Versión de HTML Básico
The Political Order
339
could not give such support to all of the churches any more than to a
single one, for this, too, would be a form of establishment.
But while the founding fathers were intent upon preventing any
organic or institutional connection between the state and the church,
they did not seek to separate the state from religion. Indeed, they
believed that the vitality of democratic government and the welfare of
the country depended to a large extent upon the strength and support
which were made available through religious faith.30 According to
Dean Luther Weigle, “It was not unbelievers, but believers, who
brought religious freedom into American life and established it as a
national principle. The separation of church and state in this country
was intended not to restrict but to emancipate the churches, not to
impair but to protect religious faith.”31 The purpose of the founding
fathers was to grant an equal legal status to all religious groups and
guarantee full religious liberty to all of the people. They believed,
moreover, that disestablishment would prove beneficial to the churches
themselves.32
The term “separation of church and state” emphasizes the nega
tive aspect of religious freedom, but it fails to do justice to the positive
meaning of this concept. The former is essential to the latter, but
religious freedom is incomplete if it does not safeguard the latter. In
the words of Dean Weigle, religious liberty not only includes “the
right to dissent in the name of religious belief, reason and conscience,
from an act or requirement of the state, and to express this dissent in
action or in refusal to act as well as in speech,” but it also includes
“a right greater than that of dissent; it is the right of responsible
participation in the making and executing of public policy. The
religious freedom of the citizen includes his right to hold the state
itself responsible to the moral law and to God, and the right to labor
to this end through appropriate judgments, witness, and constructive
participation in the activities of citizenship.”33 From the standpoint
of our democratic heritage, the right of responsible participation is a
right which every individual and group has; from the standpoint of
man’s responsibility before God such participation is a duty for each.
30 See Anson Phelps Stokes,
Church and State in the United States,
3 vols.,
New York, Harper & Brothers, 1950, vol. I, pp. 514-517, 556.
31 Luther A. Weigle, “The American Tradition of Religious Freedom,”
Social Action
,
XIII, no. 9 (November 15, 1947), p. 8. Cf. Stokes,
loc. cit.
32 Stokes,
op. cit.,
p. 556; Merrimon Cuninggim,
Freedom's Holy Light,
New York, Harper & Brothers, 1955, p. 99.
33Weigle,
op. cit.,
pp. 11-12.