Civil unity and religious integrity

In 1790 Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France. When he comes to his defense of English institutions (“an established Church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy”), he says: “First I beg leave to speak of our Church Establishment, which is the first of our prejudices—not a prejudice destitute of reason, but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom. I speak of it first. It is first, and last, and midst in our minds.” In that same year the people of the states newly formed into the American Federal Republic were debating the ten amendments to the Constitution, submitted to them for ratification. The ratification was complete in 1791, and in that year the legal rule against any establishment of religion was on its way to becoming, where it had not already become, the first of our prejudices. There is a contrast here, a clash of prejudices, which still endures. The clash ought to be mentioned at the outset of our present question, primarily because it should teach one the dangers of doctrinaire judgments. Such judgments are always in peril of falsity; they are particularly so in the delicate matter of the legal regulation of religion in society. We have a special prejudice in this matter, which is specifically American, because its origins are in our particular context and its validity has been demonstrated by the unique course of American history.

The subject might almost be left right here, if it could be generally admitted that the First Amendment expresses simply an American prejudice, in Burke’s sense of the word. A prejudice is not necessarily an error; to be prejudiced is not necessarily to be unreasonable. Certain pre-judgments are wholesome. Normally, they are concrete judgments of value, not abstract judgments of truth. They are not destitute of reason, but their chief corroboration is from experience. They are part of the legacy of wisdom from the past; they express an ancestral consensus. Hence they supply in the present, as Russell Kirk puts it, “the half-intuitive knowledge which enables men to meet the problems of life without logic-chopping.” The American Catholic is entirely prepared to accept our constitutional concept of freedom of religion and the policy of no establishment as the first of our prejudices. He is also prepared to admit that other prejudices may obtain elsewhere—in England, in Sweden, in Spain. Their validity in their own context and against the background of the history that generated them does not disturb him in his conviction that his own prejudice, within his own context and against the background of his own history, has its own validity.

American Catholics would even go as far as to say of the provisions of the First Amendment what Burke, in his Reflections, said of the English Church Establishment, that they consider it as “essential to their state; not as a thing heterogeneous and separable, something added from accommodation, what they may either keep up or lay aside, according to their temporary ideas of convenience. They consider it as the foundation of their whole Constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union.” The prejudice formulated in the First Amendment is but the most striking aspect of the more fundamental prejudice that was the living root of our constitutional system—the prejudice in favor of the method of freedom in society and therefore the prejudice in favor of a government of limited powers, whose limitations are determined by the consent of the people. The American people exempted from their grant of power to government any power to establish religion or to prohibit the free exercise thereof.

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