Religion and the American Public Order
"Christendom is dead, not so Christ."
Today's America offers the spectacle of supposedly serious men banning moments of silence at school graduation ceremonies, tearing the Ten Commandments down from classroom walls, sniffing after crucifixes on public property, and discussing how many Santa Clauses and candy canes have to accompany a Nativity scene for the latter to be permitted in front of a courthouse or city hall. All of this in the name of "separation of Church and State."
In fact, of course, the American Constitution nowhere speaks about "separation of Church and State," let alone about any "wall of separation." The first article of the Bill of Rights says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Article VI of the Constitution itself says that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." The Constitution itself concludes with the words, "Done... in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven...." That is it. The Federal government is not allowed to set up a national church, to prevent individuals from worshiping as they see fit, or to exclude individuals of any religious belief from Federal office. Nothing can be found which requires the Federal government, let alone the governments of the several states, to be neutral between religion and unbelief.
Some of the Founding Fathers (e.g., Jefferson and Madison) and some of their contemporaries appear to have been indeed hostile to religion and especially to Christianity. A larger number must have recognized that it would be impossible to set up an official religion in a country as religiously diversified as the United States. A substantial number, probably a majority, hoped that religion, once freed from official ties to the government, would flourish all the more without the potentially suffocating and embarrassing patronage of secular power.
For most of our history, Americans had no doubt that ours was a Christian country. Reading Alexis de Tocqueville's masterpiece, Democracy in America, about the institutions and mores of the American people in the 1830's, one is left in no doubt whatsoever that Christianity was the single most important shaper of public morality, customs, and attitudes, and that most Americans found this to be entirely proper. Tocqueville relates that one state or local court actually refused to hear testimony from a witness who would not swear before God to tell the truth, on the grounds that, in the absence of an oath, it could have no reason to believe the witness.
George Washington's first Thanksgiving Proclamation acknowledged that the American people, not only as individuals but also precisely as a people, owe a debt of gratitude to God. Perhaps the clearest evidence of our public acknowledgment of Christian faith was provided by Abraham Lincoln's proclamation, during the War Between the States, of a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. Said the proclamation, "it is the duty of nations, as of men, to owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions... and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord."
In view of the role later played by the Supreme Court in creating an entirely non-Constitutional barrier between religion and public life, it is worth considering what that same Court once had to say. In one case, in 1844 (Vidal v. Girard's Executors), we read that "it is unnecessary for us... to consider what would be the legal effect of a devise... for the establishment of a school or college, for the propagation of Judaism or Deism, or any other form of infidelity. Such a case is not to be presumed to exist in a Christian country...." Upholding legislation against polygamy, the Court declared, in 1889 (Mormon Church v. United States), that "it is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity has produced in the Western world." As late as 1931 (United States v. Macintosh), the Court remarked that "we are a Christian people... according to one another the equal right of religious freedom and acknowledging with reverence the duty of obedience to the will of God."
Some scholars like to go through the private lives and private papers of our Founding Fathers and our leading statesmen to try to find there evidence for their preferred interpretation of the First Amendment. The exercise is largely pointless. The Treaty of Paris, by which the United States joined the community of nations at the end of their War for Independence, began with an invocation of the Holy Trinity. Starting then, if not earlier, the laws of the United States and the public acts performed under the authority of the United States provide overwhelming evidence that Christianity was an integral part of our public constitutional order.
To this day there remain vestiges of that once lively order. The Senate and the House of Representatives have their chaplains. There are chaplains in the armed forces. Witnesses in Court swear on the Bible, binding themselves to tell the truth under the penalty of blasphemously making God Himself out to be a liar. Men entering upon public office take their oath on the Bible. We still pledge allegiance to "one nation under God." [At least, at the time of writing this was so — Webmaster.]
Until not much more than half a lifetime ago, we seemed able to congratulate ourselves on being, as Justice Story of the Supreme Court said of us in the early part of the nineteenth century, tolerant without being indifferent.
