The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

In 1785, six years after Jefferson first proposed the statute for religious freedom, Madison shepherded it through the state legislature (as he would later push the First Amendment through the House), making Virginia the first state to separate government and religion. The statute was unique in another respect. It was less a declaration of positive law and more a declaration of a natural right: “the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.” Relying on natural law to protect rights was a Jeffersonian motif, as we shall see in chapters 3 and 4 on the Declaration of Independence. Madison is not only the Father of the Constitution and the Father of the Bill of Rights, but also perhaps the greatest advocate for the separation of state and church. “Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance;” he wrote in 1822, adding, “And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”60 Madison argued that the separation existed as much to protect religion as to protect government. In response to a sermon he received from a New York clergyman, Madison wrote that “the United States is a happy disproof of the error s...