The United States often is said to be the most religious country in the West, but you’d have a hard time knowing it from the record of the Supreme Court. For half a century, the nation’s highest tribunal repeatedly has displayed near-obsessive zeal to eradicate religion from the public square.
Two big church-state cases before the court in its new term will show whether the obsession is still at work. It is time to consider the underlying causes of this endless fretting about religion.
Having covered the Supreme Court and commented on its activities for four decades, I conclude that the fretting arises from two quite different, although hardly unrelated, sources. The hostility to religion of aggressive secularism is one.
Secularism is adept at using the language of toleration to make its case, but the ideology of secularism causes it to be not merely intolerant of religion but committed to eradicating it entirely if that can be done. The public square is a good place to begin but not where secularists hope to end.
The secularist campaign against religion is on display in one of the cases before the Supreme Court (Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow). A self-described atheist objects to having his daughter, a student in a public school near Sacramento, recite the pledge of allegiance containing the dreaded words “under God.”
The man’s wife, with whom the girl lives, said she and her daughter are Christians who don’t mind “under God” in the pledge. That raises a question of legal standing noted by the Supreme Court in accepting the case. But it didn’t deter the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from overturning recitation of the pledge as a religious “establishment.”
Inevitably, this dispute recalls the school prayer and bible-reading cases of the 1960s. Secularists say all they want is state neutrality between belief and non-belief. But, as these controversies illustrate, the alternative to mild friendliness often isn’t neutrality but secularist hostility. Significantly, the flag pledge dispute will be weighed by a tribunal, the Supreme Court, which starts work by invoking God.
The other religion case before the court this term is an excellent specimen of the second big source of continuing church-state conflict — namely, as Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out in an opinion a couple of years ago, the residue of 19th century anti-Catholicism still found in some American institutions, especially in education.
Locke v. Davey arose in Washington state when the authorities denied a $1,125 scholarship to an otherwise qualified student because he proposed to major in pastoral ministries (along with business management) at his Assemblies of God college. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled for the student. The state appealed.
Behind the refusal of the scholarship lay a provision of the state constitution resembling provisions in the constitutions of 36 other states that go generically by the name “Blaine Amendments.”
“Blaine” here is James G. Blaine, a U.S. senator from Maine, who in the 1870s, with sentiment against Catholic parochial schools running high, pushed for an amendment to the federal Constitution barring public expenditures for any religious purpose. The amendment lost in Congress, but versions of it entered into the constitutions of numerous states, where they are serious obstacles to education vouchers and other forms of aid.
Both cases have attracted intense interest. Well they might. “Such a stigmatizing religious classification is prohibited by the First Amendment and inconsistent with our traditions,” U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson wrote in his brief in the scholarship case. Very true. Don’t expect the secularists to care.
Russell Shaw is a free lance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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