E PLURIBUS UNUM: AN ESSAY
IN RESPONSE TO JENNIFER

If you're like me, you're probably wondering what in the name of God made the state of Indiana think that getting the Amish to Wal-Mart was a problem of sufficient urgency to merit the building of a new road--of several new roads, actually, because according to the news story the state was going to watch the success of this road carefully to decide if the concept should be adopted state-wide. This is the Amish we're talking about. They think buttons are too technologically advanced to be safely used by devoutly Christian people. They don't have electricity. They don't have telephones. They don't wear the kind of clothes that hang on racks under signs shrieking Special Today! Sizes 1x to 4x, two for the price of one!

As it turns out, there is a problem of sufficient urgency, not only in Indiana, but in Pennsylvania and any other state where the Amish have settled in significant numbers. The Amish do go to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart sells fertilizer and seeds as well as electronics and outsized fashions. The Amish, like most other Americans, think saving money is more important than shopping on the local main street. Wal-Mart saves them a lot of money on things they need, and has, as a result, made their way of life more viable than it was before the arrival of superstores.

It has also created an unusual traffic problem. The Amish do not use motor vehicles, but the local Wal-Mart is often unreachable except by the highway. To get to it, the Amish must take their horse-drawn buggies out on the road away from the areas in which they are known and expected. Drivers come whizzing around curves at sixty miles an hour only to find themselves neck-and-neck with a vision out of a 1940s Christmas movie. The horse, hearing the roar behind it, panics. The driver of the motor vehicle, confronted with a horse, panics, too. Too often, by the time everybody finishes panicking, several people are badly hurt, and somebody may be dead.

In case you're wondering what got me started thinking about the Amish going to Wal-Mart after all this time, here it is: a few weeks ago, around the time the Supreme Court refused to hear Michael Newdow's challenge to the use of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, I got an e-mail from a person I had never met staunchly declaring that the First Amendment to the Constitution should be interpreted to mean what it actually says, that she knows what it says and I don't, and that she isn't going to let the atheists win this one because God is all that keeps America from going to hell in a handbasket.

Now, this is not exactly an unusual occurrence. Aside from everything else I do, I serve as president of the Connecticut Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. If you click on the "contact" link at our web site, the mail gets sent to me. I always get a little rainfall of e-mails from strangers after AU's national office has filed an amicus brief in some case or the other. After Newdow prevailed in the Ninth Circuit, I got a positive hailstorm of hate mail declaring that I was about to go to hell and burn for all eternity, as well as half a dozen decently sane messages asking me why I hate America. What always strikes me about this mail is that practically none of it comes from Connecticut. Why somebody in Juneau, Alaska wants to write the president of the Connecticut chapter of AU--instead of the president of the Alaska chapter of AU, or AU national--is beyond me, but there it is.

Most of the time, I don't answer this mail, because there's no point, but I do try to reply to the saner messages, if only as a matter of courtesy. At first glance, this looked like one of the saner messages. It wasn't calling me names, or consigning me to hell, or demanding that I accept Christ as my personal savior. The e-mail address was a work-related one, and it took me about three minutes to track down the writer at her place of business. The e-mail actually made some points and showed some attempt to think rationally about the subject, even if the points were wrongheaded and the reasoning could have used a vigorous workout with a textbook in elementary logic. Most of all, she seemed to actually want a discussion. I get a little tired of the sort of people who think "the right to free speech" means "the right to state my opinion without anybody calling me on it."

Jennifer had several points to make, all based on what she thought was a literal reading of the First Amendment. The first was that there should be a literal reading of the First Amendment. We should go by what the words in the amendment say, and nothing else, not even the intentions of the people who wrote it, or what they or the people who voted for it at the time thought it said. Like many people who insist on a "literal reading" of various documents, Jennifer was under the delusion that words are fixed in the firmament of time, unchanging and unambiguous.

