Say Goodbye To Religious Freedom In Red States
While the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear verbatim in the Constitution, the concept was deeply embedded in the discussions surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Constitution and the First Amendment and there was significant debate among the founding fathers regarding the precept. Some, like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were strong advocates for the separation of church and state. Jefferson famously wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 about the need for a “wall of separation between Church and State” to protect religious freedom and prevent government interference in matters of religion. Madison, often called the “Father of the Constitution,” shared Jefferson's views on the importance of religious freedom and the need to keep religion separate from government institutions. Madison argued that religious establishments tended to promote division and intolerance, and he believed that government should remain neutral in matters of religion to ensure equal rights for all citizens.
Some of them were eager to point out that the religious wars and conflicts that had occurred in Europe were a cautionary example of what could happen if religion became intertwined with government in the new nation. They saw the establishment of state religions and religious persecution in Europe as contributing factors to sectarian violence, intolerance, and oppression. Jefferson, in particular, expressed concern about the potential for religious strife here if government institutions became entangled with religious matters. He believed that the government should not favor one religion over another or impose religious beliefs on its citizens to avoid the religious conflicts that had plagued Europe. Madison argued that religious freedom was essential for maintaining peace and stability in society.
The eventual consensus among the founders was that a government that remained neutral in matters of religion would be better equipped to protect the rights and liberties of all citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs. Many had studied history and were aware of the 16th Century struggle in France between Catholics and Protestants which saw massacres, assassinations and sieges as both sides vied for control. The wars ended with the Edict of Nantes in 1598, granting religious toleration to Protestants. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) was one of the most devastating conflicts in European history, fueled by religious rivalries. It began as a struggle between Catholic and Protestant states within the Holy Roman Empire but eventually expanded into a wider European conflict involving most major powers. The war resulted in widespread devastation, famine and disease, leading to significant population loss in many regions. It was the real World War I. The fathers influenced by Enlightenment ideas— you call them “progressives” or “wokes”— wanted to avoid anything like the Spanish Inquisition coming the the new nation. Jefferson's views on religious freedom were shaped by his experiences in Virginia, where he witnessed the consequences of state-supported religion and the persecution of religious minorities such as Baptists.
However, not all Founding Fathers held the same views on this issue. Conservatives like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, believed that religion played a beneficial role in fostering morality and social order [conservatism], and they were more tolerant of government involvement in religious matters.
Despite these differences of opinion, the principle of separation of church and state was enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution— “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This language reflects the founders' commitment to religious freedom and their desire to prevent the establishment of an official state religion while safeguarding individuals' rights to practice their own faith or no faith at all.
Progressives advocate for social, political and economic reforms aimed at creating positive change and advancing toward greater equality, justice, and prosperity for all members of society. They tend to embrace innovation, social change and government intervention to address societal problems and promote the common good and prioritize individual freedoms and civil liberties while also recognizing the importance of collective responsibility and social welfare programs.
Conservatives generally favor preserving traditional values, institutions and social norms, and are cautious about changes to the existing order, especially rapid and radical changes. Generally, they advocate for limited government intervention in the economy, lower taxes, free-market principles, strong national defense and individual responsibility, emphasizing the importance of family, religion, patriotism and law and order in maintaining a stable and orderly society.
In contrast, reactionaries want to drag society backwards and seek to reverse or undo social, political and economic changes that they perceive as threatening traditional values, institutions, or societal hierarchies. They reject progressive reforms and advocate for a return to older, more authoritarian or hierarchical systems of governance and social organization. Reactionaries are motivated by a desire to preserve privilege or dominance for certain groups (their own), such as the ruling elite, dominant ethnic or religious groups, or traditional gender roles. They may oppose social progress, democracy, multiculturalism and individual freedoms in favor of maintaining existing power structures and social hierarchies.
