The “shot heard around the world” ignited the American Revolution and led to the independence we celebrate every July 4th. Before that shot, a preacher delivered a prayer. That prayer is celebrated in paintings and even in our law. The Supreme Court uses this prayer today to interpret the meaning of the Constitution—a Constitution that wouldn’t become the law of this new land for another 15 years.
Supreme Court justices have cited this preacher and his prayer to justify congressional chaplains, prayers before legislative sessions, and even a 40-foot-tall Christian cross on government land. That jurisprudential logic is flawed, but unsurprisingly, so is the history.
As with much American mythology, we’ve only heard part of the story. We’re told of the chaplain and his prayer—but not of his treason.
“Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion,” mused John Adams, reflecting on his failed 1800 re-election bid. As president, he mixed church and state, a mistake he ultimately blamed for his electoral loss. Adams had called for a national fast, a governmental overreach which he believed “turned me out of office.” But when the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774, Adams lacked the benefit of this hindsight. Without it, he and the other delegates appointed a chaplain, Jacob Duché (“Dushay they pronounce it,” wrote Adams), to say a prayer. The story of Duché’s appointment and prayer come down to us from one of John Adams’ many letters to his wife, Abigail.
“When the Congress first met, Mr. Cushing made a Motion, that it should be opened with Prayer,” begins Adams’s story. Much like Adams’ electoral loss after meddling in religion, Thomas Cushing was ousted from the Congress the following year—though more likely for his opposition to the colonies declaring independence.
Cushing’s prayer motion, wrote Adams:
“was opposed by Mr. Jay of N. York and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, because we were so divided in religious Sentiments, some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some Aanabaptists, some Presbyterians and some Congregationalists, so that We could not join in the same Act of Worship.”
John Jay and John Rutledge, who would become the first and second chief justices of the Supreme Court, opposed the prayer because the Continental Congress was religiously diverse—and the more diverse a company, the greater the division religion sows. It’s best to remove religion from the political equation. Our framers eventually enshrined that idea in the Constitution.
Then comes the part of the story we see most often: “[Sam] Adams arose and said he was no Bigot, and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.” The motion passed.