"The Devil Can Cite Scripture for His Purpose"

For the last two days, Senator Josh Hawley has been busy stepping on one rake after another, trying to find some quotation from the founding generation that supports a Christian nationalist vision of America.

First, he tweeted out a completely fake quote from Patrick Henry, which as Seth Cotlar noted, had its origins in a white supremacist magazine of the 1950s. After being roundly mocked for that mistake, Hawley pretended it had never happened and tweeted out a real quote from John Quincy Adams, who it turns out was not actually an important member of the founding generation in 1776 as he was just nine years old.

And so it goes.

While Hawley’s proven to be especially inept at this game, this is a familiar routine by now. Someone linked to the Religious Right claims that America really is, or should be, a “Christian nation” and we’re off on a thrilling game of Quote/Counterquote as conservatives and liberals go on a scavenger hunt looking for lines from letters and speeches to justify their own position on the role of religion in American government. The wide range of opinions trotted out in these debates never leads to any consensus, which, of course, is why we play this dumb game over and over again.

If anything, the array of opinions here should remind us that in most cases there was not some single, monolithic mindset that we can now confidently identify as The Founding Fathers’ Vision.™ They were like us, diverse in their backgrounds, education, philosophies, politics, and, yes, faith.

To be sure, it’s fun to counter Hawley’s grasping search for a historical soulmate with the more prominent and important writings of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and others that so clearly refute his ideas.

But it’s better, I think, to brush aside these politicians and partisans who cherry-pick their way through the founding era and simply remind them that in the Constitution of the United States — you know, the document that actually founded this country and established its rules and norms — none of their wish casting for a “Christian nation” finds any support at all.

For all their disagreements and debates about the proper role of faith, the crafters of the Constitution came together around its common rules. And we should note that the only times religion is mentioned in the Constitution is to keep it at arm’s length away from the political system and governmental operations they were constructing.

Even before we get to the Bill of Rights, there is in the main body of the Constitution a ban on any and all religious tests for office holders. Article VI, Clause 3 states quite clearly that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The Founders were extremely clear on this point and quite united, too, for they had learned through hard experience that state meddling in religion and religious influence in government could only lead to crises.

And then, of course, in the First Amendment, we get the other two explicit references to religion, which say quite clearly that the federal government would not establish any kind of state religion and, moreover, that it wouldn’t do anything to interfere with the choice of individual citizens to worship or not worship as they saw fit.

That’s the entirety of the Constitution’s stance on religion — no religious tests for office holders, no official national religion, no interference with private religion.

The only references to religion in the Constitution, the one place that actually matters, are ones that directly contradict the argument that Hawley and others are pushing.

Stop arguing about this quote or that quote. Show them the Constitution.