Author Meacham Writes About Faith and Government

JEFFREY BROWN: And how do you define what they came up with, how they resolved these differences?

JON MEACHAM: It's not tolerance. James Madison, who as a very young man objected to the idea that there was religious tolerance in the country, because tolerance presupposes that someone, a majority, is granting a minority the right to believe something and that that right could then be revoked if need be.

He insisted in the Virginia State Convention on the idea of religious liberty, the liberty to believe or not believe, to worship or not worship, liberty of conscience. And it was that idea, I think, which is the central American insight that religion is hugely important in the life of the nation, but it has to be a matter of individual conscience.

JEFFREY BROWN: The key phrase that comes up time and time again is "public religion," Benjamin Franklin's phrase, that is parsed that goes to much of what you're saying. What did he mean by it? Why was it so important to you?

JON MEACHAM: Franklin used it in 1749 when he was laying out a syllabus for what became the University of Pennsylvania. His line was that public religion had been shown by history to be essential to the maintenance of morality of people and of governments.

His sense of public religion, the God of public religion, was that there was a creator God, a god who was attentive to history, who weighed prayers, who would judge us in a later life for our conduct in this.

This was the God, I believe, that the founders had in mind when phrases like "In God we trust," or "God bless America," "One nation under God." When that sort of language is used, that's the God that they were thinking of.

It's not God the father or the holy trinity; it's not the God of Abraham. But it was this more deistic figure who could, in a way, rise above the sectarian strife of the day. And really endowed, in many ways, was the force that endowed us with the fundamental human rights that set us apart, because that's the God of nature's God and the creator from the Declaration of Independence.

JEFFREY BROWN: But it also did not mean, from what you write, that this is a Christian nation?

JON MEACHAM: By no means. By no means. A Christian nation is, first, a theological impossibility. Jesus said to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were of this world, then would my servants fight." In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the author says, "We have no lasting city but seek the city which is to come." The psalm that says, "Put not thy trust in princes."

So when particularly evangelical Christians of the 21st century talk about, "Well, we are a Christian nation, and if only we could get back to those origins then all would be well," I think they're making both a theological and a historical mistake.

Here's one of the reasons it's a historical mistake. In 1790, President Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew congregation at Newport in which he said that tolerance -- we no longer spoke of tolerance in this land but of liberty, and that we are not founded on any sectarian faith. Every man should sit under his own vine and fig tree, an image from Micah, and none shall make him afraid.

JEFFREY BROWN: So if, on the one hand, though, this notion of a public religion does not mean a Christian nation, it also does not mean to you that there can be a strict separation or wall between church and state?

JON MEACHAM: I think that history tells us that, if there is a wall between church and state, it is a mighty short one, and it's one that we can jump back over as we wish. And we always have.

Even the most ferociously separationist presidents, Thomas Jefferson, the man who brought that phrase back into American public life in 1802, saying there that there's a wall of separation between church and state in the letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, he went to services in the House of Representatives. He carried a well-worn prayer book around.

At the end of his life, he said, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word."

Remember, the founders were men before they were monuments. These were human beings working through incredibly complicated, difficult, tangled times, revolutionary times, literally, as the world seemed to be taking a different shape than it had before.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why then today does it feel so often that the debate is polarized between, on the one hand, a conservative Christianity, a so-called conservative Christianity, and a so-called secularism?

JON MEACHAM: Because I think both sides fail to understand the complications and the complexities of the history we're talking about.

I honestly believe that conservative Christians who believe we are a Christian nation and that all would be well if we could get back to those pure origins don't understand the founding and all its complication and nuance.

I also think that secularists, who believe that the separation of church and state is an absolute value, is something that is sometimes mistaken to be in the Constitution, don't understand that we're sitting in a church where George Washington, a complicated religious figure, came to worship.

So I think that the complications on both sides are such that they're not particularly comfortable for either side to engage with.

One other possible explanation for the current sense of crisis and conflict culturally: It's been 40 years since the left had a kind of golden hour. It's been 40 years since Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act.

It's been 40 years since the high watermark of the Great Society, and the two presidents the Democratic Party has managed to elect, President Carter and President Clinton, have not been great liberal hopes, have not fulfilled great liberal hopes. So, in a way, the left feels it's losing ground.

Interestingly, the right also feels that they're losing. They feel beleaguered and surrounded. So we have two sides that both think they're losing, which makes, I think, both sides more agitated, more trigger-happy, frankly.

The right went into politics in a serious way after the Roe decision in 1973 with two central demands: a pro-life amendment to the Constitution; and a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. Neither has ever remotely come close to passing.

And so they look around and they try to figure out, "Well, what have we gotten for this 35-year journey of ours? We've elected a lot of presidents. We've elected Reagan. We've elected two George Bushes. But what do we have to show for it?"

JEFFREY BROWN: So, when you look at the sweep of history from the founding to today, do you feel hope or worry about the continuing debate over the role of religion?

JON MEACHAM: Both. I'm an Anglican, so both, as always. I do think that hope will come with an appreciation of history and of the realities of what our forbearers fought for and fought through.

And I think the key thing about the American experiment has always been that we are a work in progress, that everybody at the founding, virtually everybody, understood that this was going to require a great deal of maintenance, a great deal of pruning, and tweaking, and fixing.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. The book is "American Gospel." Jon Meacham, thank you very much.

JON MEACHAM: Thanks, Jeff.