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THE HOME OF THE GODLESS AND THE LAND OF THE FREE(THINKER) By William Sierichs Jr. Newspaper columnist Joseph Perkins thinks the U.S. Supreme Court should "settle, once and for all, the half-century-long legal war between the God-fearing and the godless" by allowing official school prayers. He also mocks "secular humanists" who are outraged when officials invoke a god in their public pronouncements, such as Bill Clinton’s 1999 Thanksgiving proclamation. In a November 1999 column for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Perkins said he wants the justices "to reach all the way back to 1962 and overturn the ruling that first declared school prayer unconstitutional," when "the liberal, activist Warren Court turned the First Amendment’s so-called ‘establishment clause’ on its head." He calls the separation of church and state "that phantom constitutional principle" based upon a misreading of the Constitution by people who "are obviously ignorant of the founders’ views on government and religion." Perkins also quotes George Washington invoking "Almighty God" in response to Congress’ request for a day of public thanksgiving and prayer; quotes a theistic utterance by Benjamin Franklin (which has a phony ring to it; Perkins cites no source for it); and notes that Congress opens its sessions with prayers. "If prayer is constitutionally acceptable in the public chambers of the Capitol, how can the Supreme Court constitutionally defend a ban on prayer and other forms of religious expression in schools and other public venues," he argues, adding that the U.S. was "founded by God-fearing people who never imagined that the government they created would one day banish religion in schools." We don’t need Joseph Perkins or anyone else to tell us what the founders intended on the subject of religion. We know exactly what they wanted. It’s in the U.S. Constitution - or rather, it’s not there. Nowhere does the Constitution cite God, Jesus or Christianity. Its preamble states six purely-secular reasons for composing the Constitution. It does not name a state god nor create a state religion, unlike Christian governments since the 4th century C.E. The oath of office for the president is godless; religion has no part in the oath or the president’s duties. The Constitution makes exactly one reference to religion, in Article VI: "but no religious Test shall ever be required as a qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." An atheist has as much right to hold public office as Billy Graham. The primary author of the Constitution, James Madison (to quote a founder Perkins ignores), pointed this out in an Oct. 17, 1788, letter to Thomas Jefferson when he discussed the pros and cons of adding a bill of rights. Among his concerns: "because there is great reason to fear that a positive declaration of some of the most essential rights could not be obtained in the requisite latitude. I am sure that the rights of Conscience in particular, if submitted to public definition would be narrowed much more than they are likely ever to be by an assumed power. One of the objections in New England was that the Constitution by prohibiting religious tests opened a door for Jews Turks & infidels." [footnote 1] This was not an accidental omission. Devout Christians tried to get the state ratifying conventions to demand that the Constitution be amended to declare Christianity the state religion. The Christians failed, and have failed repeatedly in the 212 years since to make the United States a legally Christian nation. Our Constitution is a godless document, not a God-fearing one. We are a godless nation, not a God-fearing nation. The struggle in our country is not between the God-fearing and the godless, but between those people who believe in freedom of religion - which means freedom from any and every religion you want no part of - and those people who believe that members of one religion can use the power of the government to cram their beliefs down everyone else’s throats. We know which side the majority of America’s founders took in this debate because they left us their thoughts, which secular humanists can quote to Perkins. The founders grew up in English colonies that, like England, were legal theocracies. The founders knew of Baptists and Quakers being fined, imprisoned, even whipped because they wanted to practice religion their own way, not the way dictated by the government church. The founders knew that attempts to enforce religious conformity had led to horrendous bloodshed in the past, such as the Thirty Years War, the Huguenot wars in France, the Anglo-Irish wars and the wars between England and Spain, and Spain and the Netherlands. In Puritan Massachusetts, Quakers had even been hanged to stop them from preaching. The government also censored publications, so that no openly anti-Christian or anti-theist material was available to balance pro-religious arguments. This is what Thomas Jefferson referred to when he wrote: "Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth." [footnote 2] Furthermore, the full rights of citizenship - voting and holding public office - were granted only to certain Protestant Christians. The anti-Christian Jefferson once held church office because it had political duties. Even after religious freedom was established, Christians remained a significant element of the population. Any politician who wanted to hold national office could not be publicly non-Christian. Washington was not a Christian, contrary to Perkins’ attempt to tailor him for clerical garb, nor were Jefferson, James Madison or many other prominent figures. Washington did go to churches to listen to sermons, but he refused to take the sacraments - mandatory for a Christian - and declined repeatedly to publicly identify himself as a Christian. In private, he was a skeptic, friends said. No wonder that the clergy, years after his death, muttered that he was a Deist. [footnote 3] Jefferson was more openly critical of Christianity, to the point that some ministers publicly denounced him as an atheist during the 1800 presidential election - which Jefferson won. Religious Reichers today offer the absurd claim that Jefferson was a marginal figure in the constitutional debates because he was in France at the time of the ratification. By 1787, he was author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, former governor of Virginia and current ambassador to America’s most valued ally. Further, he was a core member of the political and cultural elite of his day, who both reflected and influenced what Americans thought and was in regular correspondence