Why Is Religion Essential for Freedom?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is the need for religion in our constitutional republic. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. President George Washington and President Donald Trump believe religion is essential to freedom.

President Trump believes, according to his State of the Union address on February 24, that the United States could be in the midst of a spiritual revival. However, a recent Gallup survey says that the data is mixed. In his article published at The Daily Signal, Andrew Fowler states: 

Nevertheless, for the nation to prosper and bind together, religiosity is not only a crucial aspect of civil society, but vital to its sustainability. This sentiment was express by none other than the country’s first president, George Washington.

Fowler explained that Washington was “private in his own religious convictions and skeptical of fanaticism.” However, he gave a “prescient warning to contemporary and future Americans – on national and international affairs – definitively emphasized that ‘[o]f all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.’ Moreover, to ‘subvert’ such ‘great pillars of human happiness’ – like the freedom of religious expression – would be considered unpatriotic.” Fowler continued his explanation.

Indeed let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Fowler explained that Washington “was not the only Founding Father to stress religion’s intrinsic importance to the new republic.” He then quoted a famous statement by the future President John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He quoted a third Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, as saying: “[God] ought to be worshipped” and “the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children.”

Fowler continued by quoting “Thomas Jefferson, the most notable deist among the Founding Fathers.” He “warned about the consequences of abandoning religious conviction entirely.” Jefferson advocated for a “wall of separation” between church and state, but he also said: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

Fowler explained that the rationale of the above Founding Fathers “was not without historical precedent.” He continued by explaining that Christianity has served for centuries “as the basis for establishing institutions that we take for granted, such as universities, hospitals, economic systems, and – most importantly – the philosophy undergirding the truth that ‘all men are created equal.” It was Alexis de Tocqueville, a 19^th-century political scientist, who observed and then wrote in his “Democracy in America” that “religion is the ‘companion of liberty’ and a ‘safeguard’ in preserving the ‘pledge of freedom.’”

Fowler then shared his thoughts about how religion is doing in America today and the consequences that have followed.

Today, however, American religiosity is struggling – and the consequences borne from this sociological trend have reverberated across civil society and political dynamics.

In the early 1950s, 75% of Americans found religion to be “very important” in their lives. Now, that is 47%. Moreover, the March Gallup survey shows that “in each year since 2022, 28% of Americans have said religion is ‘not very important’ in their lives,” which is the “highest proportion” in this trend and “more than double the rate seen as recently as the early 2000s.” Concurrently, as a recent Pew Research Center survey discovered, the United States is “the only place” where “more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%).”

The relationship between these trends may not be purely coincidental. Religious affiliation has historically declined since the 21^st century’s outset; meanwhile, the importance of one’s political party affiliation has risen and, in some cases, supplanted not only religion as an identifiable characteristic, but race, culture, and even language.

Additionally, in recent years, Americans have shifted their self-defining characteristics to better align with their politics; in effect, a political platform has increasingly informed one’s values and principles, instead of one’s beliefs being rooted by families, churches, and communities.

Psychologically, this identity shift heightens emotional reactions toward political criticisms since debate – or opposition – now challenges the core of a person’s personality. Even brain activity confirms political conflict has a similar effect as being physically attacked and/or threatened. It should be unsurprising then, as a result, America has seen increased polarization and even violence against political adversaries.

At the same time, American civil society has receded. Fewer opportunities exist for neighbors to gather together, regardless of political affiliation, and pursue a common goal. In the past, religious organizations and charities were cornerstones for such activity; today, however, as religiosity fades – which had been a motivating impulse propelling communal outreach – a void has formed. Indeed, the less religious are less likely to be civically engaged.

This massive disconnect between an individual and society at-large presents an existential crisis in the modern United States. Civilizations cannot survive without a firm foundation. In an American context, morality was not borne from thin air nor from moral relativism – but formed by Western philosophy and the Judeo-Christian religions.

President Trump is launching initiatives like “America Prays” and establishing the White House Faith Office. In addition, there are signs that the rising generations are seeking spiritual guidance. Will this trend continue?

Fowler offers “Washington’s fatherly advice” given in his Farewell Address as being “relevant to modern audiences: “when religiosity disappears from the public square, the moral framework supporting civil society wanes and weakens. A transcendent set of principles, however, unifies and moors the nation in common principles.”

Fowler suggests that this year -- America’s 250^th birthday anniversary – is a good time for Americans to return to what has been called the “indispensable” pillars that hold up society: “prayer, worship, and charity.” He wonders if faith is powerful enough to “reverse every sociological problem.” He suggests that religious commitment must be revived if we are to “renew the civic bonds that sustain, safeguard, and preserve a free society.”

