THE NEW LEFTIST DOCTRINE OF THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SUPREME COURT
INTRODUCTION
No idea in modern times has excited more controversy than the “separation of church and state.” It was first suggested in its present form in a Supreme Court decision by Justice Hugo Black in 1947 as the proper interpretation of the “establishment clause” of the first amendment. It certainly did not occur to many at that time that extrapolations from this interpretation would be used to try to drive religion and religious symbols from not only the public schools but also from the public square and all public life. It has been used as a weapon in the hands of atheists and those who deem religion irrelevant to enforce an increasing secularization of American society. This has intimidated evangelical Christians and curtailed their freedom of religious expression. It has finally prompted an effort by some members of Congress to clarify and strengthen the First Amendment--the establishment clause, and the brief freedom of the exercise of religion clause--by means of another amendment to the Constitution.
One of these proposed amendments has been introduced to Congress as Bill HR 121 by Henry Hyde (R-IL). It is called “The Religious Equality Amendment” and reads: Neither the United States nor any State shall deny benefits to or otherwise discriminate against any private person or group on account of religious expression, belief or identity; nor shall the prohibition on laws respecting an establishment of religion be construed to require such discrimination.”
The current interpretation of the First Amendment by the leftist-liberals has resulted in the most critical act of censorship in our history; namely, the deletion of prayer and the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and all references to God and religion from the public schools. (1962-63 and subsequent years) School boards and principals have been threatened with law suits by the ACLU if they do not comply. It has been construed to mean that God, Christian morality, and all Christian symbols and celebrations, including even Christmas, shall have no place in the public education of American children. (These actions are reminiscent of one of God’s reasons for His serious judgment of Judah by the destruction of Jerusalem and their captivity in Babylon in 586 B.C. “In their deceit they refuse to acknowledge me.” Jeremiah 9:6) It has even resulted in a revision and complete perversion of the American history and tradition that is taught in the public schools. It can been easily proved that this has been a major contributing cause of the moral disintegration of our culture.
Evangelical Christians and a number of legal experts regard this application of the First Amendment to be a gross error and an imposition of the values of secular humanism and atheism on American culture. These values and their accompanying assumptions grow out of the same Marxist soil that produced National Socialism in Germany and Communism in Russia.
The phrase “separation of church and state” is first and foremost a socialist doctrine and never appears as such in our Constitution or as it is interpreted today in the writings, philosophies, or practices of the Founding Fathers. The phrase, however, does appear in the Constitution of the Soviet Union and was part of Marxist-socialism’s doctrine that religion is dangerous and society should be secularized. This has become one phase of an effort by leftist-liberals to secularize American culture.
SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
I believe it can be shown that the modern concept of the “separation of church and state” has not come to us through the teachings of the Founding Fathers but from the Marxist-Leninist beliefs of socialist-communism.
In 19th century Germany there was an effort spawned by the Hegel, inspired by Robert Dale Owen, sometimes called the father of socialism, to eliminate all religion from the education of Prussian children. “The great object was to get rid of Christianity and turn our churches into halls of science. The plan was not to make open attacks upon religion, although we might belabor the clergy and bring them into contempt where we could. . . but to establish a system of state (or national) schools from which all religion would be excluded and to which all parents were to compelled by law to send their children.” America’s most well-known and most successful educator John Dewey, who was himself an atheist and a socialist, picked up on this vision and sought to substitute a secular religion, namely, humanism, for Christianity. His goal was to make American public schools teach the doctrines of humanism and wean subsequent generations away from traditional western culture. This was a necessary plan if the social engineering of the socialist vision for society was to be executed. Traditional religion and its teachings on the nature of man and its transcendent world view, which was diametrically opposed to the assumptions of a secular socialism, had to be muzzled in society.
In 1923 the Marxist oriented Frankfurt School, or the Institute for Social Research as it came to be known, was begun at Frankfurt University in Germany. Its founder Felix Weil originally called it the Institute for Marxism and sought to advance Marxism as a scientific discipline. It was a copy of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and had a goal of converting Germany to Communism. With the advent of Hitler, however, the leaders of the Institute fled to the United States and set up shop in the free atmosphere of our democracy. Here they proceeded to seek to destroy and undermine with their propaganda everything that America had stood for over our 150 years of existence. Although they hid both their purpose and their identity, according to their first director, Carl Grunberg, they were totally committed to Marxism as a scientific methodology. They trained many American young people who became avowed Communists, such as Angela Davis, now a professor at a California university. Ms Davis now rejects her identification with Communism or Marxism, preferring to be called a progressive liberal, which is just the old socialism with a new name.
Purpose of the Frankfurt School
Atheism vs. Theism
Two ways evolved by which the Institute sought to undermine the traditional American way:
(1) The first approach of the Institute of Social Research prior to 1930 was found in the code phrase “Critical Theory.” Max Horkheimer, Director of the Institute, published a series of articles in the 1930’s later published in 1968 in two volumes in German entitled Kritische Theorie. The purpose of “critical theory” was not to simply discuss esoteric ideas in social philosophy, but to literally bring about social change by destroying a given society and culture through the revolutionary action of persistent, unending, ruthless, unremitting criticism. It was the Marxist principle that before you could build anything new you had to destroy the old. Social change had to be preceded by social disorder, disruption and destruction. Western culture and western civilization and the American version of it all had to be undermined and destroyed before a “new world social order” could be established.
They began to influence the academic elite in America, which in turn brought a growing number into sympathy with the Communist cause in Russia. Our schools, our government, our popular culture, our media and our business world were infiltrated in the 1930’s and 1940’s by those who believed the Marxist lies. This gave rise to the investigations of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the ill-fated McCarthy probes. They were both met with storms of protest in the name of freedom, an ideal with which the socialists made propaganda use but really failed to practice. Individual liberty has never been very high on a leftist liberal list.
So those to whom America had granted asylum from Hitler’s Germany had reestablished themselves in this nation with the announced goal to destroy everything that America represented in the world. We know now from the information gathered on the Venona tapes, after the secret codes of the Soviet Union had been broken, that there were 200 official spies plus thousands of sympathizers who were working in America for Soviet Russia, of whom only 60 were eventually identified, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and even J. Robert Oppenheimer. Some of this information had been slipped to Senator Joe McCarthy, which gave rise to his hearings and all the opprobrium heaped on his head. In all over 140 of these spies were never identified or apprehended. After McCarthy’s censure the FBI and the Democrats, who had abused him, quietly got rid of many security risks remaining in the government. But because of what was really socialist propaganda McCarthyism remains a term of opprobrium today. In reality, Joe McCarthy was a faithful patriot. Unfortunately his idiosyncrasies were easy to caricature.
