By: Tony Williams
On January 24, 1774, James
Madison wrote to a college friend praising the Boston Tea Party, which had
occurred only weeks before. He praised
the Boston
patriots for their boldness in “defending liberty and property.” Equating political and civil liberty, he
warned that if the Church of England had established itself as the official
religion of all the colonies, then “slavery and subjection might and would have
been gradually insinuated among us.”
Madison had in mind the
religious tyranny that he was then witnessing in Virginia.
In an adjacent county to his home, a half dozen itinerant Baptist
ministers were in jail for preaching the Gospel to all who would listen, even
from their jail cells. Baptists and
other dissenting Christians had suffered horrific violations of their religious
liberty when they were horsewhipped on stage or violently driven out of towns for
preaching without a license. Madison lamented that a
“diabolical Hell-conceived principle of persecution rages,” and asked his
friend to “pray for liberty of conscience to revive among us.”
The young Madison
believed that religious liberty was an essential right of mankind. Educated at Princeton
under the tutelage of Rev. John Witherspoon, he was imbued with the ideas of
religious and political liberty from the Scottish Enlightenment. Madison
told his friend, “That liberal catholic and equitable way of thinking as to the
rights of conscience, which is one of the characteristics of a free
people.”
Following
the revolution of 1776, Madison
would be at the center of the struggle over religious establishment a decade
later when Virginian legislators took up the issue of Patrick Henry’s bill for
a general assessment for religion. After
some brilliant politics that delayed the consideration of the bill and pushed
Henry into the governorship, Madison led the
forces of disestablishment with his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance” against
religious taxes. He wrote, “The religion
then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man;
and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable
right.” Madison
continued, stating that, “It is unalienable also, because what is here a right
towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.”
That duty is built into the fabric of human nature and precedes the
claims of civil society. “We maintain
therefore that in matters of religion, no man’s right is abridged by the
institution of civil society and that religion is wholly exempt from its
cognizance.” If there is a sense here of
separation of church and state, Madison’s
understanding is that the government must not interfere with the inalienable
rights of liberty of conscience.
In the
First Congress, Madison fulfilled the promise of
the Federalists to ratify amendments to the Constitution protecting essential
liberties though not altering the structure of the government. The First Amendment reflected decades of Madison’s serious thought and work protecting religious
liberty. Although Madison
wanted the Bill of Rights applied to the states, he lost the debate, and the
First Amendment specifically limited the power of Congress to establish an
official national church or to interfere with freedom of conscience. “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” He had been at the forefront of the twin
goals of disestablishment and religious liberty as a natural right in Virginia during the American Revolution and now at the
national level during the founding of the American republic.
In 1791
and 1792, Madison wrote a series of essays on
the principles of republican government for Philip Freneau’s highly partisan National Gazette. On March 29, 1792, Madison
published his “On Property” essay, which posited a new understanding of a
property in natural rights. Madison writes that property is much more than merely land
or wealth, and “embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have
a right.” In this sense, every person
“has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.” The most essential right in human nature is
religious liberty, in Madison’s estimation. “He has a peculiar value in his religious
opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.” He sums up his thinking about property by
stating, “In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may
be equally said to have a property in his rights.”
Madison then
brilliantly explored the very purpose of republican self-government to protect
the inalienable rights of mankind, striking another Lockean chord. “Government is instituted to protect property
of every sort,” he writes, “This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man,
whatever is his own.” For Madison,
it was a moral principle that the government must act justly and fulfill its
purposes. His social compact thinking
mirrored that of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote:
More
sparingly should this praise be allowed to a government, where a man’s religious
rights are violated by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a
hierarchy. Conscience is the most sacred
of all property; other property depending in part of positive law, the exercise
of that, being a natural and unalienable right . . . [There is] no title to
invade a man’s conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold
from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the
very nature and original conditions of the social pact.
Madison averred that the United States government was not a government that
violated the sacred rights of mankind.
Indeed, it was instituted to protect those rights. “If there be a government then which prides
itself in maintaining the inviolability of property . . . and yet directly violates the property which
individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their
faculties . . . that such a government is not a pattern for the United
States.” Madison
finished his essay with more conditional logic, stating that if the new
republic wished to be known for wise and just government, it would “respect the
rights of property, and the property in rights.”
James Madison spent a lifetime thinking about the natural
right of religious liberty and in public service doggedly working to protect it
at the state and national level from government intrusion. The current administration shows either a
willful ignorance or a remarkable disregard for Madison’s
career-long defense of freedom of conscience to so openly and blatantly violate
the property rights that Roman Catholics and other religious people have in
their conscience. Thus, we are reminded
of the importance of studying history and the Constitution that we may
understand American founding principles and firmly stand united against any
violations of religious and civil liberty by the government.
No comments:
Post a Comment