Maine Owl

I'm normally no fan of the usually-truculent warmonger Charles Krauthammer. But a friend over at the peacecast.us email list (Mailman system, all Maine Owl readers are welcome to check it out and self-register if you wish to be on it) recommended his truly-sane Friday column called "An Overdose of Public Piety."

KRAUTHAMMER: This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it's only going to get worse. I'd thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, "Do you believe every word of this book?" -- and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race -- changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next -- so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.

Right on, Charles. My friend, J., over at the Peacecast list, sheds additional light on what is happening as the religious right has begun to split from its coalition with business Republicans, a front that has been more or less united in elections since Ronald Reagan's in 1980:

J.: It really boggles the mind how many of the conservative pundits--Fred Barnes, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity etc-all claim to be die-hard Christians. They effortlessly attack liberal points of view using religious piety that cannot really be debated. And of course, since Reagan, this argument has held most of the political force--even Bush senior tried to look religious to win the support of the religious right that has held sway in national-level politics--or at least has helped Republicans sew up that 1/4 of the states (Bible Belt) that make liberal victories nearly impossible.

Now, however, the Krauthammer's of the political world are coming out of the woodwork because it is looking like it may not work this time. (I saw George Will making much the same argument, in fact) Many conservatives are pissed because they know that the guys they wouldn't mind voting for-Giuliani, McCain-can't get the support of the Religious Right and this might force them to bow to the religious zealots from now on when they think they have a viable candidate. I suppose they don't like Huckabee as much as the Iowan church-goers do and they think they are going to be forced to support him rather than one of the more business-oriented guys.

Yep. The people vastly outnumber the business Republicans. The religious zealot Republicans seem to favor Huckabee, who makes the business Republicans very nervous, just like Howard Dean made the Democratic establishment nervous in 2003 before they crushed him in Iowa in 2004. The Republicans need the zealots to win elections. Huckabee talks a sort of populist game that paints his own Party establishment as the enemy, just like the Democratic Party establishment is. Neither party establishment can afford to have its "base" take power and independently elect populists.

Krauthammer concludes:

It's two centuries since the passage of the First Amendment, and our presidential candidates still cannot distinguish establishment from free exercise.

Indeed! I find the paired free exercise and establishment clauses among the most brilliant legal constructs I can imagine. Fervor to codify myth as law has infected the human race, well, forever. The American founders really struck the right cord in addressing this, along with outlawing religious test for office. It has made this country open and great in a way few other places in the world are.

It has opened space for someone like me. In an act of conscience during first-grade Lutheran Sunday school class, I hid in the bathroom while I refused to memorize and declare "I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth." It may not be easy to publicly claim our American "freedom of conscience" (a phrase used by some founders) to embrace or deny whatever religious dogma to which our consciences respond. After all, I had to hide in the bathroom to avoid punishment. So we may face hostile backlash from many quarters while making this claim to freedom. But it is our right in law, and that law has struck down myriad coercive governmental attempts to demand we conform to such religious dogma.

I've fought little email battles on this over the years, mainly with family members who are inspired by a certain kind of popularization of the myth that the US was founded on Christian religious principles. Below is a sample exposition in this genre attributed to CBS commentator Andy Rooney.

Andy Rooney Asks:
DID YOU KNOW? As you walk up the steps to the building which houses U.S. Supreme Court you can see near the top of the building a row of the world's law givers and each one is facing the one in the middle who is facing forward with a full frontal view-it is Moses and he is holding the Ten Commandments! DID YOU KNOW? As you enter the Supreme Court courtroom, the two huge oak doors have the Ten Commandments engraved on the lower portion of each door. DID YOU KNOW? As you sit inside the courtroom, you can see the wall, right above where the Supreme Court judges sit, a display of the Ten Commandments! DID YOU KNOW? There are Bible verses etched in stone all over the Federal Buildings and Monuments in Washington, D.C. DID YOU KNOW? James Madison, the fourth president, known as The Father of Our Constitution made the following statement: "We have staked the whole of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." DID YOU KNOW? Patrick Henry, that patriot and Founding Father of our country said: "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. DID YOU KNOW? Every session of Congress begins with a prayer by a paid preacher, whose salary has been paid by the taxpayer since 1777. DID YOU KNOW? Fifty-two of the 55 founders of the Constitution were members of the established orthodox churches the colonies. DID YOU KNOW? Thomas Jefferson worried that the Courts would overstep their authority and instead of interpreting the law would begin making law-an oligarchy the rule of few over many. DID YOU KNOW? The very first Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, said: "Americans should select and prefer Christians as their rulers."

How, then, have we gotten to the point that everything we have done for 220 years in this country is now suddenly wrong and unconstitutional? Lets put it around the world and let the world see and remember what this great country was built on. I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn't. Now it is your turn. It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, it is very hard to understand why there is such a mess about having the Ten Commandments on display or "In God We Trust" on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. If you agree, pass this on...

A little investigation of this reveals the following: While some of the claims made in the piece are true, most are false, distorted, or fail to take into account facts that cast light on the history of separation of church and state that is very different than the slant of the piece. For example, although Moses is in the middle of a sculpture near the back entrance of the Supreme Court building, Confucius and Salon (not Christians) are facing the front as well, not facing Moses. There are figures on each side of the three men facing them. The tablets in the sculpture are blank. The notion that the 10 Commandments are displayed in the friezes inside the courtroom itself is patently false. The numerations therein actually depict the 10 amendments to the US Constitution we call the Bill of Rights. Many other distortions and inaccuracies are present.

Look at this: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/r/religious-depictions.htm. In fact, separation of church and state is a fundamental freedom that goes to the core of the debates of the founders. This is not some new thing that a bunch of liberal nasties have dreamed up to provoke the mendacious wrath of Bill O'Reilly. In response to a letter from a Baptist leader, Thomas Jefferson wrote,

...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 thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and State.'' [Italics added]

It's ludicrous to argue that America has only a Christian foundation. The Constitution is purely secular. Nowhere does it mention God. Yes, most of the founders were churched people. It's basically irrelevant what certain out-of-context founder quotes purportedly convey. They did deeply debate the role of religion in government. But in the end, they settled on having a country with religious freedom: free personal exercise and no state promotion. Brilliant in my estimation and one of my favorite things about America.

Yet danger remains that successful politicians pandering to fervent zealots will through executive fiat established during the W. Bush years be able to circumvent 230 years of history and build a theocratic state. Resistance to this trend exists, but it is not strong enough if the ease of Bush's & Cheney's success in seizing this power while loyal opposition refuses to impeach is any indication.

The detestable Willard "Mitt" Romney made this clear in his sadly media-well-received "Faith in America" speech last week. In it he declared not a "religious test" for office. In fact he was careful to appear to champion separation of church and state, lest voters who may elect him be scared off thinking it would be Mormon leaders calling the shots. No, he lept over the Constitution to something higher and more powerful--freedom itself. And to Romney, that freedom is sourced from his notion of God and religion. Does anyone find this as scary as I do? We will need to fight to wrest our notion of freedom--freedom of conscience, and especially freedom from religion if we so choose--from the likes of George W. Bush and Willard Romney.