Starting in 1947, a series of Supreme Court decisions demolished the old constitutional order and, for all practical purposes, established atheism as the "official religion" of the United States. Ignoring relevant precedents and using questionable logic to draw conclusions from constitutionally irrelevant documents, the Court struck down policies and practices by which public authority, especially at the local and state level, had supported religious schools and religion generally, albeit indirectly and in a manner which generally did not favor any particular church or sect. In a landmark decision in 1947 (Everson v. Board of Education), one of the Justices said that "Like St. Paul's freedom, religious liberty with a great price must be bought, and for those who exercise it most fully, by insisting upon religious education for their children mixed with secular, by terms of our Constitution the price is greater than for others." This bizarre logic, which converted citizens serious about their religion into second-class subjects of the state, could have been used equally well to justify the forcible suppression of Christianity (i.e., Christians are free to practice their religion, but only if they pay the price of being condemned to death for doing so).
In a later decision, in direct defiance of what the Founders and their contemporaries had understood by religion, the Supreme Court decided that "secular humanism," meaning atheism, is a religion protected by the First Amendment. The practical result of this was to transform atheism into the privileged established "religion" of the United States, since the only possible compromise between believers and atheists is to say nothing at all about religion. To take an example, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Baptists could all, while this was still a professedly Christian nation, agree that gratitude and repentance are due to God or that the twenty-fifth day of December is the birthday of Jesus Christ. For believers and atheists, however, the only common denominator is precisely zero or, to put it differently, a practical public atheism. Of course, this "compromise" favors the atheist side, leaving believers with nothing.
Once the logic, such as it is, of the Supreme Court's reasoning about religion is grasped, no individual Court decision further excluding religion from the public sphere can be any surprise. The only limitation on what the Court has done in pursuing its logic to its ultimate conclusion has been its sense of what it could get away with without provoking a public backlash. It is said that a frog, if dropped into a pot of hot water, will jump out; if it is dropped into a pot of cool water which is gradually heated, the frog will allow itself to be boiled. Precisely this has been the Supreme Court's tactic — and it has been diabolically successful.
We can recognize several factors as responsible for what amounted to a successful atheist revolution against the original intent of the First Amendment and against the old Constitutional order. First, when the Court started its revolution, it was heavily dominated by Freemasons, who have always had a special hatred for Christianity. Second, the revolution coincided in time with the post-war consolidation and expansion of the "New Deal" into the "Welfare State." A Federal government busily aggrandizing its power over every aspect of the lives of its citizens found it in its interest to weaken the influence of organized religion and, as we will see, of the family. Third, the legal establishment had come to be dominated by the school of "legal positivism," which sees the binding force of a law as proceeding from the will of the maker or interpreter of the law ("the law is whatever the judges say it is"), in contradistinction to the old understanding that a man-made law, whether statute law or Common Law, derives its binding force from its being in accordance with, and its being an application of, God's Natural Law. Fourth, once the Court had started on its new path, even "conservative" judges found themselves seduced by their own lack of real principles into upholding and expanding the new precedents. Fifth, "conservative" elected officials and citizens similarly followed the path of least resistance, even though the Constitution gives Congress the right to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. A final factor should be recognized: as long as the Court's decisions seemed to strike only or primarily at Catholic parochial schools and the Catholic Church in general, viscerally anti-Catholic Protestants foolishly consoled themselves with the thought that these were the only targets.
There remains the question why so many who should have known better followed that path of least resistance. The major reason seems to be that religious belief in general had grown significantly weaker in the United States since the days of Washington, Tocqueville, and Lincoln. Having become increasingly secular in our outlooks and having allowed religion to become a "Sunday thing," with little influence on what we did the rest of the week, we did not react with the necessary vigor when a Court cabal decided to make our secularization both formal and irreversible. Many religious schools, fearing the loss of indirect Federal support (e.g., student loans), quietly accomplished their own secularization.
