IS AMERICA A CHRISTIAN NATION?
By: Anne Gaylor
The U.S. Constitution is a secular document. It begins, "We the people," and contains no mention of "God" or "Christianity." Its only references to religion are exclusionary, such as, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust" (Art. VI), and "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" (First Amendment). The presidential oath of office, the only oath detailed in the Constitution, does not contain the phrase "so help me God" or any requirement to swear on a bible (Art. II, Sec. 7).
If we are a Christian nation, why doesn't our Constitution say so? In 1797 America made a treaty with Tripoli, declaring that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." This reassurance to Islam was written under Washington's presidency, and approved by the Senate under John Adams.
The First Amendment To The U.S. Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ."
What about the Declaration of Independence?
We are not governed by the Declaration. Its purpose was to "dissolve the political bands," not to set up a religious nation. Its authority was based on the idea that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," which is contrary to the biblical concept of rule by divine authority. It deals with laws, taxation, representation, war, immigration, and so on, never discussing religion at all.
The references to "Nature's God," "Creator," and "Divine Providence" in the Declaration do not endorse Christianity. Thomas Jefferson, its author, was a Deist, opposed to orthodox Christianity and the supernatural.
What about the Pilgrims and Puritans?
The first colony of English-speaking Europeans was Jamestown, settled in 1607 for trade, not religious freedom. Fewer than half of the 102 Mayflower passengers in 1620 were "Pilgrims" seeking religious freedom. The secular United States of America was formed more than a century and a half later. If tradition requires us to return to the views of a few early settlers, why not adopt the polytheistic and natural beliefs of the Native Americans, the true founders of the continent at least 12,000 years earlier?
Most of the religious colonial governments excluded and persecuted those of the "wrong" faith. The framers of our Constitution in 1787 wanted no part of religious intolerance and bloodshed, wisely establishing the first government in history to separate church and state.
Do the words "separation of church and state" appear in the Constitution?
The phrase, "a wall of separation between church and state," was coined by President Thomas Jefferson in a carefully crafted letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802, when they had asked him to explain the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, and lower courts, have used Jefferson's phrase repeatedly in major decisions upholding neutrality in matters of religion. The exact words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the Constitution; neither do "separation of powers," "interstate commerce," "right to privacy," and other phrases describing well-established constitutional principles.
What does "separation of church and state" mean?
Thomas Jefferson, explaining the phrase to the Danbury Baptists, said, "the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions." Personal religious views are just that: personal. Our government has no right to promulgate religion or to interfere with private beliefs.
The Supreme Court has forged a three-part "Lemon test" (Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971) to determine if a law is permissible under the First-Amendment religion clauses.
A law must have a secular purpose.
It must have a primary effect which neither advances nor inhibits religion.
It must avoid excessive entanglement of church and state.
The separation of church and state is a wonderful American principle supported not only by minorities, such as Jews, Moslems, and unbelievers, but applauded by most Protestant churches that recognize that it has allowed religion to flourish in this nation. It keeps the majority from pressuring the minority.
What about majority rule?
America is one nation under a Constitution. Although the Constitution sets up a representative democracy, it specifically was amended with the Bill of Rights in 1791 to uphold individual and minority rights. On constitutional matters we do not have majority rule. For example, when the majority in certain localities voted to segregate blacks, this was declared illegal. The majority has no right to tyrannize the minority on matters such as race, gender, or religion.
Not only is it unAmerican for the government to promote religion, it is rude. Whenever a public official uses the office to advance religion, someone is offended. The wisest policy is one of neutrality.
Isn't removing religion from public places hostile to religion?
No one is deprived of worship in America. Tax-exempt churches and temples abound. The state has no say about private religious beliefs and practices, unless they endanger health or life. Our government represents all of the people, supported by dollars from a plurality of religious and non-religious taxpayers.
Some countries, such as the U.S.S.R., expressed hostility to religion. Others, such as Iran ("one nation under God"), have welded church and state. America wisely has taken the middle course--neither for nor against religion. Neutrality offends no one, and protects everyone.
The First Amendment deals with "Congress." Can't states make their own religious policies?
Under the "due process" clause of the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868), the entire Bill of Rights applies to the states. No governor, mayor, sheriff, public school employee, or other public official may violate the human rights embodied in the Constitution. The government at all levels must respect the separation of church and state. Most state constitutions, in fact, contain language that is even stricter than the First Amendment, prohibiting the state from setting up a ministry, using tax dollars to promote religion, or interfering with freedom of conscience.
What about "One nation under God" and "In God We Trust?"
The words, "under God," did not appear in the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954, when Congress, under McCarthyism, inserted them. Likewise, "In God We Trust" was absent from paper currency before 1956. It appeared on some coins earlier, as did other sundry phrases, such as "Mind Your Business." The original U.S. motto, chosen by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, is E Pluribus Unum ("Of Many, One"), celebrating plurality, not theocracy.
Isn't American law based on the Ten Commandments?
