The Boston Phoenix
June 1 - 8, 2000

[Features]

Web Extra

Jeff Jacoby, James Madison, and the First Amendment

by Dan Kennedy

Posted Friday, June 2

James Madison said what?

Jeff Jacoby, in his Boston Globe column of June 1, rails against the ACLU for its unbending efforts to keep church and state separate. The piece is not without its strengths, as Jacoby gives the ACLU a well-deserved poke for its silly (though thus-far successful) campaign to ban "With God All Things Are Possible" as the state of Ohio's official motto.

But then Jacoby invokes a higher authority -- no, not God, but James Madison -- in order to prove his case that the framers of the Constitution never intended to ban religion from the public sphere. Jacoby quotes Madison as saying, "We have staked the future of all of our political institutions . . . upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

By midday, I had received an e-mail from my former Phoenix colleague Tom Scocca, now with the Baltimore City Paper, suggesting that the Madison quote had "already been proven spurious." I checked, and Scocca was right. According to an essay by University of Richmond historian Robert Alley, the editor of James Madison on Religious Liberty (1985), "It is proper to state that Madison cannot be found to have said anything even vaguely similar to the words attributed to him."

In a piece Alley wrote in the June 1997 issue of Church & State, Alley criticized Representative Joe Scarborough, a Florida Republican, for invoking Madison's alleged quote in support of a bill to display the Ten Commandments in government offices and courthouses. Alley also reported having shown the bogus quote to David Mattern, an editor of Madison's papers, who responded: "We did not find anything in our files remotely like the sentiment expressed in the extract you sent us. In addition, the idea is inconsistent with everything we know about Madison's views on religion and government, views he expressed time and again in public and in private."

Jacoby says he found the quote in America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations (1996) -- but, upon reading the footnote, he concedes that no primary source is cited. As a substitute, he offers this 1785 bit of Madisonia, drawn directly from Madison's papers: "Religion [is] the basis and Foundation of Government." Well, okay. But another Madison quote, taken from a letter he wrote in 1822 and posted on the James Madison University Web site, offers more insight into Madison's views on God and the state: "I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing [sic] that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together."