Although the academic approach of the Frankfurt School--Critical Theory--stimulated a minority of supporters, they were too much a part of America’s tiny cultural elite world to be successful. Their propaganda was rejected by Big Labor, whom the Communists wanted the most to influence, and also by the bulk of Americans who held the Judeo-Christian values as a general consensus, although these principles were diluted and emotionally held more than they were verbalized. Nevertheless, the ideas generated by the Institute’s writings and the supporters in academia left a permanent impact on America’s elite many of whom occupy positions of academic tenure in our universities and Canadian universities to this day.
An equally and perhaps ultimately a more important influence was the establishment of a national educational laboratory by Kurt Lewin, one of the Institute’s members. This became the first of many similar organized efforts to generate ideas which could influence public education in America. The humanist educator John Dewey had really laid the foundation for the “progressive” revolution in American education which included the “dumbing down” of American society emphasizing relationships and “doing” rather than high literacy. The socialists knew that a highly literate population was too individualistic, and a new emphasis on collective behavior had to be cultivated. This could only be done through the American school system. There is no doubt that this was a transparently conscious effort. For example, Dr. Shirley McCune of the Midwest Educational Laboratory asserted in an address at a 1989 Governors’ summit on education, “What is happening in America today. . . is a total transformation of our society.” What Dr. McCune was referring is being partly implemented in the educational programs called Goals 2000, School to Work and Careers and the whole mastery program, which has borrowed extensively from Lenin’s model for Soviet education. Some have called this “Orwellian Education” for obvious reasons.
In order to accomplish their goal, the socialist/humanists knew that all religious influence had to be deleted from American education. Their goal was accomplished in 1962-63 after a 15 year old
boy, Bill Murray, came home from public school in Baltimore and complained to his mother that teachers began the day by reciting the Lord’s Prayer and reading from the Bible. So Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who managed the Communist Party Bookstore in Baltimore, took the school to court in 1960 in the name of her son. Her victory in the Supreme Court in 1963 Murray v Curtlett was one of three almost simultaneous attacks on any religious influence in America’s schools. Along with Engle v Vitale (1962) and Abingdon v Schemp (1963), America’s atheists and pagans succeeded in deleting prayer, the Bible and references to God in the public schools, changing the atmosphere in American public education where secularism and relativism have proliferated to produce a pronounced blight on the training of America’s children, compromising our nation’s moral strength and commitment to this day.
Incidentally, Bill Murray who has since become a committed Christian evangelist tells how Gus Hall, head of the Communist party, patted him on the head and thanked him for his part in deleting religious influence from American education. He explains his mother’s philosophy in an article “Why not Prayer in Schools? (The World and I, June 1995, pp. 148-53) She held Marxist-Leninist indoctrination courses in her home teaching that “To destroy the capitalist system in America, the people must be separated from their religious (moral) heritage and traditions. All icons of Western civilization must be removed from the school and children taught that all cultures are equal (multiculturalism) and that all blessings flow from government.” (p. 150)
(2) Since the bulk of Americans could not be encouraged to respond to thke intellectually oriented socio-economic theories, the Institute for Social Research embarked on a new effort to undermine America’s cultural superstructure--America’s folkways and mores. They integrated the Freudian ideas relating to psychoanalysis and theorized that man could be liberated from his repressed personality by becoming liberated sexually and rejecting the patriarchal authority. In this new revolutionary, post-capitalist world, man would become free from the bondage of marriage and the family. This in turn would bring down the nation.
The anti-authoritarian part of this destructive approach was abetted by the Institute’s anti-Nazi program. Even though he was as much a socialist as the communists, Hitler was identified as being “right wing”. Any one on the right was considered psychologically unbalanced. Then a test was developed for the “authoritarian personality” which was deemed a Fascist characteristic. The theory was most highly developed in a very popular book by Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality. (1950) This supported the rise of radical feminism and many items on the agenda of “political correctness” today. These ideas sought to identify victims and create social unrest through highlighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. Cultural Marxism was a philosophy of divide and conquer. The idea was to promote cultural warfare and erect this new code of morality, which we now call “political correctness.” PC is a translation of the Chinese Communist phrase for “party line” which came out of the 1960’s many of whose radicals were admirers of Mao Tse Tung (or Zedong). Political correctness therefore is cultural Marxism.
The student rebellion of the 1960’s greatly advanced the culture war. The rebels were greatly influenced by cultural Marxism through the work of a University of California Berkeley professor Herbert Marcuse, who had been part of the Frankfurt School (The Institute for Social Research). His book Eros and Civilization was the bible of the student radicals who took over college campuses which movement has changed or corrupted American higher education to this day. The theme of the book is that Western culture must be overthrown because its civilization is repressive. Eros emphasized instincts, feelings, the erotic nature, sensuousness, and aesthetics and negated discipline, order, self-denial, self-abnegaton, and self-control. “Let it all hang out! Turn on and drop out. Do as you please. Anything goes. Make up your own rules. Express yourself. The body is something to be enjoyed not to be controlled or repressed.” This meant that the old Western culture and Puritan ideals were to be rejected and a new culture pushing “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” would prevail, tearing down the old Christian, hence repressive, civilization. It worked all too well, and America received a face-lift and a new image in the world. Unfortunately this translated into our characterization as “The Great Satan” in the eyes of Muslim fundamentalists, who are the next great international threat looming on the horizon.
A BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY
Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950 Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1996
Rolf Wiggershaus. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Trans. Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995
Arato and Gebhardt (Eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1997.
Michael Minnicino, “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness,” Fidelio (Vol. 1, No. 1) Winter, 1992 (KMW Publishing, Washington D.C.)
Angela Davis. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1974 (The Frankfurt School, et.al. seen through the eyes of a participant.)
Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
Other books include The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism by Andrew Arato (Seabury Press, 1979); The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute by Susan Buck-Morss (Free Press, 1977); Introduction to; Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas by David Held (University of California Press, 1980); The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno (Harper, 1950); Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm (...&Mac179; and Rinehart, 1941); and Eclipse of Reason by Horkheimer, Adorno and others.
(Oxford U Press, 1947).
AN APPLICATION OF RADICAL IDEAS
AND THE DEMISE OF AMERICA’S ORIGINAL TRADITION AND CULTURE
By far the most influential and perhaps destructive change of the 1960’s was in this victory of the socialist-humanists in the area of American education. Not only were the universities invaded by the new radicals, but the public schools were to be changed possibly forever at the hands of an activist, neo-pagan Supreme Court which was committed to changing America’s culture into an image of their own liking. Law students at Yale, for example, were taught that as judges they had the right and obligation to interpret the laws, expeciallly the Constitution, based on their own political and sociological beliefs.
