Religion & Law

This weekend, we in the United States of America celebrate our Declaration -- and, in time, our achievement -- of Independence.  We should hope that more than a few of our fellow citizens will mark Independence Day by actually reading the Declaration.  Stirring stuff.  (Peggy Noonan has an interesting reflection on some words of Jefferson's that were cut out, here.)

Most people, if they are familiar with Declaration at all, know about the "course of human events" and "truths to be self evident" parts.  I encourage my first-year law students, though, to read through the bill of particulars against the King, the facts about his "injuries and usurpations" that the Declaration "submit[s] to a candid world."  Among these, interestingly, is a complaint about the Quebec Act of 1774, which (among other things) admitted Roman Catholics to full citizenship in Quebec.  This Act outraged the American colonists, as Steve Waldman reports:

Alexander Hamilton decried the Quebec Act as a diabolical threat. "Does not your blood run cold to think that an English Parliament should pass an Act for the establishment of arbitrary power and Popery in such an extensive country??Your loves, your property, your religion are all at stake." He warned that the Canadian tolerance in Quebec would draw, like a magnet, Catholics from throughout Europe who would eventually destroy America.

Sam Adams told a group of Mohawk Indians that the law "to establish the religion of the Pope in Canada" would mean that "some of your children may be induced instead of worshipping the only true God, to pay his dues to images made with their own hands." The silversmith and engraver Paul Revere created a cartoon for the Royal American Magazine called "The Mitred Minuet." It depicted four contented-looking mitred Anglican Bishops, dancing a minuet around a copy of the Quebec Act to show their "approbation and countenance of the Roman religion." Standing nearby are the authors of the Quebec Act, while a Devil with bat ears and spiky wings hovers behind them, whispering instructions. . . .

So, anti-Catholicism fanned flames of a rebellion that would, in time, yield an approach to religious-freedom-under-law that, some say, inspired the content and foundations of the Catholic Church's Declaration on Religious Freedom.  And so it goes . . .