The White House Attack on Religion Continues Part Four
Those renewed Biblical teachings on protecting the rights of conscience were eventually carried to America, where they took root and grew to maturity at a rapid rate, having been planted in virgin soil completely uncontaminated by the apostasy of the previous twelve centuries. Hence, Christianity – especially as imported to America – became the world’s single greatest historical force in securing non-coercion and the rights of conscience.
For example, in 1640 when the Rev. Roger Williams established Providence, he penned its governing document declaring:
We agree, as formerly hath been the liberties of the town, so still, to hold forth liberty of conscience. [i]
Similar protections also became part of subsequent early American documents, including the 1649 Maryland “Toleration Act,” [ii] the 1663 charter for Rhode Island, [iii] the 1664 Charter for Jersey, [iv] the 1665 Charter for Carolina, [v] and the 1669 Constitutions of Carolina. [vi] Christian minister William Penn incorporated the same protections into the governing documents he authored, including in 1676 for West Jersey, [vii] in 1682 for Pennsylvania, [viii] and in 1701 for Delaware. [ix] There are many additional examples.
Historically speaking, it was the followers of Biblical Christianity who vigorously pursued and first achieved the protection for the rights of conscience that subsequently became an XXXa crucial???XXX- T indispensable??? characteristic of the American civil fabric. Even Roscoe Pound (1870-1964; a professor at four different law schools and the Dean of the law schools at Harvard and the University of Nebraska) acknowledged that it was the Biblical-minded Puritans who first brought these rights to the forefront of civil protection; [x] and in the words of an 1824 court:
c[xi]
So thoroughly was American thinking inculcated with protecting conscience that when America separated from Great Britain in 1776, the original state constitutions immediately secured the rights of conscience so long expounded by Christian leaders. (See, for example, the constitutions of Virginia, 1776; [xii] Delaware, 1776; [xiii] North Carolina, 1776; [xiv] Pennsylvania, 1776; [xv] New Jersey, 1776; [xvi] Vermont, 1777; [xvii] New York, 1777; [xviii] South Carolina, 1778; [xix] Massachusetts, 1780; [xx] New Hampshire, 1784; [xxi] etc.)
America’s Framers openly praised those protections. For example, Governor William Livingston (a devout Christian and a signer of the U. S. Constitution) declared:
Consciences of men are not the objects of human legislation. [xxii]
John Jay (an author of the Federalist Papers, original Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, and President of the American Bible Society) likewise rejoiced that:
Security under our constitution is given to the rights of conscience. [xxiii]
Thomas Jefferson (a signer of the Declaration and a U. S. President) repeatedly praised America’s protections for the rights of conscience:
No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience. [xxiv]
[O]ur rulers can have no authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted. [xxv]
A right to take the side which every man’s conscience approves . . . is too precious a right – and too favorable to the preservation of liberty – not to be protected. [xxvi]
It is inconsistent with the spirit of our laws and Constitution to force tender consciences. [xxvii]
James Madison (a signer of the Constitution, a framer of the Bill of Rights, and a U. S. President) similarly affirmed:
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort. . . . [and] conscience is the most sacred of all property. [xxviii]