The god-in-the-constitution controversy

American secularisms in historical perspective

Tìsa Wenger

pp. 87-105

in: Linell E. Cady, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (eds), Comparative secularisms in a global age, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

In February 1873, approximately five hundred people attended a national convention held by the National Reform Association (NRA) in New York City to call for a constitutional amendment that would "recognize God as the source of all power, Jesus Christ as the chief ruler, and the Bible as the supreme ruler of all national conduct."¹ The NRA, created a decade earlier by a coalition of Protestant leaders, pointed out that America had already been identified as a Christian nation in various state and federal court decisions and by prominent national figures such as Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who had famously written that it was "the especial duty of government to foster and encourage [Christianity] among all the citizens and subjects."² NRA organizers believed that an amendment clarifying the nation's Christian foundation would provide necessary constitutional protection for prayers and Bible reading in the public schools, Sunday closing laws, antiblasphemy laws, prison and military chaplains hired by the government, and other laws and traditions that they believed essential to the nation's moral foundations. They denied that the proposed amendment would create an unconstitutional establishment of religion on the grounds that no particular denomination would receive special privileges and insisted that such a change would actually preserve rather than violate America's liberties. In the words of an earlier NRA statement, "The proposed religious amendment to our national Constitution, so far from infringing any individual's rights of conscience, or tending in the least degree to a union of Church and State, will afford the fullest security against a corrupt and corrupting Church establishment, and form the strongest safeguard of both the civil and religious liberties of all citizens."³