Freethinkers: a history of American secularism by Susan Jacoby, page 104

Freethinkers: a history of American secularism by Susan Jacoby, page 104

The real cause of America’s fratricidal conflict (Civil War), many religious leaders asserted, was the failure of the founders to enshrine God in the Constitution. The war was nothing more – or less – than the fulfillment of the Reverend John Mason’s 1793 prediction that the godless document would one day impel the Divinity to “crush us to atoms in the wreck.” The only way to stop the destruction was to amend the Constitution’s preamble and finally acknowledge not only God but Jesus Christ as the source of all just governmental power. In 1863, the “nondenominational,” albeit entirely Protestant, National Reform Association was founded for the specific purpose of lobbying Congress to put God into the Constitution. Today’s Christian conservatives use the slogan “Let’s put God back into the Constitution, “ thereby implying that “secular humanists” have managed to overturn what was originally intended to be a marriage of church and state. Nineteenth-century clerics knew better and were honest about their desire to reverse what they regarded as the founders’ erroneous decision to separate church and state. At an 1864 convention In Pittsburgh, the National Reform delegates were in a dither about how to word the proposed amendment before presenting it to President Lincoln and the Congress, so as not to offend any orthodox Protestant denomination. They were not worried about offending Jews, Catholics, or dissident Protestant sects like Hicksite Quakers, who were appalled by the idea of tampering with the Constitution in order to blur the distinction between church and state. After rejecting acknowledgment of “Almighty God” and “His revealed will” as too imprecise, the ministers finally agreed on a rewording of the preamble that would replace “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…” with “Recognizing almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government…”

The religious stalwarts who founded the National Reform Association met with Lincoln in February 1864 and presented him with their forthright petition for a Christian government:

You…as no other of our Chief Magistrates ever did have solemnly reminded us of the redeeming grace of our blessed Savior, and of the authority of the Holy Scriptures over us as a people. By such acts as these you have awakened a hope in the Christian people of this land that you represent them in feeling the want of a distinct and plain recognition of the divine authority in the Constitution of the United States.

The ministers had some reason to hope that Lincoln would respond to them favorably. In 1862, he had issued an order, unprecedented in American history that military colanders observe Sunday as a day of rest in deference to the religious sensibilities of Christian soldiers. But Lincoln was also one of the canniest politicians ever to occupy the White House, and he had no intention of using his authoru8ty on behalf of a measure as potentially divisive as the Christian amendment in the midst of a war that had already pitted brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor. Observing that “the work of amending the Constitution should never be done hastily,” he promised to “take such action upon it as my responsibility to my Maker and our country demands. Lincoln’s action was to take no action at all. Congress also ducked the proposal to Christianize the Constitution and continued to table similar resolutions year after year.

The ministers may have derived some consolation from the fact that Congress, though unwilling to become embroiled in debate over a substantive constitutional amendment, was easily persuade to take the symbolic action of acknowledging the deity of American coins. The union of God and Mammon came about as the result of a suggestion by a Pennsylvania minister to Secretary of the Treasure Salmon P. Chase, who was known to be the most religiously orthodox member of Lincoln’s cabinet and who took credit for Lincoln’s invocation of God at the end of the Emancipation Proclamation.