As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the monuments in Washington, D.C., will feature prominently—so much so that it’s easy to forget that the country’s legacy is not made of marble. The Founders erected monuments of ideas, and none is so central to our republican government as the idea of civic virtue grounded in religious belief and community. Few religious practices are more deeply enshrined in our founding heritage than the Sabbath: the weekly refuge from ambition, appetite, and noise.
Earlier this week, President Trump paid homage to this heritage when he included in his Jewish American Heritage Month proclamation a call for American Jews to “observe a national Sabbath” from May 15 to 16 to coincide with religious celebrations around the nation’s 250th birthday. This is an invitation worth taking seriously.
For much of the 20th century, a powerful school of thought treated the Founders as though they intended religion and state to be hermetically sealed spheres set apart by Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation.” That view captured part of the American story, but not the whole of it. The Founders prohibited religious tests and the federal establishment of religion, but also opened public proceedings with prayer, appointed chaplains, and came from states with laws that protected the Christian Sabbath. Their aim was not to rid public life of religion, but to prevent the state from coercing conscience.