Not at all! The first four Commandments are religious edicts having nothing to do with law or ethical behavior. Only three (homicide, theft, and perjury) are relevant to current American law, and have existed in cultures long before Moses. If Americans honored the commandment against "coveting," free enterprise would collapse! The Supreme Court has ruled that posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is unconstitutional.
Our secular laws, based on the human principle of "justice for all," provide protection against crimes, and our civil government enforces them through a secular criminal justice system.
Why be concerned about the separation of church and state?
Ignoring history, law, and fairness, many fanatics are working vigorously to turn America into a Christian nation. Fundamentalist Protestants and right-wing Catholics would impose their narrow morality on the rest of us, resisting women's rights, freedom for religious minorities and unbelievers, gay and lesbian rights, and civil rights for all. History shows us that only harm comes of uniting church and state.
Return To List
Remembering Why We Are Americans
Who's That Next to Us at the Meeting?
By: Nat Hentoff
July 5th, 2002 3:00 PM
A true patriot would keep the attention of his fellow citizens awake to their grievances, and not allow them to rest till the causes of their just complaints are removed. —Sam Adams of the Sons of Liberty and Committees of Correspondence, Boston, Massachusetts, 1771
Right after John Ashcroft revived the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover (its headquarters, after all, is named after him), The Bill of Rights defense committee of Northampton, Massachusetts (Voice, July 2), reacted by recalling Hoover's disgraced COINTELPRO program, which serially abused the Bill of Rights:
"In the 1970s, the Senate banned COINTELPRO because of its unconstitutional character. The FBI had invaded privacy in order to disrupt lawful political activity. . . . By banning COINTELPRO, Congress declared illegal what was obviously unconstitutional. It was a major step forward for democracy in this country.
"Now Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Bush . . . have unilaterally placed in jeopardy the right to organize peacefully and legally, [putting] our communities at risk. Who is sitting next to us at city council, church, peace, or ACLU meetings? And what will that mean to the outcome of that meeting or to our individual security?"
These citizens of Northampton are well aware of what constitutional lawyer David Cole wrote in the valuable June 3 "Striking Back" issue of The Nation:
"National-security types often assure us that wartime diminutions of civil liberties are only temporary. But this is likely to be a permanent war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that the war will not be over—and the prisoners on Guantanamo will not be released—until there are no terrorist organizations of potentially global reach left in the world.
"Given that modern technology gives practically everyone 'global reach,' that day will never come. . . . The only certainty is that we will see further erosions of our privacy, our freedoms, and our principles."
Also in that June 3 issue of The Nation is an ominous and revealing piece by Robert Dreyfuss ("The Cops Are Watching You"), which details the increasing interconnections among the FBI, state and local intelligence units, and anti-terrorism squads. For one example, there is veteran FBI agent Mike Clemens, now stationed in Baltimore, who assembles and directs Maryland's FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). To determine which groups under surveillance might be involved in violent activity, Clemens told Dreyfuss, a wide spectrum of organizations has to be monitored.
Therefore, writes Dreyfuss, "the FBI—working in conjunction with state and local police—often gathers a significant amount of information on groups that end up having no proclivity toward violence, Clemens says. . . . 'We identify a group, develop sources inside it. Maybe we make 15 contacts or more over a period of six months, and if they are all negative, we just leave them alone.' " This infiltration by multiple government forces is going on nationally.
And are the names of group members, along with their other affiliations, eventually expunged from FBI files? That's as likely as George W. Bush doing penance for all those people he executed while governor of Texas.
Keep in mind that this invasive FBI monitoring of entirely lawful groups was going on—under the direction of John Ashcroft—for months before he disclosed in May that, under the "new" guidelines, he was bringing back COINTELPRO (though he never used that disgraced name).
In his Nation article, Robert Dreyfuss also reports that in March, the ACLU in Denver found out that since 1999, the police there "have maintained intelligence dossiers on 3200 people in 208 organizations, from globalization protesters to the [Quaker] American Friends Service Committee, and from Amnesty International to the Chiapas Coalition and the American Indian Movement. 'Individuals who are not even suspected of a crime and organizations that don't have a criminal history are labeled criminal extremists,' says Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado."
New York City's police commissioner, Ray Kelly, has added counter-terrorism specialists to his intelligence division, but do we have any idea who will qualify for inclusion in the NYPD dossiers of suspected domestic "terrorists" that will be exchanged with federal intelligence units? This is something the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York Civil Rights Coalition, and other groups operating in the spirit of Sam Adams ought to look into. So should teams of investigative reporters. Look at how much Robert Dreyfuss found out in Maryland.
In From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776, historian Pauline Maier quotes a letter from Sam Adams emphasizing that "the colonists must henceforth depend primarily upon themselves for the defense of their liberties."
In another passage, published in the January 21, 1771, Boston Gazette, and just as crucial and pertinent under Bush and Ashcroft as it was under King George III, Sam Adams wrote, "Our ship is in the hands of pilots who . . . are steering directly under full sail to a rock. The whole crew may see [this course to violate our liberties] in full view if they look the right way."
