This article shows that nearly 150 years after the Constitution was ratified, America was still a Christian nation, as the U.S. Supreme Court had observed in 1892. This article is representative of the kind of secularist agitation that was already active in America, and would eventually overturn the original intent of the Founding Fathers and convert America from a Christian nation into a Secular Humanist nation.
| It was not the Constitution which required this transformation, it was secularist "agit-prop" (such as this article) which persuaded American legal scholars and jurists to abandon the Christian vision of our forefathers and adopt a new vision -- a secularist vision -- of government and society. |
It is noteworthy that soon after this article was published, the Supreme Court, in U.S. v. Macintosh, overruled the Holy Trinity case, effectively gutting the concept of America as a nation "under God."
In the course of my discussion of the "separation of church and state" with infidels on the Internet, I have heard some secularists paint a picture of America as instantly secular -- i.e., as soon as the Constitution was ratified, all the laws which favored Christianity were abolished, all laws which advanced the true religion were abolished, or if they were accidentally left on the books, they were henceforth never enforced. This article decisively disproves that wishful thinking. The laws were retained and enforced, and there was no argument -- certainly no "majority view" -- that these laws were unconstitutional.
- The Constitution did not require the rebuilding of American law on secular foundations rather than Biblical foundations;
- The Constitution did not require states to permit atheists to take oaths;
- The Constitution did not force the states to abandon a Christian concept of marriage and allow homosexual "unions";
- The Constitution did not prohibit publicly and officially acknowledging God on the Sabbath;
- The Constitution did not prohibit laws against blasphemy
- The Constitution did not prohibit prayer or Bible reading in the public schools.
Hartogensis' article proves each of these propositions with citations from state constitutions, statutes, court cases and legal scholars. His goal, of course, is to overturn each of these facts, to transform America from a Christian nation to a secular nation. But in the course of advocating replacing Christianity with Secular Humanism as our national religion, the author admits that for nearly 150 years of Constitutional operation America remained a Christian nation. These facts shatter the delusions of separationists and the illusions they have created in the minds of weaker Christians.
| It was the combination of activist atheists and retreatist Christians that brought about the transformation of America from a Christian nation to a secular nation. God promises that if Christians end their pietistic retreat and take action, we can again make America a Christian nation, a "City upon a Hill." This article shows that the Constitution is no barrier to Christian political activism. |
This article argues for a more "enlightened" social policy than that of the Founding Fathers; it does not argue for a more rigorous enforcement of their Constitution. The modern myth of "separation of church and state" is not legally required by the Constitution. It is simply the sociological product of the rise of Secular Humanism and the decline of Christian activism. There is nothing in the Constitution which legally prohibits Christians from passing laws and returning to the days when the Supreme Court declared this to be a Christian nation.
Here are the major sections of Hartogensis' law review, which are found in separate files:
- [Introduction] (follows below)
- Christianity Part of Our Law
- Are Oaths of Believers Alone Believable?
- Official Oaths Founded on Christian Belief
- Compelling Marriage in the Face of the Church
- Sunday Laws
- Blasphemy
- Bible Reading in the Schools
Denial of Equal Rights to Religious Minorities and Non-Believers in The United States
B. H. HARTOGENSIS
Yale Law Journal, vol. 39, pp. 659-681 (1930)
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Analysis and links
"The Rights of Man" was a slogan of the French Revolution, not the American Revolution.
"Freedom of Conscience" is a Christian concept. Atheists never fought for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. Baptists (for example) fought the Church of England for the right to worship God according to their own conscience.
The Revolutionary War was a movement of Christians, not an atheistic movement. (These Christians may have been wrong about whether their revolution was Christlike.) |
Equality of all men before the law, the ideal to which seers and philosophers have looked forward for ages,[1] is far from being attained in the United States, despite such slogans as the "Rights of Man," "Freedom of Religion and of Conscience," "A Free State," "All Men Are Created Equal," the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, and the like. The Revolutionary War, so we are taught at school, separated Church and State, but that meant merely that the colonists were no longer subservient to the Church of England.[2] For the purpose of putting an end to the arrogant "toleration"[3] of religious minorities,[4] by
providing equal rights and religious freedom for all, it succeeded merely in giving all Christian sects equal rights before the law. Rights have consistently been denied other religious minorities. This is not merely a legal proposition; for in fact an invidious deference is being paid by the state to the miscalled "national religion" of the majority, beyond mere recognition thereof, a deference that entails, every day, actual proscriptions and hardships in certain states to non-conformists and unbelievers alike, all under color of law. Typical of this inequality was the disallowing and discrediting of testimony of unbelievers in the recent Gastonia trials in North Carolina.[5]
The purpose of the present discussion is to show how religious beliefs of the dominant Christians in the United States are allowed effectually to control our every day affairs, not in moot questions or exotic dead-letter blue-laws, but through laws that are actually in force,[6] or, if not enforced, still dangerous to civil rights of citizens because enforceable at will.[7]
[1] A high ideal is that of the Mosaic law: "Ye shall have one manner of law as well for the stranger as for one of your own country." LEV. 24:22; cf. NUM. 15:29.
