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There’s never a dull moment during election season, but what leaves me astonished isn’t the predictable political theater—it’s the breathtaking ignorance of basic concepts underpinning our nation. On Sunday, a college graduate graced my Facebook feed with this gem of misinformation:
Now, I won’t name and shame, but I do feel frustrated that someone with a college degree could walk away with such a flimsy grasp of religion’s role in shaping society. To be fair, I don’t lay all the blame at their feet. Our educational system is churning out graduates without even a cursory understanding of the foundational role religion played in America.
So, let’s clear the air. The United States wasn’t founded on “separation of church & state” in the way this post says. That phrase? It doesn’t appear in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or any other founding document. It comes from an 1802 letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists, reassuring them the government wouldn’t meddle in their religious affairs. He wasn’t erecting an impenetrable wall between religion and public life—he was promising to protect religious freedom from government interference.
Yet here we are, with college grads thinking that “building a wall of separation between Church & State,” as Jefferson wrote it, means “keep religion out of everything”—a blunder that wouldn’t survive five minutes in a real history class. And who can blame them when the institutions tasked with educating them gloss over the fact that the Founding Fathers saw religion—Christianity, in particular—as essential to moral governance?
George Washington nailed it in his Farewell Address: “Religion and morality are indispensable supports” of political prosperity. John Adams took it further: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Western law itself is rooted in Christian ethics. Murder, theft, perjury—these aren’t secular inventions. They’re biblical commandments brought into the legal frameworks we rely on today. Legal historian Harold Berman noted in Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition that Western law was founded in the church and on Christian values. The very movements the left loves to champion—like the abolitionist movement—were heavily rooted in Christian ethics. Without Christian conviction, the push to end slavery would’ve fizzled. Leaders like William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker viewed slavery as an affront to God’s moral law. Should those Christian leaders have kept quiet? Should they have refrained from imposing their moral convictions on society?
And, hey, we just had Columbus Day. Intellectuals and dumb intellectuals alike have debated the merits of keeping Christopher Columbus statues. Leftists have toppled them. But in the frenzy, the broader historical context of his arrival has been lost. That is, should the Catholic missionaries and explorers who landed on American shores have remained silent when they saw human sacrifice, ritual killings, and child sacrifice? Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish priest—whom, yes, I know has been critiqued for exaggerating things—nevertheless documented these horrors in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. He condemned such practices but saw them as evidence of the need for Christian conversion. Should the missionaries have turned a blind eye in the name of cultural relativism?
The modern argument that Christianity shouldn’t influence society reveals a profound misunderstanding of history and the faith itself. Christianity isn’t a private club where you keep your beliefs to yourself. It’s a worldview that calls its followers to engage and transform the world. As Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes reminds us: “The Church…carries on the work of Christ.” Christians are called to be the “salt of the earth” and “light of the world,” (Matthew 5:13-16)—not retreat into hiding.
How are we graduating people with such a juvenile understanding of religion’s role in public life? You spend four years and a fortune for what? The ability to regurgitate shallow misinterpretations of “separation between church and state” on Facebook? Our universities are failing at their most basic task: teaching. Instead, we’re producing eligible voters who can’t grasp the basic principles of their own country, let alone religion’s influence on law, politics, or society—yet vote they will.
This isn’t just ignorance—it’s dangerous. As John Adams warned, without religion, the Constitution becomes “wholly inadequate.” So, as I said to the poster, respectfully, America doesn’t need more confusion about “separation of church & state.” It needs a proper education about religion’s role in shaping its moral and legal foundations.
Until our institutions start teaching that, you’ll just have to rely on Minding the Campus to set the record straight.
Image: The first prayer in Congress, Sept. 1774 — NYPL’s Public Domain Archive
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