with many founders, notably his close friend Madison. This is marginal? Jefferson’s comment on separation was not some unique concept he invented. "Separation of church and state" was used by other people in his day and earlier as a shorthand explanation of their view. The phrase goes back to at least the 17th century - probably the 16th century - in debates in England over the legal position of religion. It was an integral part of Roger Williams’ arguments. [footnote 4] Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, was as much a separationist as Jefferson. In a March 2, 1819, letter to Robert Walsh, Madison wrote that it had once been the opinion that government could not stand "without the prop of a Religious establishment" and "the Xn religion" would not survive without government aid. Instead, religion had thrived since 1787, he noted, and "The Civil Govt. tho’ bereft of everything like an associated hierarchy possesses the requisite stability and performs its functions with complete success; Whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, & the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State." [footnote 5] Again, in a July 10, 1822, letter to Edward Livingston, Madison complained about "another deviation" from the principle that presidential proclamations should not push religion in the form of public holidays. He believed that at most the president could recommend a day when religious believers might all celebrate together, with no injunction toward anyone who declined. He criticized anew the idea that government and religion needed each other "Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together." [footnote 6] Madison elsewhere complained about what we would call a slippery slope in religious proclamations. "The 1st proclamation of Genl Washington dated Jany 1. 1795 recommending a day of thanksgiving, embraced all who believed in a supreme ruler of the Universe. That of Mr Adams called for a Xn worship. Many private letters reproaching the Proclamations issued by J.M. [Madison himself - Sierichs] for using general terms, used in that of Presidt W-n; and some of them for not inserting particulars according with the faith of certain Xn sects. The practice if not strictly guarded naturally terminates in a conformity to the creed of the majority and a single sect, if amounting to a majority." [footnote 7] Madison spelled out one of his strongest warnings on this subject in an Oct. 17, 1788, letter to Jefferson. He notes that Virginia would not have adopted Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom if the Legislature had believed that the majority of people wanted freedom of religion restricted. "Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents." [footnote 8] Thus, rights are to protect the minority - such as non-Christians - from tyranny by the majority. Christian prayers at government functions are exactly the type of fascism Madison warned against. Prior to the creation of the U.S. Constitution, John Adams wrote a book defending the new state constitutions against European critics. At one point, he says the state governments were "erected on the simple principles of nature." He later says, "It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture." [footnote 9] The founders are not with Perkins. Neither is the history of school prayer law. The courts have never banned students from praying quietly before, during or after school. The only thing courts have banned is public officials forcing students to sit through a prayer, which usually would be Christian and would almost certainly be offensive to at least some students - a majority of students in some schools where non-Christian students predominate. This did not start with a 1962 Supreme Court ruling. Beginning in the 19th century, a number of state courts previously had ruled that state constitutions prohibited official prayers or Bible readings. In 1915, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in "Herold vs. [Caddo] Parish Board of School Directors" that Bible readings and prayers in public schools were illegal in Louisiana. By 1962, only a minority of school systems in the U.S. forced prayer upon children. [footnote 10] Allowing students to vote on the prayers or letting a student speaker express religious sentiments in a school gathering is a subterfuge, since a majority of students in most schools would call themselves Christians - either because they’re genuinely devout or because peer pressure would force them to if they’re not. Student-led prayers inevitably would be Christian prayers. Should Muslim, Hindu or atheist students somehow get the podium, Christian administrators certainly would not allow them to give Muslim or Hindu prayers or read from anti-religion statements by Tom Paine or Robert Ingersoll. We know that because school officials in various states have blocked or tried to block the founding of atheist student clubs as a counterbalance to Christian student clubs. [footnote 11] Contrary to Perkins’ implication, Washington did not favor pushing religion onto people. On Aug. 18, 1790, he wrote a letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., in which he said that Americans "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." [footnote 12] "Toleration" was not merely a general term in his day. It was a legal doctrine in that the English Parliament had issued an Act of Toleration in 1689 for some Protestant groups other than those that belonged to the Church of England - which basically meant that Puritans and Presbyterians could not legally be tortured or burned at the stake. The English government also gave unofficial toleration to Roman Catholics, so long as they prayed in private. Nor was Washington hostile to the godless. In a March 24, 1784, letter, Washington asked his aide Tench Tilghman to hire some craftsmen for him. "If they are good workmen, they may be of Assia, [sic] Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, [Muslims] Jews, or Christian of any Sect - or they may be Atheists ..." So much for a "God-fearing" George Washington. [footnote 13] Contrast this to former President George Bush’s comment that atheists can’t be good citizens. George Bush was no George Washington. The founders clearly knew that mixing government and religion inevitably leads to repression, censorship and bloodshed. They wanted to avoid those horrors in the United States. So they kept religion out of our Constitution; they banned religious tests for public office; and they added another legal protection against theo-Nazism when the First Amendment was passed, forbidding the government from establishing a religion. Perkins falsely