Originally the purpose of the “establishment clause” was simply to forbid the Federal government from favoring one Christian denomination over another. It was drawn up primarily to assure the States, several of which had their own established churches, that the Federal government would not supersede their authority and establish a national church. Furthermore, this first clause was enforced by the second; namely, that the Federal government would never prohibit the free exercise of religion. This was the only “original understanding” and intention of the First Amendment as written by the Founding Fathers. All judicial extrapolations from this phrase are created by “activist” judges who are imposing their own opinions and agenda on the Constitution.
A compelling reason for the need for a clarification of the First Amendment by a “religious equality amendment” can be seen in a number of cases which have come before the Supreme Court. For example, in the recent decision Robertson v. The University of Virginia, 1995, the vote was only 5 to 4 in favor of religious freedom. In this case an evangelical Christian group had been denied the right to use student activity funds held in trust by the University to help finance the publication of a short periodical even though both Jewish and Muslim groups had been allowed to do so. State and Circuit courts decided in favor of the University thus upholding this discrimination against Christians on the basis of the leftist-liberal interpretation of the “establishment clause.” On an appeal to the Supreme Court, the secularist jurists Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter all voted to support the new strict, secularist interpretation of the “establishment” clause which many view as a perversion of our American heritage and tradition. This is a dramatic proof that just one swing vote protects true religious freedom in America. It makes a further Constitutional clarification absolutely necessary.
There is considerable opposition to Hyde’s amendment including many mainstream liberal religious organizations such as the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty and the National Council of Churches. Other antagonists include the American Jewish Congress, the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and all the leftist-liberals of the Rainbow Coalition. It is expected perhaps that atheistic groups would oppose any religious amendment because they are hostile to religion. It is very difficult to understand, however, how supposedly religious organizations could oppose any philosophy or position which supports religious freedom. It would appear for one thing that their revisionist approach to the Bible is paralleled by their support for a revisionism and evolution in the interpretation of the Constitution.
We would do well to recall Justice Potter Stewart’s warning in his dissent in Abington School District v. Schempp. This Supreme Court decision in 1963 judged Bible reading, even without discussion, at the beginning of every school day to be unconstitutional. Stewart wrote,
“A compulsory state educational system so structures a child’s life that if religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state created disadvantage. Viewed in this light permission of such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of the religion of secularism, or at the least, as government support of the beliefs of those who think that religious exercises should be conducted only in private.”
Most Americans are unaware how widespread are the judicial decisions which have inhibited free religious expression. Everyone of these decisions becomes part of a body of law called jurisprudence, which is used cumulatively as a basis and precedent for future decisions. This strengthens the case for the further inhibition of religion in society. Fortunately a few decisions have begun to reverse this trend; however, in the past 30 years most have been weighted in the direction of restrictions. Here are a few examples out of hundreds.
(1) Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ” was removed by court order from display in a rural school in Bloomingdale, Michigan in 1993 where it had hung for over 30 years as part of an art and historical presentation. A federal judge ordered the face covered with paper during the court proceedings. The Supreme Court refused an appeal and let the decision stand.
(2) In 1980 the courts ordered the removal of all displays of the Ten Commandments from schools and more recently from a court house in Cobb county Georgia. Prayer was then removed from a court room in North Carolina. Alabama Judge Roy Moore is being sued by the Alabama Free Thought Association, which is trying to force a removal of both a display of the Ten Commandments and prayer in Judge Moore’s courtroom.
(3) A high school football team was forbidden by a court to pray before a game to ask that no one be injured; a principal was forced to forbid a teacher from reading the Bible at her desk during free reading time; children have been forbidden to say grace in lunchrooms; attempts have been made to remove religious symbols from public buildings and from public places at Christmas and even sacred Christmas songs from school programs. A list of such decisions by lower courts based on Supreme Court decisions is almost endless.
(4) The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled for the ACLU and against the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, which includes a cross in the city seal, depicting part of the city’s history. The decision is being appealed to the Supreme Court. It would be well to note that Thomas Jefferson wanted the seal of the United States of America to show Moses the lawgiver leading the children of Israel to freedom out of Egypt to the Promised Land--a reminiscence of how early Americans viewed their own exodus from Europe.
(5) In Hartford, Connecticut an 8th grade teacher has been suspended for mentioning the Ten Commandments when talking to students about lying. She also read a passage from the Bible at a faculty meeting and gave a co-worker a Christian novel to read. The courts will decide whether or not her freedoms of speech and religion have been violated.
A BRIEF LOOK AT GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION IN THE USA
(Enlarged excerpt from American Morals and the First Amendment by James M. Murk)
The first act initiating the Continental Congress in September 6, 1774 was a prayer and the reading of the Bible by a clergyman Mr. Duche, who later was appointed chaplain to the Congress. The Congress wrote “Desirous to have people of all ranks and degrees duly impressed with a solemn sense of God’s superintending providence, and of their duty devoutly to rely on His aid and direction . . (we) Do earnestly recommend a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer, and that we may with united hearts, confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and, by a sincere repentance and amendment of life. . . and, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.”
Being in Congress in those days must have sometimes seemed like being in a non-sectarian church. So it was true from the beginning in our nation that there was no separation between religious practice or influence and the state or civil government in the minds of our Founding Fathers. The only “wall of separation” that was erected was to protect the people from the Federal government; namely, to prevent the newly formed national government from supporting any one individual church or Christian denomination and imposing it upon the States. England was Anglican and it was feared by some that King George III was going to impose this religion on the colonies. France had been Roman Catholic. Germany was Lutheran. The originators of our country simply wanted all Christian churches (The denominations were called religions and later sects.) to have equal rights and acceptance under the law.
Separation of church and state as it is interpreted, promoted, and practiced today in America was not even conceived of as possible by the Founding Fathers. Patriotism and Christian faith were one and the same in our nation for generations. As an ideal this was true for the majority in this country, at least through the years of the Second World War. “For God and country” were virtually synonymous commitments. Not to believe in God or be religious was almost considered unAmerican and unpatriotic by the majority of Americans.
Whereas atheism is certainly permitted under our proclaimed freedoms, it is an anomaly in a nation which has always considered itself to be “under God.” The leftist-liberal influence of the growing numbers of atheistic secular humanists produced in the halls and classrooms of our “institutions of higher learning”, however, has contributed to most of the cultural tension and moral decline and to much of the political, social, and religious conflicts of the past 30 years. The Catholic scholar Michael Novak who is the recent recipient of the Templeton Prize for “progress in religion” stated in his magazine Crisis, that the destructive morality going on in our country today is the fault of contemporary leaders whom this radical liberalism has produced. These include “those who work in the movies, rock music, television, the law schools, some leaders of the feminist movement, some leaders of the gay rights movement and many in journalism who worry about protecting their progressive credentials (who) are together waging a form of total warfare to destroy every vestige of cultural support for (and the residual cultural prestige of) Christian faith and morals.” (Quoted in the Christian American, May/June 1994, p. 30.) There is no doubt that the Founding Fathers to a man would judge organizations, such as the ACLU, the People for the American Way, the National Organization of Women and the National Education Association, all spokesmen for the liberal elite, who militantly support these changes and reinterpret our American tradition, as seditious, subversive and treasonous.