If we were forced to choose between these two options, it is clear why we fought the American Revolution and demanded the First Amendment:
- To ensure freedom to worship God according to conscience, rather than according to the decrees of an Anglican bishop appointed without American representation.
- To ensure that atheists never hear any public or official acknowledgment of our nation's gratitude and dependence upon God.
There isn't a scrap of evidence to support #2. For #1, the reader is invited to see Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre , Oxford Univ. Press, 1962. More analysis here.
There is a remarkable parallel between Hartogensis' distinction between "toleration" and "liberty" and that drawn by the modern "religious right." See Chalcedon Position Paper No. 31, "Religious Liberty vs. Religious Toleration," reprinted in Roots of Reconstruction, pp. 147f. |
[2] See BONDY, HOW RELIGIOUS LIBERTY WAS WRITTEN INTO THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION (1927).
[3] "Toleration -- I am for freedom of religion against all manoeuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another." Thomas Jefferson. "The right of every man is to liberty, -- not toleration." James Madison.
Toleration may be defined as a favor granted by the dominant Christians to such non-conformists as they graciously for the time being tolerate, i.e., suffer and allow, as a superior does his inferior. Toleration is thus to be expressly distinguished from religious liberty for all, which negatives a union of Church and State, and expressly denies authority to enforce any religious observance. Bloom v. Richards, 2 Ohio St. 387 (1853); cf. VAN LOON, TOLERANCE (1925).
Compare Maryland’s so-called Act or Edict of Toleration, the Act of Religion of 1649. Its first section prescribed death for those who shall deny the divinity of Jesus and the Holy Family. The only "toleration" was protection guaranteed Protestant Christians by Catholics and vice versa for a few years in order to avoid friction in the Colony. Bancroft and others misconstrued this to constitute a highly meritorious, well-conducted scheme like that of Roger Williams. In fact at no time during the history of the Colony was there toleration for any except Trinitarian Christians, with misery for non-conformists, and no cessation from religious strife. These laws especially persecuted Catholics, all of whom were expressly disfranchised, including Charles Carroll
of Carrolton, Maryland’s principal signer of the Declaration of Independence. So confused is the public as to the true import of this false "Toleration" even to this day that this Edict of Toleration was adopted as part of the Democratic Platform in Maryland in 1896.
[4] "Probably the best test of true liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of opinion; but complete liberty
for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor." ROOSEVELT, AFRICAN AND EUROPEAN ADDRESSES (1910) 69.
[5] These took place at Gastonia and Charlotte, N. C., in September, 1929, in connection with the riots of textile workers at local mills.
| This fact completely destroys the secularist revisionism surrounding the Torcaso case. |
[6] Thus when the Maryland legislature of 1927 appointed a commission to recommend abolition of "obsolete" laws, not one of the state laws herein mentioned as operative was considered in its report.
| If a one man says "The tree-gods told me to kill all lumberjacks," is "Interference with differing religious views . . . a function of government?" The lumberjacks better hope so. James Madison spoke of "false religions," and urged legislators to vote against any bill which did not advance the "true religion." The Supreme Court of the U.S. invoked Jefferson to support the claim that polygamy should be outlawed in all "Christian nations."
The Founding Fathers believed government was a religious (Christian) institution. Read their words here. |
[7] "Interference with differing religious views is not a function of government, nor is it the province of a legislature to determine what religion is true or what false. Our government is a civil not a religious institution. Every person has the right to choose his own religion and enjoy it freely, without molestation, apart from religious sentiment, alike entitled to protection so long as be does not invade the rights of others. The legislature is not a proper tribunal to determine what are the laws of God, for this would involve a legislative decision of a religious controversy." BLAKELEY, AMERICAN STATE PAPERS BEARING ON SUNDAY LEGISLATION (Religious Liberty Association Pamphlet).