S3 E3: Church & State

Today, we are covering two topics almost guaranteed to make that Thanksgiving dinner more awkward than it already was: religion and politics, or more specifically for this episode: Church and State.

If we're going to talk about a bully pulpit, then we've got to talk about the pulpit part of this equation. But we're also going there because the question of the relationship between church and state is as old as the country.

Thus, we begin this episode by examining George Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s major speeches, public proclamations, and even reading some of the president's mail. From these founding presidents, we get a strong sense of where this church and state conversation started. We then fast forward to the Cold War and the War on Terror, to consider how these conflicts caused Americans to ask familiar questions:

What is the relationship supposed to be between church and state? What is the difference between religious toleration and religious freedom? What role, if any, does the president play in shaping these ideas? 

We are pleased to welcome Dr. John Fea to discuss the founding era with us. Dr. Fea is professor of American history at Messiah University. To learn about more recent religious history, we turned to Dr. Lauren Turek, Associate Professor of History at Trinity University.

Transcript

41. Season III, Episode III: Church & State

Release Date: April 7, 2022

Guests: Dr. John Fea, Dr. Lauren F. Turek

Interviewers: Dr. Lindsay Chervinksy, Dr. Brian Franklin

Citation: 

Church & State, 41. Center for Presidential History, Southern Methodist University, The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, 7 April 2022, accessed at 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1304182/10392490-season-iii-episode-iii-church-state.mp3?download=true 

Disclaimer: This transcription offers our best good-faith effort at reproducing in text our subject's spoken words. In all cases, however, the audio of this interview represents the definitive version of the words spoken by interviewees.

Brian: Welcome to The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, a podcast production of Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History. I'm Brian Franklin, Associate Director of the Center for Presidential History. And I am thrilled to join my friend and colleague Lindsay Chervinsky as your historian hosts for season three: The Bully Pulpit.

We started in episode one with a big broad topic: The Big Speeches and how they've carried influence through the years. Then we dove into one of the most fraught topics of the last several decades, healthcare, and how the president has spoken to that critical issue. It's a perennially tough topic, but we were glad to go there with you.

So naturally that gave us the confidence to talk about two subjects that everyone knows. Two topics almost guaranteed to make that Thanksgiving dinner more awkward than it already was: religion and politics, or more specifically for this episode: Church and State.

If we're going to talk about a bully pulpit, then we've got to talk about the pulpit part of this equation. But we're also going there because the question of the relationship between church and state is as old as the country. Actually, much older, and for as long as we've been experimenting with it and arguing about it, we haven't figured it out; but we do have at least two things to help us. First, we have history and for the U. S. this history begins, well, at the beginning.

More specifically, it begins with the constitution. Now the constitution actually has very few things to say directly about what the proper relationship of church and state should be, but it is certainly not silent, nor were the earliest presidents that took their cues from it. 

We'll look to two of those presidents, George Washington, and especially Thomas Jefferson, to see where it all began.

Through major speeches, public proclamations, and even reading some of the president's mail. We'll get a strong sense of where this church and state conversation started. We'll then fast forward two centuries to the Cold War, to the War on Terror and to new circumstances which caused Americans to ask the same old questions.

What is the relationship supposed to be between church and state? What role, if any, does the president play in shaping these ideas? And how does this discussion change if we're talking about more than just Protestant religion and the state, I told you earlier that in all this complexity, we have two things.

First we have history. And second, we have historians for our first guests. We are pleased to welcome Dr. John Fea, Dr. Fea is professor of American history at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He's the author or editor of six books, which include Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction, and Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.

He's also the executive editor of Current, an online journal of commentary and opinion that provides reflections on contemporary culture, politics, and ideas. 

Later we'll talk with Dr. Lauren. Turek about the ways these debates over church and state carried into the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush.

Who better to join us than a historian of early America who specializes in discussing complex questions of religion and politics. No one. So let's dive in.

Brian: John Fea, thank you so much for being with us today. Could you start out before we get to talking by introducing yourself, telling us about who you are and what you work on.

John: Sure. I teach American history at Messiah University, a church related Christian college outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I've been there for 20 years. I do a little bit of everything in this sort of intersection of religion and politics. I'm trained as an early American historian. Most of my work is in that area, but in the last five or six years or so, I've also been really interested in even more contemporary or more recent manifestations of the relationship between religion and Christianity, especially in American politics. So I've written about the religious beliefs of the founders. I've written about the relationship between religion and the enlightenment in the 18th century. I've written about the Bible in America. I'm really interested in how historians think and the ways in which historians teach.