A Biblically Illiterate Society
We have come into an era in America when most of our citizens are Biblically illiterate. Certainly until the 1930’s, and in many communities thereafter, the Bible was at least read from each day, if not taught, in the schools. In some cases it was an elective course studied in high schools, e.g., in Dallas, Texas, up to the time of its proscription by the Supreme Court in Abington v. Schempp, 1963 and Murray v. Catlett, 1963. (Some rural schools in the South, in fact, still use the Bible in the classroom in civil disobedience to what they believe is an illegal prohibition by the Supreme Court.) Historically for 200 years from before the founding of our nation until at least World War I, the Bible was used in many schools as a text to teach reading and cited as the basis for moral and ethical instruction. Scripture verses were used to learn the ABC’s, and a basic Christian catechism was a part of the New England Primer used in America until 1900. In fact, the clergy were for the most part in charge of the schools in this country until the year 1900. (For well-documented discussions of the entire history of the First Amendment concerns see David Barton, The Myth of Separation. Aledo, TX: WallBuilder Press, 1992 and Barton. America: To Pray or Not to Pray. Aledo, TX: WallBuilder Press, 1991.)
When the forerunner of the National Education Association was formed about the turn of this century to head up the public school system, the members committed themselves in their charter to continue the moral instruction which had been a part of America’s heritage from the beginning. In fact, they went so far as to say that if they failed in this responsibility, the church and the society should make it an issue to restore the educators to “the straight and narrow.” Under the “progressive educator” John Dewey and the influence of other secular humanists, however, the public school curriculum began to minimize the teaching of the Christian ethic. Secularizing changes began to creep in after World War I; however, even as late as the 1950’s then president of the NEA, W.A. Early, asserted that the moral principles, which were still being taught in America’s schools, originated with the Bible which was the textbook of our Jewish-Christian value system.
How The Modern Interpretation of the First Amendment Began
The legal foundations for the extreme changes that have taken place in the public schools in the last thirty years were laid in 1947 by Justice Hugo Black. He may have been the first to widely popularize the phrase separation of church and state in the Supreme Court case Everson v. The Board of Education, which examined the issue of paying for bus transportation for parochial
school children with public funds. Fifteen years later this “separation of church and state” decision by Justice Black became the precedent for the school prayer decision Engle v. Vitale, 1962. This started a virtual avalanche of cases to remove all religious influence from the public schools and any public place or forum. It almost seemed motivated by a leftist conspiracy. It is ironic that this phrase “the separation of church and state,” used by Justice Black is identical word for word with an article of the Communist constitution of the Soviet Union. It never appears in the Constitution of the United States, although some people now assume incorrectly that it does. Communist philosophy had been very popular among academics and the culture elite in America before and during World War II. This idea was firmly supported by socialist teaching.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair was the head of the Communist Party in Baltimore in 1963 when she led the fight against the use of the Bible and prayer in public schools. She used her son William Murray as the plaintiff in Murray v. Catlett, a Supreme Court decision which removed the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and Bible reading from the Baltimore school system. She had been teaching seminars on Communism in her home. One of the principles of her teaching was revealed by her son William, who has since become a born again Christian evangelist, in an article in the World and I (June 1995, p. 150) This principle was stated as follows: “To destroy the capitalist system in America the people must be separated from their religious (moral) heritage and traditions. All icons of Western civilization must be removed from the school and children taught that all cultures are equal and that all blessings flow from government.” This is exactly what has been happening in America ever since the new, strict interpretation of separation and church and state has been employed by the judiciary. Many who support this interpretation hold to the same values and assumptions as the Marxist-Socialist-Communist philosophy.
Justice Black opined that there was an impenetrable “wall of separation” between the govern-ment and the church supported by the First Amendment to the Constitution. This phrase from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptists was used by Justice Black to support his new opinion and allegation. Jefferson had written the Baptists to assure them that their religious freedoms were protected by the Constitution. The Federal government had no authority to establish a national church. Jefferson used the phrase “wall of separation” to explain this prohibition.
Justice Black extended Jefferson’s phrase in his own mind to expound a secularist agenda and inserted this opinion in the body of jurisprudence we call Constitutional law. Whatever Black’s purpose, it amounted to a master stroke of judicial fraud, an example of legal artifice in the use of historical proofs. Anyone reading the entire letter of Jefferson would never find any support for this new judicial interpretation--the separation of church and state--as it has been applied in society today. Besides, Jefferson had nothing to do with writing or interpreting the First Amendment. He was in France at the time. In none of his own actions and decisions, furthermore, as president of the United States or founder of the University of Virginia did Jefferson follow an absolutist doctrine of the “separation of church and state.”
Justice Black, furthermore, made a calculated error in his decision in Everson v. The Board of Education, which was a virtual amendment to the Constitution or an unconstitutional violation of both the First and the Tenth Amendments. He wrote, “. . . neither a state nor the federal government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. . . No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious acivities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
If the First Amendment means anything, the prohibitions of the “establishment clause” should be applied to the Federal government only. The Court, however, was beginning to apply the 14th Amendment to the States, including them as the subject along with the Federal government as covered by the Bill of Rights. This was convenient for their new interpretation of the Constitution but patent nonsense historically. Any study of the occasion for the 14th Amendment would deny this intention, or as Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has pointed out the Bill of Rights was written to protect the States not to inhibit them. This kind of error in interpretation Bork calls “judicial lawlessness.” Consider the following:
At least nine of the original States had established churches and were paying the clergy out of tax money when the Bill of Rights was penned. The First Amendment was written specifically to set the States free to do their own thing relative to religion without interference from the new Federal government. In other words, the Federal government could not overrule the States and declare one Christian denomination to be the official “religion,” The States already had their “official religions.” This was really the primary cause and meaning of the “establishment clause.” (cf. Laurence Tribe and words of Thomas Jefferson) Otherwise the Constitution would never have been ratified. The States would have rebelled. But now Justice Black says that States are bound by the same rules as the Federal government. This was pure invention. It was a blatant amendment of the Constitution--an”elite con job.” It has been suggested that now everytime the Supreme Court sits, a constitutional convention is in session.
