Should Washington Be Taken as Seriously as Jefferson on Church/State Matters?
Ed Brayton on Mar 5th 2008
Here’s an interesting article in the Texas Journal of Law and Politics by Nathan Forrester that makes the argument that George Washington’s views on church and state have been unfairly ignored and should be given as much weight as those of Thomas Jefferson. The article is actually a book review of Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State, by Tara Ross and Joseph Smith. And there’s much in the article that is hard to argue with.
I’ve pointed out many times the basic split among the first four presidents on such matters. Washington and Adams were what might be called non-coercive accommodationists, while Jefferson and Madison were strict separationists. Washington and Adams believed that the government should provide a general and rhetorical support to religion through proclamations of days of thanksgiving and prayer, but only if those proclamations were kept non-coercive (that is, no one was required to follow them) and they were worded very broadly so as to encompass almost any religious belief, not merely Christianity.
One of the things Forrester points out in his article is that Washington was more a pragmatist than a theorist. Unlike Jefferson and Madison, who wrote at great length on the philosophical questions that define the church/state relationship, Washington did not. In discussing the famous case of Patrick Henry’s bill to require people to pay taxes to ministers for the propagation of the gospel, a bill that James Madison defeated while passing Jefferson’s Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia, he writes:
It turns out that Washington held a different view of the proposed religious assessment, which at least merited mention alongside the views of Jefferson and Madison. Washington regarded the bill as imprudent but declined an invitation to sign on to Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, making clear he did not oppose the bill in principle; “I must confess,” he said in a letter to George Mason, “that I am not amongst the number of those who are so much alarmed at the thoughts of making people pay towards the support of that which they profess.”
I have said before that the accommodationist position of Washington and Adams is a legitimate interpretation of the first amendment’s religion clauses. I personally prefer the Jefferson/Madison position, and I think the vastly increased diversity of religious beliefs in America today versus the late 18th century supports that preference. But as a matter of constitutional interpretation, the Washington/Adams model is clearly within the bounds of reasonable interpretation. Having said that, however, I do think that the fact that Washington (and Adams, to an even greater extent) did not set out any sort of coherent theoretical framework for the relationship between church and state undercuts the argument made by Ross and Smith that the courts should give them equal weight.
Constitutional interpretation is largely the art of applying broad principles in specific situations. Jefferson and Madison left behind a detailed and thorough series of principles in regard to church/state matters that Washington and Adams, who sort of flew by the seat of their pants in making such decisions, simply did not. Forrester himself says that Washington’s case-by-case focus on practicality rather than on application of core principles “is vulnerable to the charge that it elevates political expediency over legal principle.” I would argue that this is a compelling reason to favor the Jefferson/Madison position over his in matters of constitutional interpretation.
The article does an excellent job of detailing what Washington’s views on various church/state matters actually were, and it’s certainly worth noting them and the distinctions between his views and those of Jefferson and Madison. This does help inform our debate on such matters and is valuable for that reason. Ultimately, however, I think the Jefferson/Madison framework is both more principled and consistent than Washington’s accommodationism, and more practical for a society that is far more religiously diverse than the one those three men lived in.
Filed in The Basement
Well, I got the idea from Mr. Kuznicki [credit where it's due]:
It seems to me that states had great leeway in “establishing” religion at the Founding, but such “accommodations” to churches as with the issue here are forbidden by Amendment XIV and the SC’s expansive view of “equal protection of the laws.” And we certainly wouldn’t want to take a census of Druids for tax purposes.
Per your last bit, Ed, for every “accommodation” Christians might seek these days, I just remind them it would also apply to Islam. They get a lot less pragmatic and a lot more into principle in a damn hurry.
[...] Just to add a bit of information to Ed Brayton’s excellent post. I agree that George Washington and John Adams were religious accommodationists, as opposed to strict separationists like Jefferson and Madison. However, one bit of information needs to be added to a quotation of Washington’s that Brayton reproduced to put it in context. Washington and Adams, though accommodationists, nonetheless believed that all men of all religions (or no religions) possessed equal religious rights. In other words, they believed, contra Jefferson and Madison, that government could both at once support a particular kind of religion (i.e., Christianity) and not violate the rights of non-Christians. But they were concerned with the rights of non-Christians. [...]