Rep. Phil Jensen, R-Rapid City, listens to testimony during a state House Education Committee hearing on Jan. 22, 2024, at the Capitol in Pierre. Last month, Jensen said the Founding Fathers would be “rolling over in their grave at the fact that we’re even having to debate” a resolution urging South Dakotans to “seek the Lord Most High.” (Photo by Joshua Haiar/South Dakota Searchlight)
Republican state Rep. Phil Jensen of Rapid City was right to think America’s Founding Fathers would be “rolling over in their grave” because the state’s legislators recently debated whether to pass a formal resolution urging South Dakotans to invoke God to rescue the state from its most intractable problems.
But he was wrong about why he was right.
The Founders certainly would be aghast to learn that modern American elected representatives would insert religion directly into the lawmaking process — but not, as Rep. Jensen insists, because the Founders were foursquare in favor of such theological devotion and would be alarmed its necessity even needed a debate. The opposite is true: The Founders, although largely Christian (as most colonists at the time), were acutely aware of the catastrophic dangers of religious dominance of governments, which had led directly to disastrous, murderous wars between European Catholic and Protestant states in the Middle Ages. Armed with that hard knowledge, they sought to carve such overweening sectarian influences out of their new democratic republic’s governance.
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As one iconic founder, Thomas Jefferson, wrote in “Notes on the State of Virginia” in 1785: “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Jefferson was stressing that a person’s theological beliefs, or none, had no place in the crafting of practical laws in America’s unique, secularly governed republic.
In other words, government and religion, to paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould, should be “non-overlapping magisteria,” which is to say government and religion should be effectively separate from each other, walled-off, as it were. Gould wrote that science and religion were entirely separate — non-overlapping — realms of knowledge, as, in my and the Founders’ view, government and religion should be.
That’s one key purpose of religious freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment of the American Bill of Rights — not to allow religious ideology to run rampant in government but to allow the government to operate free of the overt, domineering, destructive influence theological ideology has so terribly enjoyed in past eras. More importantly, it allowed and still allows all Americans to believe in whatever deities they choose — or none at all — and have full confidence that our government cannot contradict or penalize those beliefs.
We are in an era where theological-political activists — e.g., conservative Christian nationalists — have for years been trying (and often succeeding) in shoehorning their theological ideas into the American body politic and the nation’s laws. American life and governance is being infiltrated by a spreading unconstitutional miasma of religion, whether it be evangelical Christian Bible classes in public schools; Supreme Court rescinding, due to Christian ideology, of decades-old laws legally allowing abortions; designated congressional Christian prayer weeks and chaplains, and other corruptions of church-state separation.
Rep. Jensen’s “rolling over in their grave” comment came during recent passage in both legislative chambers of Resolution 604, sponsored by Republican Rep. Tony Randolph of Rapid City, “urging the people of the state of South Dakota to return to the Lord Most High, the Almighty and Uncreate, and plead for His mercy upon the state.”
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The resolution is nonbinding, meaning only symbolic, merely expressing a toothless opinion that is not law or formal policy.
Yet, Rep. Randolph insisted resolutely during the resolution debate that, “We are in the lowest moral state, probably, in the history of our nation. How do we deal with that? I say we go back to the root of what made this nation great and call on Him.”
The measure’s official text states that the nation was founded on “trust in the all-merciful, all-powerful hand of Providence,” adding, “… we hold that only a continual submission to the sovereignty of the Almighty and wholly Righteous God … will allow us to protect the liberties that have been given to us by the Almighty, from all forces that are intent on advancing an agenda that seeks to turn us away from rightly loving God and our neighbors.”
Those protections, though, do not pertain to our Buddhist, atheist and other non-monotheist neighbors, apparently, of which there are arguably thousands in South Dakota and millions in the U.S.
Nonetheless, the resolution easily passed, 22-11 in the state Senate on Jan. 27 and 42-23 in the House of Representatives two days later.
Yes, I suspect the Founders would roll over in their graves to know that so many American lawmakers in South Dakota today are injecting sectarian religion into the sacred secular machinery of government.
