Faceoff: Nine Justices, Ten Commandments

WASHINGTON, May 30 (UPI) -- UPI National Political Analysts Peter Roff, a conservative, and Jim Chapin, a liberal, face off on a key issue in the news.

Today: Is there an anti-religious bias in American law and culture?

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Roff: America is well over the fine line

On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court elected not to hear an appeal out of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals regarding public posting of the Ten Commandments on public grounds.

Supported by the ACLU, two Elkhart, Ind. residents filed a lawsuit against the city in 1998 contending that a granite monument made them -- nonbelievers -- feel like outcasts in the community.

In his dissenting opinion -- arguing the court should have heard the case -- Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote: "The monument does not express the city's preference for a particular religion or religious belief in general ... It simply reflects the Ten Commandments' role in the development of our legal system."

Responding, Justice John Paul Stevens observed the tablet's inscription began with the words "I am the Lord thy God," rendering it difficult "to square with the position that monument expresses no particular religious preference."

Both Justices are wrong.

The tablet is expressly religious. The Ten Commandments, though they are the basis of western legal and spiritual tradition, are a statement by God of his rules for mankind. They have value as part of America's legal heritage, but that value is secondary to their role as scripture.

Justice Stevens errs when he argues, implicitly in his statement, this renders them unfit for display on public lands.

The refusal of the court to hear this case is not decisive, as the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld the constitutionality of a similar public display. It is, however, part of the increasingly aggressive anti-religious posture of American public life.

In a society where government is forced to accommodate Wiccans and other pagans, it is not a stretch to argue that room can be found to accommodate symbols of America's religious majority -- overwhelmingly Christian, albeit denominationally divided.

Due in large part to an organized effort to drive professions and expressions of faith from the public square, that is not possible.

This is not what the founders intended.

The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of religion by government alongside any efforts to prohibit the free exercise of faith. The latter includes, presumably and as it was understood for more than 150 years, expressions of faith in public.

The tablet in Elkhart is one more public expression that has been forcibly tossed aside because the whims of non-believers are now held to equate constitutionally with the faith of believers. This is not a formulation that portends success for American religious liberties in the long run.

The Supreme Court errs in its rulings on this kind of public expressions. Religious adoration of these tablets, should it occur, would not be coercive.

Reflecting on the religious divisions between Protestants and Catholics that caused so much bloodshed and pain for generations in Britain, the founders set out their vision of religious liberty to guard against a repetition of such events here in America. Such displays were permissible in 1789 when the Constitution was adopted and should, without question, be constitutional today.

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Chapin: We still have, and we still need, separation of church and state.

We need to be clear about what this monument was. It was not a monument commissioned by the city government of Elkhart. Nor was it some sort of timeless piece of Elkhart history. It was a six-foot-high monument created by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1958 and given to the city.

It doesn't reflect the beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Rather, it reflects the public religiosity of the Eisenhower Era. Eisenhower interrupted his inaugural address with a prayer -- the first president to do so (Reagan and the senior Bush followed him) and it was in his administration that the words "under God" were inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance at the urging of the Knights of Columbus.

The religious beliefs reflected by this tablet reflect those of the brief interval between the end of World War II and the beginning of the new immigration in 1965. In those years, with the decline of the virulent Catholic-Protestant struggles of the earlier years (many Catholics would be astonished to know what the majority of the first 30 American Presidents thought of their religion), and the need for Christians to disassociate themselves from the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust, the idea of a Judeo-Christian "public faith" became popular in the land.

It was best expressed in the belief that it was necessary to worship a God, but it didn't matter which God one worshipped. It was a belief which would have astounded most people throughout history, and certainly would have astounded the Founding Fathers.

This belief was a necessity for the struggle against what Eisenhower always called "godless Communism." It left little room for the Deists, free-thinkers, agnostics and anti-clerical activists who played a major role in the first 150 years of American intellectual and political history.

And, it turned out, it left little room for the variety of religions that have appeared in the last generation, through immigration and conversion.

The younger President Bush now refers to mosques and synagogues in his speeches, and the rising number of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and hosts of other religions from Wicca to Bahai, not to mention the unchurched, making the United States a mosaic far more complicated than the simple, if imagined, uniformity of the "Judeo-Christian tradition."

British historian A.J.P. Taylor once said that most of the "immemorial traditions of the British people date back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century." In the United States, as befits its younger status, it sometimes seems that our "immemorial traditions" date back to the middle third of the 20th century.

The six Supreme Court members who failed to join the right-wing trio of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas understand the real American tradition. That tradition separates church and state, not for the benefit of the state, but for the benefit of the church. "Established churches," like those that still exist in most European nations, soon lose their beliefs. The merger of state and church makes the state stronger, but the church weaker.

There's a reason that ten times more Americans attend religious services each week than Europeans. Creating some sort of "civic religion" made up of posted rules from particular religious traditions is exactly what the Founding Fathers didn't have in mind.

The line still holds -- and it's good for all of us that it does.

-- Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
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