The Constitutional Cure for Separation Anxiety

By Edward Cone

8-31-03

Pop quiz: How often is God mentioned in the Constitution of the United States?

The answer, apparently a surprising one to many people, is not at all. There is no Supreme Being in the supreme law of the land. The Constitution is a bracingly secular document, ordained and established by We the People, without a single appeal to God or invocation of the traditions and principles of any religion. (It is dated “in the year of our Lord” 1787.)

The only mention of religion in the document or in the Bill of Rights comes in the First Amendment, which helps ensure that, as James Madison would write, "Strongly guarded...is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States."

The framers of the Constitution did their work deliberately. They knew what they were about. Earlier, less-secular attempts at self-government in the colonies had resulted in things like the hanging of Quakers on Boston Common, and Roger Williams being banished from the land of the Mayflower Compact before he could found the first Baptist church in America. Separation of church and state wasn’t a sop to non-Christians, it was a necessity for a free country with a diverse Christian population.

Then as now, there were plenty of outspokenly religious Americans who wanted to render Caesar’s portion unto God. Yet the founders, some quite religious themselves, resolutely kept their words on an earthly plane, and took pains to secularize the ideals found in seminal documents such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights that they adapted for our new government’s rule book.

More than two centuries on, religion and religious liberty are thriving in the United States. We are the most religious nation in the industrialized world, and the multitude of different faiths that have taken root here tend to live fairly harmoniously together.  

But some people don’t recognize the genius of the Constitution – in fact they want to rewrite history and deny the secular foundations of our government. This revisionism sounds like a drumbeat in Alabama, where Judge Roy Moore built his shrine to the Ten Commandments, and in Davidson County, where a legal battle is brewing over the words “In God We Trust” on a courthouse wall. These cases involve local law and custom as well as Constitutional principles, but the wisdom of the framers still applies.

Americans have the right under the free speech clause of the First Amendment to enunciate their own interpretations of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and to focus myopically on this single tree while ignoring the forest of secularity that is the rest of the Constitution. The proper role of religion in public life, though, is too important a question to let the revisionism go unchallenged.

Down in Davidson County, the controversy could be defused by adding two words to the courthouse inscription, so that the phrase becomes “In God We Trust. Or Not.” Adding the extra words would offend some people, which is inevitable as soon as you start mixing religion and government, but it makes the statement completely inclusive, and emphasizes at the same time the full reach of the law. After all, if statutes have to be invested with religion to be legitimate, why should the irreligious obey them?  

In Alabama, supporters of Judge Moore are also trotting out the shaky argument that the Ten Commandments provide some kind of foundation for the laws we follow today. It is true that state laws do prohibit murder, theft, and bearing false witness, but that’s true the world around. Adultery is covered in some aging laws against alienation of affection, but it’s still a national pastime. Honoring one’s parents is not legally required, although it’s definitely encouraged at our house, and covetousness is the basis of a significant portion of our economic activity.

The other four commandments are specific instructions on how to practice a particular religion – Judaism, to be exact, although like bagels and irony the Ten Commandments have come to be enjoyed by Christians as well. They just don’t belong on massive monuments in courthouse rotundas, not even if they were posted in Hebrew.

Any state that invokes God is claiming more power than I want my government to have, and attributing to any government the power of the divine seems idolatrous. Our secular Constitution provides an excellent model for keeping government and religion apart. We should heed the eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not fix it if it ain’t broke.”

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com, www.edcone.com) contributes a column to the News & Record on Sunday.

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