Brian: So really I want to start at the beginning before we jump to how particular presidents early on addressed the issue of church and state. Can you just give us a brief overview of: What does the Constitution actually have to say about the relationship between church and state?

Because it's a topic everyone has an opinion on, and many of those opinions are often more formed by their communities or the things that they've grown up learning; less often by history and the actual Constitution. So could you start there?

John: The words separation of church and state do not appear in the United States Constitution. There's only one reference to religion in the Constitution, as it was originally written.

It says that there will be no test oath. In other words, no religious test for holding federal office in the newly created United States.

Now, after the Constitution is ratified, a series of 10 amendments are added known as the Bill of Rights. And religion is referenced twice in the first amendment. And it's what is known as the Disestablishment Clause. In other words, the idea that there will be no established religion in the United States.

The United States will not privilege one religion over another, as for example, England in the 18th century or as even some of the British colonies had done prior to the revolution. 

In Virginia, there was an established church, the Anglican Church. What that meant is you needed to pay a religious tax to support the Anglican Church, whether you were Anglican or not. So the framers of the United States constitution are saying there will be no established church.

The other reference in the first amendment is often referred to as the Free Exercise Clause, which allows freedom of religion. “The free exercise thereof” are the words that are used, which is not really expounded upon very much beyond that. Those who initially interpreted the first amendment did not really define specifically what that meant. But, later on, the Supreme Court would interpret that to mean that individuals are free to practice their faith or not practice any faith without government interference.

Brian: So we have these pretty limited references, right? No test oath, free exercise, no establishment. 

And yet we know that Americans then and now are very religious as a general principle. And in the early period, highly Protestant, and have views about these things and—to the subject of our podcast here—expect their leaders to have views on these things. 

So, when George Washington steps into office under this new Constitution, which has this very limited set of guidelines on religion, what does he do with that?

John: George Washington is going to respect the idea of the free exercise of religion: the free exercise clause and the disestablishment clause. 

He is going to write letters to every major religious denomination. And you mentioned Protestants, but he's also going to write to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. He's even going to write a letter to a small sect known as the Swedenborgians, and in these letters, he is going to defend the idea that they have the right to freedom, without the government interfering, to worship in the way they want to worship. And he assures them the government will defend that right to worship.

He's also going to, in his farewell address at the end of his two terms, he's going to talk about the role of religion. An essential pillar, if you will, of creating a good moral Republic as he understands it. 

So Washington was using his presidency to affirm what the first amendment had to say, especially on the free exercise of religion. 

Brian: When he wrote these letters, I know it's a little different than 2022, he's not stepping in front of a microphone with cameras in front of him and immediately going viral. But how public were these letters? How known were they, when he sent them or how known perhaps did they become upon receipt?

John: They did not have the kind of public cache—like today Joe Biden or the president has a website where every letter he writes or every formal statement he makes to a particular group is announced. They were certainly shared and passed on within the communities to whom he wrote. This is particularly the case with the Jews who shared the letter; who saw the letter as an important part of their place in the Republic, especially with the overwhelming Christian population. 

Of course, they took on much greater popularity and sort of a sense of gravity later on, as they were often used in Supreme Court religious liberty cases. As people made arguments in the early 19th century and even after the Civil War, even into the 20th century, some of these presidential letters, Washington's you asked specifically, are being invoked in in arguments in the Supreme Court.

But very quickly, I think within a generation, these entered into sort of the public domain; especially as Washington became more venerated after his death in the 19th century, as a defender of religious liberty. 

Brian: Your answer reminds me of something we discussed in our first episode on famous presidential speeches—in that oftentimes these speeches have a usually a more limited reach in their original context because they're addressing something specific.

I wonder if we could turn to one more president—and the one I'd really like to focus on—and that's Thomas Jefferson; the one who makes this phrase “separation between church and state” famous or infamous, depending on your views on these things.

Can you tell us a little bit about that? Set the scene? Where does that phrase come from in Jefferson's writing? 

John: The idea of a wall of separation between church and state actually predates Jefferson. It was actually used in the 17th century by the congregational minister and defender of religious freedom Roger Williams, the Baptist who gets ousted from Massachusetts Bay Colony. Williams described a quote, “hedge” or wall of separation between “the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”

The phrase for Jefferson comes from an 1802 letter that he wrote to the Danbury Baptist association.

This was a group that was living under a congregational established church in Connecticut. Now this gets back to the point where we talked about the Constitution saying there's no tests oaths for office or no established churches. That was a federal requirement. 