The more interesting part of the argument, though, was that after Jennifer had established that we must take the words "exactly as they are," she proceeded not to. "An establishment of religion" she declared, means exactly the same thing as "the establishment of a religion." Of course, it doesn't. If I am enjoined from establishing a religion, then I may not establish Catholicism or Hinduism or Islam, but there is nothing to prevent me from establishing the simple idea that religion is a good thing, or a better thing than lack of religion. If I am enjoined from establishing religion, however, I cannot establish even something so vague as the idea that religion is a good thing. In fact, I can't establish the idea that religion isn't a good thing, either. The entire subject of religion is off the table.

Now, this is not a matter of opinion. It's a simple objective fact about the syntactical and grammatical structure of the English language. If we really did what Jennifer wanted us to do, and relied on the words alone without delving into what their writers intended them to mean, then the proper separation of church and state would require much less religion in public life than we now have. At the very least, Presidents and other public officials would not be allowed to talk about God while performing their official duties--George W. Bush would just have to keep it to himself that he prays before the start of every day in the Oval Office.

Any resort to original intent, however, makes it clear that the First Amendment was not written to prevent Presidents, or mayors, from talking about what God means to them in their private lives. It was written to prevent the U.S. government and any of its agents from committing any official act that put it on one side or the other on questions of religion. The idea was not atheism, but secularism: the restriction of government action to the things of this world. The Founders understood something Jennifer does not. People fight about religion. They always have, and they always will. If religion is on the table, people of many different faiths have a hard--historically, a damned near impossible--time living together. Take religion off the table, however, and Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and atheists can sit down in reasonable peace and harmony and figure out the best way to build and pay for a dam, or a road, or the Library of Congress. They can drop off casseroles at each other's houses when there's been a death in the family. They can organize Little League teams that everybody's children can play on. They can find a way to get the Amish to Wal-Mart without running up a vehicular death toll similar to the body count at Verdun.

Put religion on the table and in no time at all you have a war of all against all, and the end of the American experiment in limited government. You also have a lot of roads that don't get built, dams that don't get raised, and splintered horse drawn buggies on the Interstate.

Jennifer had a few subsidiary points to make, almost all of them based on an ignorance so profound, and so proudly held, that trying to counter the nonsense was an impossible job. The things Jennifer didn't know included:

• the fact that Al Gore won the most votes in the 2000 election.
• the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment applied the Bill of Rights to the states
• the fact that courts have always held that the term "shall make no law" applies not only to formally passed laws but to any act of the government having the force of law
• the fact that in 1797 President John Adams signed, and the United States Senate ratified, a treaty with "The Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary" whose Article 11 declared "...the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..."
• the fact that Roman Catholics left the American public school system in the early 20^th century because American public schools then started their day with the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer
• the fact that in the past fifteen years there have been two major cases of harassment of non-Christian schoolchildren by faculty and administrators, as well as students, in schools where religious exercises are still held in violation of the law
• the fact that Americans United for Separation of Church and State is not an atheist organization
• the fact that Americans United for Separation of Church and State was originally founded to oppose the use of tax dollars to pay for Catholic (or other) religious schools and still considers that tax money given to religious schools, via vouchers or anything else, should be held un-constitutional

Those last two wouldn't matter much under most circumstances, but Jennifer was writing to Americans United to protest its policies. You'd think that knowing what the organization is and what it does would be necessary information to gather before she did that.

In retrospect, I should have skipped all those things. After a while, my e-mails were more than half full of attempts to correct the factual errors that dotted Jennifer's arguments like rat pellets dot a slaughterhouse floor, and I wasn't getting anywhere. Confronted by the fact that she'd made a factual error, Jennifer either declared it didn't matter or ignored it altogether. Sometimes she just switched tactics midstream, with nary a nod to the inconsistency. After I informed her that Americans United was not an atheist organization, she stopped accusing me of being an atheist who hated and feared Christians and started accusing me of being a Catholic who hated and feared Jews, African Americans and poor people.