We should note that the exclusion of Christianity from public schools and the prohibition of indirect government support to religious schools was a blow aimed no less at families than at religion. The responsibility of educating children had always been thought to lie with their parents, while the state was thought to have at most a limited and secondary interest in the matter. In the Middle Ages, when states were formally Catholic and the vast majority of people had no doubt that Catholicism was the only true religion, Catholic theologians had argued that the responsibility of parents is so paramount that the right of Jewish parents to teach Judaism to their children takes precedence over the objective right of the children to be brought up in the True Faith. (Recall that the Supreme Court, in Vidal, had identified Judaism as a form of infidelity, a judgement with which no Christian can reasonably disagree.) In Davis v. Beason, the Supreme Court had spoken of the family as a sacred institution and the basis of society: "... the family, as constituting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy state of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress...."
Let us apply the principle of the sacredness and paramount duty of the family to the American situation, where local governments collected taxes for the support of education from all taxpayers and made disbursements from the resulting common fund available for school books, transportation to schools, and the like. Even if religious schools were the ultimate recipients of such disbursements, the first order beneficiaries were parents, who were thus helped to discharge their own duties to see to the education of their own children. When indirect assistance to private schools was banned and the public schools were secularized, the first target against which the Supreme Court had scored its bullseye was the parents who, while desirous of providing their own children with a religious education, could not afford simultaneously to pay school taxes and tuitions at private schools.
A major factor allowing the new atheist and statist legal order to take root was the cultural upheaval of the 1960's. First came the hippies, with their rejection of traditional moral and religious norms. As they grew older, they shaved their beards, took baths, put on suits, and moved into that same "establishment" which they had once scorned. In short, without ever recovering the Christian norms which they had abandoned, they became "yuppies," with one of their own in the White House. The last thing desired by this generation — and by the children whom they have raised in their own image — is the restoration of the public influence once exercised by Christianity on behalf of Christian morality.
The continuing struggle today is not over the First Amendment, but over the survival of men's right and duty to make public policy judgements on the basis of traditional moral and religious beliefs, even if the latter are not overtly held up as the motive. On the one hand, therefore, you have politicians claiming that they are "personally opposed to abortion, but unwilling to impose" their own opinions, as if defense of a modicum of public morality and repression of murder were not among the duties of government. The point, of course, is that the new public philosophy does not see them as the duties of government, precisely because it has divorced morality and politics. On the other hand, you have district attorneys unlimbering the heavy artillery of RICO, a statute originally aimed at organized crime, against anti-abortion protestors, while Congress passes legislation to subject those same protestors to special legal hazards and punishments. The separation of morality and politics is a continuation of that same atheist program which first gave us "separation of Church and State."
In the New Testament it is written that no man can serve both God and Mammon. It is also written that we are to render unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Furthermore, it is written that we are to be obedient to the magistrates placed in authority over us. The traditional interpretation of this has been that our first and foremost duty is to God, the Author of the civil order, and that our duty to the state is derived from, and thereby regulated by, our primary duty to God. It was also understood that men in their public capacities, no less than in their private capacities, owe obedience primarily to God, not to a man-made Constitution, let alone to a Court's twisted and tendentious interpretation of that Constitution. Today, God and His commandments have been driven out of the public square, where men are expected to go through at least the motions of acknowledging the sovereignty of Caesar and Mammon. The ancient Christians, let us recall, preferred martyrdom....
What comes next? Most religious groups have become so worldly in their outlooks, so indifferent about even their own nominal beliefs, and so willing to trim their sails to the spirit of the times that the regnant Liberal and statist orthodoxy is likely to allow them to continue to exist. In the meantime, there will be a continuation and an intensification of the pressure against public morality (e.g., condom distribution in schools, "values clarification" courses, and so on). If any religious groups recover their faith, their elan, and their numbers in sufficient measure to threaten the new atheist orthodoxy, they will be subjected to selective attacks, perhaps even in the form of Waco-style assaults against schools, churches, seminaries, and retreat houses. As the "Religious Right" tries to make the best of a bad deal by supporting "moderates" in preference to outright leftists, the philosophical and political center of gravity, if we may so call it, will shift further and further towards the left, towards those, that is, who seek the consummation of the overthrow of both Christianity and morality in America.
The bottom of the abyss is not yet in sight. We can be reassured only by the knowledge that God will not be defeated in the long run. In the words of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, spoken in the 1950's, "Christendom is dead, but not so Christ."
[Signed under the name Stefan Zachartowicz, written ca. 1993-94]