This year is a suitable time for all of us to pray for America and for our political leaders.

 

How Important Is Religion to National Sovereignty?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns faith, religion, and freedom. There are two underlying principles for this discussion. Please keep them in mind as you read the following information.

The first principle comes from the Book of Mormon – Another Testament of Jesus Christ. It is: The prayers of righteous people protect righteous and unrighteous people alike. (See Alma 10:22-23.) The second principle is that citizens of all nations should have religious liberty and be allowed to worship God as they choose. (Article of Faith 1:11.)

An article written by Mariya Manzhos and published in the Deseret News shared some interesting profiles about how religion and culture intersect. 

When researchers study people’s relationship with religion and faith, they cast a wide net of questions that get at both inner beliefs and outward practices.

Some questions focus on attitudes and identity: Do people see religion or spirituality as important? Do they identify as Christian? Do they believe animals have spirits – or do they believe in God? Other questions explore lived practices: How often do they pray, attend church, meditate, light candles or read scripture?

Together, these answers sketch the contours of how individuals, and entire nations, experience religion and spirituality.

Pew Research Center asked some of these questions in a recent study about the religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” held across 22 countries. The findings show that many people who don’t identify as religious still hold different beliefs or engage in spiritual practices, but the strength of those ties varies widely.

In Brazil, for example, 92% of the unaffiliated say they believe in God, compared to just 10% in Sweden. Similar divides are seen between Latin America and South Africa on one end of the spectrum and much of Europe and Australia on the other.

According to Manzhos, researchers found that countries are individual in their stages of secularization. There are three stages of religion decline: Participation-Importance-Belonging.

First, religious practices like service attendance decline, often among younger generations….

In the second stage, people are questioning religion’s personal importance and weakening their sense of belonging….

The final stage marks the shedding of religious identity altogether for the younger generations….

These religious transitions show that secularization isn’t a single story of religious decline. It also reveals the many ways faith lingers through belief, identity and practice.

Tracing these patterns may help us understand how faith still influences broader values, culture and politics – even as religious affiliation fades.

For leaders of congregations, understanding how secularization works may point to a central challenge in halting it – how to create religious communities where more young people feel that they belong.

In her article, Manzhos indicated that the United States is in the second stage where people are questioning the importance of religion to them personally. “The United States fits this pattern today: younger adults attend services less often and are 45% less likely than older generations to claim a religious affiliation, although a recent report from Barna Group challenged this pattern with its finding that Gen Z and millennials now go to church more often than older adults.” Other nations placed in this stage are Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Greece, Italy and Canada.

What Effect Does Family Size Have on Child Bearing?

Size of parental and ancestral families influences the size of current families. Children who were reared with siblings tend to want their children to be reared with siblings, according to Stephanie H. Murray. Larger families can strengthen communities, states, and nations. 

I grew up in what, by modern standards, is a pretty big family. I have four siblings, including two sisters – one older and one younger. At the moment, my older sister has four children. My younger sister and I are each in the process of welcoming our thirds….

Given that we’re all millennials with graduate degrees, the childbearing trajectory my sisters and I have followed is already a bit unusual. These days, an American woman with a master’s degree has an average of 1.4 kids, and won’t have her first child until she is 30. At that age, my sisters and I already had two each….

But in another sense, the earlier-and-more approach to parenthood my sisters and I have taken is entirely in step with a pattern demographers have observed in many countries: the “intergenerational transmission of fertility.” That’s just a big way of saying that people tend to mirror the older generations in their family tree when starting a family. Kids without a sibling are more likely than others to stay childless in adulthood. Those who grow up with a bunch of siblings are more likely to go on to have a lot of kids themselves. The more children that your aunts, uncles, grandparents and in-laws have, the more you’re likely to have. Bigger families beget bigger families.

My experience testifies that bigger families have bigger families although the size of families has grown smaller. My parents have twelve children, most of whom have larger families:  Brother #1 (3 children), Brother #2 (9 children), Sister #1 (8 children), Sister #2 (5 children), Brother #3 (3 children), Sister #3 (4 children), (Sister #4 (1 child by adoption), Me (6 children), Brother #4 (9 children), Sister #5 (7 children), Sister #6 (10 children), and Sister #7 (5 children) for a total of 70 grandchildren for my parents and an average of nearly 6 grandchildren per child.

My husband’s parents have three children: Son #1 (6 children), Son #2 (infertile), and Daughter #1 (2 children) for a total of 8 grandchildren and an average of almost 3 grandchildren per child.