Yeah, I know. Whatever.

The thing is, I knew the absolute crux of the argument when I saw it, but I was so busy trying to do something about the details I never fully addressed it. This was what Jennifer said, in what I think was her second to last long e-mail to me:

...by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or celebrating Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, or Thanksgiving, etc, it is not making a law establishing religion, but is in effect practicing free exercise thereof.

We are not made less by these activities, we are enriched by comraderie (sic) and greater knowledge. We are brought closer to a fuller understanding of each other by learning about our differences.

It would be easy to get caught in the details again: no American school I know fails to celebrate Thanksgiving, for instance, and most of the ones I know manage to mark the occasions of Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa without getting entangled in the religious elements of any of them. The issue isn't reciting the Pledge of Allegiance but using the words "under God" in the reciting of it when it is being recited as an official act of the school. It would be easy to get caught in the illogic, too. A few paragraphs after the above, Jennifer insisted that she "didn't believe that [her] beliefs should be considered by any government entity as any better or worse than any one else's", but it's difficult to understand what government acknowledgment of "monotheism" and lack of acknowledgment of anything else would be except the government establishing that "monotheism" was better than other beliefs. It's impossible to understand how she just can't see that an official school celebration of a religious Christmas, by its very existence, violates the free exercise rights of all the non-Christian students whose parents' tax money has been diverted to pay for it.

No, the crux of Jennifer's argument lies in that second paragraph above, the one where she says that by saying "under God" in the Pledge and otherwise getting the government to endorse religion we are "enriched by comraderie (sic) and greater knowledge" and "brought closer to a fuller understanding of each other by learning about our differences."

Are we? Does the government endorsement of religion--even the mere "acknowledging" of "monotheism"--bring us closer together and help us to learn about our differences?

No.

The government acknowledgment of religion is a deeply and viciously divisive thing, and the Founders of this country knew it. They were closer to the European religious wars of the Reformation and the Counterreformation than Jennifer is. They had seen first hand the kind of enmity, injustice and strife that comes from exactly the sort of situation Jennifer wants to establish right here, right now, as a way to encourage 'comraderie (sic)."

A few people closer to our own time know something Jennifer does not about what happens when schools "acknowledge" "monotheism." They are the three Jewish children of Sue and Wayne Willis of Pike County, Alabama, who were required to bring suit against the Pike County school board because they were: forbidden from wearing the Star of David on their clothes even though other students were allowed to wear crosses; required to bow their heads during Christian prayers and physically forced to do so if they tried to refuse; beaten up by their fellow students and subjected to having swastikas painted on their lockers, bookbags, and jackets; forced, by a vice principal, to write an essay on "Why Jesus Loves Me" as a punishment for "disrupting class" by refusing to bow their heads during Christian prayers; subjected to being called names and to being threatened by other students when they left a classroom during a presentation by the Gideon bible group, in full hearing of a teacher, who did nothing.

That didn't happen in 1645. It happened in 1996. If you think it's an isolated case, you should go to the ACLU or Americans United for Separation of Church and State and look at their roster of cases on just this sort of issue, involving students from every known non-Christian religion and nonreligion, across the board.

No, these exercises do not teach us to respect each other, and they do not teach us about our differences, and they most certainly do not engender "comraderie (sic)" or even camaraderie. They exalt one group above the others and invite hatred, derision and abuse.

