CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS

[MC Just]

CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS: HISTORICAL TRUTH VERSUS SECULARIST SPIN

By Michael J. Gaynor
MichNews.com
Feb 22, 2005



In law school prospective lawyers are taught to represent their clients zealously and effectively.

If the facts are on your side, pound the facts.

If the law is on your side, pound the law.

In neither is on your side, pound the table.

Secular extremists slyly but successfully turned government away from supporting religion generally, by misrepresenting the law, distorting the facts, posing as victims rather than victimizers, and pounding the table.

In 1947, the United States Supreme Court ruled that neither the federal government nor any state government can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.”

In so ruling as to aiding all religions, the Court substituted its extreme secularist view for the views of those who founded the United States, wrote and ratified the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and adopted the First Amendment.

And, in so ruling, the Court misused a much-quoted letter in which Thomas Jefferson described the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between church and state.”

The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution all recognize God.

The Articles and the Constitution were dated “in the year of our Lord.”

Meaning Jesus Christ.

The First Amendment was not intended to prohibit government from acknowledging God or supporting religion generally.

Its proscription forbids Congress from making a law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Its protection extends to "the free exercise of religion."

Only coercive or sectarian governmental acts that establish a particular faith or prohibit the free exercise of any faith or force people to violate their consciences are unconstitutional.

And Jefferson's wall is supposed to keep government from interfering with that religious expression, not to ban religious expression from the public square.

But the United States Supreme Court, while professing neutrality as to religion, actually opted for secularism, to its own benefit.

The United States is supposed to be "one Nation, under God," as The Pledge of Allegiance states, but the United States Supreme Court declined to rule so on the merits and instead rejected professed atheist Michael Newdow's argument on a procedural ground, lack of standing.

St. Paul, Minnesota's Archbishop, John Ireland, at a convention of the National education Association held in St. Paul in 1890, foreshadowed the triumph of secular extremism while asserting that "the state should, for the sake of its people and its own sake, permit and facilitate the teaching of religion by the church."

Archbishop Ireland warned Protestants and Catholics to work together against irreligion:

"Believe me, my Protestant fellow citizens, I am absolutely sincere when I declare that I speak for the weal of Protestantism as well as that of Catholicism. I am a Catholic, of course, to the tiniest fiber of my heart, unflinching and uncompromising in my faith. But God forbid that I should desire to see in America the ground which Protestantism now occupies swept by the devastating blast of unbelief. Let me be your ally in warding off from the country irreligion, the destroyer of Christian life and of Christian civilization."

But, irreligion was not to be denied by the United States Supreme Court in 1947.

And, in proclaiming official governmental neutrality between religion and irreligion, the Court empowered irreligion to end governmental support of religion generally, which never had been intended when the Constitution was written, ratified or amended.

Neither the Articles of Confederation nor the Constitution gave the national government the express power to act in the field of religion, but both the Continental-Confederation Congress and the Congress under the Constitution supported general, nonsectarian religion.

But Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution empowered Congress to tax to "provide for...general Welfare of the United States" and "[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution" that and other powers, and support for religion generally was thought to be essential to, in the words of the Constitution's preamble, to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...."

Nevertheless, the United States Supreme Court subsequently banned voluntary school prayer, even though nondenominational, whether at school each morning or at a school football game.

Supposedly because Thomas Jefferson had written of a "wall of separation

between church and state" and governmental property was not to be used for religious purposes.

Secular extremists cite Jefferson and Madison as rigid proponents of separation between church and state.

FALSELY!

In fact, two days after writing that letter referring to a wall, Jefferson began attending nondenominational church services in the House of Representatives on Sundays.

Public property!

Madison did the same.

There WAS a difference,

Jefferson traveled their by horseback.

Madison took a coach pulled by four horses.

Those church services in the House of Representatives were voluntary as well as nondenominational and continued after the Civil War.

The podium of the Speaker of the House was used as the preacher's pulpit.