We have evidence to suggest that he would would have supported the idea in the Constitution that the states could do anything they want in terms of creating establishments.

Now that changes down the road for reasons we may or may not go into here, but the Baptists were chafing under a congregationalist establishment. They felt like they were only being tolerated and they did not have complete religious freedom. Now, those two words often get confused, religious toleration, and religious freedom.

I like to tell my students this: religious toleration means we don't really like you here, but we will tolerate your existence. Religious freedom means everybody has a kind of an equal say in the religious, political, cultural life.

So the Danbury Baptists . . . they write to Jefferson, thanking him for defending religious liberty and congratulating him on his 1800 election over John Adams. Jefferson was painted by many of the Federalists in that election—John Adams's supporters—as an infidel, as a diest, as an atheist, as somebody who did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ; while John Adams (a good New Englander despite the fact that he was a Unitarian himself) was concerned about the Christian morals and values of Massachusetts society. And he would write the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution in which he kept the congregational establishment. 

Jefferson had the support of most rank-and-file evangelicals who were not new England Congregationalists; Virginia Evangelicals. You can imagine this today, right? Virginia Evangelicals; Baptists in Connecticut. Those who are chafing under these religious establishments. Now Virginia had already abolished theirs by this point, but people who liked Jefferson's defense of religious liberty and did not like the fact that the Federalists were trying to establish a church. That's the context. 

The Danbury Baptists write Jefferson a letter. Jefferson responds and this is the Danbury Baptist letter that we often talk about.

I'm going to read part of it really quickly, just so your listeners can get a sense. He says:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

So he's quoting the first amendment there

"Thus building a wall of separation between church and state." 

He is suggesting that the first amendment, which says, “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” He's quoting the first amendment there. Thus or the equivalent of building a wall of separation between church and state. 

That's how he interprets the first amendment; or at least that's what he tells the Danbury Baptists. That's the context, right? 

Jefferson . . . I think there's strong evidence to suggest that Jefferson was a small ‘F’ federalist, meaning he fully believed that he did not have any constitutional power to enforce a kind of complete separation of church and state in Connecticut.

Because when I say Federalist he would've probably said, the 10th amendment allows anything not covered in the Constitution to be decided by the states. This gets to your bully pulpit theme, if you will. 

So he's quietly here saying to the Danbury Baptists, I'm with you. We should interpret the first amendment to apply also to the states, not to the federal government, because of course, this is what he pushed for in his own state of Virginia.

Brian: That was what I was going to mention. If they didn't have Jefferson saying this really out loud as president, they certainly had him saying it out loud back in Virginia. One of the things that Jefferson himself marks at the end of his life, as one of the most important things he did, was to participate in this Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

John: But again, I think it's important, Brian, to realize that Jefferson was not trying to overturn the first amendment, he was suggesting that each state has the right to decide these issues for themselves. And technically, even though he doesn't like it, Connecticut and Massachusetts could do what they want to do as well. 

Brian: How then does he treat this issue during his presidency? This letter has become something of a Rosetta stone for people to interpret Jefferson and early church-state relations. What did he actually do though when he was president, can you give us some examples of the ways he spoke about these issues, particularly public?

John: Let me just really quickly say something about that Rosetta stone. This letter was not a major part of 19th century conversation about religion, religious freedom, church, and state. 

It really becomes the Rosetta stone in a New Jersey busing case Everson v. Board of Education in New Jersey, [which] used Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists to argue that there is not only a wall separation between church and state, but that wall separation should be quote unquote high and impregnable. And then that decision became the basis of later decisions like 1962 and 1963, the removal of prayer from public schools, mandatory Bible reading, all of those kinds of things.

Brian: That's an incredible lesson for us. That's just one example of the way in which people will often refer to a piece of evidence or a trump card to say, look, I win. The president said this way back when, it supports my view. This is a perfect example of one where actually what the president said at the time was much more limited, much more focused and not even quite what you think he said—we're interpreting it through something that came much later.

John: And much more rooted in a particular historical context. Jefferson is following up two Federalist presidents who were very very interested, and on many occasions had issued, proclamations of prayer and Thanksgiving for the country, Jefferson was opposed to this idea. Now he did issue proclamations of prayer and Thanksgiving when he was governor of Virginia.

But he did not think that was appropriate for a president to do this. So this was part of the reason why he was blasted so hard by the Federalists during the 1800 election against John Adams. 

And there's a really interesting interpretation of the 1802 letter by the former librarian of the Library of Congress manuscript division, James Hudson, who argued this was largely a political letter, as much as it was a religious letter, because what Jefferson is doing is he's sticking it to all of those Federalists who attacked him during the election of 1800 for being an atheist, or an infidel, and so forth. So there could be some of that involved in this conversation as well.

