| Dreisbach speaks
By Chris Wenstrom
Assistant News Editor
FILE PHOTO
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During a presentation on Tuesday evening Daniel Dreisbach, professor of justice, law and society at American University, delivered a new perspective on Thomas Jefferson’s view of religion and government. Watching were various professors that will possibly be deciding whether or not Dreisbach will be hired here at Calvin.
Dreisbach is a candidate for the Byker Chair, a position that will have ties to the economics, sociology and political science departments.
“One constant in thinking about the role of religion and church in America is that history is important in understanding the role of religion and the church in America,” Dreisbach said. “According to James Madison, ‘history will be an admitted umpire.’”
In the Supreme Court case of Everson v. Board of Education, the court acknowledged that religion is one of the most fundamental parts of the constitution in the first amendment. The court stated that in the words of Jefferson, the role of constitution is to build a wall between church and state that must be high and impregnable.
Justice John Paul Stevens said, “Our democracy is threatened whenever we remove a brick from the wall of separation between church and state.”
Historical context is important when discussing Jefferson’s metaphor of enacting a wall between church and state. When Jefferson was elected, he was viewed as a secular atheistic person who was the enemy of religion.
“When they heard of his election, women buried their Bibles in their gardens because they feared he would burn them,” Dreisbach said. Also, at the same time many Americans were fearing what was happening in the French Revolution could happen here in the United States if atheists were allowed to take control of the government.
The Baptists, who where a religious minority in colonial times, championed Jefferson’s view of separation between church and state which allowed them to practice their form of religion that many other Protestants did not agree with. The Danbury Baptists wrote a letter to Jefferson in support of his policy decisions.
On New Year’s Day, 1802, Jefferson wrote a letter responding to the Danbury Baptists. His reply was political, to reassure the persecuted Baptists that he was in favor of religious freedom. In his letter responding to Danbury Baptists he coined the term of a wall between church and state.
“The wall today that we have built would not be what Jefferson intended,” Dreisbach said.
Dreisbach wrote a book explaining what he thinks Jefferson intended the “wall of separation” to mean. The major theme of his book was that “Jefferson’s law” is a matter of federalism, not between religion and all civil government; he wanted to reaffirm his federalist idea of separation of power, not lack of power.
In the late 1770s as a Virginia state legislator, Jefferson was the principal proponent of a bill for a day for public prayer. As governor, in 1779 he designated a day for public prayer and thanksgiving to “Almighty God.”
“Why then did he not support things like days of prayer as president,” Dreisbach asked. “Because of his feelings with federalism—there is no power delegated to national government on matters regarding religion. His decisions in his presidency were simply reaffirming the notion of federalism in that there should be a separation of powers between state and federal government including powers of religion being left to states.
“The term wall of separation used today is the wall that Justice Hugo Black built,” Dreisbach said. “Black didn’t just reaffirm, he reshaped the wall that Jefferson made.”
Problems with the metaphor of the “wall” today include: “in the context of Jefferson’s time, disestablishment and separation were viewed to be extremely different,” Dreisbach said.
“A metaphor of a wall is bilateral in today‘s context; this separation imposes restrictions not just on public life and government but also on religion and how it can be used in private life. This is a problem because it separates any religion from any public life,” he said
Dreisbach argues that this rhetoric of separation of religion and politics was first used by the establishmentarians to smear the Baptists in the late 18 century, saying that “if they get there way of separation of church and politics there will be no church in any public life.”
This rhetoric of church and state was used again when a wave of Irish Catholics came to America. Protestants embraced separationists in order to frighten people into thinking that Catholics and their strange liturgy would infiltrate American government.
“I am not saying that a separation of church and state is bad. I support a form of this separation, the problem with this rhetoric is that it is so mushy. You could put a catholic bishop, an ACLU member, protestant preacher and many more in a room, and they would all agree to a separation of church and state. But their view of what it means for church and state to be separated would vary greatly,” Dreisbach said.
Concerning Calvin College‘s consideration of Dreisbach as a faculty member, Corwin Smidt, professor of political science, said, “Any candidate, should he/she be offered and accepted the position [Byker Chair], would need to be housed in a particular department. In Dr. Dreisbach’s case, he would be housed in the political science department.
After his lecture, political science professors convened in order to discuss their feelings on Dreisbach, talking about things like his interest in Calvin.
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