Faith, reason take holiday

Men wearing wigs say strange things, and so one said this: “[L]et us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. ... Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Obviously, some fellows never bent knees and bowed heads in accordance with propriety and due reverence before the American Civil Liberties Union or that great irreligion known as secular humanism. In the category of such wayward souls falls George Washington, who before others knew better warned in 1796 that a young nation would cast aside religion only at her peril. Failing 212 years later to learn history, Americans appear doomed never to repeat it.

Telltale signs proliferate, including this: An Intercollegiate Studies Institute survey says that less than one in five Americans and even fewer elected officials know that the phrase “wall of separation” between church and state appears in a letter penned by Thomas Jefferson. Half of Americans believe, wrongly, that those words can be found in the Constitution. This explains the common misapprehension of the founding fathers’ intent in the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”

Jefferson and the founders sought not to banish faith from the public sphere but to prevent duplication here of England’s abuses abroad, orchestrated under the umbrella of a national religion, or perhaps more clearly stated, a national denomination. Principally, this meant Americans were to be given leave to worship as they pleased. This and no other was the point for Jefferson when he made reference to the “wall of separation” in a letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association written shortly after his inauguration as president in 1801.

A religious minority in New England, where Congregationalists prevailed, the Danbury Baptists specifically were concerned with securing protections against state infringement on their freedom of worship. Jefferson provided precisely these assurances in what he regarded as a political letter written to supporters, not as a treatise against faith in public life.

For almost 150 years and through several court rulings, Jefferson’s original intent remained sufficiently vivid. But that trend and so America’s course changed starting in 1947, when the Supreme Court ruled that “individual religious liberty could be best achieved by a government that was stripped of all power to tax, to support or otherwise assist any religions.”

Now under the banner of Jefferson’s “wall,” the ACLU takes up legal arms against school prayer, nativity scenes on government grounds and displays of the Ten Commandments on courtroom walls. Ardent secularists and their minions, a populace unschooled in the facts, perpetually prove the veracity of theologian J. Gresham Machen’s lament: “[N]othing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms.”

Also substantiated are the first president’s admonitions. As religion has been severed from public life, what Washington referred to as “national morality” has frayed, evidenced by the stratospheric increases since the 1960s in the rates of violent crime, divorce, illegitimacy and drug use, among other maladies.

America today still celebrates Christmas, though hardly in the former fashion. Recognition of the birth of Christ devolved into a feast of consumerism that since has turned to famine as the economy wobbles. Religion has been cast to the ashes, where it lays in waste, an object of derision. Those who believe we are better for this would do well to discover the treasure that is this country’s history and to light anew the flickering spirit of the fathers who forged it.