For the Muslim Times’ Encyclopedic collection on Separation of Mosque-Church and State, click here.

By John Compton; Assistant Professor of Political Science, Chapman University

Huff Post: The U.S. Constitution is, by all appearances, a secular document. It prohibits the use of religious tests for federal officeholders. It guarantees the right to practice the faith of one’s choice. It bars the state and federal governments from establishing an official religion. Some of its original provisions, including the fugitive slave clause, are so odious that is difficult to believe that any religious person could have agreed to them.

U.S. Constitution

It should come as no surprise, then, that early American evangelicals found much to dislike in the new Constitution. During the ratification debate, Anti-Federalists warned that the ban on religious test oaths for federal officeholders might one day facilitate a Catholic takeover of the government. No self-respecting Protestant, they reasoned, could favor ratification of such a “Godless” document.

In the 1840s, the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, disgusted by the framers’ compromise with slavery, declared the Constitution a “covenant with death and an agreement with Hell.” To drive home the point, he publicly burned the copies of the document.

A few decades later, the leaders of the prohibition movement – nearly all of them evangelicals – denounced the Constitution as “the great legal fortress of intemperance.” The problem, in this case, was that the Constitution’s due process and commerce clauses protected property rights in liquor. In order to transform America into a dry utopia, the prohibitionists concluded, a constitutional amendment would be necessary.

Some of the causes championed by early American evangelicals were laudable. Others now seem misguided, or even downright pernicious. But it is hard not to admire the honesty with which these reformers pursued their policy aims. When the will of God (as they saw it) was at odds with the principles of the framers, they frankly admitted as much.

How the times have changed.

More: