It’s interesting to note that when we speak of our Founding Fathers, most of us are speaking of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and John Adams. Essentially that was the inner core of the people who really shaped the ideas and the foundational documents that gave birth to our country. Though all of them were men of upper class, and were powerful people in their own day, they were highly suspect of the use of power and of what power could do to people. In their documents they were very careful to try to strike balances.

For example, they decided to break up the federal government into three different branches so that one never had too much power. They broke up power between states in the Federal Government so that neither one would have too much power. Do you get the gist of what they were trying to do? Someone said that power corrupts, and absolute power absolutely corrupts. The truth is that any time that any of us are in the possession of a great control or power we are probably, because of our human nature going to miss-use that. It is much the credit of those early founders of our county that they had the wisdom to understand that particular part of human nature and to try to somehow place within the founding documents of our country some things that would give restraint.

Last week we were talking about the notion of what freedom meant to three different groups of people that somehow continue to struggle against one another even into the present. What we understand about a democracy,–a true democracy–is that there is never a settled sense of these issues in our lives. Because if people have real freedom to express themselves and live the way they want to, it’s going to create tension and friction and there are going to be inner struggles.

Remember that we said that there were those people who were escaping the lack of religious freedom in Europe. They came here and founded communities where they could live out their own sense of who God was and what God had called them to be. The problem very often, and the Puritans in New England were probably the best example of this, was that while they wanted freedom to worship God as their clergy saw fit, they were extremely intolerant of people among them who did not worship the same way that they wanted to worship. For all of our great love of our puritan ancestors we have to remember that in many ways that they were as intolerant of others points of view, as the people who had kicked them out of England.

Rhode Island became a state because some Baptists refused to adhere to the creeds of the Puritans. That is just one example. The Founding Fathers, all of them except for John Adams were Deists. That means they had some generic sense of a God who had created the world and then stepped back and let it run on its own. They were concerned about the inner religious battles that they saw within Europe and the potential that inner religious battles had in those thirteen original colonies. They deliberately set up a government that was not religious but secular, in order that all people could worship God in the way that they saw fit. And there is some irony to the fact that it was a secular government that would allow religion to flourish rather than the other way around. It almost seems counter intuitive. And then we remember the births of that young movement known as the Great Awakening that occurred in the late 1700’s that brought to great significance two denominations: Methodist and Baptist. An evangelical reacted against the Calvinism of those Puritans. And spoke of the free agency and free will which each of us has as individuals. In many ways they were also reacting against those very aristocrats who had been the Founding Fathers.  John Adams was quoted as saying “you didn’t want too much democracy because the average might take money from the rich”. He actually said that because he was concerned about that. These young denominations flattened that class system. And what they preached was that all people were equal in the sight of God and that that was as much a part of their spiritual life as it was their temporal life.

Now that’s a summarization of what I said last week, to make a foundation for what I want to say today.

We often have a two dimensional view because we don’t look at the details. We often assume that on July 4^th, 1776, that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and the country became free. And that all of the problems that were going on before vanished. We forget that freedom was a process; a process that continues some 250 years later. After the Revolutionary War was over, and we had sent the British packing, there was still a long way to go in creating that freedom which those early Founding Fathers saw as important. Believe it or not, there were still state churches scattered throughout the thirteen colonies that people paid taxes to whether they wanted to or not. Methodist and Baptist ministers were being arrested constantly for doing–guess what–preaching! Can you believe it? That was after the British were gone because the Anglican Church was still the state church in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, a Deist who hated organized religion, got together with a Baptist minister. Both of them wanted to curtail the power of the established church. They went to the general assembly in Virginia and had added to the Virginia constitution a bill, which separated religious faith from the government. It was that separation of church and state document that was used as a model that Jefferson later took to the federal government, which also passed amendment, which separated religion from the state.  You have to remember that this had never been tried before where the government and the religion were one and the same.

Jefferson honestly believed that once religion was severed from the state that it would go away. The Baptist minister thought something different and guess who was right. Religion flourished in this country. It flourished because it was not tainted by the power that politics often engenders. It flourished because it was capable of sitting back and giving true and clear judgment at times of the wrongs and injustices of people in power and in politics often engenders. It flourished because it was capable of sitting of back and giving true and clear judgment at times of the wrongs and injustices of people in power and in politics without some how being polluted by the political process itself. Religion flourished because people knew that they could worship wherever they wanted to worship and however they wanted to worship, not because they were coerced into it, but because they came freely and of their own will.