In a letter dated January 3, 1803, Manasseh Cutler told Joseph Torrey that Jefferson "and his family have constantly attended public worship in the Hall" of the House of Representatives.

In fact, the seats that Jefferson and his private secretary occupied the first time that they attended services in the Hall of the House of Representatives "were ever afterwards by the courtesy of the congregation, left for him."

Jefferson's conception of a "wall" did not stop him from permitting church services in the Treasury building either.

And the Gospel was preached in the Supreme Court chambers.

So much for separation of church and state!

Archbishop Ireland lamented that "the state...hinders and prevents the work of the church."

With tragic consequences:

"The children of the masses are learning no religion. The religion of thousands who profess some form of religion is the merest veneering of mind and heart. Its doctrines are vague and chaotic notions as to what God is and what our relations to Him are. Very often it is mere sentimentality, and its precepts are the decorous rulings of natural culture and natural prudence. This is not the religion that built up our Christian civilization in the past and that will maintain it in the future. This is not the religion that will guard the family and save society."

Archbishop Ireland implored his audience to face an urgent problem:

"I am not questioning how far we may lay at the door of the nonreligious school the breaking up of Christian creeds, the growth of agnosticism and unbelief, the weakening of public and private morals, and the almost complete estrangement from church organizations of the poor and working classes. But I do submit that these dreaded evils of our day should awaken us from our lethargy and stimulate us to bestow more than ordinary care upon the religious instruction of the children of the land, that they may have the strength to withstand the fierce temptations which await them."

Archbishop Ireland explained:

"From the principles of religion, morals derive power and vitality. Separated from a belief in God and the existence of the soul beyond the present life, morals are vague and weak commands which passion is not slow to scorn.

What seems to be morals without religion are often but the blossomings of fortunate and kindly natures, or habits, which, fashioned upon Christian traditions, grow weak as the traditions become remote."

The first two presidents of the United States under the Constitution--George Washington and John Adams--agreed.

Washington, the President of the Constitutional Convention, in his Farewell Address, described religion not only as the source of morality, but "a necessary spring of popular government."

Adams, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, asserted that "Religion and Morality alone...can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand."

Archbishop Ireland explained why government should support religion generally without establishing a particular religion:

"Ought we not to have religious instruction in connection with the school? There are, I confess, serious difficulties in the way. But are we to be stopped by difficulties when it is incumbent upon us to reach the goal? Secularists and unbelievers will demand their rights. I concede their rights. I will not impose upon them my religion, which is Christianity. But let them not impose upon me and my fellow Christians their religion, which is secularism. Secularism is a religion of its kind, and usually a very loud-spoken and intolerant religion. Nonsectarianism is not secularism, and when nonsectarianism is intended, the secularist sect must not claim for itself the field which it refuses to others."

Under the guise of maintaining neutrality, the United States Supreme Court effectively made secularism the chosen religion of the United States.

Chosen by the Court.

NOT by the Congress, or the state legislatures, or the people.

Archbishop Ireland proposed a practical compromise: "American Catholics will not, of course, impose Catholicism upon Protestant children, and, with similar fair-mindedness, American Protestants will not impose Protestantism upon Catholic children."

And Archbishop Ireland sagely asked: "Is it not a thousand times better to make a compromise than to allow secularism to triumph and own the country?"

Archbishop Ireland was right, of course.

But, secularism triumphed and owns the country, thanks to the United States Supreme Court and the people's deference to it.

And the minority blocking a constitutional amendment to rectify the Court's wrong.

Perhaps President Bush should issue a fast day proclamation urging citizens to "acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly charged as individuals and as a nation; beseeching him at the same time, of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our offences, and to incline us, by His Holy Spirit, to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor and heavenly benediction."

After all, President John Adams did precisely that on March 23, 1798.

Long after the First Amendment had been adopted.

Lest Jews and Moslems be offended, President Bush could refer simply to God rather than each person of the Trinity.