Jefferson was opposed to these kinds of proclamations as president. Having said that, it's also fascinating that just a couple of days, two days after Jefferson wrote this, he is in attendance at a Christian worship service that's being held in the United States Capitol.

And the way Hudson interprets this, I think is very helpful. I think Jefferson clearly believed in some type of a wall between separation of church and state, but that wall as Hudson puts, it had many different checkpoints where religion could pass through.

James Madison was even stronger on this separation. He didn't even want to have prayer before Senate and House meetings. He did not want chaplains, military chaplains, congressional chaplains. Jefferson doesn't come in a whole lot on those. 

However one interprets Jefferson's wall separation between church and state or the disestablishment clause in the United States Constitution, the history here doesn't necessarily always help us in deciding whether or not we should have prayer before a Texas football game, right? Or whether the 10 commandments belong in a courthouse. And the language of the Constitution is so vague, but also the history is so complicated that anybody who's going to try to make a definitive case about church and state issues today is inevitably going to cherry pick certain things about the founding and leave other things to the side that don't suit their legal argument in the present.

Brian: And I think a good place to close and thinking about the way that the president functions, which is, it's not something that brings reality into being much like a regular pulpit. There's a position of authority, but there's also a position of pure influence that has to come from that place. And when the president like Jefferson is speaking on these topics, he’s speaking from his office, but he doesn't actually have the authority to make these things change. He's more interested in this letter and more broadly and making his way through this and using the influence he has in the places he feels like.

John: I think the danger, whenever you get into a lot of history, but in this particular case, church and state, is you want to take contemporary culture-war debates over church and state and somehow superimpose them on, the 18th century. 

When Thomas Jefferson went to a worship service two days after he wrote the wall separation between church and state letter to the Danbury Baptists, there was no contradiction in his mind about these things. He was probably invited to this service. He went. The Marine Band played at it. The ministers preached from Psalm 100. 

Jefferson seemed to have no problem whatsoever with attending. He couldn't have imagined these future debates with us now talking about what about when you went to the service in the Capitol. History can only help us so much. But certainly it can provide the kind of context and the right questions to be asking when we have these modern day debates. 

Brian: Thank you very much for joining us. Really appreciate your insight into this time period and into this topic. 

John: This was fun. Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian: After spending some time in the founding era, we jumped forward to the 20th and 21st centuries to explore the ways in which the discussions about church and state changed when new factors enter the equation. The candidacy and eventual election of John F. Kennedy raised newly immediate questions about church and state in America.

Namely, what does Catholicism have to do with this? Then there was the Cold War, a conflict about many things, including about the varying roles of religion and religious freedom at home in the U.S. and across the globe, and then came 9/11 and with it came deeply painful, emotional, even existential questions about church and state, and specifically about the role of Islam and American politics.

And the president who, compared to many before, certainly wore religion on his sleeve: George W. Bush. To learn about this era we turned to Dr. Lauren Turek, Associate Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Turek brings a wealth of expertise on the ways in which religion has intersected with politics, foreign policy and society across the 20th and 21stcenturies.

She is author up To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations and author of multiple articles in this realm, including on Christian nationalism and the Contra war; and on the evolution of George W. Bush has religious rhetoric. So let's get to our conversation.

Brian: Dr. Turek, thank you so much for joining us today. Could you introduce yourself, just tell us a little bit about your background, what kind of work you do, even what you're working on.

Lauren: Sure. Thank you, first of all, so much for having me. I'm Dr. Lauren Turek. I am an associate professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio, and there I teach classes on modern U.S> foreign relations and public history. I have written quite a bit on the history of religion and U.S. foreign relations in particular. My first book To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations came out in 2020, and will be out in paperback soon.

I am currently working on a book that looks at the history of debates over U.S., foreign aid and considers the moral and strategic dynamics of that. So it will also to some degree address religion, but I am very interested in the intersections of domestic and foreign policy, and religion plays a big role in the cultural dynamics of those interactions. 

Brian: Absolutely, which is exactly why we wanted to have you on today. I wanted to start with the presidency or perhaps the presidential run of John F. Kennedy. Could you tell us just a little bit about what that meant for a well-known Catholic to be running for president, how he handled that, how the country handled, that, how he addressed it?

Lauren: Absolutely. He's running for the presidency in 1960, it is still a time period when there was an enormous amount of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States. And he is surely thinking back to the last time that there was a Catholic who ran for president, which of course is Al Smith in 1928.

