With this year’s Thanksgiving holiday at our door, it is fitting
that we ask an important question that has so much to do with our
Constitutional liberties: What is the Separation of Church and State?
Why is it fitting to ask this question as we approach the Thanksgiving
holiday? Well, it’s precisely the Thanksgiving holiday that
reminds us of the origins of the phrase, separation of church and state.
In 1620, a group of Christian pilgrims known as the Separatists washed
ashore in what came to be known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. They first
left England to escape religious persecution there. They landed in
Holland but realized Holland was not a place that allowed their faith
to flourish. They set sail again; this time for America.
When the pilgrims set up their colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts, they
soon employed a policy that came out of their own struggles for
religious freedom. They employed the first American policy of a
separation of church and state.
This may seem like a counterintuitive decision for a group of deeply
religious people. However, the Separatists knew full well that when the
power of the church is placed under the control of the government, the
government then begins to mandate its own sanctioned religious
practice. The Separatists had endured the religious persecution of the
state in England and wanted to ensure that no such persecution would
occur in America. Unlike the Puritans, who believed in establishing
some form of a Theocracy, these Separatists, being true to their name,
decided to separate the two entities of the church and the state so as
to allow the free expression of religion to flourish. That is precisely
what happened. Early America in the 1600’s saw many religious
groups and sects set up colonies that were specifically designed for
the free expression of their religion without government interference.
That is what the separation of church and state is really all about:
keeping the government out of the church’s business.
Fast forward to the writing of our nation’s Bill of Rights in
1789. Founding fathers like Patrick Henry and James Madison knew that
allowing a mandated government religious practice would stifle
religious expression in the new nation. They decided to embrace what is
the most harmonious balance between the federal government and the
church that the world has ever seen. They wrote the First Amendment of
the Constitution.
In the First Amendment we see the balance between the federal
government’s role in protecting religious practice and not
coercing it. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United
States, which guarantees all Americans the freedom of speech, religion,
press, petition and assembly, has this to say about religious practice:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
The federal government cannot mandate a religious practice, nor can
they prohibit religious practice. Unfortunately, in the last few
decades we have seen many judicial rulings that demonstrate a desire to
uphold the establishment clause of the First Amendment at the expense
of the free exercise clause. This is completely contrary to the purpose
of the First Amendment and a violation of it as well.
The first major case that undermined the balance between the
establishment clause and the free exercise clause occurred in 1947. In
Everson vs. Board of Education the Supreme Court, led by Justice Hugo
Black, an FDR appointee and member of the Ku Klux Klan, reinterpreted
the meaning of the First Amendment of the Constitution. This decision
set in motion an unconstitutional chain of events that has undermined
our First Amendment liberties ever since.
Just what did Justice Black and the other FDR appointees to the Supreme
Court do? They hijacked a phrase used by President Thomas Jefferson,
“separation of church and state,” found in a letter he
wrote to the Danville Baptist Association in Virginia (1802).
Jefferson’s letter was actually used by the court to limit
religious freedom.
By taking completely out of context the phrase used by Jefferson in his
letter, "separation of church and state," the Supreme Court ruled that
the freedom of religious expression in the public square was a
violation of the “separation of church and state” found in
the Constitution. This is an astounding ruling, as the phrase
“separation of church and state” is not even found in the
Constitution.
In 1947, the Supreme Court actually used Jefferson’s letter to
the Danville Baptists as the basis for their decision, even though his
letter is not Constitutional law. This is another example of the
Progressive Bait and Switch tactic at work that I spoke of in my last
article with Townhall.
Another interesting fact concerning Jefferson's use of the phrase,
“separation of church and state” is its true meaning.
Thomas Jefferson used this phrase as nothing more than a metaphor to
express the First Amendment’s role as a protector of religious
expression in the public square. So even if Jefferson’s letter
was Constitutional law, Hugo Black and the other FDR appointees on the
Supreme Court still misinterpreted the meaning of Jefferson’s
letter and the separation of church and state.
In his letter to the Danville Baptist Association, President Jefferson
said he believed there was a "wall of separation" in the Constitution
that was designed to keep the government from interfering in the
affairs of the church, not a wall to keep free speech out of the public
arena. Thankfully, the Supreme Court finally clarified what Jefferson
truly meant in Lynch vs. Donnelly (1984) when they said that the phrase
“separation of church and state” is nothing more than the
opinion of Thomas Jefferson, a “euphemism” as they put it,
not Constitutional law.