Religion must triumph over irreligion.

And what unites the religious is much more important than what divides them.

[argent_paladin]

The best book on this subject, by far, is Philip Hamburger's The Separation of Church and State. He shows how this idea was driven primarily by anti-Catholic sentiment and has no basis in the Constitution or the early history of our country. Here is a First Things review:


Books In Review
Separation of Church and State

Copyright © 2002 First Things 128 (December 2002): 43-47.
“We the Protestants”
Separation of Church and State. By Philip Hamburger. Harvard University Press. 492 pp. $49.95.

Reviewed by Stephen F. Smith

During last year’s commencement exercises at the University of Virginia, every graduate received a fancy compendium of excerpts from Thomas Jefferson’s most notable writings, including the Declaration of Independence and the famous Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. These sources suggest that Jefferson regarded the founding of the American nation, and the essential character of the polity “We the People” created, as religiously motivated acts, not simply applied Lockean social contract theory. To this extent, at least, the public square was not “naked”—or so it might seem.

As University of Chicago law professor Philip Hamburger ably demonstrates in Separation of Church and State, the matter is actually far less benign than the picture the University of Virginia graduates were given. An avalanche of private correspondence contradicts the religiosity Jefferson sometimes projected, and reveals a Jefferson who was deeply hostile to organized religion. Using imagery Protestants typically reserved for the pope, Jefferson described the Protestant clergy as “the real Antichrist.” To Jefferson, Protestant denominations were no better than the Roman Catholic Church: all stood as enemies of mental freedom, and all were therefore anathema to lovers of liberty and—the true Supreme Being for Jefferson—“Reason.”

It was this anticlerical Jefferson who, as President, responded to an 1801 petition from a group of dissenting Baptists seeking relief from non-Baptist religious establishments in Connecticut. The Danbury Baptist Association argued for neutrality in religious matters: the government should not favor any church over another, enforce any religious duties, or discriminate among citizens on account of their religious beliefs. Jefferson’s letter in response argued for a very different concept—a “wall of separation between Church & State”—that, according to him, was enshrined in the First Amendment. Almost a century and a half later, in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court officially adopted Jefferson’s “wall of separation” as the bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment.

As Hamburger skillfully shows, Jefferson’s wall of separation was shockingly radical in the early 1800s. Neither the First Amendment nor state constitutions were written or understood in terms of a separation of church and state. The novelty was advertent on Jefferson’s part because he intended to change prevailing notions of religious liberty and to impose new limits on the power of the clergy. It was only decades later, after an anti-Christian secular movement to amend the Constitution to require separation had failed, that proponents of separation pulled Jefferson’s “interpretation” from the dust bin of history.

Hamburger carefully dissects founding-era debates concerning various religious matters, such as clerical eligibility for government office. Contemporary advocates of separation try to derive historical support for their project from those debates, but Hamburger convincingly shows that such efforts are completely ahistorical. Not only did the dissenters not argue for or desire separation, but separation simply was not part of the national debate until well into the 1800s.

In the eighteenth century, separation served only as a “straw man” argument by defenders of American religious establishments. Portraying religious dissenters as favoring separation was an effective, if disingenuous, rhetorical tactic because it was so widely accepted by Americans that church and state occupied cooperative relationships. A democracy could not function without a virtuous people, and churches inculcated the virtues necessary for self-government. Far from challenging this linkage between church and state or arguing for a naked public square, then, dissenters sought only the repeal of establishments and other forms of religious discrimination.

The less than ebullient reaction of the Danbury Baptists to Jefferson’s missive illustrates the point. Having solicited President Jefferson’s support, they promptly buried his letter, neither publicizing it nor even recording its receipt in the Association’s minutes. Instead of endorsing separation, the Danbury Baptists continued to make the traditional disestablishment arguments, convinced, as many early Americans were, that separating church from state was not only misguided, but inconsistent with Christian social action.