When Al Smith ran for presidency, when he ran for the presidency, anti-Catholicism really tanked his candidacy. There was a tremendous amount of sentiment coming, not just from the fringes of American society, but really throughout, that Catholics were fundamentally un-American that they were taking direction from the Pope and were therefore not really Americans, not really going to be in line with American values.

There's a sense that this sort of hierarchy of the Catholic Church would be in fundamental disagreement with the U.S. values. There were some comments and concerns that he and his advisors were hearing that if he were the president, what if he is going to take orders from the Pope?

Which of course sounds truly ridiculous now, but at the time that was a genuine concern. And so he had to make a very concerted effort to make clear to potential voters that he really strongly valued the separation of church and state. And he made a number of speeches to that effect, where he talked about the fact that he was not going to take orders from the Pope. He was not going to make Catholicism the religion of the United States.

He made a speech, in fact, to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September of 1960, where he made clear to them, he actually said that he: 

"Believes in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be Catholic, how to act. And no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote. Where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him."

So he really stressed that America was neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish. And so he tried to allay the suspicions and fears that people had, that he was going to govern primarily as a Catholic. And he said he was the candidate of the Democratic Party. And he really emphasized the political side, almost to the effect of making it seem as though his religion was incidental. 

And he also really emphasized that what he wanted was to see a time when there would be no more religious intolerance in the United States. So he also addresses that head on and he linked the struggle for religious freedom, not just in the United States, but abroad, with his broader anticommunist goals.

Brian: And yet in the context of the Cold War, many Americans believe that it is at some level, a religious war between a theistic United States and an atheistic communism. So how does he straddle that in this speech or in and throughout his presidency?

Lauren: I actually think his inaugural is a great speech to think about in this case, because we're all really familiar with one of the concluding lines of the speech where he says: 

"My fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

And we usually leave the quote at that, but that is not where the quote ends.

He actually then says:

"To fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America can do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."

And then he says: 

"Whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice, which we ask. With good conscience, our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love. Asking his blessing and his help but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."

It's that where we really see him linking this idea of his religious faith, his faith, that the freedom of religion is tied intimately to American ideals like democracy. And saying that the work of the United States to promote democracy and freedom abroad is the work of God. 

Brian: Do you have a sense how that was received or how it was covered in the press or how people talked about it afterwards? Because when I hear that quote I hear something that any Protestant president before him could have said as well. There's nothing distinctively Catholic about that, but I'm sure that it remained some sort of issue. So how do people respond? 

Lauren: I think he was intentionally framing it in that way. That would seem very ecumenical. My sense is that the press really attached to some of the more well-known phrases from it.

The fact of that does not mean that Kennedy was not continuing to be concerned about the potential impression that people might get, that he might be favoring his religion over others. And so he was very careful not to try to show any favor to the Catholic church.

So he was very cautious about any kind of diplomacy with the Vatican, for example, whereas later presidents who were Protestant were able to have different types of relations with the Vatican.

Brian: Can you tell us a little bit more about this question of the Vatican or a potential ambassador to the Vatican, because that strikes me as a really interesting moment to think about, this theme we're talking about the Bully Pulpit and when the president chooses to exercise it or not. And what that says, whether he speaks or not.

Lauren: Kennedy said when he was running, that he was going to not support an ambassador to the Vatican. But what's interesting is the man who was Pope at the time had a lot of public approval. And not just from Catholics in the United States, but he was actually a lot of liberal Protestants were very receptive to him as well. And so Kennedy was able to cautiously establish a relationship. He visited Vatican City in 1963.

He was really walking this very fine line between being open to a very popular Pope, while also not signaling to the people who were skeptical of his Catholicism, that he was going to create this connection between the U.S. government and the Vatican that they might not approve of.

He spends the entire presidency threading the needle very carefully between public perception and anxieties, and what starts to be a little bit of a rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants around some of these broader things.

Brian: And just reading some of the things he says and listening to some of his speeches, he seems to do this such a careful and specific job of threading this needle, so it's not just, don't be afraid of me because I'm a Catholic, but actually as Americans, this is what we should think about the role of religion and the role of church and state.

Lauren: We do see his own sense of his religion in watching what is happening overseas and the type of repression that Catholic face and other Christians as well, and saying, listen, if one of our core values of the United States is religious freedom, we are facing an adversary that is fundamentally and at present brutally repressing people of all kinds and especially religious minorities. 

