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Protecting the Wilderness: Comments on Howe's The Garden in the Wilderness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 November 2010
Extract
“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, . . . set up the tabernacle of the tent of the congregation. . . . put therein the ark of the testimony . . . bring in the candlestick, and light the lamps thereof.” No, I am not going to preach a Puritan sermon to you. I want only to remind you of the Puritan in Roger Williams who said the words that provide the title of the book under consideration. The words come from Williams's debate with John Cotton over church government: “When they [or the those who desired to Christianize the world through the use of worldly power] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God had ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness.” For Mark deWolfe Howe, Williams's “theological wall of separation” represents the evangelical impulse in American religion and is an important source for understanding American law concerning church and state. A key contribution of Howe's monograph was to remind its readers that not only Jefferson's sense of natural law and individual rights but also Williams's congregational and biblical notions informed the First Amendment religion clauses. Howe finds fault with the Supreme Court's ignoring this dual lineage and favoring only Jefferson's Enlightenment view. For Howe, the modern Court's use of Jefferson's language to impute due process values to the religion clauses “distorts their manifest objectives” to grant religion constitutionally protected status—a status distinct from other forms of conscience, not least irreligion. These other forms of conscience are, he argues, protected by other constitutional guarantees, such as speech, press, and association.
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References
1 Exodus 40:1–4 (KJV).
2 Howe, Mark deWolfe, The Garden and the Wilderness: Religion and Government in American Constitutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 3Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., 168.
4 Ibid., 163–64. Howe's entire statement reads: “In recent opinions of the Supreme Court,” he argued, “one can occasionally discover intimations that their broadening of neutrality's obligation . . . is being brought about by a . . . process of giving more scope (and perhaps, less and less meaning) to the concept ‘religion.’”
5 Ibid., 31, 25.
6 James Hutson, “‘A Wall of Separation’: FBI Helps Restore Jefferson's Obliterated Draft,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin (June 1998), at http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danbury.html.
7 For an extended discussion, see for example, Gilpin, W. Clark, The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 85–89Google Scholar.
8 Williams, Roger, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for the Cause of Conscience, Discussed in a Conference Between Truth and Peace (London, 1644)Google Scholar (emphasis added).
9 Emil G. Hirsch and Wilhelm Nowack, s.v., “Candlestick,” Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=87&letter=C.
10 Of course, Williams would have known the Bishops' Bible version: “And he put the candlesticke in the tabernacle of the congregation, ouer agaynst the table towarde the south syde of the tabernacle, 25 And set vp the lampes before ye Lorde: as the Lorde commaunded Moyses.”
11 Russel, Jeffrey Burton, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 29Google Scholar.
12 Ezekiel 43:7–9 (KJV).
13 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1853), 2:498.
14 For Williams's view of ecclesiastical authority, see David L. Mueller, “Roger Williams on the Church and ministry,” Review & Expositor 55, no. 2 (April 1958): 165–81.
15 Quinn, D. Michael, “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriage, 1890–1904,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 42Google Scholar.
16 Senator Fred T. Dubois (D-Idaho), Congressional Record, 59th Cong., 2d sess., 1906, 41, pt. 1.
17 Bailey, Rev. A. S., “Anti-American Influences in Utah,” in Christian Progress in Utah: The Discussions of the Christian Convention (Salt Lake City, 1888), 17–23Google Scholar.
18 Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878).
19 “Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists: The Final Letter, as Sent,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin (June 1998), at http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html.
20 For an extended analysis of the hearing, see Flake, Kathleen, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
21 U.S. Senate. Committee on Privileges and Elections. Proceedings before the Committee on Privileges and Elections of the United States Senate in the Matter of the Protests agains the Right of Hon. Reed Smoot, a Senator from the State of Utah, to Hold His Seat. 59th Cong., 1st sess., S. Rept. No. 486, (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1904–1906), 1:1.
22 Ibid., 1:99.
23 Ibid., 1:728.
24 Ibid., 1:313.