Glenn Beck wants to have a national day of prayer and fasting, and points to Thomas Jefferson as someone who was all for that sort of thing. Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson weighed in on just exactly this sort of issue:
First, on the issue of prescribing such observances:
I consider the government of the U S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the U.S. Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority.
That one actually seems crystal clear without recourse to old TJ, but, in this day and age, it pays to be thorough. But hows-about the more sly, more thoroughly “modern” version of said observances in which the President (or a similar authority) simply encourages folks to pray or fast or what-have-you:
But it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting & prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the U.S. an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded them from. It must be meant too that this recommendation is to carry some authority, and to be sanctioned by some penalty on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some degree of proscription perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommendation the less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed? I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.
Exactly right. Why, it’s almost as if this country was founded by deists who were looking to completely separate the respective functions of church and state. Just don’t tell Glenn Beck; such facts get in the way of his preferred narratives.
So, which recent or current President would Jefferson judge as more dangerous to the Republic? And exactly which part of Glenn Beck’s daily spew would Jefferson recognize as even American, much less the work of a self-proclaimed “Constitutional Scholar”?
Lemkin 