Brian: I would love for you to talk about that a little bit more, especially as you take this question of church and state on a global level. How do presidents handle that going forward post-JFK through the end of the Cold War?

Lauren: What we see is that regardless of where the presidents fall in terms of their religious values, one of the ideas that they come back to frequently in their discussions about U.S. relations globally, is that one of the core things that they're doing is defending freedom. And part of that freedom is religious freedom. 

There's some debate about this during the Nixon years. And Nixon is an interesting character. Of course, he's a Quaker. His national security advisor is Jewish and they have this interesting relationship at a time when Congress has grown very concerned about increasing religious repression in the Soviet union and the Soviet bloc. 

The Nixon and Kissinger years are times where we see Congress pushing more forcefully on the religious freedom issue perhaps than the presidents, because they mounted a pressure campaign against Nixon's policy of detente with the Soviet Union on the grounds that the Soviet Union is persecuting Jewish people and also persecuting Christians. 

When we see the Carter administration come in, here you have Southern Baptist, somebody who talked quite a lot about his faith journey and who really emphasized the fundamental ways in which promoting religious liberty and religious freedom, as well as human rights, more broadly reflect his own personal sense of his Christian faith. And so we see more of that in terms of the rhetoric that he uses in office. 

Then Reagan also picks up on this rhetoric of religious freedom, perhaps even more strongly, largely due to, I think a lot of the advocacy of more conservative evangelical groups who sees the banner of religious freedom globally as a really useful tool to fight against Soviet repression abroad. And Reagan makes religious freedom the linchpin of his understanding of U.S. human rights policies. Really jettisoning many of the civil and political rights that the Carter administration was also fighting for and saying religious freedom is the key to the U.S. fight for freedom globally. And then they use it very effectively as a cudgel against the Soviet Union to say:

You're not living up to your own constitution on religious liberty. And he brings it up in a number of the summits that they have with the different Soviet leaders. So religious freedom becomes this core principle that he advocates, among others, where we see that influence of religion and then this notion of religious freedom just being so central and whether that's advocating for the release of political and religious prisoners, like the Siberian Seven or just a more general statement. 

Brian: Are there particular elements of the religion question that come up? Does the Reagan administration push the idea that what characterizes America and other democracies is the separation of church and state?

Or is it more leaning toward the religious toleration, religious freedom aspect, that whatever kind of government you have, what you should have is freedom for people to worship. I know those are sort of two sides of a similar coin.

Lauren: Yes. In terms of the global religious freedom language that we see it is much more on the latter of that. We are a pluralistic society where people can worship how they want. People are not facing persecution for their particular form of worship. And look at what is happening in the Soviet Union or in communist China. We have our responsibility to fight against religious persecution. 

It's a profoundly influential idea that does not just stay with the Reagan administration. And so what we see by the late 1990s during the Clinton years is that Congress passes an international religious freedom act that creates a UN agency within the state department that is charged with promoting religious liberty.

That is a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. And that is much more about promoting a particular ideal; rather than this notion of a separation of church and state being the fundamental goal.

Brian: Let's jump forward here so the War on Terror. And I think if you ask a lot of people today, when you think of a religious president, I think many people would go to George W. Bush for good or ill. They would think of him that way. And I know you've written about this and I really have two questions for you. 

One about George W. Bush’s, a pretty overt religious rhetoric in general. And what does that tell us about the role of the president in particular? 

And then secondly, I'd love to ask you about what happened right after 9/11 and the way in which the president dealt with the question of Islam, which was not new to the United States, but I think to many Americans felt new.

Lauren: I think one of the aspects of George W. Bush’s religious rhetoric and perceptions of him as a religious candidate that I find most interesting is that before he became the president, he did not use so much religious rhetoric actually. And so that association is one that's developed over time.

And if we look at the speech that he made prior to his first election for governor in Texas in 1990. He said something that was actually very similar in a lot of ways to what JFK said in talking about his candidacy for president.

And he said,

"I've been very careful about not trying to campaign as a more godly candidate. I just don't agree with that. I don't agree with mixing religion in political campaigns." 

That said he does talk about how in his personal life, his religion is really key. So he starts off as governor making clear that he wants a separation of church and state, and he makes that a core point that he repeats over and over again.

And he says that he is running explicitly on conservative political issues. And that's what he does in his first term as governor, he focuses on education reform and tort reform in Texas. 

But he has this evolution over time that is in part influenced by broader changes in the Republican Party and the influence of the religious right in U.S. politics in the 1990s, which is he starts to embrace this idea of faith-based initiatives and what he starts to call compassionate conservatism. 

