Americans suffer from 'separation' anxiety

Two recent court decisions have highlighted the ongoing debate concerning the separation of church and state.

In a widely discussed decision, the ninth district court of appeals found the use of the words “one nation under God” in the pledge of allegiance to be unconstitutional. A nearly simultaneous decision by the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of vouchers for school tuition being used to pay for religious school. Each case is worth a closer look.

            The ninth district court of appeals acknowledged in its official ruling that “the Supreme Court has occasionally commented that the presence of ‘one nation under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional.” However, the appeals court found that in requiring all students to recite the pledge with the words “under God” was not a neutral action.

            The official ruling stated, “A profession that we are a nation ‘under God’ is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,’ because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.”

            The court ruled that the government must remain neutral with respect to religion and found “one nation under God” to violate that neutrality. One circuit judge, Ferdinand Fernandez agreed in part and disagreed in part with the judgment. He wrote,

“Legal world abstractions and ruminations aside, when all is said and done, the danger that “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance will tend to bring about a theocracy or suppress somebody’s beliefs is so minuscule as to be de minimis.”

In another recent ruling, the United States Supreme Court found the Cleveland, Ohio plan for using tuition vouchers to pay for education to be constitutional. In upholding the voucher plan, the court rejected a constitutional challenge to the use of public money to help parents pay for religious school.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s found precedent for upholding a program of “true private choice” when the government is neutral between religious and secular choices. The decision was a five to four vote. The dissenting justices considered the decision a major breach in the wall between church and state and predicted that it would prove divisive.

In all the rhetoric, it is easy to forget that the constitution never uses the words “separation of church and state.” The applicable portion of the constitution is the First Amendment, which reads,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

This establishment clause of the First Amendment was written to protect us all from the horrors the early settlers had experienced in Europe when their understanding of God clashed with the views of the state religion.

I am thankful that the founders of our nation did not create a state religion to which all must adhere. While I could line up a group of quotations from the Founding Fathers which would make them all seem like orthodox Christians, the truth is that many of the Founding Fathers were Deists, who held vague beliefs in God.

The classic Deist affirmation is that God was like a watchmaker who created the world and then set back to look on from afar. Had Thomas Jefferson, for example, been the one to set a state religion, it would have likely upheld this deistic view of the world.

It was in fact then President Thomas Jefferson who coined the term separation of church and state in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. The President wrote, in part, to allay the concerns of the group that no state religion would be established. Jefferson wrote,

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise there,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

            With that letter, Jefferson brought the image of a wall of separation into the interpretation of the first amendment. The 1947 Supreme Court's decision in Everson v. Board of Education made a wall of separation part of constitutional interpretation. In that case, the court took a very restrictive view of the First Amendment declaring “any aid or benefit” to religion from governmental actions unconstitutional.

Justice Hugo Black wrote, “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”

This idea was countered by Chief Justice Rehnquist in his ruling on the 1985 Wallace v. Jaffree case, which involved the constitutionality of a moment of silence to start the school day. Justice Rehnquist wrote,

“The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment had acquired a well-accepted meaning: it forbade establishment of a national religion, and forbade preference among religious sects or denominations… The Establishment Clause did not require government neutrality between religion and irreligion, nor did it prohibit the Federal Government from providing nondiscriminatory aid to religion. There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the ‘wall of separation’ that was constitutionalized in Everson.”

            I agree with Chief Justice Rehnquist. The Establishment Clause intended to prevent the Federal Government from preferring one denomination over another.

The constitution does not necessitate or validate relegating religion to the private sector alone. There is no basis for believing our Founding Fathers intended to create the current situation in which mention of God in a publicly sponsored forum is endangered.

Further challenges are sure to come, including an attack on the constitutionality of “In God We Trust” on United States currency. In each case, I hope that the courts will find a middle path between having the state endorse any one narrow religious view and striking all religious references from public life.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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