This assertion was in the wind even before Brown vs The Board of Education in 1954, which was out and out substantive due process in the application of the 14th amendment to the Bill of Rights. Justice Black’s statement anticipates this by seven years; and, although taken for granted today as a part of case law or jurisprudence, it is palpably an historical error. It is a dogma originating in the “romantic heart of the judge.” As Black himself said, these judgment calls are the “law of the judges,” and I would contend, therefore, that they really have no business being accepted as the “law of the land.” The judiciary has cavalierly usurped a responsibility which the Constitution specifically grants to the Congress. Ultimately this is sacrificing our tradition, our heritage, and our culture. It may even be a justification for civil disobedience. Our system is supposed to exist only by the “consent of the governed.” The American people did not give consent for our Constitution to be manhandled in this manner. Plenty of examples exist in the historical record indicating the Founding Fathers’ wish to limit the influence and control of a single Christian denomination, such as Jefferson’s and Madison’s efforts to dethrone the Anglican church as the official state church in Virginia; but there is no significant support from any historical examples for limiting the influence of religion in any areas of public life including the educational and the political.
The modern doctrine of the separation of church and state is a completely new interpretation of the First Amendment’s simple statement,“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The judges have expanded the meanings of the significant words in this Amendment. They believe that the Constitution must be treated in the context of “evolving” law, and thus in our day it must mean something other than the original meanings and intentions of the Founding Fathers. For example, the word Congress in the First Amendment has been expanded to mean all state legislatures and any local rule making bodies in the nation. This interpretation has been the result of the application of the 14th amendment to the Bill of Rights thus incorporating the States as part of “the government of the United States.” The word religion, which simply meant Christian denomination in the vocabulary of the Founding Fathers, has been expanded to include any world religion, and even atheism, humanism or a sense of “deep concern,” following the definition of the very liberal theologian Paul Tillich. Does this not in essence negate our even having a Constitution?
Since this new interpretation in 1962 was determined, three generations of young people have gone through the public schools ignoring all the facts, the sources and the implications of our nation’s religious and moral origins. They have suffered the onslaught and consequences of a debilitating moral relativism, the doctrine of a new secular religion, which has sapped the vitals of our nation’s discipline and purpose and left us wallowing in self-indulgence and a radical individualism. The old American values, the wholesome Puritan and Victorian values of self-determination, self-control, self-sacrifice, self-respect, responsibility, diligence, hard work, and fidelity, which were responsible for the building of this nation, have been minimized; yes, and even ridiculed by many.
The Practices of the Founding Fathers Contradict the Modern Interpretation
James Madison is often cited by “separation extremists” because in reaction to his experience with the Anglican church in Virginia vetoed the incorporation of an Episcopal church in Washington DC. He also opposed military chaplains; he felt churches could supply this need. Also he opposed tax exemptions for church property which was again a reaction against the Anglican State church in his home state of Virginia. He questioned the calling for a national day of thanksgiving; however, in all these opinions he was not supported by any of his contemporaries. When he became president, for example, he was forced by the example and desires of his peers, including George Washington, to call for such an official national celebration of thanksgiving.
The last place the Founding Fathers would have prohibited religion, however, was in the school classroom. Actually just the opposite was true as can be easily demonstrated from the historical record. Madison himself recognized the absolute necessity of training the next generation in the moral principles expressed in the Bible especially the Ten Commandments. John Adams had said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate
to the government of any other.”
No one represented the spirit of the age more than Noah Webster, a Founding Father known as “the Schoolmaster to the Nation” He was both a legislator and a judge, besides an educator, and was active into the 1840’s. His “blue-backed speller” (1780ff) numbered in the millions and was used in America for 100 years. He also wrote histories, catechisms and dictionaries. His “speller” included a moral catechism with rules from the Bible for daily conduct. He said that the Bible should be America’s basic text book, that “education is useless without the Bible,” and “God’s Word, contained in the Bible, has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct.”
In the introduction to Webster’s famous An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) he wrote, “In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed. . . No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.” In his History of the United States (1832) he wrote, “. . . it is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion. . . to this (genuine Christianity) we owe our free Constitutions of Government. . . The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis o;f all of our civil constitutions and laws.” He believed that a most important purpose of education was to form the moral character which was the basis for good government.
(Cf. William J. Federer, America’s God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations. Coppell, TX: Fame Publishing Co., pp. 10-11, 411, 675-80.)
In no area of contemporary judicial decisions has historical precedent and the wishes and practices of the Founding Fathers been more violated than in this new doctrine of the “separation of church and state.” What was taken for granted in this nation for over 175 years; namely, a pervasive influence of Judeo-Christian virtues and values, has been discarded by the culture elite. It is easily demonstrated, however, how the “establishment clause of the First Amendment” was understood by the Founding Fathers by examining their own practices.
(l) The same First Congress and Senate which passed the First Amendment immediately appointed chaplains who opened their sessions with prayer and ordained special days of prayer and thanksgiving to God.
(2) Since the days of Chief Justice John Marshall, the Supreme Court itself invokes a prayer
each day, a Crier imploring loudly, “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”
(3) Thomas Jefferson and the Congress enacted a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians in 1803 and provided the funds for the erection of a Roman Catholic mission ostensibly with the secular goal of civilizing the Indians which would make them less dangerous to the settlers by teaching them the principles of Christian moral behavior.
(4) There were four Land Grant Trusts provided by Congress for the mission of the United Brethren churches from 1799 through 1803 “to propagate the Gospel among the heathen” for the same salutary purpose as noted above. In other words the authors of the First Amendment saw nothing in the Constitution they had written that prohibited them from using a sectarian or religious means to achieve a political goal; namely, the pacification of the Indian tribes.
(5) The author of the final wording of the First Amendment (August 20, 1789), representative Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, wrote a booklet urging that the Bible be used in the schools.
(6) Thomas Jefferson, often quoted by the Court, required students at the University of Virginia which he founded, to attend chapel services each morning at a local chapel of their own denomination (in that day called a religion or sect) before attending classes. Jefferson had written a word on his philosophy of education: “. to instruct . . our citizens in these, their rights, interests, and duties as men and citizens. . . education should aim at the improvement of both one’s morals and faculties (skills).” In essence this was the consensus held by all.
(7) Jefferson also participated in the introduction of the Bible and a popular Christian hymnal to teach reading in the schools in Washington DC where he was head of the Board of Education while also serving as President of the United States. All of the above activities and decisions clearly were not regarded by the Founders as “Congress. . . establishing a religion.”