If the wall of separation was so out of step with American beliefs, why has it become so widely accepted over the years? This question turns out to be the central conundrum of Hamburger’s book. By the time separation achieved critical mass during the second half of the nineteenth century, the establishments of old had long since died out. Why, then, was the country so quick to embrace, often with religious fervor, the notion that separation of church and state is a necessary precondition of religious liberty?

Hamburger’s answer is as compelling as it is chilling: anti-Catholic bigotry is what drove the triumph of separation. Of course, Protestant animus against Catholics was nothing new in America. What was new was that American Catholics were growing in number and influence. In the first half of the nineteenth century, waves of Catholic immigrants came to America from Ireland and Germany and settled in big-city metropolises, such as New York, to the great alarm of native-born Protestants.

In the hordes of immigrants, “nativist” Protestants saw mindless hordes controlled by the “Roman dictator” who sat atop the Catholic Church. These nativist Protestants feared that the pope was poised to capture control of the government and forcibly convert non-Catholics. These fears assumed a fever pitch in 1832 when Pope Gregory XVI de­nounced separation of church and state, prompting Tocqueville to remark that across America “the Catholic religion has erroneously been looked upon as the natural enemy of democracy.”

Once that clear and present danger to freedom was identified, it was obvious that drastic steps had to be taken. Vigilantism was one common response. There were waves of mob violence against Catholics, and churches and convents (mocked as “nunneries”) were burned. Another response was to deny Catholics political power. Nativists argued that Catholics lacked the mental freedom required for political equality, with the “Know Nothings,” for example, swearing their members to vote against “all . . . Roman Catholics.” In fact, a constitutional amendment was proposed to empower Congress to abolish the Catholic Church as a “foreign hierarchical power . . . founded on principles or dogmas antagonistic to republican institutions.”

It was during this period of anti-Catholic animus that popular conceptions of American religious liberty were redefined in terms of separation. The courts soon followed suit. In Reynolds v. United States (1878), a case rejecting a claim that it was unconstitutional to prosecute Mormons for polygamy, the Supreme Court accepted Jefferson’s “wall of separation” letter as the “authoritative” interpretation of the First Amendment. State courts at this time, decades before Everson, began enforcing separation as a state constitutional principle.

Although there is no inherent sectarian bias in the concept of separation, Hamburger demonstrates that separation was used for anti-Catholic purposes in the nineteenth century. Believing that they, unlike Catholics, acted as “individuals,” not a “church,” Protestants did not understand separation to prevent them from taking their religious beliefs into the public square. Consequently, it was deemed proper, for example, to teach nonsectarian Prot­estantism, anti-Catholic propaganda, and the King James Bible in public schools. The wall of separation was breached only when Catholics sought, in effect, school vouchers for paro­chial schools to escape Protestant indoctrination in public schools. These Catholic claims prompted state constitutional amendments nationwide dictating that public funds for education could not be controlled by “any religious sect,” language carefully chosen to halt the Catholic drive while preserving public school instruction in nonsectarian Protestantism.

In this sense, “We the People” who had the God-given right of religious liberty under the Constitution be­came “We the Protestants.” Religious freedom was guaranteed to Protestants by a doctrine—separation of church and state—that was intended to deny that same freedom to Catholics. As Bishop John Hughes of New York noted in 1835: “Under the pretense of solicitude for the preservation of civil and religious liberty, the Catholics are to be robbed of both.”

There is an interesting irony in the developments Hamburger traces. Protestants responded to the rising Catholic tide by embracing separation but, in doing so, inadvertently undermined the moral authority of their own churches. If it was wrong for the pope to “tell” Catholics what to believe, were not Protestant clergymen who exercised spiritual authority the “Protestant Popedom” Jefferson had condemned? This anticlerical thinking gave rise to a theologically liberal brand of Protestantism, whose adherents were receptive to demands from atheists, liberals, and secular Jews for total separation.