In the pre-Civil War South, there was a strong reactionary movement among white slaveholders and their allies who sought to defend the institution of slavery against abolitionist sentiment and efforts to restrict its expansion. This reactionary movement was characterized by a commitment to preserving the plantation economy, maintaining white supremacy and resisting federal intervention in Southern affairs. It led to the secession of Southern states and the outbreak of the Civil War in defense of slavery and states' rights. Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, there was a reactionary backlash in the South against the gains made by African Americans in terms of civil rights and political representation, leading to the enactment of Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation and disenfranchised African Americans. These laws violently reasserted white supremacy and maintained racial hierarchy in the aftermath of Reconstruction. That and the Red Scare of the 1950’s were the ideological and spiritual antecedents of the MAGA movement.
Yesterday, Michelle Boorstein, reported on one of the latest manifestations of reactionary politics in America— led by Texas, of course: putting chaplains in public schools. State legislators in red states, she wrote, “are pushing a coordinated effort to bring chaplains into public schools, aided by a new, legislation-crafting network that aims to address policy issues ‘from a biblical world view’ and by a consortium whose promotional materials say chaplains are a way to convert millions to Christianity. The bills have been introduced this legislative season in 14 states, inspired by Texas, which passed a law last year allowing school districts to hire chaplains or use them as volunteers for whatever role the local school board sees fit, including replacing trained counselors. Chaplain bills were approved by one legislative chamber in three states— Utah, Indiana and Louisiana— but died in Utah and Indiana. Bills are pending in nine states. One passed both houses of Florida’s legislature and is awaiting the governor’s signature.”
The bills are mushrooming in an era when the U.S. Supreme Court has expanded the rights of religious people and groups in the public square and weakened historic protections meant to keep the government from endorsing religion. In a 2022 case, Justice Neil Gorsuch referred to the “so-called separation of church and state.” Trump has edged close to a government-sanctioned religion by asserting in his campaign that immigrants who “don’t like our religion— which a lot of them don’t” would be barred from the country in a second term.
“We are reclaiming religious freedom in this country,” said Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator and the president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which he founded in 2019 to craft model legislation, according to the group’s site. Its mission is “to bring federal, state and local lawmakers together in support of clear biblical principles … to address major policy concerns from a biblical world view,” the site says.
The group hosted [MAGA Mike] late last year at its gala at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. The chaplain bills, Rapert said, are part of an effort to empower “the values and principles of the founding fathers.” Critics who compare such efforts with theocracy, he said, are creating “a false flag, a boogeyman by radical left to demonize everyone of faith.”
Rapert says he’ll push in the next round of chaplain bills to make the positions mandatory.
Since he brought up the founding fathers, let me just speculate that if Jefferson were to witness efforts to introduce chaplains into public schools, he’d flip out about the violation of religious freedom and the establishment of religion in government institutions. He’d argue that public schools should remain neutral on matters of religion and refrain from endorsing or promoting any particular religious beliefs. He’s certainly view the movement as a dangerous encroachment of religious influence into secular spaces and a threat to the principles of religious liberty and pluralism. Like Jefferson, Madison would absolutely oppose efforts to introduce chaplains into public schools on the grounds that it could lead to government endorsement of religion and infringe on the rights of religious minorities. He’d argue that public schools should focus on secular education and refrain from promoting specific religious beliefs or practices and would emphasize the importance of maintaining a strict separation between religious institutions and government entities to ensure equal treatment for all citizens regardless of their religious beliefs, something Rapert either can’t or doesn’t want to understand.
Boorstein spoke with Heather Weaver, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, who said that “allowing chaplains into public schools ‘a constitutional time bomb. It definitely would be a much more direct route to promoting religion to students and evangelizing them than we’ve seen in the past.’ Despite its popularity among some legislators, the campaign has drawn objections in some places where efforts to incorporate religion— Christianity in particular— into public life are normally welcomed. Texas’ law required all school districts to vote by March 1 on whether to accept chaplains, and the state’s biggest districts, in both red and blue areas, rejected the creation of a new chaplain position. Those districts enroll more than half of the state’s public school students.”