How the New Interpretation fo Separation Was Able to Evolve and Allow
Unconstitutional Acts by the Judges of our Constitution
It is astonishing, but none-the-less typical of a revised legal attitude toward the meaning of “judicial power,” that Justice William O. Douglas, one of the most active of the “judicial legislators,” who became an absolutist with regard to church-state separation, had the temerity to imply that the First Congress had violated its own First Amendment. It is apparent that he regarded his own opinion as more valid than the original Framers of the Constitution. (Robert Cord, Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction.. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1988, pp. 156-57.) This is a good illustration of the mind-set of many of our judges today. As amazing as it may seem to the layman, Justice Douglas believed that the way he understood and interpreted the First Amendment was more valid and accurate than what it actually meant to the Founders! This is the same as if a contemporary performer of Bach or Beethoven considered his own interpretation of their musical compositions more accurate than the composer’s original intent. Most thinking people will find this whole attitude almost beyond belief, unreasonable, audacious and arrogant. But after all, these are the liberal elite who consider themselves, as Thomas Sowell has dubbed them, “The Anointed.”
The modern authoritarian approach of the liberal elite to judicial decisions arises from philosophies developed and taught at no less a prestigious institution than Yale Law School,where William O. Douglas was a professor. Here it was recommended to law students that judge should choose his result first, based on his own social proclivities, and then reason backwards using legal artifice and the ambiguity of precedents to support his original thesis. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in summarizing this liberal philosophy of Yale Law School described what was being taught as follows: “A wise judge knows that political choice is inevitable; he makes no false pretense of objectivity and consciously exercises the judicial power with an eye to social results.” (Schlesinger, “The Supreme Court, 1947,” Fortune Magazine, January 1947, pp. 73, 201-02 quoted and discussed in Bork, pp. 69-70.) On the face of it, this is outright dishonesty. In other words what the liberals cannot pass through the elected representatives in the legislature, they can have written into law through the courts. This is a blatant unconstitutional abuse of judicial power by those who have assumed the authority to accuse others of being “unconstitutional.” The “new” judicial attitude toward the Constitution seems to be very much like the disposition of the secular humanist or liberal theologian toward the Bible. It was a venerable and useful document in its time, but it is not applicable in the contemporary world and needs to be reinterpreted, rewritten or even ignored.
There is a seeming weakness or limitation in the Constitution of 1787 that allows this unwarranted power to the judges. Whereas the Constitution delineates the powers and limits of the executive and legislative branches of government, it never qualifies what is meant by “judicial power.” Modern Constitutional Law has exploited this limitation with impunity.
When the judiciary takes it upon itself to ”create new laws” with Court decisions, however, it is usurping the prerogatives of the legislative branch of government which is made up of representatives chosen by the people. This is not an accidental happening, it is a contrived and purposeful philosophy of judicial power, which has gravely threatened the “balance of power” established by the Founders in our system of government. It is in itself a flagrant violation of the spirit of the Bill of Rights, imposing the will of a minority of the liberal elite, which deprives the majority of the people of their freedom of choice and decision. What the liberal elite could not get passed through the legislature, they have won through “judicial legislation” in the courts. Surely this assaults and ravages the entire Constitution of the United States which specifically gives political and governing power to the people through their elected representatives in the legislature and never to the judges. Leftist-liberals are guilty of consciously manipulating the courts in order to change the American system. They have a vision of a “new republic” very different from the America established on the principles of the Judeo-Christian value system, which was the world view of the Founding Fathers. According to Bill Bennett, these culture elite hate the American heritage and tradition primarily because it is Biblical. (The DeValuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children. pp. 26ff)
Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia recently bemoaned the fact that the greatest threat to the structure of our whole society is the contemporary theory in Constitutional law that the Constitution is a mutable, changing document to be adapted by the judges to a “maturing” society. He said that the Constitution cannot stand up under this continual reevaluation based on the idea of an evolving society. In other words, the Constitution as the Founding Fathers wrote it and intended it will cease to exist. Since the newer is better; the secular is superior to the religious. This is the new definition of maturity. Scalia noted that society is always seen by these calloused liberal philosophers to be “maturing” and never “rotting.” Keith Fournier of the American Center for Law and Justice, commenting on Scalia’s words, warns, “This evolving notion of the Constitution is consistent with the denigration of absolute values and the substitution of the mind of a secularized state as the guiding light of behavior. It could easily propel statist thinking and policies to the forefront, which will further jeopardize all our freedoms, not simply those involving religious belief, expression, and practice.” (Keith Fournier, Religious Cleansing in the American Republic. Washington DC: Liberty, Life and Family Publications, 1993, p. 32.)
According to the Constitution, this power to make laws was properly delegated by the consent of the people not to appointed judges, but only to elected representatives. This is why Robert Bork and other conservative jurists have called this new use of judicial power by the courts “judicial lawlessness.” Furthermore, there is nothing in the Constitution to suggest that the Judicial branch of government has any more authority to interpret the Constitution than either the Executive or the Legislative branches. In fact, the three branches of government were set up by the Founding Fathers to check and balance each other so that no one branch could dominate.
Thomas Jefferson himself saw the possible result of the weakness of not stating the limits of judicial power. He recognized that it could eventually subject the nation to the “despotism of an oligarchy.” He said, “The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in . . the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body . . working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States.” In the last 50 years we have seen this prophecy gradually come true. It remains to be seen how much power and jurisdiction the Republican reformers in the present Congress can return to the States thus decentralizing what has become a national rather than a federal government. If any of the three branches of our government should have preeminence, it would naturally be the Congress because it most closely represents all the people of America. The judiciary in America all too often has been guilty of nullifying both State and popular sovereignty.
It took several generations for the Supreme Court to evolve from the least important and creative of the branches of government into the most creative, activist, and influential of the three branches. It primarily took a change in world-view. From understanding law as being an absolute set of standards based originally on the Bible, the foundation of all English common law, legal theorists began to teach law as an developing system based on a new technology, changing social patterns and the majority opinion held by the educated liberal elite in the society. Instead of being rooted in God’s revelation, law was the invention of man. (For an extensive discussion of the liberal elite see Bill Bennett’s The DeValuing of America cited above.) Instead of the Constitution, therefore, being an inviolable document “written in stone” by the Founding Fathers, which could only be changed by amendments ratified by a large majority of the people, it was viewed as flexible, adaptable to new behaviors, new ideas and to the opinions of the judges.
After the Civil War law professors began to be influenced in their attitude toward the law by Spencerian evolution. Herbert Spencer had applied Darwin’s theories about biological life to every institution in human society. New legal theories literally threw off the yoke of the static idea of an immutable God with an absolute law. Biblical theism as the basis for human law began to be set aside by the legal theorists, such as Christopher Langdell, dean of the Harvard University Law School. With the concept of evolution being applied to the legal system, the agents of change were seen to be the judges who were actually taught to be the creators of new law. These ideas were embellished by another Harvard dean Roscoe Pound, who doubted that there could be absolute judgments, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who believed that it was the experience of the “fittest” in society which made the law, and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes who said, “The Constitution is what the judges say it is.” (For this history see John Whitehead, The Second American Revolution, Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1982, pp. 43-56.)
