The Wall between Church and State

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 21^st 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 1^st 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.”