First American Right

Details: 14 October 2011

An Incident

A news article from a few years ago can serve to illustrate what Doctor Stephen Krason calls "the rigidity, unreasonableness, and even unreality of the new strict separation doctrine" enacted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The story begins in a small middle America town with one public high school where, for more than one hundred years, a Christmas program for the townsfolk was held, in which the high school chorus sang. A non-Christian family moved into the town and enrolled a teen-aged daughter in the school. She liked to sing and joined the chorus. However, she (and the family) strenuously objected to using the term "Christmas" and to the singing of any Christmas carols. The school authorities offered to have her sit out for any songs she did not care for or, if she wanted, to sit out for the whole program. However, this was not acceptable for her family and they demanded that the whole celebration must have nothing to do with Christ’s birth, but had to celebrate only the winter solstice, forcing the school and town to reject any mention of Christianity and to accept a government mandated complete secularism. The family obtained support from some national, liberal organizations and their attorneys, who flew in from both coasts and "bamboozled" a local dim-witted judge, who then issued an injunction imposing secularism, claiming that using the word Christmas and singing carols was the equivalent of "Congress establishing a state church" and, therefore, the usual century old high school program in that town had been violating the first amendment to the Federal Constitution.

The story goes on. In conformity to the court ruling, a secular "solstice program" was presented to replace the Christmas program, but during the new program, somewhere between the songs "Frosty the Snowman" and "Winter Wonderland", one of the men in the audience stood up and began to sing loudly "O Come All Ye Faithful". In a few seconds the entire audience was singing that carol. When they had finished, they were evidently so exhilarated that they went on to sing other religious carols together with the smiling chorus youths. The non-Christian girl and her family fled the school, screaming obscenities. They then demanded that the entire town be cited for "contempt of court", but that turned out to be too much secularism even for the dim-witted judge, who at last began to realize that the first amendment also does not permit the government to prohibit the free exercise of religion.

Recent Book

In giving consideration to the "constitutional turmoil" caused in recent decades by what many scholars see as the "gross historical error" of the U.S. Supreme Court’s "strict separatist interpretation of the establishment clause", attention should be paid to the growing amount of learned literature currently being published on the issue. A recent book especially deserves, in my estimation, a careful reading in its exhaustive treatment of the matter. It is entitled "Church, State, and Original Intent" (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The author, Donald L. Drakeman, is a well known church-state attorney and a lecturer at Princeton University’s Department of Politics. He is also the Chairman of that University’s Advisory Council of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His book is a formidable work, and I have only had time to read a portion of it, but it has been excellently reviewed by Doctor Krason in the latest issue of Catalyst (October 2011).

Krason notes, "Drakeman catalogues, as other writers have, the ways in which the government in the U.S., at all levels, for much of our history gave aid to religion. If our government was supposed to be neutral as between belief and unbelief, which the Supreme Court has said is constitutionally mandated, it certainly did not act that way." He points out how the anti-Catholic attitudes and beliefs of such Justices as Hugo Black and Wiley Rutledge accelerated the slide to the establishment of secularism as the national religion (or non-religion). He also remarks about the excessive reliance on and uncritical acceptance by the Court of Irving Brant’s multi-volume biography of James Madison and on the mixed, complex, and often internally contradictory views of Madison and Jefferson, resulting in an erroneous understanding of the Founders’ thoughts and intentions.

Ironically, it was after the Second World War that the onslaught of secular liberalism came full force into our national culture. The irony is that the 1940’s were some of the most religious years in our country’s recent history ("There are No Atheists in Foxholes", "God is My Co-Pilot", "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition", "Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer", etc.). Krason concludes his review: "Our Platonic guardians on the High Court have tried to remove from the realm of politics an essentially political problem. An assumption motivating them has been that any government support for religion inevitably breeds divisiveness. So, they have taken it upon themselves to fashion a secular state, a naked public square to use the term of the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, and have created divisiveness anyway. Moreover they have tried to justify themselves by promulgating the fantasy that the establishment clause requires it. One wonders how long the Court will keep up the charade."

Even Protestants

The wrong turn taken by the Supreme Court was noted even by some prominent Protestants, who issued a strong statement criticizing the Court in 1948: "The signers of the statement are right in seeing that the Supreme Court extended the meaning of the original conception of separation in a most fateful way when it moved from the mere prohibition of an establishment of religion to the exclusion of all cooperation between the state and the various religious bodies even when such cooperation does not give any of them an advantage over others. The logic of this new position would destroy all types of cooperation between church and state, which the American people have long taken for granted from the military chaplaincies to tax exemption for church property.... This new form of the doctrine of separation tends in practice to give an advantage to aggressive secularism." They said that this new doctrine is "unwarranted by the language of the first amendment"......and "will accelerate the trend toward the secularization of our culture."

The Protestant magazine, The Christian Century, said about this statement that "it commits its signers to a position virtually identical with that of the Roman Catholic Church, which contends that tax funds and the civil law may be used to aid churches provided that the aid is available to all churches alike."

Being opposed to the establishment of secularism as the national religion of America does not mean, however, that American Catholics are in any way in favor of some other establishment of a national religion. Cardinal James Gibbons said it well: "No establishment is dreamed of by any Catholics. But were it attempted it would meet united opposition from all the Catholic people of the USA, priests and prelates included." Provided that our Constitution is correctly interpreted, American Catholics see our national relationships between church and state as those which work best for the good of religion and the good of the government.