"And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

In New York City he has given his name to a high school and any number of retail stores, to an Avenue, a Park and even a succession of Square Gardens.

Far more important, Founding Father James Madison was the fourth President of the United States (1809-1817), the principal author of the Constitution and its fiercest defender as the author of more than a third of the Federalist Papers. Perhaps most important of all to rationalists, humanists and democrats (small d), he was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were based, and the co-author, with Jefferson, of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the basis for the Constitution's First Amendment.

"Not accidentally," Christopher Hitchens wrote last December in "In Defense of Foxhole Atheists," in Vanity Fair, "the first clause of our Bill of Rights, this amendment unambiguously forbids any 'establishment of religion' in or by these United States. In his 'Detached Memoranda,' not published until after his death, Madison even wrote that the appointment of chaplains in the armed forces, and indeed in Congress, was 'inconsistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principles of religious freedom.'"

In fact, President Madison did veto legislation authorizing congressional chaplains, but Congress overrode him. Madison was no atheist, but became more of a Deist as he matured, and a Unitarian through his friendship with John and Abigail Adams. While today's revisionists loudly proclaim Madison's Christian faith and practice in his youth, they ignore the fact that Madison came home to Virginia from the College of New Jersey as an orthodox Christian but almost immediately, David Holmes says in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, "witnessed the persecution and jailing of religious dissenters [Baptists] by the established [Anglican] church-his church."

At the age of twenty-two, Madison became a convert to religious freedom, believing and arguing that only liberty of conscience could guarantee civil and political liberty. And in 1785 he wrote the "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments," which advanced fifteen arguments why government should not support religion. Tell us, Mr. President, what you really think of established religion:

"Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishmetnts, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contray operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
                        --James Madison, addressing the Virginia General Assembly, June 20, 1785

--John Rafferty
PIQUE, March 2010
Secular Humanist Society of New York