There is much more of value to our present condition in Pauline Maier's From Resistance to Revolution. Fortunately, this account of how American liberties were won has recently been restored to print by W.W. Norton & Co. I recommend the book highly to the Bill of Rights defense committees rising around the country, to ACLU affiliates, and to the growing number of increasingly concerned citizens—from right to left and in the middle.
The book's epigraph is from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: "The Revolution of the United States was the result of a mature and reflecting preference for freedom. . . . It contracted no alliance with the turbulent passions of anarchy, but its course was marked, on the contrary, by a love of order and law."
The Bush administration and the Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress keep intoning the mantra "the rule of law," while the FBI and CIA are amassing more information on more of us—traducing the law and using more invasive technology than ever before.
As David Cole says, "Popular resistance is critical."
Return To List
Holding Courts In Contempt
By: Stuart Taylor, Jr.
NEWSWEEK
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
July 8 issue — The federal court decision declaring the “under God” phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional caused an uproar. But it may also provide a window into a larger contempt for the judiciary that seems to be taking hold in George W. Bush’s Washington.
THE STORMY LEGAL BATTLE after the 2000 presidential election, and the ever-nastier fights over nominations to the federal bench, risk eroding the courts’ standing among Democrats and Republicans alike. Discontent with the courts is particularly strong in the current White House, which views the judiciary with more disdain than any in recent history. Bush has made no secret of his desire to curb judicial power, and especially the courts’ role in reviewing his conduct in the war on terrorism.
The pledge case itself may turn out to be a minor distraction. California’s Ninth Circuit, one of the nation’s most liberal courts, is also one of the most overturned—and its pledge decision is almost certain to be reversed down the road. But lost in the tumult over the ruling was a simple fact that helps to illuminate the larger dissatisfaction with the courts: as much as the ruling overreached, the California court was clearly taking its cues from a higher authority—the U. S. Supreme Court.
The California judges’ condemnation of the words “under God” in the pledge was in fact a perfectly plausible reading of several recent Supreme Court precedents, which have contained sweeping denunciations of government-sanctioned bows to religion. Two years ago the Supreme Court used similar language when it ruled, 6-3, that student-led prayers at high-school graduations and football games have “the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship”—even though nobody was required to go to the games or join in the prayers. In that case, the two centrist justices joined the four liberals, and their opinion suggested that prayers would be unconstitutional even if students approved them without encouragement from school officials.
Does that mean the Supremes will uphold the California ruling if the case eventually reaches them? Not likely. Various Supreme Court justices, including a majority of the current nine, have suggested that nothing in the Constitution requires “under God” to be deleted from the pledge.
But whatever the eventual outcome in the pledge case, the Supreme Court’s tendency to seed its own rulings with loose rhetoric has certainly tempted adventurous lower-court judges to issue decisions that infuriate most Americans. This only plays into the hands of administration officials who believe the courts lack common sense.
BUSH AND THE COURTS
This disdain for judges, and for what Bush calls “legalisms,” comes naturally to a president who saw his election victory almost snatched away by the liberal Florida Supreme Court. So it is no surprise that a trademark of the Bush war against terrorism has been a push to insulate his policies from judicial review. In his order last November authorizing special military commissions to detain and try noncitizens suspected of terrorism, Bush explicitly provided that suspects could not “seek any remedy” in “any court of the United States.”
Bush has run into scattered judicial resistance to the secretive detentions of noncitizens arrested in the post-September 11 dragnet. A federal judge in Manhattan rejected the administration’s use of the “material witness” law to detain people charged with no crime or immigration violation. Other judges have challenged the legality of the blanket secrecy policy; one ordered that deportation hearings be opened immediately, despite a Justice Department claim that that this would provide critical information to terrorists. (The Supreme Court has suspended that order, allowing the government to maintain the secrecy while it appeals the lower court’s decision.)
Impatient with the need to satisfy the courts, Bush has invoked his commander-in-chief powers in an effort to block meaningful judicial review in the cases of two detained U.S. citizens suspected of Al Qaeda connections—Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan, and Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago on suspicion of plotting a “dirty bomb” attack. In the Hamdi case, the administration made a sweeping challenge to the court’s power, arguing that the courts “may not second-guess” the U.S. military’s decision to classify a suspect as an “enemy combatant”—even though the designation leads to indefinite incarceration. Officials also argued against letting Hamdi see a lawyer, which they say would interfere with efforts to interrogate him.
Clearly, Bush is testing just how far he can go in bypassing the courts—and judicial rulings that offend most Americans only help his cause. If judges hope to stop a popular wartime president from robbing them of their power, they’ll need to win the support of the Congress, and the public.
Return To List
OPEN FORUM
"ENTER HERE"
YOUR COMMENTS
We encourage our readers to submit their comments, articles or a response to any item that appears on our pages.
Please be aware though, WNOL reserves the right to edit any article submitted to it for publication which may be offensive to the point of abusive or vulgar language, racist, gender bashing, sexist, unfounded accusations, threats or personal vendettas.
Send your material to: EDITOR
Return To List
