by Miles H. Hodges – The Spiritual Pilgrim
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That’s the First Amendment to the American Constitution … put there as a guarantee that Congress (the new government we were putting in place back in 1789) would not get in the business of trying to regulate the people’s religion, speech, writings, gatherings, or ability to appeal to the government over this or that matter. The deal was that the states would most likely not accept the new Constitution unless a number of political protections against government involvement in the affairs of the people were firmly put in place. Consequently, the Ten Amendments to the Constitution!
And notice, this is not only the first and foremost of those Ten Amendments or protections but also notice which item it is that comes up first on the list: religion. That’s because religion was understood to be without a doubt the people’s most important, most fundamental of all human rights … because all human life is built on “religion,” that is, built on what people believe to be True about life: how it works and why it works that way. The government was thus to stay out of the business of trying to regulate such an important human right.
The Constitution clearly does not intend to endorse any particular religion … not even Christianity – although Christianity was largely what most Americans had in mind when the word “religion” came up. To these Framers or Founding Fathers of the Constitution, no such public endorsement was needed. Christianity came naturally to them. It required no government support or protection. In fact, given the ugly political history of religion, that was the last thing these Founding Fathers wanted. Their Christian faith could take care of itself quite nicely without government involvement.
But also note, this First Amendment was not intended to keep their religious faith out of their public affairs. Prayer to God, in fact, was a common way America’s political leaders went about their business. But here too, they would need no legal endorsement to go to prayer in their public meetings … for that came to them not only as a basic right but even as a basic necessity. Indeed, thanks to Franklin’s warning in 1787 about the impossibility of getting past their partisan politics to come to an agreement on this new Constitution, they needed to remember how it was by and through daily prayer that they got through the dark days of the recent war fought against English royal tyranny. Ultimately, they understood that prayer was the tool they needed in order to achieve their higher goals. It was becoming quite obvious that their well-presented logical or rational arguments were serving merely to divide them into contending parties – not unite them.
So it was that the wise Franklin was well-appreciated for his having reminded them how depending, on the one hand, on their own self-serving human logic and, on the other hand, on faith in God’s provision were certain to produce very different results.
So why have things shifted so dramatically today … to the point that it is now a common understanding that the First Amendment forbids religion in public affairs?
That’s because in the early 1960s, through a number of court cases, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) got the Supreme Court to support their organization’s view that allowing the practice of any form of religion (except their mechanical-materialist or Secularist worldview) in the public schools (specifically prayer or reading of the Bible) entailed its “establishment.” In short, they got the Supreme Court to ignore the very specific wording of the First Amendment concerning what the government was not allowed to do concerning religion: prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Sadly, the Supreme Court bought the ACLU’s argument, supposing that countless generations of Americans that had gone before their own had failed to see the danger that prayer and Bible-reading posed to American liberties. Thus in doing so, the Supreme Court completely ignored the precise intentions of First Amendment’s rule about the role of government in the realm of religion. They were to stay out of that matter. That matter belonged to the people … not Washington, D.C. officials. Not even the lawyers in black robes.
But things did not just stop there. In the early 1970s, the Supreme Court again violated the Constitution by actually establishing Secularism as the only worldview allowed to undergird American education.
How could the Supreme Court be so blatant in establishing Secularism as the only worldview (thus “religion”) to undergird American education? The response was that Secularism is not a religion. It is simply Truth … Truth as Secularists understand such matters.
Yes, but note: forty years earlier, in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, the Secularists (including members of the ACLU) made it quite clear that in pushing for their Secular-Humanist agenda they were actually trying to plant a new religion (“Religious Humanism”) in America. Ooops! But that most revealing and also most embarrassing affirmation was erased when a new Humanist Manifesto II was published in 1973 … which dropped the “religion” part and stated instead that they were simply after “truth.”
More precisely, Secularists hold as such “truth” the belief that all life – including human life – works simply according to material, mechanical laws. There is no other force that shapes life. Thus, going beyond that material-mechanical realm in the quest for a Higher Truth appears to a Secularist to be pure insanity.
But the critically important spiritual realm of life – ignored by Secularism – has very little to do with the material-mechanical realm. It’s where the realm of art, music, poetry, philosophy and other forms of true creativity are to be found … a realm that lies well beyond mere mechanics. And for most Americans, it’s where the Creator who inspires such higher Spirit within us is to be found. For the Secularists to ridicule that realm is simply to give testimony to their own spiritual blindness as pure materialists.
In any case, the Supreme Court has no business in getting in the midst of this difference of opinion on such cultural-spiritual matters … no right to decide for us how the debate is to go. The Constitution supposedly made that very clear in quite specifically outlawing just such governmental involvement in America’s religious life.
Most thankfully, God is not done with America. America has had to deal with this secular-humanist-materialist worldview before. We have been brought out of cultural- spiritual apathy previously through a number of “Great Awakenings, getting us ready in spirit to face some huge and most unpredictable challenges coming our way … most notably a bloody war with England and an even more horrific Civil War. And prayers, rather than just rational design, was also what carried America spiritually through the Great Depression, World War Two and the Cold War.
It seems that something of a spiritual revival (another “Great Awakening”?) might be underway in America … especially among members of the Gen-Z generation, a generation of well-educated youth who are having a hard time finding anything reasonable about the world that lies before them.
So it is easy to have hope that simply through a higher spirit, rather than through some kind of rational design by social planners, America will find its way back to its original moral-spiritual grounding – and the fundamental but divine laws that go with it – a grounding that America was built on and by which America rose to become an awesome society. Let us indeed pray that this be so.
Miles Hodges is a writer, historian and political analyst who explores the question of why societies behave as they do … especially in this matter of their rise and fall.