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."