I have six children, half the number that my parents have, but twice the number that my husband’s parents have. However, my six children follow the same pattern: Daughter #1 (infertile), Daughter #2 (4 children), Son #1 (4 children), Daughter #3 (4 children), Son #2  (1 child – wife has brain cancer), and Daughter #4 (6 children) for a total of 19 grandchildren and an average of more than three grandchildren per child.

Murray discussed how children in larger families have fewer temporal/physical blessings than children in smaller families. Children in larger families tend share bedrooms, wear hand-me-downs, and get “a smaller slice of your parents’ resources, be that money or time.” I know that this is true because I come from a family of twelve children. I did not miss the “things” as a child, but I understood as an adult that there were other blessings that made up for the material things that we did not have.

Having seven sisters necessitated that we shared beds – three to a double bed with the baby sleeping with parents. The boys slept two to a bed. I grew close to my siblings because we did so much together. During the daytime, we worked together to haul hay, herd cattle or sheep, and milk cows. At night, we had “pillow talk” until sleep took us. We were never alone and always had someone with whom to play.

Murray stated that statisticians have studied for more than 120 years the way that “family sizes correlate across generations” to determine how and why. They found three prominent theories [that] “fall into three broad – and not entirely distinct – categories.”

The first is genetics: We all have the same genes as our parents. “Those genes may influence several aspects of a woman’s life that, in turn, impact the number of kids she has.”

But arguably the best-evidenced explanation for the intergenerational transmission of fertility is what Bernardi refers to as status inheritance. “We are born in families that have a given educational level, a given social status, a given residential outlook,” she says. As such, we share quite a few sociodemographic characteristics with our parents that are “proven to be very much related to fertility levels, fertility timing and preferences.”

Factors like these explain a good chunk of the link between siblings and fertility in the U.S., but not all of it, Vogl says. Tinkering with data from the General Social Survey, he couldn’t get the association to disappear by accounting for such attributes, “so there’s a lot left that I don’t know how to explain.”

[Second] The children of college-educated Americans tend to go to college themselves, for example, and women with a college education tend to have fewer kids than their less-educated counterparts. [This is not true for my daughters by blood and marriage: Five of the six women have master’s degrees with one having a doctorate; the sixth daughter has a five-year nursing degree. All fathers have master’s degrees or doctorates.] Likewise, religion tends to be passed from parent to child, and religious folks tend to have more kids than nonreligious ones…. [My family is also religious, so we are influenced by genetics, education, and religion.]

The last, and perhaps murkiest, of the possible causes of the big family to big family link is what Bernardi calls “socialization.” This would include all the ways that growing up in a particular family shape one’s attitudes toward family formation. As our first reference, our families offer a model for what a family ought to look like. Likewise, parents may hold certain values that they impress upon their kids….

And despite its persistence, the intergenerational transmission of fertility has not been enough to counteract the massive decline in fertility that has occurred across the world over the past couple of centuries….

If that’s the case, the tendency for people from big families to have more kids will not be enough to reverse our country’s ongoing baby bust. But I suspect that America may still have something to learn from big families. America would be a more family-friendly place if its culture more closely resembled that of a large family. If the effort of raising children was more broadly valued, if parenthood was more relaxed, if kids weren’t tucked away in gated playgrounds and schools, but were an ever-present aspect of daily life. Maybe then, even those who didn’t grow up in big families might not hesitate so much to raise a family, small or big, themselves.

Larger families that are bound together in love and commitment are stronger, and strong families strengthen communities, states, and nations.

Religion Is Essential to Liberty

This principle of freedom is that religion is essential to a government of free people. Most, if not all, of our Founding Fathers believed that religion and morality were essential for good government as well as happiness and that these topics should be taught in the schools. No specific religion was to be taught, but the universal truths, which were acceptable to all religions, were necessary. W. Cleon Skousen quoted Benjamin Franklin when he summarized basic religious beliefs as "fundamental points in all sounds religion" in a letter to Ezra Stiles, Yale University president: "Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is in doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion." (Smyth, Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 10:84.) Skousen then explained Franklin's statement of the "five points of fundamental religious beliefs. 1) There exists a Creator who made all things and mankind should recognize and worship him. 2) The Creator has revealed a moral code of behavior for happy living which distinguishes between right and wrong. 3) The Creator holds mankind responsible for the way they treat each other. 4) All mankind live beyond this life. 5) In the next life mankind are judged for their conduct in this one" (The Five Thousand Year Leap, p 61). Even though the Founders considered these core beliefs to be America's religion, they wanted all religions to have equal protection under the Constitution. They wanted the citizens to have morality, religion, and virtue, but they did not want the federal government favoring any one religion or church. This is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said that the Constitution created "a wall of separation between Church and State" (Beigh, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 16:282, as quoted in The Five Thousand Year Leap, p 69).