Dry Messiah: The Life of Bishop Cannon 136 (Knopf, 1949)Google Scholar.
3. Ahlstrom, Sidney, A Religious History of the American People 872, 904n, 870 (Yale, 1972)Google Scholar.
4. Stokes, Anson Phelps, 2 Church and State in the United States 304–06 (Harper, 1950)Google Scholar.
5. Stokes, Anson Phelps and Pfeffer, Leo, Church and State in the United States 287 (Harper & Row, 1964)Google Scholar. Most of the material in this section is drawn from this important work.
6. Stokes called this crusade to bombard Congress with petitions bearing thousands of names “the greatest piece of organized propaganda that had ever up to that time been attempted in the United States.” Stokes, at 155 (cited in note 4).
7. See Stokes, at 121-249 (cited in note 4).
8. When Henry Ward Beecher was attending a meeting at which a deacon was raising money to supply weapons for a company to take part in the Kansas crusade, he declared that a Sharpe's rifle was a greater moral agency in this struggle than a Bible — an incident from which sprang the popular phrase, “Beecher's Bibles.” Stokes, at 201 (cited in note 4).
9. As cited in Wolf, William J., The Almost Chosen People 22 (Doubleday, 1959) (emphasis in original)Google Scholar.
10. See Stokes, at 5-12 (cited in note 4).
11. Stokes and Pfeffer, at 305 (cited in note 5).
12. The legislation was sustained in Champion v Ames, 188 US 321 (1903).
13. This whole fascinating story is related in Bridenbaugh, Carl, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics 1689-1775 (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar.
14. Handy, Robert T., A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada 137 (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar.
15. Ahlstrom, at 361 (cited in note 3).
16. Gaustad, Edwin S., A Religious History of America 118 (Harper & Row, 1966)Google Scholar. The “election sermon” was a quaint New England custom, now fallen into desuetude, in which a local clergyman addressed the populace on Election Day, often from the rostrum of the town hall or even the Assembly. From such roots, presumably, sprang the custom in the early days of the Republic, of church services for members of Congress conducted on Sundays in the Hall of the House of Representatives.
17. Letter of John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 13 Feb 1818, 10 The Works of John Adams 282 (Little, Brown, 1856; reprint: AMS Press, 1971) (emphasis added)Google Scholar.
18. This thesis is explored at greater length in Kelley, Dean, Religion in the American Revolution 34 Christianity and Crisis 123–28 (no. 10, 06 10, 1974)Google Scholar.
19. This article deals mainly with the churches' role in the United States, since other and earlier settings pose very different considerations, in which churches and their members may have had very little to say about political choices (as during the first three centuries of the Christian era) or too much to say (under Constantine and later regimes in which the church and its leaders were to some extent part of the ruling structure).
20. Westminster Confession, chapter xxxi, as cited in Leith, John H., ed, Creeds of the Church 228 (John Knox, 1973)Google Scholar.