claims he’s trying to educate people about what America’s founders intended. Instead, he’s counting on people’s ignorance or confusion about the founders to pull off a scam by claiming they really intended to make the United States into a Christian version of Iran. Even if Perkins were right about the founders intending this to be a Christian nation, he would still be wrong for several reasons. First, the United States has changed considerably in 212 years. Back then, most religious believers were Protestants. Today, Roman Catholics are the largest single denomination, and Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are significant elements of the population. We have no national religion, not even an agreement among Christians as to which form of Christianity is correct. Uniformity of belief or prayer is impossible and could not be imposed without extreme violence. More importantly, what the founders thought is still important, but hardly commanding. We have to deal with the urban, industrialized, multicultural nation of today, not the rural, agrarian, Eurocentric nation of 1787. Second, Christianity is one of the most murderous and brutally totalitarian movements in history, responsible in the 20th century alone for millions of deaths in Yugoslavia’s religious wars, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, Argentina’s "Dirty War" and other conflicts. It long ago forfeited any claim to moral superiority or moral leadership, as Jefferson noted in the quote above, and has no claim to respect by any person or group, much less the government of the United States. Third, the effect of Perkins’ proposal would be to create two classes of citizens, Christians being in the first class and non-Christians and Christian dissenters in the second, lower class. This is contrary to every trend in American law since its founding, as well as our fundamental principles. When the Constitution was written, most states limited the right to vote and hold public office to white male property-owners. These rights were progressively expanded to include non-property owners, black Americans, women and 18-year-olds, to name some major changes. We’re on the verge of giving full rights to homosexuals, despite the vigorous - even violent - opposition of devout Christians. Creating two classes of citizens is unacceptable. Any serious attempt would tear the nation apart. Conservative Americans support separation; radical extremists such as Perkins want to destroy it and the United States as well. The self-serving nature of the arguments of Perkins and other Christians like him expose the reason for his dishonesty - he wants to rule other people as a tyrant, not be a fellow citizen. The effects of such church-state mixings demonstrate why the Religious Reichers’ dishonesty must be exposed. Claiming legal superiority for one group over all others led to the horrors of the Soviet Union and other Communist states, Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Serbia, segregation, apartheid, Northern Ireland, East Timor and other atrocities - religious and secular alike - just in the 20th-century. On the matter of church-state separation, the founders were absolutely right. Keep religion out of the government, prayers out of public schools and theism out of the Constitution, and we’ll all live longer and happier lives, the godless and the God-fearing alike.
1) Madison, "Writings," 1999, The Library of America, page 420 2) Jefferson, "Notes on the State of Virginia," Query XVII, "Writings," 1984, The Library of America, page 286 3) In his private journal, Jefferson once commented about George Washington: "I know that Gouverneur Morris, who claimed to be in his secrets, and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more in that system [Christianity] than he did." from John E. Ramsburg’s 1906 book "Six Historic Americans," who cites "Jefferson's Works," Vol. IV, page 572, as his source. Ramsburg also quotes clergymen who called Washington a Deist. 4) "Walls of separation" of church and state appears in "Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie," Vol. 8, by Richard Hooker, printed in 1648, partially reprinted in "Divine Right and Democracy," 1986, Penguin Books. The phrase is on page 219. Hooker had died in 1600 after writing an eight-volume defense of the Church of England’s legal dominance. Five volumes were published in his lifetime. The last three volumes supposedly were published in 1648. A modern editor says the scholarly consensus is that the 1648 volumes are authentic. Hooker was criticizing 16th-century dissidents who called for separation. 5) Madison, "Writings," page 727 6) Madison, "Writings," pages 788-789 7) Madison, "Detached Memoranda," "Writings," page 765 8) Madison, "Writings," page 421 9) Page Smith, "John Adams," Vol. II, 1962, Doubleday & Company Inc., page 692 10) Rob Boston, "Why the Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church & State," 1993, Prometheus Books, pages 100-102 11) In the November 1996 issue of "Freethought Today," page 4, former Alabama high school student Adam Butler describes his personal and legal struggle to form a freethought club at Pelham High School, Ala., against opposition by a Christian principal; the May 1999 issue of "Freethought Today," page 5, describes the struggle of middle school student Amanda Black to form an atheist club at South Middle School in Belleville, Mich., over opposition by a school board that cleared a Christian club with no problems. The January 1999 issue of "Church & State," page 14, describes the barriers school officials placed before Micah White of Grand Blanc, Mich., in his efforts to start at atheist club at his high school; legal intervention by Americans United for Separation of Church and State was required before officials approved the club. Also, Robert S. Alley’s "Without a Prayer," 1996, Prometheus Books, recounts the struggles a number of Americans have had with school officials who used their positions to promote Christianity while ignoring the Constitution, laws and court rulings to the contrary. Church-school separationists have faced intense, even violent, public hostility for defending the Constitution, according to Alley. On Dec. 3, 1999, in Louisiana, a lawsuit was filed challenging a new school prayer law because students in West Monroe, La., who tried to opt out of public prayers were pressured to participate by other students and were called such names as "Satan worshipper," according to an Associated Press story. 12) Washington, "Writings," 1997, The Library of America, page 767 13) Washington, "Writings,"
pages 555-556
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