Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace/The Christ Child Goes to Court:
Flaherty, Francis
BOOKS Sixteen enigmatic words ARTICLES OF FAITH. ARTICLES OF PEACE James Davison Hunter and Os Guinness, Editors The Brookings Institution, $22.95, 163 pp. THE CHRIST CHILD GOES TO COURT Wayne...
...In contrast, the essays in Articles get down to the nitty-gritty of constitutional and social debate over religion...
...Kilpatrick to opposition...
...The Supreme Court has had great difficulty with these questions, particularly over the Establishment Clause because it implicates basic issues of governance...
...It simply cannot be completely excised from the public sector, accommodationists say...
...Though a major accommodationist victory, the case spurred even conservative commentator James J. Kilpatrick to opposition...
...The Supreme Court says Oregon does not violate Indians' rights by banning peyote, a hallucinogen used for centuries in their rituals...
...Written by a Connecticut College government professor, the book is geared to college students...
...The diverse authorship of the charter necessarily means it does not confront the thornier church-state issues...
...The clauses impose two duties on government: to be neither a boon to, nor a burden on, religion...
...Religion ramifies throughout society and government, from the Ten Commandments depicted on a Supreme Court frieze to "In God We Trust" on our coins...
...That is, the dangers of excessively separating church and state pale compared to the dangers of separating them too little...
...on how we view the place of religion in American life and how we should contend with each other's deepest differences in the public sphere...
...More than two hundred scholars, lawyers, and politicians-spanning the ideological spectrum from Strom Thurmond to Elie Wiesel-have signed the Williamsburg Charter, which is appended to this volume...
...they value some accommodation...
...The clauses also attest to the dignity of the individual conscience...
...Also published for the Constitution's bicentennial, this document "sets forth a renewed national compact...
...Its contributors believe that such social changes as the multiplication of faiths in the United States and rising religious intolerance make understanding the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause more important than ever...
...The Establishment Clause focuses on the former...
...A person may be chagrined when "ACLU types" force the removal of a creche from the county courthouse at Christmas...
...The former is amply represented in Articles, with several essayists competently arguing for the basic accommodationist position...
...Establishment Clause theorists coalesce around two polarities, one "conservative" and one "liberal," or, in legal argot, "accommodationist" and "separationist...
...But, generally, the book features more of the conservative viewpoint, albeit well-reasoned and well-written, than of the separationist perspective...
...Its tone is urgent...
...From the serious to the silly, all these developments unfolded during the few weeks I was reading these two volumes about religious freedom...
...Such separation is vital, the theory goes, because religious persecutions and other tragedies have proven the church-state mixture to be explosive...
...The Christ Child Goes to Court is a useful study of Lynch v. Donnelly, a 1984 Supreme Court case upholding the display of a creche by the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island...
...The book is not just a civics-class exercise in constitutional basics, however...
...I find the social damage minimal...
...let him view the creche in church...
...Some Articles essays decry secular humanism as the established religion of our time, and wonder why its influence is not seen to violate the doctrine of church-state separation...
...But explaining them requires a brief constitutional primer: The two religion clauses, the most enigmatic sixteen words in the Constitution, broadly mandate a separation of church and state...
...There are no meditations on religious persecutions and violence or the debasement of religion accompanying its melding with the state...
...The worry is that the U.S...
...State aid to parochial schools, Sunday-closing laws, and a Christmas creche display in a public building are typical topics under that article...
...And I find accommodationist fears of losing public norms and community cohesion to be suspiciously nostalgic and too speculative compared to the reality of, say, anti-Semitism...
...The Free Exercise Clause orders the state not to interfere unduly with citizens' religious practices...
...Others mourn one baleful effect they see of separationists' Establishment Clause doctrine-the loss of religious institutions' aid in education, welfare, and other public tasks...
...Not all the essays take these tacks...
...It takes the reader from A to Z in the dispute, and interspersed throughout are mini-lectures on the role of the judiciary and the like...
...THE CHRIST CHILD GOES TO COURT Wayne R. Swanson Temple University Press, $27.95, 242 pp...
...For example, University of Virginia Professor William Lee Miller cites evenhanded evidence that both religious and secular feelings-the Bible and the Enlightenment- influenced the nation's founders...
...and to do so would violate our basic nature...
...And a Los Angeles couple charged with prostitution protest that they are merely practicing their religion, in which, you see, "absolution" is based on sex and "sacrifice" entails the payment of money...
...The country will not be a community...
...That said, I recommend the book highly...
...His essay rebukes the many liberal and conservative partisans who cite only self-serving proofs, thus doing violence to historical truth...
...And other essays touch on accommodationist ideas but take no final position...
...The coincidence proves how pressing and pervasive questions of religion are in this secular age...
...Of course, full explication of these issues is beyond the scope of this review...
...It will profit readers of all constitutional inclinations...
...Moreover, if religion were so excised there, there might well be a "bleeding of the public domain of all significance," in one writer's words...
...Lynch, the first of a parade of cases featuring government-sponsored creches, menorahs, and other religious symbols, has been sharply criticized...
...Representative cases involve general state laws that collide with a particular faith's practice...
...This concern is widespread...
...But it strongly affirms basic church-state principles, and its diversity of signers dramatically demonstrates the tolerance and high purpose to which the charter commendably aspires...
...To my separationist mind, in a world of Beirut and Belfast, of ayatollahs and anti-Semitism, these are the main issues...
...will be morally impoverished and normless when strict separation, secular humanism, and the liberal focus on the individual rather than the state combine...
...they draw a line the state cannot cross...
...Francis Flaherty Five North Carolina lawyers sue a judge who opens court with a daily prayer...
...Too, separationists do not demand state hostility to religion...
...Its tenets include a strong belief that religion has played a major role in the psyche and history of the United States...
...May Christian Scientists, for example, be constitutionally required to submit to vaccination laws...
...Despite what dissenting Justice William Brennan called the "singular religiosity" of the creche, the 5-4 Court held it did not promote religion enough to violate the Establishment Clause...
...The new bishop of Brooklyn takes a jab at Mario Cuomo over abortion...
...This belief was the spur for Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace, a collection of essays written by law and government professors from Harvard, McGill, and the like, and presented at a symposium on the Constitution's bicentennial...
Vol. 117 • August 1990 • No. 14