The rest, as they say, is history, albeit history that proponents of separation, for obvious reasons, are quite content to leave untold. Nativist groups, including the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan, enthusiastically adopted the anti-Catholic conception of separation. A Klan-inspired movement, supported by anti-Christian secularists, prompted passage in the 1920s of compulsory public school education laws intended to take Catholics out of parochial schools and “Americanize” them. As the success of this movement suggests, nativist sentiments had become pervasive among Americans from all walks of life, spreading into groups that were not officially nativist. One example of these groups is the Freemasons, which Catholics were forbidden to join on pain of excommunication under the 1917 Code of Canon Law, based in part on the view that Masons “plot[ted] against the Church.”

In 1947, all nine Supreme Court Justices—at least seven of whom were Masons—agreed in Everson v. Board of Education that the Constitution re­quired separation. The majority opinion was written by Justice Hugo Black, former Klansman and Senator from Alabama. He had distinguished himself in politics as someone who, in the words of an admiring Klan leader, could “make the best anti-Catholic speech you ever heard.” Ironically, the Court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld a law granting Catholic parents reimbursement for school bus fare on terms equal to other parents. Black certainly understood that voting to uphold the law might dampen criticism of his Klan background. Somewhat controversially, Hamburger suggests that Black may have voted strategically to accomplish that result. In either case, the point, I take it, is not that Klan or Masonic affiliations led the Court to embrace separation, but rather that the nativist assumptions and anti-Catholic biases held by Klansmen and many Masons were shared by many well-intentioned people at the time, both on and off the Court.

Although Jefferson’s musings about separation had thus become the law of the land, it was not the kind of separation the nativists had wanted. To their chagrin, Protestants also found themselves trapped behind Jefferson’s wall because the Court enforced it against all religions, not just Catholicism. The Court also ruled that separation forbids the government from favoring “religion” over “nonreligion” (Epperson v. Arkansas [1968]), meaning that even nondenominational support for religion was constitutionally suspect. In a series of grant-in-aid cases, the Court held that students in religious schools had to be denied benefits offered to students in nonreligious private schools. So, for example, on-site remedial educational services could be provided to disadvantaged children enrolled in private schools, but not their counterparts in religious schools (Aguilar v. Felton [1985]). This untoward result—interpreting a Constitution intended to guarantee religious liberty as requiring affirmative discrimination against people of faith—would seem to be the necessary result of a doctrine of separation that invalidates government action that lacks a “secular purpose” or has the effect of “advanc[ing] . . . religion” (Lemon v. Kurtzman [1970]).

Fortunately, the Supreme Court has, of late, come to recognize the anomaly of its separation jurisprudence. Although the Court has not rejected the wall of separation, it has lowered the wall fairly dramatically, moving steadily away from the pernicious view that separation requires discrimination against religion. In Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (1995), for example, the Court ruled that Jefferson’s university could not deny student aid funding to a Christian student magazine. Additionally, the Court, overruling Aguilar and similar cases, has held that where services are provided to private school students, students in religious schools can also receive those benefits (see Mitchell v. Helms [2000]; Agostini v. Fenton [1997]). Just last term, the Court upheld the use of school vouchers even if parents elect to use them to send their children to religious schools (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris [2002]).

Arguably the most powerful voice in the recent assault on separation has been Justice Clarence Thomas. His plurality opinion in Mitchell declared that, in the educational context, strict separation was “born of bigotry” and thus “should be buried now.” Incidentally, Thomas was educated by nuns in parochial schools and graduated from Holy Cross. Maybe the nativists were onto something about those Catholic schools after all.

Stephen F. Smith is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

[MC Just]

wow.

[Phatmasser777]

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[MC Just]

[quote name='Phatmasser777' date='Feb 26 2005, 10:53 PM'] Oh plz..lol [/quote]
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[MC Just]

bump

[Phatmasser777]

Did.

[Melchisedec]

Whats the point.