Pushing the Limits of Church and State

The New York Times Magazine, a weekly publication where they get to put longer stories and points of interest than what appears in their normal paper, recently published How Christian Were The Founders, an article that highlights the Christian Fundamentalist movement to effectively rewrite American history from a Christian-centric point of view. Highlighted in the article is the Texas Board of Education and and several opinions from Christian-based law schools.

More specifically, this movement focuses on American's founding fathers having a deeply Christian motivation for creating this country the way they did, as substantiated by early-American texts such as the Declaration of Independence, the Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. This is, the movement contends, supposed to be a Christian nation and our early historic documents verify that.

One of the most interesting cases made (and by "interesting" I mean "a stretch") for this is by Liberty University Law School's Cynthia Dunbar:

Dunbar began the lecture by discussing a national day of thanksgiving that Gen. George Washington called for after the defeat of the British at Saratoga in 1777 — showing, in her reckoning, a religious base in the thinking of the country’s founders...

...A student questioned the relevance of the 1777 event to the court rulings, because in 1777 the country did not yet have a Constitution. “And what did we have at that time?” Dunbar asked. Answer: “The Declaration of Independence.” She then discussed a legal practice called “incorporation by reference.” “When you have in one legal document reference to another, it pulls them together, so that they can’t be viewed as separate and distinct,” she said. “So you cannot read the Constitution distinct from the Declaration.” And the Declaration famously refers to a Creator and grounds itself in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Therefore, she said, the religiosity of the founders is not only established and rooted in a foundational document but linked to the Constitution. [emphasis added]

I checked with a few of my legal resources (my lawyer buddies) and asked them about this concept of "incorporation by reference." The consensus was this: incorporation by reference is often done in creating laws as well as in contract law and trust and estate law. But Constitutional Law, or in taking a non-legal document, like the Declaration, and trying to have any of its references incorporated into the Constitution is not an accurate use of that legal concept.

This entire article sets the stage for this: the movement focuses on tearing-down the "wall of separation" between church and state.

[Wallbuilders leader] David Barton reads the “church and state” letter to mean that Jefferson “believed, along with the other founders, that the First Amendment had been enacted only to prevent the federal establishment of a national denomination.” Barton goes on to claim, “ ‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant.”

A response:

“The founders deliberately left the word ‘God’ out of the Constitution — but not because they were a bunch of atheists and deists,” says Susan Jacoby, author of “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.” “To them, mixing religion and government meant trouble.” The curious thing is that in trying to bring God into the Constitution, the activists — who say their goal is to follow the original intent of the founders — are ignoring the fact that the founders explicitly avoided religious language in that document.

I could fill line after line with examples in the article from one side or another in this debate, so instead I encourage you to read the article.

There are a few things at work here in this article. First is the Texas Board of Education. Unlike many other states, the Texas Board determines the curriculum and textbooks for the entire state, rather than district-by-district. Given the size of the Texas school system, and what that does to the price and content of textbooks across the country, what the Texas Bord decides arguably has a massive effect on the content of textbooks across the country.

The Texas Board is systematically allowing for religious content in public school books. This article not only shows how that is happening, and who the players are, but also how the Texas Board movement is hand-in-hand, conceptually and actually, with the overall "Christian Nation" movement across the country.

I have several problems with this. First, I believe the tactics they are using are misleading. Filling law school students' heads with erroneous legal interpretations is irrensponsible. Their goal there is to be able to start to challenge 1st amendment cases, with fresh Christian-law-trained minds, all the way up to SCOTUS...and perhaps even control SCOTUS one day. I admire the long-view strategy; that takes a level of commitment that I can't fathom! But it treads dangerously close to the establishment of a State religion.

Another problem I have is the blind, dogmatic following of the Texas Board with this approach. Specifically, here's one of my favorite gems:

Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See?” It’s not an especially subversive-sounding title, but the author of this 1967 children’s picture book, Bill Martin Jr., lost his place in the Texas social-studies guidelines at last month’s board meeting due to what was thought to be un-American activity — to be precise, “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.” Martin, the creator of 300 children’s books, was removed from the list of cultural figures approved for study by third graders in the blizzard of amendments offered by board members...

..In this case, one board member sent an e-mail message with a reference to “Ethical Marxism,” by Bill Martin, to another board member, who suggested that anyone who wrote a book with such a title did not belong in the TEKS. As it turned out, Bill Martin and Bill Martin Jr. are two different people. But by that time, the author of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” was out. “That’s a perfect example of these people’s lack of knowledge,” Miller says. “They’re coming forward with hundreds of amendments at the last minute. Don McLeroy had a four-inch stack of amendments, and they all just voted on them, whether or not they actually knew the content.[emphasis added]

It's fine for students to learn about the Mayflower Compact or any of the other semi-constitutional documents that preceded the actual Constitution, especially in terms of their overall impact on the final document we know and love today. But despite the rhetoric of only wanting to "acknowledge" the Christian contributions to the United States, this is an attempt to rewrite American history and establish Christianity as the single religion of the U.S., through our public school system (which is supposed to be the great democratizer).

Either you acknowledge every religion's impact on the formation of the country, or you stay secular and report the facts. I'm all for the latter. I can learn all the other stuff in the church of the denomination that I choose to attend. I am not hyperventilating about what they're doing; I don't think in the long run that our country will become some Christian Caliphate. But I do want to raise awareness. Our government is secular for a reason and what these folks are doing threatens to violate the 1st amendment and clearly establish a de-facto religion for the United States. That's not government's role, and that's not public education's role.

[/navel gazing]