Defending God in the Public Square
Challenge Number Two
Newt Gingrich
There is no attack on American culture more deadly and more historically dishonest than the secular Left’s unending war against God in America’s public life. The decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule unconstitutional the phrase “one nation under God” was the final straw. A court that would destroy a Pledge of Allegiance adopted by the Congress, signed by the president (Eisenhower), and supported by 91 percent of the American people1 is a court that is clearly out of step with an America that understands that our rights come from God, which is why no government—or court—can justly take them away from us.
While the Supreme Court overruled the Ninth Circuit on procedural grounds, it did not affirm that saying “one nation under God” was constitutional. Only three of the justices took that position. Five of the justices hid behind procedural excuses, ruling that the atheist plaintiff did not have legal standing to file the suit. The ninth justice, Antonin Scalia, had recused himself because he had made a public speech supporting the Pledge.
Amazingly, in 2004, the Supreme Court likely had a five to four majority for declaring “one nation under God” unconstitutional. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor defended the Pledge only by denying it any meaning: “even if taken literally, the phrase is merely descriptive; it purports only to identify the United States as a Nation subject to divine authority. That cannot be seen as a serious invocation of God or as an expression of individual submission to divine authority....Any religious freight the words may have been meant to carry has long since been lost.” The Pledge, she deemed, merely invoked “civic deism.” Yet if pledging allegiance to one nation under God does not mean we believe the nation (and therefore ourselves as citizens) is under God, what could it possibly mean?
When a handful of judges decide they can overrule the culture of 91 percent of America, how can the Court maintain its moral authority? It ¬can’t. The Court itself begins each day with the proclamation, “God save the United States and this honorable Court.” This phrase has been used for almost two hundred years. It was not adopted as a ceremonial phrase of no meaning; it was adopted because justices in the 1820s actually wanted to call on God to save the United States and the Court.
Similarly, the Pledge of Allegiance does not contain a “ceremonial” reference to God. The term under God was inserted deliberately by Congress to draw the distinction between atheistic tyranny (the Soviet Union) and a free society whose freedoms were based on the God-given rights of each person. As the report from the House of Representatives accompanying the law asserted: “From the time of our earliest history, our peoples and our institutions have reflected the traditional concept that our Nation was founded on a fundamental belief in God.”
“Fundamental belief” is not “civic deism.”
For most Americans, the blessings of God have been the basis of our liberty, prosperity, and survival as a unique country.
For most Americans, prayer is real and we subordinate ourselves to a God on whom we call for wisdom, salvation, and guidance.
For most Americans, an atheistic society that forbids public reference to God and removes religious symbols is a horrifyingly bad society.
Yet the voice of the overwhelming majority of Americans is repressed by an elite media that finds religious expression frightening and threatening, or old-fashioned and unsophisticated. The results of their opposition are everywhere.
Our schools have been steadily driving God out of American history (look at your children’s textbooks or at the curriculum guide for your local school).
Our courts have been literally outlawing references to God, symbols of God, and stated public appeals to God (prayer).
For two generations we have passively accepted this assault on the values of the overwhelming majority of Americans. It is time to insist on judges who understand the history and meaning of America as a country endowed by God.
The secular Left has been inventing law and grotesquely distorting the Constitution to achieve a goal that none of the Founding Fathers would have thought reasonable. History is vividly clear about the importance of God in the founding of our nation. To prove that our Creator is so central to understanding America, there is a walking tour of Washington, D.C. that shows how often the Founding Fathers and other great Americans, and the institutions they created, refer to God and call upon Him. Indeed, to study American history is to encounter God again and again. A tour like this should be part of every school class’s visit to Washington, D.C.
Religion is the fulcrum of American history. People came to America’s shores to be free to practice their religious beliefs. It brought the Pilgrims with their desire to create a “city on a hill” that would be a beacon of religious belief and piety. The Pilgrims were but one group that poured into the new colonies. Quakers in Pennsylvania were another, Catholics in Maryland yet a third. A religious revival, the Great Awakening in the 1730s, inspired many Americans to fight the Revolutionary War to secure their God-given freedoms. Another great religious revival in the nineteenth century inspired the abolitionists’ campaign against slavery.
It was no accident that the marching song of the Union Army during the Civil War included the line “as Christ died to make men holy let us die to make men free.” That phrase was later changed to “let us live to make men free.” But for the men in uniform who were literally placing their lives on the line to end slavery, they knew that the original line was the right one.
First Principles
For the colonists the argument with the British government was an argument about first principles. Where did power come from? What defined loyalty? Who defined rights between king and subject?
It was in this historic context that America proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This turned on its head the notion that power came from God through the monarch to the people.