And what we start to see is that in his governorship, as he's advocating for faith-based initiatives for welfare he starts to use more and more religious rhetoric, and it is very politically effective for him. It is expanding his salience with Hispanic Americans, with African American women. In a way that was not typical at the time for a Republican.

By the time he is running for president he is able to talk much more broadly about his faith journey. We start to see him describing his born-again experience in a way that he had not in earlier writings. 

9/11 takes the Bush administration by surprise. You can see when you watch the video of President Bush being informed of the attacks, he's reading a children's book at an elementary school, you can see the shock. Within a few days though, this event has galvanized a new and different George W. Bush and it fundamentally reshapes the Bush administration. His rhetoric starts to turn into one of: The United States has a global responsibility to promote freedom.

Brian: This rhetoric of spreading freedom globally is something that whether purposefully or just organically he's drawing from the cold war era that we were just talking about.

Lauren: He actually says, freedom is the greatest export that the United States has. Very shortly after the attacks he defines what has happened as an attack by evil in a similar way to the way that when President Reagan spoke about an evil empire, when he was referring to the Soviet Union. We see a similar rhetoric from George W. Bush, this rhetoric that we have been attacked by evil.

A few days after 9/11, he's giving a joint address to Congress. He says: 

“They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.”

Now, Bush also knows, because in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were a number of very public and horrifying attacks against Muslims, as well as Sikhs and others who are not Muslim. He's very careful to say that this is not a war against Muslims. We are not fighting with Islam. 

He really emphasizes the fact that, not just that Islam is a religion of peace and Islam, Christianity and Judaism were actually all linked and they have this common ancestor in a sense. And I think he does that in part, because he sees this Islamophobia emerging in the United States. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, what we're seeing is this effort to try to make it not a war of religions, but a war against terror.

Brian: It strikes me as similar to JFK's speech in that what he's trying to do is unite people as Americans and not have them privilege first describing themselves as one religion or another, that speech at the Islamic Center is about how this is an attack on America. And these people are also Americans. 

Lauren: He says the terrorists are traders to their own. The enemy of America is not our Muslim friends. It's not Muslims in America. It is this group of terrorists. So he's really trying to define the enemy as he sees it in a narrow way. 

And it does strike me as similar to that JFK speech where the sense it that we are Americans first. 

Religious freedom is a key part of our national value. That's what we are promoting and we should not let us be divided by this. The pluralism is our strength. 

Brian: And that really circles back to, I think, a little bit stronger understanding of what some of the earliest presidents and leaders were actually trying to accomplish. They weren't having the same kind of cultural, partisan discussions about the religious right or the religious left. They were having discussions about the way in which church and state, when mingled, can damage one another and the way in which they prevent democratic flourishing, if they are too close to one another.

Lauren: And I think that it’s one of those moments, when you're teaching U.S. religion and politics, you and I do teach that class from the founding onward. It is one of these ideas we keep coming back to. The importance of the idea of the separation of church and state and the way that it is linked, not just to pluralism within the country, but to the way that the U.S. projects its values.

Brian: Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Turek. This has been fascinating and very enlightening. 

Lauren: Thank you so much for having me. It was wonderful to get to talk with you.

Brian: Those were two great conversations that I got to have with a couple of just really great scholars about a really complicated topic. And I'm glad that we got to have two great scholars who could hit high points of presidencies and also the sort of down in the details, difficult discussions about a topic like church and state. So what did you take away from those discussions?

Lindsay: Just fantastic interviews and I appreciated that they were so attentive to thinking about this subject within the context of our season and the bully pulpit.

My big takeaway, in a hilarious inversion of our first conversation, is, when you think of church and state, I tend to think of laws and the constitution and government and courts may be adjudicating these issues.

And so the thing that struck me was the intense prevalence of politics. Not just politics, but campaigns, the power and the importance of campaigns in defining this issue, going all the way back to Jefferson, and the Federalists were really concerned that he was going to steal their Bibles.

And that was a big centerpiece of that campaign. So I just thought that was so fascinating about the farewell address and how that has been interpreted by various people over time. That document, of course, as we discussed in our first episode, just continues to live on, but its religious elements I think are so often under studied.

The way that Lauren Turek talked about how this question of church and state really almost got flipped on its head in 20th century campaigns. 

And if you will allow me a second point, one thing she said towards the end, which just really made me stop in my tracks. She was talking about in recent campaigns religion had become sort of your identifying tribe. When candidates were talking about this they were speaking to religion as your identifying tribe. And I wonder in the last 10 years, how people, what people would choose first as their identification, if they would choose their religion or if it's become a political party.

