Evangelical Christians continue to represent a sizeable percentage of the current president’s base support. To those who have watched evangelicals spend “the last 40 years telling everyone how to live, who to love,” and “what to think about morality,” the continued alliance with this president makes evangelicals the “biggest phonies” in all of politics. Indeed, the behind-the-scenes details of how a “thrice-married, insult-hurling” president obtained the endorsement of the evangelical hierarchy are as lewd and hypocritical as one might expect.
As much as the hypocrisy of evangelicalism can be mocked and exposed however, there exists a kernel of truth lurking behind the claim that evangelicals are supporting this president out of fear. It is simply impossible to deny that institutionalized persecution of religious ideas by public universities has occurred. Thankfully, this persecution has been continuously challenged and overturned in the courts.
The fact that persecution of religious ideas can and has occurred in our society however, does not even remotely suggest that intolerance is a uniquely “secularist” problem. In fact, intolerance of dissent and censorship of opposing views has been a general feature in religious institutions for thousands of years. Moreover, the same intolerance and censorship evangelicals claim they hate so much when it occurs in “secular” institutions is expressly embraced at the largest Christian colleges in the United States today, such as Liberty University. Does this past and current existence of intolerance in religious institutions mean that religion is inherently intolerant? No, because human bias exists generally in all human institutions, a fact the framers of the Constitution knew all too well and the exact reason why they chose to embrace secularism.
Of course, if you were to ask an evangelical about how the Founders established religious freedom, you would likely get the (wrong) answer that separation of church and state was never originally intended. One of the most ridiculous claims made by evangelicals that the Constitution does not provide for the separation of church and state is that the phrase “separation of church and state” is not itself in the Constitution. As author Ronald Lindsay has explained:
What these persons fail to understand is that it would have been redundant to include such a phrase in the Constitution. The document as a whole embodies the view that government is not to meddle in religious matters. The federal government is given very specific, limited powers only over various secular matters. It has no powers relating to religion. The government is secular both in its origin (the consent of the governed) and its function. The government and religious institutions are completely separate and have nothing to do with each other. To insist that the Constitution doesn’t mandate separation of church and state because it doesn’t contain that phrase is more preposterous than a person who is not named as a beneficiary in a will insisting he has a claim on the estate because the will does not specifically exclude him by name.
The origins of our religious liberty come from pre-Constitution Virginia, in the year 1785 in fact, where James Madison would engage in a political fight to establish what would become the fundamental American precepts of religious separation in the Constitution. What prompted Madison’s engagement was a state bill that proposed enacting tax assessments for churches, but afforded citizens complete individual autonomy in selecting which church could receive the funds. The bill also included specific exemptions for Quakers and Mennonites who belonged to churches without clergy. Along with these specific exemptions, the bill directed all undesignated funds to the state general fund for developing “seminaries of learning” that were not required by the text of the bill to be religious in nature in order to receive the funds.
In the view of those who supported the assessment bill, the absence of continued public funding of religion at the state level was “fatal to the Strength and Stability of civil government.” However, because the proposed bill gave control to the individual, not the government, and not to any “Sect or Denomination of Christians,” its proponents were arguing they were offering “a General and equal contribution of the whole state upon the most equitable footing that is possible to place it.” To James Madison however, this non-preferential, neutrally applied, and individual choice religious assessment framework remained impermissibly coercive to freedom of conscience. As I have tried to explain the way in which Madison reached this conclusion contradicts virtually all modern evangelical claims about American secularism and the separation of church and state:
According to Madison, using civil support mechanisms to support religion always violated the free conscience of citizens, even if no taxpayer objected. To allow civil support was for Madison a contradiction to religion itself “for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers of this world.” Civil support for religion also presented “a contradiction in terms” to Madison because it weakened “those who profess this Religion a pious confidence in its innate excellence and the patronage of its Author.” In other words, Madison felt religion stood in no need of civil assistance, and to provide aid, even neutrally applied as it was in the assessment bill he was opposing (and how funding is justified today), ultimately undermines religion’s authority.
Although Madison was successful in defeating the bill in Virginia and establishing his brand of separation of church and state, not every state adopted Madison’s view. Indeed, many early states maintained established churches well into the 19th century. Madison was able to convince Congress however, to adopt his principled version of religious liberty in the First Amendment (see Justice Souter’s concurring opinion in Lee v. Weisman). That early states maintained established churches while the federal government prohibited such arrangements did not present any constitutional concerns at first. It was not until the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause incorporated Bill of Rights protections to the states, including the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, that those early forms of state establishment became unlawful.
What is clear from this history is that Madison was not trying to establish a secular country that separated the domains of religion and government because he hated religion or wanted to discriminate against believers. Rather, Madison sought to establish a secular country to protect religious belief, protection that will only become more necessary the more religion declines. Today, however, secularism has become the ultimate scare word for evangelicals. For example, David French, who I would argue is a moderate evangelical, has argued recently that we should be wary of European immigration because those countries have a “secular-bias” that will “alter American culture in appreciable ways.” In answering this nonsense from French, it is important to acknowledge that such a statement amounts to nothing less than vile bigotry.
To illustrate, imagine for one second how French would react if a liberal pundit on MSNBC said we should avoid immigrants from Christian-majority countries because America is steadily becoming more secular. Is there any doubt French would find such a statement to be a reflection of bigotry against Christians based on ridiculous notions that they are somehow incapable of assimilating into American culture? Yet he felt no issue disparaging and demeaning immigration from a whole continent based entirely on whether they held certain religious beliefs or not. Why? Because for all too many evangelicals, non-belief is simply not viewed with the same respect as religious belief, despite the fact that our Constitutional free conscience liberty makes no distinction. Put simply, it is nothing less than disgraceful the level of bigotry that evangelicals impose on the none-religious. Until and unless the religious stop lying about the nature of secularism, falsely depicting it as the ultimate evil, I fear such bigotry will continue to increase.
Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of 
