HOW RELIGION INFLUENCES POLITICS

How religion influences politics

How religion influences politics

James Madison won the presidency in a landslide in 1808,prevailed in a closer race in 1812, and left office as a revered elder statesman four years later. Among his most appealing traits was a lifelong commitment to religious freedom, but if we could raise him from the dead never mind the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting presidents to two terms his views on the separation of church and state might well keep him out of today's White House.

Unlike modern candidates, Madison avoided public professions of faith, and he openly expressed an idea that would be heresy today: on the critical problems of democratic politics maintaining political stability while balancing majority rule and individual rights religion offered little help. European history taught him that where one faith dominated a society, it would form an oppressive alliance with the state. Where two religions of comparable strength existed, they could rip a society apart. Liberty could only flourish where, as in the United States, a variety of religious factions could check and balance one another (James, 2007).

But even in America there were limits to the political usefulness of religion. How, Madison asked in Federalist No. 10, could arbitrary majorities be disciplined? “We all know,” he wrote, “that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.” Extending the political sphere to encompass an array of different factions in a way that would diffuse power offered a more plausible alternative. Even in his extended republic, however, religion could often be used to incite dangerous prejudices. Madison had his own encounter with a religious opposition; he blamed a partisan clergy for inflaming passions in New England against the War of 1812 (Loconte, 2003).

Religious freedom is the lifeblood of the American people, the cornerstone of American government. When the Founding Fathers determined that the innate rights of men and women should be enshrined in our Constitution, they so esteemed religious liberty that they made it the first freedom in the Bill of Rights. Yet, in our modern culture, some people put much more emphasis on the former meaning and almost none on the latter. In fact, to promote their belief that people should be protected from religion altogether, they extend the idea of separation into areas that make no sense at all (Brant, 2005).

When James Madison wrote Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments in 1785, he was doing two things at once. On the one hand, Madison was promoting Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom which had been lingering in the Virginia legislature for six years as our fledgling country struggled to free itself from English oppression. By 1785, the Act's author had moved to Paris, serving as our ambassador to France. During Jefferson's absence, Patrick Henry took the opportunity to propose legislation that would have required all Virginia schools to use Christian curriculum with specific tests for adherence to Christian dogma and teaching. Madison's second and more important task in writing Memorial ...