So the Founders’ “original understanding” of the “establishment clause” of the First Amendment has been more or less disregarded by the Supreme Court since 1947. This flexibility has been extended more or less to the entire Constitution. The original meaning and application of the “establishment clause” has been enlarged and considerably modified by a new Supreme Court interpretation. By drawing out implications which are not in the First Amendment, which can quite easily be demonstrated historically to be in error, this carte blanche edict of the Supreme Court has become de facto a brand new law. It is a typical case of “judicial legislation” where justices have read their own feelings, wishes, and beliefs into the Constitution.
This new interpretation of the separation of church and state is actually a new theme or value introduced into America’s idea culture. As it is construed and applied it is in direct contradiction to a value held historically in this nation; namely, that schools should prepare good citizens by teaching character and morality. It is a good example for the behavioral science of anthropol-ogical social theory which teaches that the introduction of a new, or changed theme or value into a culture can have disastrous consequences for the stability of that society. (See detailed explanation in James Murk, “Values in Conflict: The Disintegration of American Society,” [to be published], pp. 1-12) This is exactly what has happened in America. The new interpretation of the Supreme Court is in direct conflict with the intention and the practice of the Founders of our nation. As we shall see, it has had grievous, destructive consequences.
Further Historical Evidence Against the New Interpretation and
Some Very Negative Results
David Barton cites an instance in 1853-54 when Congress was petitioned to dilute the emphasis on religion in the halls of government. After much study of the original sources and the writings of the Founding Fathers, the House Committee on the Judiciary handed down an opinion on March 27, 1854. “At the adoption of the Constitution, we believe every State--certainly ten of the thirteen--provided as regularly for the support of the Church as for the support of the Government. . . Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, though not any one sect (meaning church denomina-tion). . It must be considered as the foundation on which the whole structure of the civil government rests. Laws will not have permanence or power without the sanction of religious sentiment, without a firm belief that there is a Power above us that will reward our virtues and
punish our vices. In this age there can be no substitute for Christianity: that, in its general principle, is the great conservative element on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of free institutions. That was the religion of the founders of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants. There is a great and very prevalent error on this subject in the opinion that those who organized this Government did not legislate on religion.” (For further elaboration see Barton, The Myth of Separation, pp. 132-33.)
The final coup de grace to the historical legitimacy of the new judicial rulings, which have deleted all religious and moral influence and teaching from public schools, is found in Article III of the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Continental Congress in 1787 and again by the House and Senate in 1789. This is listed as one of the “Organic Laws of the United States of America” having the same status as the Constitution and The Declaration of Independence. It laid down the requirements for a territory to become a State. This article reads, “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The purpose of the school, therefore, in the minds of the Founding Fathers was to teach not only morality but even the Christian religion in order to sustain the beliefs and practices of the nation as they had started it.
Bill Bennett describes Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of education as found in the Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia. Besides academic subjects Jefferson said that we need “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests, and duties as men and citizens.” He believed “education should aim at the improvement of both one’s ‘morals’ and ‘faculties.’ That has been the dominant view of the aims of American education for over two centuries.” (Bennett, The DeValuing of America, The Fight for our Culture and our Children. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, p. 56.) The idea that the school was to teach morality and good citizenship was retained by the public schools in this nation at least into the 1950’s. Often the school day was begun with prayer and the Bible was read and even taught in school classrooms in many parts of our country until the years 1962-63.
No one is arguing or contending to use government legislation to teach Christian theology; but the Supreme Court interpretation has been expanded to include not just the Christian religion and the Bible, which is also the basis for Judaism, per se, but the entire moral code as well. It has even prohibited teachings which Christianity may have in common with all other religions and almost all human societies, that may be considered generic. This has completely undercut efforts to teach moral principles in our public schools. This includes all aspects of the Jewish-Christian value system upon which all our institutions were founded. It thus ignores and negates the concept of America being a nation responsible to God, which is obvious in our charter, The Declaration of Independence,, in our Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and in most historical documents of the colonial era. Since the 1960’s, youth in America have been encouraged to make up their own rules and become their own judges of morality, because the courts have virtually forbidden the teaching of the ethic of the Bible, which has historically been the basis of all American law and culture. The very themes that the Founding Fathers used to establish our entire nation and Constitution therefore have been inhibited or proscribed from the public education of America’s youth. This is exactly the goal for America proposed by Marxist socialists in order to create a new secular, humanist society in this country. They are not too far away from being able to claim almost total victory. It is significant that Communist and socialist political parties are no longer very active on their own since they have found a haven in the left wing of the Democratic Party.
One of the most dramatic and far reaching changes growing out of this rejection of the Judeo-Christian value system has been a new interpretation of freedom of speech and action with no roots in the ideas of Christian liberty held by the Founders. This new philosophy of freedom propounded by groups, such as the ACLU is like the liberte of the French Revolution or utilitarianism--an absolute freedom expounded by the British agnostic philosopher John Stuart Mill. This is a no holds barred, “do as you please” philosophy which springs from atheism. If there is no God, anything is permissible. This new spirit of libertinism mushroomed in the 1960’s. Youth threw over all traditional restraints, mores, old rules and behavior patterns. Judeo-Christian values and morality, which had been the general consensus. This new “libertinism” was then embraced by large numbers in the adult population as older generations followed the younger in a mad dash for a new kind of secularized freedom. Much that had been repressed in the “back alleys” of our country came out to parade itself on Main Street America.
Today those who still hold to the old values and meaning of freedom as “endowed by the Creator” and therefore requiring moral responsibility, are regarded as “haters of liberty” and “Bible bigots.” Christian freedom stands with the Bible, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty!” Remember the words of John Adams,“This republic was made only for a moral and a religious people.” The commitment of all the Founding Fathers is ignored. In fact, it is being stomped on. We are therefore sinking into a moral swamp, and the initial signs of a spirit of tyranny and a growing infringement on our freedoms are encroaching all around us.
The results of these radical decisions have been traumatic. The deplorable repercussion for our society in the past thirty years has been the rapid growth of social pathologies, such as violent crime, teenage pregnancies, illegitimacy, educational decline, and child poverty, to the highest levels among the leading civilized nations. We lead most nations in every social pathology. We have witnessed what may be the most rapid moral deterioration of any nation in history.