Brian: So you think about the way that a church and state, religion and politics has gone, let's say since the 1970s or so, and the rise of the religious right. And Lauren talked about this growing role from the seventies forward for presidents to associate the expansion of freedom, democratic freedom, with the specific expansion of religious freedom, and particularly with Republican presidents.

The expansion of religious freedom rhetorically comes from a place of Protestant evangelicalism. And you're definitely seeing some breaks in that really in the Trump era, as we see Republicans in particular having to come face to face with a situation in which their views about religion and their views, about the way in which religion and the church should influence politics are not matching up with the candidate in the same way that they had in the past.

And so what was a much needed coming together of views of church and state at home or abroad with candidates like George W. Bush, for example, is a much messier mix with candidates like Donald Trump and some of the people who are in his wheelhouse, in his same line of thinking.

Lindsay: And I think we're seeing a lot of that evolution in other elements of politics, too. For example, a lot of people who define themselves as conservative and hold very dear conservative principles are looking at certain elements of the Republican Party and saying, these are not actually now conservative principles.

And there's this, mismatch of what that means. Are you a conservative or are you a Republican? And sometimes you can't be both. And so I do think we are going through a pretty seismic shift in our political culture. And of course, religion plays an important element in that shift.

Brian: Yeah. And this, of course, isn't the first time. Going back to what you mentioned about John's discussion about during the time of Jefferson, there were huge religious shifts going on in America at the time with the rise of evangelical denominations, but they had such different questions about church and state.

And their champion was someone not who was just like them, not someone who was going to spread their views or take their religious or social views into office, but just someone who was going to protect them and give them basic rights.

Lindsay: What was your takeaway? 

Brian: Similar to the way you talked about the way this comes up in political campaigns. I was struck that so many candidates use the church/state issue, perhaps selfishly, perhaps just practically, perhaps artistically, as a way to stake out a position that helps them politically. And oftentimes that was more so the case then them staking out a position for a purpose of necessarily of policy, right?

So they're having to achieve a certain appearance to a broad enough portion of the electorate. Jefferson is somewhat concerned about this. Washington was concerned about this and that, of course, all the way up to Kennedy in particular, who finds himself on the defensive and is having to stake out a position that allows him to continue to be a serious candidate.

It's for many people, they think of this issue as a bedrock issue, but it's oftentimes more of a bedrock issue for political fights than it is for actually who are we as a nation and how should this.

Lindsay: Yeah, I think that's such a great point. As Lauren was talking about how careful he had to be with his campaign, because of course he had seen what had happened with Al Smith. 

The first Catholic Supreme Court justice, which is actually Roger Tawny, there was no mention of his Catholicism at all in his nomination. And yet when Brandeis was nominated, he was the first Jewish justice, it was so controversial, but that was the first time the Senate actually held hearings for a Supreme Court justice and inversely, of course, Kennedy had to battle against this.

But I'm not sure that anyone really held it against Joe Biden. I think him actually being a person of very explicit and very forward faith actually helped him. And so I just think it's really interesting how these things have evolved, how people evolve, how concepts evolve, but also, what counts as a safe religion evolves. 

Brian: The issue of safety is a good one, because I really do think like a lot of issues in American history, it comes back to fears or concerns about new things, and people were afraid of Kennedy's Catholicism. 

And you're right, that there was not an issue in the Biden campaign.

We are not usually in the business of predicting the future as story ends. But if one day we have a nominee for president from one of the parties who's Hindu or who is a Muslim there is no doubt in my mind that we will do this. Partially out, of course, of the negative side of this and people's prejudices and, but also out of just pure new circumstance.

And that will cause us to think about how this new thing fits within the system, strains the system. And we'll have to come back to terms with it again. And hopefully when that happens that candidate and the people around them will use the Bully Pulpit with grace, with understanding of history, and we'll be able to get to a point soon after where it's not a big deal.

Brian: That's it for today's episode three of The Bully Pulpit: Church and State. Thank you to John Fea and Lauren Turekfor sharing their knowledge and insight with us 

The Past, The Promise, The Presidency is a production of Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History. Our thanks to the office of the provost and the Dedman College of Arts and Sciences for their support and special thanks to the entire CPH team for producing this episode.

Our original theme music was composed by Marshall Engel. For show notes, more information on our experts, guest’s recommended readings and so much more about the Big Speeches and the other presidents we are talking about this season visit pastpromisepresidency.com. Tune in next week to learn about Presidents, the Bully Pulpit, women's suffrage, and the ERA.