A Timely Polemic

...While I am in hearty agreement with that conclusion, my point here is a narrower one: Authors writing about the Constitution do not distinguish themselves by disposing of such a question with a brief, superficial pronunciamento...

...They undertook to write about the fundamental law of the land, yet see fit to dismiss in a few words In Coming Issues Human Rights in Today's Russia By Charles Digges As Haiti Changes Jacmel Stays the Same By Carole Cleaver some of the most bitterly contested issues of constitutional law arising from the First Amendment...

...The framers of our Bill of Rights, Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore remind us, sought to guard against that when they wrote the Religion Clauses as the first 16 words of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

...That resistance echoes to this day in scores of cases brought to protect the hedge between the garden and the wilderness...

...Intriguing questions are also opened, if not thoroughly closed, regarding the role of religious convictions and affiliations in politics...

...to shameless pandering by politicians and what is quite literally an exploitation of God...

...Would-be thought controllers have never been willing to state fairly the claims for liberty—the very devil, after all, they seek to slay...

...Similarly, one is chagrined to find the authors dismissing as "ludicrously overstated...

...He noted that by its ruling the Court, "for the first time, [was approving] direct funding of core religious activities by an arm of the State...

...Half of an engaging chapter concerns the long 19th-century clash over mail delivery on the "Lord's Day...

...Overall, the chapter elaborates on an earlier comment about how the religiosity of the American electorate "that forces office seekers to mouth religious platitudes leads more often than not...

...My main disappointments and criticisms probably stem from my parochial outlook as a lawyer...

...The bloody history of religious conflict should have long ago persuaded us of the priceless value of that concept...

...They carried forward the teaching of Roger Williams, who over a century earlier had said there must be a "hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the Church and the wilderness of the world...

...The authors, it seems to me, exhibit a regrettable indifference to or ignorance of the law...

...District Judge WHETHER it is the civil authorities ordering the burning of Salem's "witches," the Soviets anointing bishops and chief rabbis, or the Chinese government vetoing the Panchen Lama's selection by the Dalai Lama, there are few phenomena more terrifying than the exercise of state power in the name of religion...

...To begin at an important beginning, the authors correctly view the Constitution as creating a secular state that would neither seek to control nor allow itself to be controlled by religion...

...the general debate about tax money for parochial schools...

...For instance, they say airily at the very beginning of the book that neither of them "views the issue [of classroom prayer] as one of the burning social dilemmas of our time...

...Clearly, however, every generation will witness efforts to lower or demolish the bulwark...

...They further point up the exclusionary dangers of outfits like the Christian Coalition...

...Tracing the roots of the present struggle, the authors summarize the 17th-century thought of John Locke and find that his laissez-faire ideology influenced both the spiritual and economic realms...

...Reviewed by Marvin E. Frankel Author, "Faith and Freedom: Religious Liberty in America "; former U.S...

...Since the project is certainly a congenial one for this reviewer(see my "School Without a Prayer," NL, December 19, 1994-January 16,1995),I wish The God-less Constitution were better than I think it is...

...Rejecting the Robertson-Buchanan thesis that the nation is in a state of moral depravity because of irreligion, they challenge the Pats to explain how this could be the case when Americans profess to be among the most religiously observant people in the world...

...The current history of the First Amendment is, not surprisingly, in the Supreme Court reports...

...Or that hewasaregularchurchgoerwhosepledge of faith (later engraved on the rotunda of his Memorial in Washington) said: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man...

...Jefferson, an intellectual parent (along with James Madison) of the Religion Clauses—prefigured by his earlier Virginia Act for Religious Freedom—was widely denounced as an "infidel...

...As a historian, Moore should know better than I do that the long decades of reciting the Lord's Prayer in our public schools were the age of White Protestant sway in this country, and that the Supreme Court was at the vortex of profound socio-legal change when it banned the practice...

...Leaving them out, or trivializing them, clouds the ostensible theme of The Godless Constitution...

...With the battle heating up again, this timely "polemic," as the authors properly style it, is inspired by a simple conviction: "Whenever religion of any kind casts itself as the one true faith and starts trying to arrange public policy accordingly, people who believe that they have a stake in free institutions, whatever else might divide them politically, had better look out...

...The second half of the chapter recounts efforts since the Civil War to insert into the Constitution devout references to God and Christ—efforts that have subsided but hardly disappeared...

...But before turning to some of the defects, its undoubted virtues merit attention...

...The majority sustained the claim of a religious publication at the university to a share of the Student Activities Fund...

...The Constitution and its drafters were assailed as "irreligious...

...And they identify the critical victory of Williams and Jefferson, reflected not only in what the Founders wrote but also in the unsuccessful, though robust, assaults by the opposition...

...To do so fundamentally violates American tradition...

...Interesting, too, are their observations on religious group alignments for and against the Jeffersonian tradition...

...The book's title is a needless provocation: "Secular," if less j azzy, would have been more on target than the inaptly pejorative "Godless...

...Justice David H. Souter, for himself and three others, wrote an eloquent dissent...

...Either way, tyrants like the Ayatollahs in Iran or John Calvin in Geneva are supremely horrible...

...While ourmail-less Sundays have a different cast today, the strident terms of that debate remain instructive warnings...

...A final example: In another swift sentence the authors appear to vote with the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Rosen-berger v. Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia...

...The Baptists, in particular, are credited with staunchly opposing any established church...

...From the outset, the authors recall, separation was a bone of contention...

...It was Madison, the author of the First Amendment, allied earlier with Jefferson in the Act for Religious Freedom in Virginia, who laid down the postulate that free people should resist demands for so little as "three pence only" to support even churches of their own faith...

...Tracing history and the precedents, he found this a clear violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause...

...It is relevant to recall in this connection a moment of religious kitsch in 1954, when Congress added the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance as a weapon against Communism...

...No matter that the Virginia statute he had authored declared as a basic premise in its opening sentence, "Almighty God hath created the mind free...

...The book takes aim at the opponents of separation who have always been with us and are prominently represented today on the hustings, in the Supreme Court, at the pulpit, and elsewhere...

...As Thomas Jefferson saw it, the clauses were meant to erect a "wall of separation" between religion and government...

...On their penultimate page, Kramnick and Moore rightly caution: "Public policies in the United States must never be put to a litmus test of religious correctness...

...Many of the states called upon to ratify the document had estab-lishmentarian tax-supported churches, an arrangement that continued in Massachusetts until 1833...

...The evil and the dread are the same: the brigading of the state's force with an authoritarian church decreeing what people must believe, or profess to believe, at the risk of their freedom or their lives or their ability to live with themselves in dignity and self-respect...

...That is a grave defect...

...The terror can move in both directions, with priests controlling kings or kings ruling the church...

...The book is at its best in the final chapter, where the authors take off the gloves and wade into the polemical ring with the contemporary religious Right...

...Drawing on their combined professional learning—Kramnick's in political thought, Moore's in religious history—they marshal in support of their position the contents of well-stocked minds...