I can prove it, by the way, without having to resort to history, or even the legal challenge schedule at the ACLU. I can prove it by Jennifer herself who, having finally accepted the fact that we really didn't agree with each other, included this in the e-mail with which she announced her intention to end our correspondence:

I cannot think of a better example of a place where a person can be educated and indoctrinated in religion or a religion than a Catholic school. When you made the statement at one point that some people don't want their children to play with Jews, you weren't making a general statement about other people. You were talking about yourself! Needles to say, your son will have little chance of coming in contact with very many Protestants, Jews, Muslims, or atheists, not to mention blacks, Asians, Hispanics, or people who make under.... what's a good figure?....$30,000.00 per year. That is unless the child is on some kind of scholarship - or government voucher. Then he is the token poor kid. The Supreme Court approved of the voucher system that gives money to families to send their children to religious schools. If we go by your interpretation, that would be in violation of the First Amendment. The government, by financial support, is establishing religion. According to Catholics, I guess, they are supposed to be exempt, because after all Catholicism is the one and only acceptable religion to God, and everyone else is going to hell, and God would never listen to the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer. It's kind of like the Catholic hierarchy believing that priests don't have to abide by the secular law against molesting children.

I may be missing something here, but there she is, unable to accept the differences between us without doing the prose equivalent of foaming at the mouth, and here I am, an upper-middle-class Anglo atheist with one son at a Catholic school with a Puerto Rican girlfriend from the South Bronx, another son at a Methodist Sunday school and a best friend from a Jewish family, and a part-time teaching gig in a school composed largely of African-Americans. Who is it, exactly, who seems to be having trouble living with people different from herself?

Over 200 years ago, the men who founded this country gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to replace the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution of the United States that we now know. In doing so, they dropped the mention of God the Articles had contained and insisted--against considerable public outcry from America's Christian churches--on affirming and establishing a Godless constitution. Out of that decision--the decision to found the world's first secular state--has come everything that is good and true and marvelous about America. It is why we have succeeded in establishing a religiously, racially and culturally diverse country without descending into endless unresolvable civil wars. It is why we have been able to absorb millions upon millions of immigrants from every corner of the globe and in so doing turn ourselves into the leading innovator in everything from movies to methods of doing organ transplants. It is why we can be so different from each other and yet come together as Americans whenever natural disasters or terrorism mean we need each other's help.

We are each of us fully within our rights to go into our public schools and tell our fellow students about our religion, to pray over our lunches, to meet at the Pole to pray before classes, to found Bible Study Clubs that meet at the end of the day on the same terms as the Chess Club and the Debating Society. We none of us have the right to expect our government to single us out for special treatment, to "acknowledge" our "monotheism" and thereby make us more equal than others.

People fight about religion. They always have, and they always will. America is proof positive that if we can get religion off the table, we can live together in spite of it, work together in spite of it, play together in spite of it, and, yes, get the Amish to Wal-Mart safely in spite of the fact that we think they're Loony Tunes to believe the things they believe.

Let's get "under God" out of the Pledge, "In God We Trust" off our money, and stop trying to pretend that "God Bless America" is the National Anthem. Let's stop fighting about gay marriage and nonmarital sex. Let's stop trying to force our preferred idea of sexual values onto other people's children. In fact, let's get out of the values business altogether. Let's fire the Congressional chaplains and stop opening Congress and the local city council meetings with a prayer. Let's learn to understand what Madison, Jefferson, Washington and Adams themselves understood, and tried so hard to leave us a record of.

Religion divides people. Religious questions cannot be solved politically. The business of government is secular--it is about the things of this world.

Right now, we're just spinning our wheels. We're more divided, more suspicious of each other, and more angry than we have been at any time since 1865. The aggressive resurgence of religion into political life over the last 50 years has not brought us closer together. It has not made us more understanding of each other. It has not made us better people. It has not made us a better country.

What it has done is to make it more and more difficult to address any of the real issues of government and common life. We have school systems in Hartford and New York and Los Angeles without enough textbooks for every child to have one. We have men in their fifties unable to support their families because their jobs have been exported to Bangladesh. We have a health care system that makes less sense than Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky poem. We have things that need to be fixed and we're not fixing them, because we're fighting about the one thing we were never supposed to have to fight about again.

Let's take religion off the table. Let's go back to being what we were intended to be, and what we are best at being.

God bless that Godless Constitution, and this, the world's first secular state.

Copyright © 2004 Jane Haddam. All rights reserved.

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