This week, the Supreme Court committed a historical “sin” by ruling that
government meetings can include sectarian prayer.
Religious wars are among the most
murderous and vicious scars on humankind. Well-meaning religious people have
repeatedly misused government to impose scriptural interpretations on others. The
historical result of religious imposition is catastrophe.
Year after year we watch sects
murder each other across Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, India, Ireland, Bosnia and beyond.
Far from being dangerous relics of the far-off past, internal religious civil wars rage across the 21st
Century.
The threat of religious war was well
understood by America’s Constitutional framers. The English Civil War, pitting
Catholics against Protestants, and Protestants against each other, lived within
their oral history. On a local level, religious persecution through government
action was common throughout the colonies. To protect our democracy from repeating
these tragedies they built a “wall” (Jefferson’s word) between church and
state.
As part of the Americas
experiment, religion would be a personal pursuit, not a national imposition. The
first words in the 1st Amendment read: Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof… From
the beginning, our Constitution mandated that America’s laws only reflect social needs supported by data, not
scripture. Americans could individually pursue whatever religion they wished,
but they could not use government to impose their religion on anyone else.
To test and enforce this
proscription, Americans must sometimes go to silly extremes. We prohibit Nativity
crèches in front of city halls; we ban prayers in public schools. These
extremes test our emotions -- but not our logic. Church-State prohibitions are rooted
in historical necessity. To defend our continued existence, we must constantly uphold
America’s “wall” between personal religion and public law. This constitutional
barrier remains America’s best defense against the historic contagion of
religious war.
Last Monday, Clarence
Thomas and his partisan pals thumbed their noses at history. They ignored the
logic and lessons of history and discarded the words and warnings of Jefferson
and Madison. Ironically, the Supreme Court’s license to merge politics and
religion may make prayer more necessary. We will need Heaven’s help to avoid Santayana’s
warning from a century ago: "Those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
