The Unworthy Servant

     Benjamin Franklin delivered a famous speech, asking that the Convention begin each day's session with prayers, at a particularly contentious period, when it appeared that the Convention might break up over its failure to resolve the dispute between the large and small states over representation in the new government. The eighty one year old Franklin asserted that: " The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth that God governs in the affairs of men. I also believe. " Franklin continued, that: " Without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political Building no better than the builders of Babel. " Franklin's motion failed, ostensibly because the Convention had no funds to pay local clergymen to act as chaplains.

     The language prohibiting religious tests as a qualification for federal office holders, ultimately incorporated into Article Six of the Constitution, was proposed by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina on August 20, 1787 and adopted by the full Convention on August 30. The language as it was added to the first working draft of the Constitution, the so-called Committee of Detail report of August 6, 1787, by the Convention secretary, William Jackson.

     When the Constitution was submitted to the American public, many pious people complained that the document had slighted God, for it contained: " no recognition of His mercies to us or even of his existence. "

The Constitution was reticent about religion for two reasons:
- Many delegates were committed federalists, who believed that the power to legislate on religion, if it existed at all, lay within the domain of the state, not the national governments.
- The delegates believed that it would be a tactical mistake to introduce such a politically controversial issue as religion into the Constitution. The only religious clause in the document: The proscription of religious tests as qualifications for federal office in Article Six was intended to defuse controversy by disarming potential critics who might claim religious discrimination in eligibility for public office.

     That religion was not otherwise addressed in the Constitution did not make it an irreligious document any more than the Articles of Confederation was an irreligious document. The Constitution dealt with the church precisely as the Articles had, thereby maintaining, at the national level, the religious status quo. In neither document did the people yield any explicit power to act in the field of religion. But the absence of expressed powers did not prevent either the Continental-Confederation Congress or the Congress under the Constitution from sponsoring a program to support general, nonsectarian religion.
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     Many Americans were disappointed that the Constitution didn't contain a bill of rights that would explicitly enumerate the rights of American citizens and enable courts and public opinion to protect these rights  from an oppressive government. Supporters of a bill of rights permitted the Constitution to be adopted with the understanding that the first Congress under the new government would attempt to add a bill of rights.

     James Madison took the lead in steering such a bill through the First Federal Congress, which convened in the spring of 1789. The Virginia Ratifying Convention and Madison's constituents, among whom were large numbers of Baptists who wanted freedom of religion secured, expected him to push for a bill of rights. On September 28, 1789, both houses of Congress voted to send twelve amendments to the states. In December 1791, those ratified by the requisite three fourths of the states became the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Religion was addressed in the First Amendment in the following familiar words: " Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. " In notes for his June 8, 1789, speech introducing the Bill of Rights, Madison indicated his opposition to a " national religion. " Most Americans agreed that the federal government must not pick out one religion and give it exclusive financial and legal support.

     Madison used an outline to guide him in delivering his speech introducing the Bill of Rights into the First Congress on June 8, 1789. Madison proposed an amendment to assuage the anxieties of those who feared that religious freedom would be endangered by the un-ammended Constitution. According to The Congressional Register; Madison, on June 8, moved that: " The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner or on any pretext infringed. "
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     The Virginia Ratifying Convention approved the Constitution with the understanding that the state's representatives in the First Federal Congress would try to procure amendments that the Convention recommended. The twentieth proposed amendment deals with religion; it is an adaptation of the final article in the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 with this additional phrase: " that no particular religious sect or society ought to be favored or established by Law in preference to others. "

     The influential Baptist preacher, John Leland, wrote a letter, containing ten objections to the Federal Constitution and sent it to Colonel Thomas Barbour, an opponent of the Constitution in James Madison's Orange County district. Leland's objections were copied by Captain Joseph Spencer, one of Madison's Baptist friends and sent to Madison so that he could refute the arguments. Leland's final objection was that the new constitution did not sufficiently secure:  " What is dearest of all Religious Liberty. " His chief worry was: " If a Majority of Congress with the President favour one System more than another, they may oblige all others to pay to the support of their System as much as they please. "

     The necessary two thirds majority in each house of Congress ratified the Bill of Rights on September 28, 1789. As sent to the states for approval, the Bill of Rights contained twelve proposed amendments to the Constitution. Amendments One and Two did not receive the required approval of three fourths of the states. As a result, Article Three in the original Bill of Rights became the First Amendment to the Constitution.

     John Adams " A self-confessed church going animal. " grew up in the Congregational Church in Braintree, Massachusetts. In a letter he wrote to Jefferson, Adams theological position can best be described as Unitarian. In this letter Adams tells Jefferson that: " Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell. "

     John Adams continued the practice, begun in 1775 and adopted under the new federal government by Washington, of issuing fast and thanksgiving day proclamations. In this proclamation, issued at a time when the nation appeared to be on the brink of a war with France, Adams urged the citizens to: " Acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as individuals and as a nation; beseeching him at the same time of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our offenses and to incline us, by His Holy Spirit, to that sincere repentance and reformation, which may afford us reason to hope for His inestimable favor and Heavenly benediction. "

     The celebrated phrase: " A wall of separation between church and state. " Was contained in Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. American courts have used the phrase to interpret the Founders intentions regarding the relationship between government and religion. The words: " wall of separation " appear just above the section of the letter that Jefferson circled for deletion. In the deleted section Jefferson explained why he refused to proclaim national days of fasting and thanksgiving, as his predecessors, George Washington and John Adams had done. In the left margin, next to the deleted section, Jefferson noted that he excised the section to avoid offending " our republican friends in the eastern states " who cherished days of fasting and thanksgiving.