Beginning with King John in 1215, the English had gradually been restricting and confining the power of their monarchs. But Americans went further, asserting that God granted rights directly to everyone. Moreover, these rights were “inalienable.” The government could not deny man’s God-given rights.
Those who came aboard the Mayflower in 1620 in search of religious freedom wrote a compact expressing that, We whose names are underwritten...by the grace of God...having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith...a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
At America’s Founding, religion was central. The very first Continental Congress in 1774 had invited the Reverend Jacob Duché to begin each session with a prayer. When the war against Britain began, the Continental Congress provided for chaplains to serve with the military and be paid at the same rate as majors in the Army.
During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin (often considered one of the least religious of the Founding Fathers) proposed that the Convention begin each day with a prayer. As the oldest delegate, at age eighty-one, Franklin insisted that “the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the Affairs of Men.”
Because of their belief that power had come from God to the individual, they began the Constitution “we the people.” Note that the Founding Fathers did not write “we the states.” Nor did they write “we the government.” Nor did they write “we the lawyers and judges.”
These historic facts pose an enormous problem for secular liberals. How can they explain America without getting into the area of religion? If they dislike and in many cases fear religion, how then can they communicate the core nature of the people in America?
The answer is that modern secular liberalism cannot accurately teach or deal with religion as a central reality of American history, so it simply ignores the topic. If you ¬don’t teach about the Founding Fathers, you do not have to teach about our Creator. If you ¬don’t teach about Abraham Lincoln, you ¬don’t have to deal with fourteen references to God and two Bible verses in a 732–word second inaugural address. That speech is actually carved into the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in a permanent affront to every atheist who visits this public building. You have to wonder how soon there will be a lawsuit to scrape the references to God and the Bible off the monument so as not to offend those who hate or despise religion. This is no idle threat. Dr. Michael Newdow, the atheist who brought suit to outlaw the motto “one nation under God,” told the New York Times he intended to “ferret out all insidious uses of religion in daily life.”
Unlike Dr. Newdow, the Founding Fathers, from the very birth of the United States, saw God as central to defining America.
Our first President, George Washington, at his first inauguration on April 30, 1789, “put his right hand on the Bible...[after taking the oath] adding ‘So help me God.’ He then bent forward and kissed the Bible before him.” In his inaugural address, Washington remarked that ...it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge....No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States....You will join with me, I trust, in thinking that there are none under the influence of which the proceedings of a new and free government can more auspiciously commence.
Then in the Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 3, 1789, Washington declared “it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” Note that Washington was not just imploring that individuals have an obligation to God, but nations do as well. The United States government was not yet a year old.
That most astute observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835), observed “I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can read the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.”
The secular Left and the Left-liberal elite media would argue that even if de Tocqueville were right, he is irrelevant because he is writing about an earlier America. They argue that America has changed profoundly and is now a very different country. Justice O’Connor herself wrote that the phrase “one nation under God” was adopted in 1954 when “our national religious diversity was neither as robust nor as well recognized as it is now.”
Yet this is a profound misinterpretation of modern America. As Michael Novak has noted, recognizing “one nation under God” is much more important in a country as religiously diverse as America because the phrase transcends any one faith or denomination and is as inclusive as possible. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington points out that “Americans tend to have a certain catholicity toward religion: All deserve respect. Given this tolerance of religious diversity, non-Christian faiths have little alternative but to recognize and accept America as a Christian society.”
The idea that somehow the phrase “under God” is only a fifty-year-old tradition is historically inaccurate. In an article in the Weekly Standard on October 27, 2003, James Piereson wrote that on July 2, 1776, as British troops were closing in on Staten Island and the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia to declare independence, George Washington was gathering his troops in Long Island for battles in and around New York City. Washington wrote in the General Orders to his men that day, “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves....The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.” The very same week we were declaring our independence, Washington was asserting that we, as a nation, served under God.
Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, remarked that It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
We are, and always have been, a nation “under God,” regardless of our “robust national religious diversity.”
The two primary battlefields of this cultural struggle are the courts and the classrooms. Those are the arenas in which the secular Left has imposed change against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Those are the arenas in which believing in the Founding Fathers and the classic interpretation of the Constitution can be disastrous to a career and lead to social ostracism.
If we insist on courts that follow the facts of American history in interpreting the Constitution, we will reestablish the right that every American has to acknowledge our Creator as the source of our rights, our well being, and our wisdom. And if we insist on patriotic education both for our children and for new immigrants, we will rebuild the cultural bond of historic memory that has made America the most exceptional nation in history.
http://www.newt.org/backpage.asp?art=2643
