Blog 6: Religious Liberty and American Culture

Isaac Backus (1773) appealed for religious liberty. His “greatest difficulty” concerned “submitting to a taxing power in ecclesiastical affairs.” In other words, he objected to being taxed to support a religion that is not his own. He was more frustrated that the government extended its power into religion that with the taxes themselves. He and other Baptists and separatists were often punished for religious dissent, leading him to write that “the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also.” He is actually quoting the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) which he says, “our rulers and their ministers have published to the world.” Backus is trying to show that the faith established by the government already believed in liberty of conscience, which I would define as the freedom to do what you believe to be right. He is saying that if conscience and reason are desirable things (and in America, then and now, we consider them to be so), then people must be free to act on them, and this means being free to choose your own brand of faith.

John Leland (1791) gives two reasons that governments should not give preference to any religious group:

1. Every man has to answer for himself at Judgment Day. If government will not answer for him then, it should not answer for him in matters of religion now either.
2. The mind is to be kept sacred for God (and not controlled by men) and should be open to conviction. Even the best of men change their minds, and that should be allowed!

Leland refutes the idea that conformity in religion is necessary to the happiness of civil government by comparing it to “mathematicks”, saying that religion and mathematics have equally little to do with the operations of government (and government doesn’t strictly control our math preferences).

I think that today’s arguments are both similar and different from these early separatists’ and Baptists’ appeals. Freedom from government intrusion into religion is still very important to us (probably even more so—we don’t even want religion mentioned let alone dictated) but we have tried to divorce conscience from the picture. The freedom to have no conviction is just as important to us as these early writers’ desire for freedom to have differing convictions. Thus the religion vs. anti-religion argument is more prevalent in Freedom of Religion cases than arguments between different religions. I suppose that atheism or anti-religion in general could be considered just another religion, but the difference that I am posing is that Americans today bristle at the idea that we must believe in something to be successful citizens. Notice that I said “successful” and not “good”, because we also bristle at the idea of being labeled “good” or “bad” or even at the existence of such distinctions. This is a far cry from Backus and Leland.