Of all the Founding Fathers gifts to us, the separation of church and state has probably been one of the most important. And it’s interesting to note as we look at the 1800’s and early 1900’s at those evangelical Christians known as Baptist and Methodist with a sprinkle of new light Presbyterians and some Disciples of Christ and a few other folks. It’s interesting to see how they shaped this Nation. It’s interesting to see how, when removed from politics, that some of the major ills of our country were addressed because these churches appealed to peoples conscious and to their individual sense of what was right and did not use the power and the wielding of politics to change this country.

Things we take for granted today; the equality of men and women, the fact that we do not allow children to be placed in factories and worked to the bone, the fact that blacks and whites are seen as equals in this country from a legal stand point as well as a practical one. All of these things came about in our country because of the religious commitment of those denominations, which developed during the Great Awakening. They were able to prick the conscious of this country because they did not allow themselves to become entrapped in the power of politics, where that conviction or that conscious might some how be tainted.

I wish I could stand up here and tell you a fairy tale story that said that in this wonderful world of American Democracy that the Baptist and the Methodists behaved themselves and always observed that separation of church and state in a way that was honorable. I’ve learned some things in the last few years that they did not teach me in seminary as a cautionary note and as a way of keeping us as Methodists from being too cocky about what we may have done that we needed to be proud of. There is a building that sits up on Capital Hill that is the only non-government building there. Guess what it is called? It is called the Methodist Building. It was built in the early 1900’s so the Methodists could keep an eye on Congress and advise it on how to pass bills. Do you know why that building was placed there? Because the Methodist church was concerned that there were far too many Catholics coming into this country. And that we honestly needed to have that building there to stop the Catholics from coming. And what I want to say to you is that I’m embarrassed and appalled at the abuse of the power of my denomination in that kind of bigotry. In many ways I think it put a shame on our church that we still suffer from. Some how we have allowed the power that we had engendered to be used in ways that were political and that were wrong.

I’ve got another story to tell you that isn’t quite as black and white, but says something about both the good and bad of the Methodist spirit. Any of you remember prohibition? Remember when all alcohol was banned in this country by a certain amendment that was passed. The Methodist church was 90% of the leadership of prohibition. And it was because of our good intensions as we looked around us and saw the abuse of alcohol in our country. The violence and the destruction of people’s lives it had caused. So we decided to step into politics and to bring an amendment to ban all alcohol from this country. What was wrong with prohibition was because it obviously didn’t work.  It was an assumption that we could legislate morality. We could pass laws to force people to do the right thing. And it was an utter failure. They’re again, the church had the right intent, but we had allowed ourselves to become tainted in the political process. Much has been said afterwards about some of the true honor that we lost in that process.

Now before I leave that subject, alcoholism is a still a major social issue ill in our country. We may have not been right about how to end that problem in our country, but it is still a problem that we should be concerned about. I often hear people talk that they worry about drugs in the high school, our high school. I can assure that the major drug problem at Prescott High School, as is with many high schools is alcohol and its abuse on a regular basis by a large percentage of those young people. We weren’t wrong about our desire to rid our country of that problem.  We were wrong about the process that we use to try to engender it.

When we look at the history of our country over the last 250 years what we see and understand is that when religion has been at its best, it has been when it has appealed to the individual conscience. It has in the good American spirit tried to change this country by trying to change the hearts and minds of the individual. When we have tried to use the coercive power that we have engendered over time, we have failed over and over again to be the people that God intended us to be and ultimately bring about the changes that we think are important.

There is a cautionary note in this for us, about that issue of separation of church and state and the carefulness with which we need as religious institutions to avoid the sins that come when we try to see the power of politics. We know that we are in the midst of a tense presidential election. Half of Americans think one party should be in power, and the other half thinks the other should be. Id like to be able to stand up here and tell you that one particular party has avoided in this present election mixing politics and religion, but actually both major parties have violated that in some extreme ways. We as religious people needed to resist that. Because in resisting it we preserve the integrity of the place of conscious that the church of the role it plays in this country. We need to resist it for the integrity of the gospel, and for the integrity ultimately of a democracy that 250 years ago set itself on a course that is different from any in the rest of the world.

The church needs to continue to be conscious of our country and it cannot be when it itself becomes a part of the power brokering of politics. The church needs to be a place where peoples live can be transformed and learn to live as God intended. It cannot do that when it has become tainted by the power that politics engenders. The church needs to be the church. As I say that I'm not telling you as individuals that you should withdraw from the political process. As a matter of fact, I think the church, as in institution, needs to stay out of politics, but we, as individuals and citizens of this country, need not only to vote, but also to live out our political passions. May God be with us as a Nation in the days ahead. May we preserve those inherent and important ideas in which our country was founded and may we humble ourselves before God as God moves us into the future. Let’s bow our heads for a word of prayer.