While the 1984 case was a breath of fresh air to those who love
liberty, the damage of the 1947 case has led to other terrible
decisions that defy logic, reason and the Constitution itself. In fact,
the 1947 ruling, in spite of being inaccurate and unconstitutional, has
become part of the American collective consciousness.
In what has become the most infamous Supreme Court ruling regarding
religious speech, Engel vs. Vitale (1962), the Supreme Court
reinterpreted the meaning of the establishment clause in the First
Amendment and misused its authority to ban the free exercise of
religion in schools. This is the famous school prayer case.
According to the Supreme Court in 1962, the free exercise of religion
in school somehow violated the establishment clause of the First
Amendment. The founding fathers would be up in arms to hear that free
speech was now censored in the name of protecting the establishment
clause.
While it is true that American students who do not want to pray in
school should not be forced to do so, it also true that those who do
desire to pray should not be denied their First Amendment right to do
so. There is a balance in the First Amendment between the establishment
clause and the free exercise clause. It must be upheld in order for
liberty to abound.
Where do these liberal judicial activist judges get this bizarre and
erroneous interpretation of the First Amendment and the separation of
church state in the first place? Looking back in American history, we
find that this same misguided interpretation of the First Amendment was
actually the vision of Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920. Baldwin, it is important to mention,
was a member of the Communist Party of the USA.
It was Baldwin’s vision to remove all references to God and
religion from the public square, even though the free expression clause
of the First Amendment is clear as day. Starting around the
1920’s, a major reinterpretation of the meaning of the First
Amendment and the Constitution itself began to make its way into the
colleges and universities of the USA. It is this time in history that
colleges and universities begin to teach that the Constitution is a
“living document;” one that changes with the times.
Regardless of the opinion of radicals like Baldwin, it is important to
remember that all Americans do have the Constitutional right of
religious expression in the public square as long as the federal
government does not coerce that expression. Ironically, what the
Supreme Court did in 1947 and 1962 was coerce the limiting of religious
expression, in keeping with Roger Baldwin’s dream. As such, the
First Amendment rights of all Americans have been threatened and even
violated in some cases, because the Supreme Court embraced the opinion
of a man who was a member of the Communist Party of the USA, not the
Constitution of the United States.
Finally, after more than forty years of cognitive dissonance concerning
the free exercise of religion, the Supreme Court re-established the
true nature of the First Amendment in Board of Education of Westside
Community Schools vs. Mergens (1990). In this case, the Supreme Court
upheld the rights of all students to voluntarily pray in school, form
Bible study groups and express their religious beliefs provided the
government, including government paid officials (i.e. teachers,
counselors), do not coerce that religious expression. Yet, even with
the Mergens case re-establishing the balance between the establishment
clause and the free exercised clause, the damage of the 1947 and 1962
cases still lives on.
Let’s consider the 2002 case of Kala Brotos, a five-year old
kindergarten student from Saratoga Springs, NY. Before eating her
lunch, little Kala simply prayed out loud and gave thanks for her meal.
Her teacher then scolded her before the entire the class, claiming that
Kala violated the separation of church and state – Roger
Baldwin’s version, that is. The teacher even claimed that Kala
committed a “crime against humanity.”
Well, a crime against humanity was indeed committed -- against a little
five year-old girl -- who simply gave thanks before her lunch. If this
is not tyranny, I don’t know what is.
Take a closer look at our culture today. The propaganda concerning the
First Amendment is staggering. Each year thousands of students are
suspended, harassed, receive lower grades on their term papers, or even
arrested for simply expressing their deeply held religious beliefs in
the public forum. I know this personally having endured the
discrimination and bigotry of liberal professors during college and
graduate school. Such behavior is against federal law. It is called
belief discrimination and it occurs more often than you think.
If we take a closer look at just what the Constitution really says, we
will see that the religious practice of Americans is the choice of each
citizen and cannot be censored even in public. The government cannot
mandate religious practice, nor can the government deny that same
practice. That is the balance of powers spelled out in the First
Amendment. If we fail to maintain that balance then we as a nation are
no longer truly free.
When we give thanks this Thanksgiving, let us remember the words of
Thomas Jefferson, who said, “The God who gave us life gave us
liberty at the same time.”
