First American Right - II

A Catholic professor of constitutional law in a prominent American university recently remarked, looking at the evolution of American cultural thought regarding the history of freedom of religion in the United States: "There has been a full and vicious circle, from religious persecution, intolerance, and church establishment to benign tolerance, to disestablishment, to equality of all faiths before the law, to equality of belief and unbelief before the law, and now to the secularists’ and the religious dissenters’ intolerance of all religious belief in public law. The wry irony of that is that this is being done in the name of and for the sake of religious liberty."

The professor goes on to say: "American believers are losing by default. They have taken their spiritual heritage for granted. The have allowed a creeping gradualism of secularism, under one specious pretext or another, to take over..... A vociferous and highly organized pressure group is exerting its own form of indirect coercive pressure upon the American community. Determined to deflect American national traditions and heritage from their authentic historic course, this group is cutting a divisive swath across the nation, advertising for clients to challenge in court what is obnoxious to them."

An American historian has noted, "Although our national history is rich in evidence that our political democracy was conceived in theological terms, not every American has posited religious beliefs as the wellspring of our democracy. Since the time of Washington there has been clear evidence of a secularist concept of our national experiment. But, this secular tradition is not the only American tradition. On the contrary, the religious tradition is the original and prevailing one. It is authentic in the very fiber of our body politic and as such constitutes the genuine American consensus."

In order to see where we were on the issue of the first part of the first amendment to our United States Constitution just a short time ago, we can read what the United States Supreme Court said in 1952 (in the case of Zorach versus Clauson), and then note how far away from those words we currently have come: "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor as an attitude on the part of the government that shows no partiality to any one group and that lets each flourish according to the zeal of is adherents and the appeal of its dogma. When the State encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. For then it respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe."

The Court goes further: "Prayers in our legislative halls, the appeals to the Almighty in the messages of the Chief Executive, the proclamations making Thanksgiving Day a holiday, the "so help me God" in our courtroom oaths, these and other references to the Almighty that run through our laws, our public rituals, our ceremonies, would be flouting the first amendment (in the view of the secularists). A fastidious atheist or agnostic could even object to the supplication with which our Supreme Court opens each session: God save the United States and this Honorable Court."

In 1940 the Dean of one of the Yale University Colleges said, "The principle of religious freedom is designed to protect religious belief and not to hinder or destroy it. It is meant to insure the free exercise of religion according to the dictate of consciences, but not to limit the exercise by forcing secularism upon American citizens."

The First Congress in our nation’s history, after it had passed the Bill of Rights and sent it to the States for ratification, appropriated funds for the support of Christian missionaries among the Indians (which are now called Native Americans). George Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox supported this appropriation, "the object of which would be the happiness of Indians, teaching them the great duties of religion and morality and to inculcate a friendship and attachment to the United States." It is clear that Washington, Knox, and the First Congress did not think this violated the U.S. Constitution.

Even more amazing was that this practice was continued by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the famous phrase (in his letter to the Danbury Baptists on January 1, 1802), "wall of separation between church and state". In 1803, for instance, he approved and sent to the U.S. Senate for ratification a treaty between the Kaskasia Indians and the United States. One passage of the treaty says the following: "And whereas the greater part of said tribe have been baptized and received into the Catholic Church, to which they are much attached, the United States will give annually for seven years one hundred dollars for the support of a priest of that religion, who will engage to perform for said tribe the duties of his office and also to instruct as many of their children as possible in the rudiments of literature, and the United States will further give the sum of three hundred dollars to the said tribe for the erection of a church." It is obvious that Jefferson, despite his devious and frequent ideological inconsistencies, saw the relationship of church and state in a far different light than the radical American secularists of today, who often try to manipulate him and his words to achieve their goals.

In the Soviet era of Communist expansion, Lenin and Stalin after him instructed party members to refer in public to left-wing liberals, democratic socialists, and others who agreed with many of the communist programs without actually being party members as "fellow travelers". However, they were instructed to refer to them always in private and in cell meetings as "useful idiots". The fanatic secularists, in their present and ongoing campaign to eliminate all religion in general and specifically Christianity and the Catholic Religion from American cultural life and from any participation in the discussions in the public square, unfortunately are assisted by many "useful idiots". People often fall into that category out of terror of being considered intolerant, insensitive to minority feelings, or out of the mainstream. You can detect them easily.. They are the ones who refuse to say "Merry Christmas", but insist on saying "Happy Holidays"!