I don’t have a settled opinion about CBS commentator Andy Rooney, favorable or unfavorable. I never go out of my way to watch him. But neither do I rush to hit the remote when I see his face on my screen at the end of a 60 Minutes telecast.
His humor can be diverting. He is usually good-natured and sometimes takes on the politically correct crowd. Sometimes. He respects a few sacred cows. He seems to have learned a lesson when he got heat from black activists and the homosexual lobby a few years ago.
I can’t remember whether he identifies himself as an atheist or an agnostic, but he has made clear in interviews that he does not live his life by the tenets of any religious belief. This secular bias came through during his monologue on the Sept. 7 edition of 60 Minutes, when Rooney criticized Alabama Judge Roy S. Moore for defying a federal judge’s order to remove a memorial representing the 10 Commandments from outside his courtroom.
What was Rooney’s point? It can be summarized by his parting shot. He asked what supporters of Judge Moore would think if some day in the not too distant future a Muslim judge decided to erect a display featuring passages from the Koran outside his courtroom. One suspects that Rooney believes Judge Moore and his supporters were left sputtering in search of an answer.
Rooney’s objective was to open Christians’ eyes to what he thinks is the danger of bringing our religious beliefs into the public arena. And I am sure a good number of his viewers reacted in just that way. At least at first. One can only hope that many of them asked themselves a follow-up question. Our Founding Fathers were as bright and well read as Andy Rooney. Why didn’t they think of the possibility of Muslim judges substituting the Koran for the Bible?
The answer is that they never imagined that Americans would let their country be reshaped in that manner by immigration. Rooney made a point different from the one he intended. Until very recently, Americans thought it entirely proper for Christians to shape society on the basis of our religious beliefs. The First Amendment was designed to prevent any one of America’s Christian churches from establishing itself as an established church. America was not to be an officially Episcopal, Catholic or Congregational country. The Founding Fathers wanted to avoid the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that had afflicted Europe. But they took it for granted that America was to be a Christian country.
Check the record. The Founding Fathers wanted no national church, but the local level was a different matter. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, three New England states still had Congregational established churches. The South Carolina Constitution of 1778 stated that “the Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed the established religion of the state” and stipulated that “no person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office under this Constitution.” Maryland levied “a general tax for the support of the Christian religion.” Massachusetts imposed a tax to support “public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality.” New Hampshire had a similar tax. The Northwest Ordinance stressed the need to fortify “religion and morality” and appropriated money for the Christian education of the Indians.
James Madison wrote, “We have staked the future of all of our political institutions…upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” Daniel Webster said, “Let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion…. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political or literary.” We could go on.
That’s why the generations of Americans who came before us deemed it appropriate for witnesses to swear upon the Bible during courtroom testimony; why every president takes his oath of office with his hand upon the Bible; why the Supreme Court begins every proceeding with the proclamation, “God save the United States and this Honorable Court”; why public offices and schools until very recently made clear why they were closing on Christmas and Good Friday; why our currency bears our national motto, “In God We Trust”; why the words “one nation under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance.
But was it not always understood that immigration might change the composition of our citizenry and dilute the Christian character of the country? No, it was not. There may be people nowadays who take it for granted that such a change is inevitable. But that was not the understanding of our Founding Fathers or of the people who built this country. Patrick Henry was not opposed to immigration. But he did not see it as a death sentence for the national culture: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here.”
I submit that this is also the view of most Americans, in the past and today. We are not opposed to immigration at a reasonable level. We welcome those who want to come to this country to become part of it. We welcome the cultural enrichment they bring to our way of life. We welcome diversity. But we see no obligation to permit a transformation of the national ethos similar to the one Andy Rooney used to frighten his viewers on Sept. 7.
A level of immigration that permits the poor and the oppressed to become part of our society is healthy. One that opens our doors to reasonable numbers of those who are neither oppressed nor poor, who merely yearn to become American — to become one with us — is also healthy. One that forces Americans to worry about what it might mean if we have to assimilate into an alien culture brought here by immigrants is not. That is not what the Founding Fathers or the generations of Americans who preceded us intended for the country. Those who want the country separated from its Christian foundations are in error if they take the position that the Founding Fathers and the First Amendment require that we accept that change. In error, or devious.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
