Since the 1960s, students in the United States have been miseducated to believe in materialistic determinism, which dismisses as superstitious ignorance spiritual religion and seeking to understand God’s Will. The reigning idolatry is worship of the socialistic political state, of which the regulations and welfare-state handouts are to replace individual conscience and personal responsibility.
Robert Curry writes that, in the minds of the Constitution’s principal writers, the relationship between man and the state was understood very differently in 1787.
The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding: Understanding Madison
By Robert Curry
“Madison’s political feelings were most aroused, oddly enough, not by the imperial issues of trade and taxation…it was the union of Church and State that set him on fire. The cause of religious freedom became Madison’s passport to revolution.”
M. D. Peterson, editor, in James Madison: A Biography in His Own Words
The italics are mine, and not those of the distinguished historian who was selected to edit this 2-volume work drawn from Madison’s collected papers.
For Madison, there was, of course, nothing odd here. Madison simply is the great champion of religious liberty. That fact is the key to understanding his political thought in general. Yet Madison’s focus on religious liberty strikes Prof. Peterson as odd. Why?
The problem is that Madison’s great central passion does not fit the reigning narrative in academia. The academic narrative tends to favor economic explanations over explanations involving religion. Madison is the Founder who is often called the framer of the Constitution. Better for that narrative if he had been focused on the “imperial issues of trade and taxation.” But Madison just cannot be made to conform to the paradigm Prof. Peterson prefers.
Madison was educated at Princeton where, under the leadership of John Witherspoon, religious liberty was both practiced and defended. On his return to his native Virginia, he was “set on fire” when Baptist preachers were imprisoned by Virginia’s established (Anglican) church.
Religious liberty was even the focus of Madison’s first foray into constitution-making. At the age of 25 in 1776, he was a newly-elected delegate appointed to the committee to prepare a constitution and a declaration of rights for Virginia. Because of his youth and junior status, he kept a very low profile on the committee—until the work on the declaration of rights came to the issue of religious conscience. George Mason dominated the committee’s proceedings. Following Locke, he had proposed “toleration.” This did not go nearly far enough for Madison, and it aroused him to action. He proposed instead that religious liberty be declared, in his words, “a natural and absolute right.”
His formulation carried the day in Virginia and, as the result of his untiring efforts, in America as well. We can see this very clearly in Washington’s celebrated “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport” of 1790:
“The citizens of the United States of America have… given to mankind examples of a…policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience …It is now no more that toleration is spoken of…”
Madison, you see, was a true revolutionary. The Revolution for him was not simply a matter of replacing the Colonial government with a new, indigenous government in order to address issues of taxation and trade. Madison was fighting for a radical re-conception of the relationship of man and the state, a re-conception that went far beyond the ideas of John Locke. For Madison, liberty is a natural and absolute right of the individual, not a privilege granted by the state.
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