Some experts on church-state relations say the pushback may reflect Americans’ complex and inconsistent relationship with the role Christianity should play in a pluralistic country. Polls show a majority of Americans say that the government should enforce church-state separation and oppose the government ever declaring an official U.S. religion. Yet, in a 2022 Pew Research poll, a strong minority, 45 percent, said the country “should be a Christian nation.”
“This shows there’s a difference between having some of these loose ideas or inclinations about what the relationship should be between religion and government— especially Christianity and the government— and looking at what it looks like in a policy that impacts our kids,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a group defending the separation of church and state. “Most people are in the middle.”
…The Texas chaplain bill came amid a cluster of legislative efforts there to weave religion explicitly into public schools. In 2021, the legislature passed a law ordering schools to hang “in a conspicuous place” any donated signs reading “In God We Trust.” In 2023 the state Senate passed bills requiring the Ten Commandments be hung in every classroom in the state, although the effort was shelved in the House.
… Democratic lawmakers filed amendments to the chaplain bill but the GOP majority rejected almost all of them, including one requiring parental consent to talk with a chaplain, one barring proselytizing and another requiring chaplains to serve students of all faiths. The bill as passed had no educational or accreditation requirements for chaplains, nor specifics about what they would do.
Supporters of the chaplains offered a mix of pragmatic and religious arguments.
Texas ranks 17th in the nation in the ratio of counselors to students with 1 for every 389 children. (The American School Counselor Association recommends 1 for every 250 students.) Advocates said chaplains could help with kids’ mental health challenges and would infuse a sense of reverence, morality and respect into the schools.
Texas state Sen. Mayes Middleton, one of the bill’s Republican sponsors, said Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court appointments were making “it possible for us to go win some of these fights and put God back in government so people can freely exercise their religious beliefs in government and in schools.”
Lawmakers in Texas and in other states advocating for chaplains said they have worked with the Oklahoma-based National School Chaplain Association, whose annual report says it has served 27 million students in two dozen countries. The association’s site focuses on the need to supplement the shortage of guidance counselors. Not publicized is that the association is a subsidiary of a group called Mission Generation, which has said its goal is to use public school chaplains to convert millions to Christianity.
“The key is schools, the largest network of children on the planet. There is a fantastic opportunity to bring God’s word to millions of children through public and private schools,” says a voice-over on a Mission Generation publicity video.
…Many Texas districts saw local clergy and chaplains of various faiths testify against the new positions, saying students need professional counselors, and that they were concerned about the lack of mandate for religious diversity. The leader of the legislative opposition was state Rep. James Talarico (D), a Presbyterian seminarian. He said that without sufficient guardrails, chaplains would wind up a vehicle for Christian power, which he sees as countering the gospel.
“It is the worship of power,” Talarico said this month during a news conference about the chaplain law. “Jesus never asked us to establish a Christian theocracy. All he asked was that we love thy neighbor.”
Recent Supreme Court rulings have strengthened the role of publicly funded schools as the vanguard for breaching the traditional divide between church and state. The court has ruled that state-run voucher programs must fund religious schools and that public grant programs can’t exclude religious institutions.
Advocates of school chaplains often cite a 2022 Supreme Court ruling involving a public school football coach in Washington state who had been suspended by the school district for praying on the field after games. The court said Joe Kennedy shouldn’t have been suspended for what Gorsuch called a “brief, quiet, personal prayer,” although opponents noted the prayers often drew the media and players, among others. The ruling did not, however, endorse staff-led prayer in public schools.
Some states that are proposing chaplains in schools have taken earlier steps to merge religion and public education. Seven states since 2018 have passed mandates similar to Texas’s offering a dominant display of “In God We Trust” signs. Governors in Idaho and Kentucky recently signed measures that could allow on-duty teachers and public school employees to pray in front of and with students. Advocates for church-state separation say the number of bills seeking to fund and empower conservative religious beliefs has increased, to 1,200 now.