     During the presidential campaign of 1800, the Federalists attacked Thomas Jefferson as an infidel, claiming that Jefferson's intoxication with the religious and political extremism of the French Revolution disqualified him from public office. In a cartoon, the eye of God has instigated the American eagle to snatch from Jefferson's hand the " Constitution & Independence " of the United States before he can cast it on an " Altar to Gallic Despotism, " whose flames are being fed by the writings of Thomas Paine, Helvetius, Rousseau, and other freethinkers. The paper, " To Mazzei, " dropping from Jefferson's right hand, was a 1796 letter that was interpreted by Jefferson's enemies as an indictment of the character of George Washington.

     Jefferson liked to experiment with and use cryptology. There are several different codes in his papers at the Library of Congress, including one based on the LORD's Prayer, which Jefferson carefully wrote out as a block of consecutive letters.

     In this letter Catherine Mitchill, wife of New York senator Samuel Latham Mitchill, describes stepping on Jefferson's toes at the conclusion of a church service in the House of Representatives. She was so prodigiously frightened she told her sister that: " I could not stop to make an apology but got out of the way as quick as I could. "

     According to Margaret Bayard Smith, a regular at church services in the Capitol, the Marine Band made quite a dazzling appearance in the gallery but in their attempts to accompany the psalm-singing of the congregation, they completely failed and after a while the practice was discontinued.

     This sermon on the millennium was preached by the Baltimore Swedenborgian minister, John Hargrove (1750-1839) in the House of Representatives. One of the earliest millennialist sermons preached before Congress was offered on July 4 1801 by the Reverend David Austin (1759-1831) who at the time considered himself " struck in prophesy under the style of the Joshua of the American Temple." Having proclaimed to his Congressional audience the imminence of the Second Coming of Christ. Austin took up a collection on the floor of the House to support services at Lady Washington's Chapel in a nearby hotel where he was teaching that the seed of the Millennial estate is found in the backbone of the American Revolution.

     The first Treasury Building where several denominations conducted church services was burned by the British in 1814. The new building was built on approximately the same location as the earlier one within view of the White House.

     Description of church services in the Supreme Court chamber by Manasseh Cutler (1804) and John Quincy Adams (1806) indicate that services were held in the Court soon after the government moved to Washington in 1800.

     The House moved to its current location on the south side of the Capitol in 1857. It contained the largest Protestant Sabbath audience in the United States when the First Congregational Church of Washington held services there from 1865 to 1868.

     In the 1790s, Thomas Jefferson, influenced by the writings of Joseph Priestly, seems to have adopted a more positive opinion of Christianity. In a letter to his friend Benjamin Rush, Jefferson asserted that he was a " Christian, in the only sense in which [ Jesus ] wished any one to be. " In an attached syllabus, Jefferson compared the: " Merit of the doctrines of Jesus " with those of the classical philosophers and the Jews. Jefferson pronounced Jesus' doctrines, though " disfigured by the corruptions of schismatising followers " far superior to any competing system. Jefferson declined to consider the " question of [Jesus] being a member of the god-head, or in direct communication with it, claimed for him by some of his followers and denied by others. "

     It is thought that Jefferson prepared what is referred to as the " Jefferson Bible " in 1820. In this volume, Jefferson used excerpts from New Testaments in four languages to create parallel columns of text recounting the life of Jesus, preserving what he considered to be Christ's authentic actions and statements, eliminating the mysterious and miraculous. He began his account with Luke's second chapter, deleting the first in which the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to the Messiah by the Holy Spirit. On the pages seen here, Jefferson deleted the part of the birth story in which the angel of the LORD appeared to the shepherds. The text ends with the crucifixion and burial and omits any resurrection appearance.

     Here is a description by an early Washington " insider " Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844), a writer and social critic and wife of Samuel Harrison Smith, publisher of the National Intelligencer of Jefferson's attendance at church services in the House of Representatives: " Jefferson during his whole administration was a most regular attendant. The seat he chose the first day sabbath and the adjoining one, which his private secretary occupied, were ever afterwards by the courtesy of the congregation, left for him. "

     Church services were held in what is now called Statuary Hall from 1807 to 1857. The first services in the Capitol, held when the government moved to Washington in the fall of 1800 were conducted in the: Hall of the House " in the north wing of the building. In 1801 the House moved to temporary quarters in the south wing called the Oven, which it vacated in 1804, returning to the north wing for three years. Services were conducted in the House until after the Civil War. The Speaker's podium was used as the preacher's pulpit.

     Charles Boynton (1806-1883) was in 1867 chaplain of the House of Representatives and organizing pastor of the First Congregational Church in Washington, which was trying at that time to build its own sanctuary. In the meantime, the church, as Boynton informed potential donors, was holding services at the Hall of Representatives where the audience is the largest in town nearly 2000 assembled every Sabbath for services. Making the congregation in the House the largest Protestant Sabbath audience then in the United States. The First Congregational Church met in the House from 1865 to 1868.

     John Quincy Adams describes the Reverend James Laurie, pastor of a Presbyterian Church that had settled into the Treasury Building preaching to an overflow audience in the Supreme Court Chamber, which in 1806 was located on the ground floor of the Capitol.