Americans Who Separated Church and State

Americans Who Separated Church and State 

By Lawrence W. Reed 

Did you know that American military leaders once ordered a nation to dismantle its official connections to a religion? Allow me to tell you that story but first, let me preface it with some background. 

Some people advocate for “separation of church and state” because they perceive religion to be a danger to government. It certainly can be, the theocratic kleptocracy in Tehran being a current example.

As a Christian, however, I am more concerned about the danger that government poses to religion. I don’t want politics and politicians anywhere near my faith, my church, or my pastor for the same good reasons I don’t want them in my bedroom, my bathroom, my wallet, or my face. Such matters are none of their business, full stop.

Across Europe for centuries, government and religion had been joined at the hip. The very concept of keeping distance between the two was revolutionary as recently as the 17th Century, and it originated with the early Baptists of America.

Almost 400 years ago, the founder of Rhode Island, Baptist pastor Roger Williams, became the first public official to urge “a wall or hedge of separation between the wilderness of the world and the garden of the church.” He believed matters of belief and conscience should belong exclusively to the individual and his Maker, not legislators and potentates. Years later, Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Voltaire would flesh out, champion, and popularize the notion.

From an 1802 letter authored by President Thomas Jefferson and addressed to a Baptist organization in Connecticut, we derive the familiar phrase, “separation of church and state.” But by then, the notion had already been baked into the Constitution’s First Amendment with its clause forbidding government from “establishing” a religion.

Writing for the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, Hana M. Ryman and J. Mark Alcorn note,

Both Jefferson and fellow Virginian James Madison felt that state support for a particular religion or for any religion was improper. They argued that compelling citizens to support through taxation a faith they did not follow violated their natural right to religious liberty. The two were aided in their fight for disestablishment by the Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and other “dissenting” faiths of Anglican Virginia.

The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution eleven years later were full-blown libertarians on the issue. They utterly rejected any “establishment” of a state religion. By the same token, they opposed government treating people of faith differently before the law than people of no faith. The blindfolded goddess of justice should not peek. To the Founders, being against the “establishment of religion” did not require one to be against religion, or the private practice and funding thereof.

So what’s the story about American military leaders that I alluded to in my opening paragraph? It starts with the defeat of Japan in 1945 and its occupation by U.S. forces. The Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, was in charge of preparing Japan to become a free, independent, and non-aggressive nation.

MacArthur and his advisors viewed Shintoism, the national religion of Japan, as a major hindrance to the job. It had become a propaganda arm of a militaristic state—in schools, the media, churches, and the justice system. Courses in the Shinto faith were compulsory and subsidized heavily; they included emperor worship and an extreme nationalism.

So did MacArthur simply decree that nobody could believe in Shintoism anymore? Think of what a nightmare that would be. It would likely have driven believers underground, requiring American forces to go house to house looking for any signs of it. MacArthur was not a fool. He recognized that the problem had its roots in Shinto’s state support, and that’s what he got rid of.

The General assigned Lieutenant William K. Bunce to put his knowledge of Japanese religion and culture to good use. The result was the so-called Shinto Directive, issued on December 15, 1945. Its formal title is revealing: Abolition of Governmental Sponsorship, Support, Perpetuation, Control, and Dissemination of State Shinto. See the full text via the link provided below.

Its opening paragraphs explained the Directive’s purpose:

In order to free the Japanese people from direct or indirect compulsion to believe or profess to believe in a religion or cult officially designated by the state, and In order to lift from the Japanese people the burden of compulsory financial support of an ideology which has contributed to their war guilt, defeat, suffering, privation, and present deplorable condition, and In order to prevent a recurrence of the perversion of Shinto theory and beliefs into militaristic and ultra-nationalistic propaganda designed to delude the Japanese people and lead them into wars of aggression…

In other words, the state had corrupted Shintoism and deployed it for its own nefarious ends. Wow, where have we seen that before?!

The Directive abolished or annulled all laws, taxpayer subsidies, and other forms of public support for Shintoism but affirmed the right of the Japanese people to embrace the faith if they freely chose to. They just had to do it in their own time and on their own dime. It even expressly allowed for private educational institutions to promote Shintoism “with the same privileges and subject to the same controls and restrictions as any other private educational institution having no affiliation with the government.” The document stated furthermore,

Private financial support of all Shinto shrines which have been previously supported in whole or in part by public funds will be permitted, provided such private support is entirely voluntary and is in no way derived from forced or involuntary contributions.

The Directive got rid of state-mandated Shinto textbooks, curriculum and training but did not replace all that with any other government-approved textbooks, curriculum or training. In effect, it accomplished for Japan what Roger Williams called for centuries earlier: You could believe and even worship whatever you wanted to. On such important matters, government was out of the picture.

Today in Japan, Shintoism is widely and privately practiced. It comes in a variety of flavors and is polytheistic and animistic at its core. It’s not my cup of tea, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it’s not compulsory or tax-supported.

Perhaps some of the ossified official religions of Europe could learn a thing or two from Japan about the “disestablishment” of religion. That principle shouldn’t mean that government discriminates against people of faith; it should mean that government simply has no role in the people’s faith.

General MacArthur and his advisors proved to be wise visionaries on this and some other issues facing post-war Japan. But they were not original thinkers regarding the separation of church and state. Rather, they were following the even wiser and older advice of men like Williams, Locke and Jefferson.

For additional information, see:

Text of the Shinto Directive

What Caused Japan’s Post-War Economic Miracle? by Lawrence W. Reed

Unleashing the Sun – a free eBook on Japanese history by Lawrence W. Reed

Establishment Clause: Separation of Church and State by Hana M. Ryman and J. Mark Alcorn

Roger Williams: The Rebel Who Invented the Separation of Church and State (video)

When Shinto Became a “Religion” (video)

What 17th Century England’s State Church Had in Common with Today’s Public Schools by Lawrence W. Reed

(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta. He blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.)