We are sacrificing whatever moral leadership we ever had in the world on the altar of a new multicultural ideal and a libertine philosophy of civil liberties. For this the Supreme Court and all the liberal elite who conspired to effect and support these destructive decisions must be held ultimately responsible. Robert Bork in an understatement typical of a cautious jurist observes, “The application of the Bill of Rights to the states in this and other matters has done much to alter the moral tone of communities across the country.” (The Tempting of America, p. 95) The conscience and moral order of America, which took over 300 years to cultivate and establish from the beginnings of the colonists’ quest for religious freedom, has taken only the last 30 years to uproot or mortally damage.
The future may see an increasing anarchy countermanded by greater government intervention and control leading to the loss of more and more real freedoms and an applied tyranny with a ”politically correct” agenda. We could wind up not too different from the USSR with strong central control and restricted speech and movement. We should learn from Benjamin Franklin’s prophetic words,“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
A Final Word--The “Lemon Test” and the Future
In spite of the Supreme Court’s posture on an absolute philosophy of the separation of church and state, government and religion in many traditional ways still remain interdependent and
entwined in the United States of America. Actual practice is not consistent with the Supreme Court’s enunciated principles; namely, what is called the “Lemon Test.”
The Court laid down the rules in 1971 for establishment-clause law in the decision Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971. It was determined that any statute or practice could only qualify as legitimate by meeting three criterion: (l) Any rule or law relative to religion and government must have a secular legislative purpose; (2) Its principal or primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion; (3) It must not foster an excessive entanglement of government with religion. Obviously many practices and legislative acts of the Founding Fathers, the results of which exist to this day, cannot pass this severe, absolutist test. Strictly applied, the “Lemon Test” would virtually eliminate all connections between government and religion in America just as in the old Soviet Union. In truth, the Supreme Court has not dared to apply the “Lemon Test” in some instances which relate to old traditions and established precedents attributed to the Founding Fathers, such as chaplains and prayers in the legislatures. Therefore it should be obvious that the “Lemon Test” is not a fair explication of the establishment clause. Robert Bork writes, “But if the Lemon test should be ignored where there exists historical evidence of the validity of specific practices or laws that could not otherwise pass muster, then it is a fair conclusion that the test itself contradicts the original understanding of the establishment clause and is destroying laws and practices that were not meant to be invalidated.” (Robert H. Bork, “The First Amendment,” What To Do About . . . : A Collection of Essays from Commentary Magazine. New York: HarperCollins Regan Books, 1995, p. 20)
Absolutists who want a completely secular society have won many battles, but they have not won the war. They know they have a long way to go, and they have many more goals in mind. The ACLU has stated its objectives. Besides seeking to ban all prayer and the use of the Bible in public schools, they assert the followin;g:
(1) If they could, the ACLU would remove all references to God, prayers, and the Ten Commandments from courthouses and public property. Since their victory in Cobb County, Georgia, they have warned four counties in Ohio--Licking, Miami, Greene, and Lucas--to remove monuments which illustrate the Ten Commandments. The attack on Judge Roy Moore in Gadsden, Alabama is their latest effort, where they are opposed by the governor Fob James who threatens to call out the national guard. They are seeking to establish judicial precedents and someday will lead an attack on the monuments in Washington DC, including the Ten Commandments inscribed in the Supreme Court building itself and artistic reminders of Moses the Lawgiver and the Mosaic law in the legislative chambers in the Capitol. If they would dare, they would remove all references to God in the quotations of Lincoln and Jefferson at their respective Memorials.
(2) They would like to terminate all military and prison chaplaincies and eventually eliminate the chaplains in the legislatures of our nation including the House and the Senate. In 1983, however, the Supreme Court in Marsh v. Chambers approved the employment of a chaplain by the Nebraska legislature, and did not apply the Lemon test to this case.
(3) They would purge In God We Trust from our coins and Under God from the Pledge of Allegiance. In general they support a total extirpation of Christianity and Christian symbols, including the cross and Christmas nativity scenes and religious displays, from public life, something the Supreme Court has resisted to some extent thusfar.
(4) They oppose tax exemption for churches, school voucher programs and tuition tax credits for parents who send children to religious schools, and forbid any government assistance for religious institutions, which denies children in Christian or Jewish schools any access to publicly funded services, such as busing, lunches, specialized instruction, textbooks, etc.
(5) They oppose any semblance of Christian morality taught in public schools, such as abstinence programs, and they oppose most parental rights, such as the right to notification on a teenager’s abortion, a child’s exposure to graphic sex education including the gay rights agenda
and the use of condoms. However, on the other hand, the ACLU supports a child’s right to watch pornography and the publication and free distribution of “kiddie” porn.
The battle has been joined. We are in a culture war, which is really a religious war--Judeo-Christianty vs. secular humanistic atheism. Christian legal experts, such as those with the American Center for Law and Justice and the Rutherford Institute have won cases and made inroads blocking the will of the ACLU to change this nation into a purely secular state. They have begun to establish a new body of jurisprudence which recognizes the freedom of religious expression as intended in the Constitution. With four definite liberals on the Supreme Court, however, whose votes can be predicted to “go with the flow” and oppose the influence of Christ and Christianity, and even conservative Judaism in America, we need the legislative assistance proposed by the “Religious Equality Amendment” or something similar.
Passing amendments to the Constitution is the only present check and balance that might be immediately employed for the sitting Supreme Court. With the politicization of the court, which has progressed to become what Bork called “the political seduction of the law,” we must have a president sympathetic to conservative or traditional ideals. This virtually requires a Republican victory in 1998 and 2000. Considering leftist-liberalism’s penchant for an activist court, the future security for the original heritage of our nation rests in the hands of considerate presidential appointments. (For a recent summary of the history of presidential appointments confer Stephen Carter, The Confirmation Mess: Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process. New York: HarperCollins, Basic Books, 1994) The Congress has been given the right to limit the jurisdiction of the courts which should be studied. Also it would be well for the Congress to consider term limits or scheduled reviews for the federal judiciary. An impeachment of some very activist judges may be warranted, but it would be a hard sell, and would have to have the support of an enlightened American people.
In the minds of many, this is the most critical area of conflict which demands the attention of patriotic, freedom loving conservatives in America. If the secularists and neo-pagans have their way, we will have lost our nation. We are often accused of wanting to “impose our values” on the American people. Just the opposite is true. The liberal elite have been trying to change this nation philosophically into something the Founding Fathers would not recognize. They are the interlopers. It is their values, akin to those of Marxist-Leninism, that are alien to this nation. It is the conservatives, especially Christians, who want to restore and to hold on to our original heritage and the time-honored values of the Founding Fathers, which made this country the greatest nation on earth. If we lose this political debate and culture war, the lights will go out in “the city on a hill.”
James M. Murk New Auburn, WI