One Nation Under God?
http://blog.oup.com/2008/05/trigg/
Whether it’s the question of Intelligent Design being taught in
schools, or who in the religious community presidential candidates
associate with, it seems that we can’t escape the idea of Church and State
in America - it regularly makes the news even here in Britain. Roger
Trigg,
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University, asks in his latest
book whether faith has a place in a pluralist society. Below is an extract
from the book - Religion in Public Life: Must Faith Be Privatized? - which
examines the notion of the US being One Nation Under God.
According to the Bill of Rights, attached to the Constitution of the
United
States of America in 1789, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ At a
stroke, the separation of Church and State, and religious liberty, were
made cornerstones of American life. Yet, at the same time, the United
States is a very religious country, and religion is often publicly
invoked.
Coins proclaim ‘In God We Trust’, and the Pledge of Allegiance now refers
to one nation ‘under God’. From the beginning of the Republic, there were
examples of official religious observance. Presidents proclaimed days of
prayer. George Wa****ngton himself added the phrase ‘so help me God’ in
taking the oath of office as President, with his hand on the Bible.
Official chaplains are appointed to legislatures, a practice upheld in
1983, in a case concerning Nebraska. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysberg address
included the words ‘this nation under God shall have a new birth of
freedom’. No contem****ary inaugural address by a President is complete
without biblical references and some invocation of God. The Senate Chamber
in the State House in Boston has the words ‘God Save the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts’ emblazoned at the front.
So one could go on, with numerous examples of the way in which religion is
woven into the fabric of public life at federal and state levels. As Chief
Justice Rehnquist pointed out in a judgement in 2004, even the Court
Marshal’s opening proclamation in the Supreme Court concludes with the
words ‘God save the United States and this honourable Court’, a phrase
which can be traced back to 1827. The founders of the United States may
have had their reasons for not having a religious establishment at federal
level, but they did not think that they lived in a secular nation. As
James
Hitchcock comments: ‘The Founders simply assumed the reality of a
Christian
nation, and thought that liberty was made possible through the discipline
forged by religion.’ They certainly did not believe that religion was only
a private matter. As Hitchcock sums up the situation:
“The overall result was the emergence of what has been called a ‘de facto
establishment’ of a generalized kind of Protestantism that manifested
itself in numerous public and official ways, a pattern present not only
from the beginning of the Republic, but already part of the processes by
which that Republic was called into being.”
An unfortunate aspect of this was a latent, and sometimes overt,
anti-Catholicism, which was itself often the motive for the insistence on
the separation of Church and State. Particularly after major immigration
from Catholic countries, there was a fear of the influence of the Catholic
hierarchy. The fear of Establishment had even deeper roots. It was often
voiced by groups such as Baptists, who, like the Amish, believed that the
people of God should be kept separate, and that Christ’s kingdom had
different purposes from that of the civil State. One such was Roger
Williams, who was banished from Massachusetts in 1635, and went on to
found
‘Providence’, Rhode Island. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, those who had
rejected the Anglican Establishment in England went on to make a new one
of
their own. Congregationalism was in fact established in the state until
1833.
The very fact that Churches could be established in states decades after
the adoption of the U.S. Constitution shows that the Establishment Clause
was seen as applying only at federal level. Lingering distrust of the
Church of England, coupled with denominational rivalry, led the Founders
to
be determined that the federal government should pursue a policy of
neutrality concerning denominations. Yet there was another reason. James
Madison, a significant figure in drawing up the Constitution, wrote in The
Federalist Papers that it was im****tant not only to guard against
oppression by rulers, but ‘to guard one part of the society against the
injustice of the other part’. There are, in other words, certain freedoms
too precious to be at the mercy of majority vote. Madison argued that
whilst all authority in the United States ‘will be derived from and
dependent on the society’, the society will be broken up into so many
interest groups that power can be diffused. He says:
“In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as
that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity
of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”
He was a leading opponent of Establishment, even in his home state of
Virginia, where there had been an Anglican one. There had been positive
coercion, with legal penalties. We are told, in an example referred to in
the present day Supreme Court, that in the Colony of Virginia:
“Ministers were required by law to conform to the doctrines and rites of
the Church of England; and all persons were required to attend church and
observe the Sabbath, were tithed for the public sup****t of Anglican
ministers, and were taxed for the costs of building and repairing
churches.”
With that historical background, it is hardly surprising that Madison saw
the need for religious liberty.
Christian diversity, and squabbling between denominations, can be seen as
a
disadvantage. Madison, however, saw competition between sects as a
guarantee that one would not try to dominate the others, and deprive them
of rights. This has been the American way ever since, and some have
attributed the vitality of American religion to the lack of Establishment.
Yet there is no doubt that competition, and jealousy, between
denominations
has weakened their public witness. An op****tunity has been given to those
who want no place for religion at any official level.
What started as a separation of Church and State (or Jefferson’s ‘wall of
separation’) has become an attempt to separate religion from society. It
is
argued that all public recognition of religion is prohibited by the
Establishment Clause. A significant step on this path was the agreement by
the Supreme Court through the 1940s and 1950s that the Fourteenth
Amendment’s due process clause guaranteed personal liberties in the
various
states. Furthermore, such liberties were regarded as those defined by the
Bill of Rights. The Establishment Clause, originally assumed to be
inapplicable to states, came to be seen as a fundamental protection of
religious liberty throughout the United States.
In the last fifty years, the Supreme Court has been progressively more
rigorous about separating religion from public life. With its power to
strike down legislation, the Court has not been afraid to take positions
which went against public opinion, the decisions of Congress, and
constitutional precedent. A cynic might wonder whether, in the case of
religion, the judgements made have as much to do with the personalities
and
private beliefs of the nine justices as anything else. The appointment of
justices to the Supreme Court has become a subject of major political
controversy. Many believe that the President’s ability, through careful
nomination, to alter the character of the Court is amongst the most
significant of his powers.
***************************************************************
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Historical Reality SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
***************************************************************
.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why
"a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v.
Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
****************************************************************
USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
*****************************************************************
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
****************************************************************
|
