James Madison on the True Rapport of Church and State

"Religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

Pithy excellence once again! The purity of religious institutions depends greatly on their independent influence and their independence from undue influence on each other.


"Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience, which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection for which the public faith is pledged by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact."

Man's capacity to choose his course in this life and hold to it in the face of threat and force is sacred. Yet what animates conscience, according to Madison?

"The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities to be impressed with it."

Madison builds a sound fundamental political (and moral) order on the main argument of the Declaration of Independence, which asserted to wayward King George III and the capricious British Parliament that the rights of the American colonists were not of English origin, but of divine inspiration:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,[75] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Besides its essential and essentialist holding, a belief in a Higher Power, and His crafted moral order is the essence of natural right, the firm assertion of the Continental Congress validating their claim to self-rule.

Madison's boldness contrasts with the sharp misunderstanding of modern secular pundits, who not only demand a stark separation of church and state (an effort not outlined in the Constitution), but the eradication of any deference or reference to the Almighty in the public square. A sad state of affairs, indeed.