One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (31 page)

As he sat down to write the
Engel
decision fifteen years later, Black was determined to defend that wall of separation. Religious liberty was essential, he told his wife, because “when one religion gets predominance, they immediately try to suppress the others.” History was littered with evidence of the dangers that inevitably followed when church and state merged. “People had been tortured, their ears lopped off, and sometimes their tongues cut or their eyes gouged out,” Black continued, “all in the name of religion.” To illustrate that point, the justice crafted a rigorously researched opinion. He began with the Book of Common Prayer and then reread John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress,
a classic Christian allegory written by a Baptist author who had been imprisoned for defying the Church of England. That was merely the beginning. “The Judge had religious references on his fingertips,” marveled one of his clerks, who ran back and forth to the library to collect them. As he wrote and rewrote the opinion, Black piled on more history each time. Lower courts had repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about the nation's “religious heritage” to support the defendants in
Engel,
but Black was determined to expose their errors with a meticulously researched rebuttal. By the sixth draft, the bulk of his opinion had become a lengthy narrative about the tangled history of church-state relations in the entire Anglo-American world
from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. “It is a matter of history,” he insisted, “that this very practice of establishing governmentally composed prayers for religious services was one of the reasons which caused many of our early colonists to leave England and seek religious freedom in America.” Based on their “bitter personal experience,” Black wrote, the founders crafted the First Amendment to keep the state out of religion and religion out of the state.
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On June 25, 1962, the Supreme Court announced its decision in
Engel v. Vitale.
Inside the courtroom, Black arched forward in his high-backed chair, rested his arms on the bench, and began reading the opinion with unconcealed emotion. In the audience, his wife thought his delivery “sounded almost like a sermon.” After explaining the details of the case, Black paused to collect himself and clutched his papers tightly. There could be “no doubt,” he went on, that “the daily invocation of God's blessings [was] a religious activity” and, as a result, no doubt that New York “adopted a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment clause.” Black asserted that the First Amendment embodied the founders' belief that faith was “too personal, too sacred, too holy to permit its ‘unhallowed perversion' by a civil magistrate.” (Here, an observer noted, “his voice trembled with emotion as he paused over ‘too personal, too sacred, too holy.'”) In Black's view, religion certainly deserved a place of prominence in American life, but the state could not dictate it. “It is no part of the business of government,” he read, “to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by the government.” Departing from his written text, Black added an impromptu plea. “The prayer of each man from his soul must be his and his alone,” he said. “If there is anything clear in the First Amendment, it is that the right of the people to pray in their own way is not to be controlled by the election returns.”
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Despite his apparently uncompromising stand on the matter, Black signaled in an important footnote that there were limits to his opinion. In response to a dissent drafted by Stewart, Black tried to reconcile the wall of separation between church and state with the many religious invocations that had been introduced to national political culture, especially in recent years. “There is of course nothing in this decision reached here,” Black wrote in footnote 21, “that is inconsistent with the fact that
school children and others are officially encouraged to express love for our country by reciting historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence which contain references to the Deity or by singing officially espoused anthems which include the composer's faith in a Supreme Being, or with the fact that there are many manifestations in our public life of belief in God.” Black concluded that “such patriotic or ceremonial occasions bear no true resemblance to the unquestioned religious exercise that the State of New York has sponsored in this instance.” With the majority of the Supreme Court supporting him, Black thus affirmed the essential constitutionality of what scholars would later term ceremonial deism.
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One of his colleagues, however, disagreed. Douglas, who had argued only a decade earlier that the government's embrace of religion raised no constitutional problems, had begun to express doubts during the deliberations over
Engel.
He worried about being hypocritical. “I am inclined to reverse if we are prepared to disallow public property and public funds to be used to finance a religious exercise,” Douglas explained. “If however we would strike down a New York requirement that public school teachers open each day with prayer, I think we could not consistently open each of our own sessions with prayer. That's the kernel of my problem.” When the majority went out of its way to affirm the constitutionality of such practices, Douglas pushed back with a concurring opinion. He agreed that the Regents' Prayer violated the establishment clause, but then went further to challenge a broader range of religious policies. “The point for decision is whether the Government can constitutionally finance a religious exercise,” Douglas argued. “Our system at the federal and state levels is presently honeycombed with such financing.” (Here he added an important footnote of his own, denouncing a wide array of “government ‘aids' to religion,” including religious proclamations by presidents, the use of “In God We Trust” on currency, and the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.) “Nevertheless,” he continued, “I think it is an unconstitutional undertaking whatever form it takes.”
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At the other end of the spectrum, Stewart offered the lone dissent. Though he typically took a liberal position on First Amendment issues, he argued that the majority had “misapplied a great constitutional principle.” “I cannot see how an ‘official religion' is established by letting those
who want to say a prayer say it,” Stewart wrote. “On the contrary, I think that to deny the wish of these school children to join in reciting this prayer is to deny them the opportunity of sharing in the spiritual heritage of our Nation.” Like Douglas, he believed the Regents' Prayer was inseparable from other manifestations of public faith. But in citing the same examples as his colleague, Stewart came to the opposite conclusion, asserting that these ceremonies should be upheld, rather than struck down, as Douglas believed. Still, he shared Douglas's puzzlement at the majority's willingness to strike down the Regents' Prayer but sanction the rest: “Is the Court suggesting that the Constitution permits judges and Congressmen and Presidents to join in prayer, but prohibits school children from doing so?” Ultimately, Stewart believed, neither the state nor the federal government, in the regular religious ceremonies of either Congress or their own court, established anything approximating an “official religion.” Although alone in his dissent, Stewart soon found much of the country in agreement with him.
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The outraged reaction to the
Engel
decision was, in large part, driven by alarmist coverage in the press. The court's majority had gone to great lengths to note that their ruling merely struck down the Regents' Prayer and, moreover, did so only because of the unique role that New York State officials played in its composition and implementation, but newspapers lost the nuances. “God Banned from the State,” ran a typically hyperbolic headline. Hostile editorials only compounded the problem. The New York
Daily News,
for instance, lambasted the “atheistic, agnostic, or what-have-you Supreme Court majority,” while the
Los Angeles Times
complained they made “a burlesque show” of the First Amendment. Publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr. went so far as to call for a complete rewriting of the First Amendment in a signed editorial that ran in all his papers. The media's misrepresentations were so widespread that the
Columbia Journalism Review
devoted its fall issue to figuring out just how and why it had all gone so spectacularly wrong.
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The overwrought reactions in the press fueled, and were in turn fueled by, equally hyperbolic comments from politicians. As the
Columbia Journalism Review
report found, “The wire services, in their efforts to follow up an obviously ‘hot' story, worked on a first-come, first-served basis in selecting persons for comment.” As a result, early coverage was “heavily
loaded” with negative comments from politicians, especially “Southerners already hostile to the court for its desegregation decisions.” The Associated Press, for instance, updated its noon bulletin on the decision throughout the afternoon with comments from outraged southern congressmen. Representative George Grant of Alabama remarked, “They can't keep us from praying for the Supreme Court.” Another Alabamian, Representative George Andrews, offered a more dramatic line. “They put the Negroes in the schools,” he marveled, “and now they've driven God out of them.” Less than an hour later, the AP added a comment from Representative Howard W. Smith of Virginia. “The next thing you know,” he said, “they'll be telling us we can't open our daily House sessions with prayer.”
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As the Capitol became consumed with the school prayer decision, attention turned naturally to the White House. The issue of religion in public life was especially tricky for President John F. Kennedy, the nation's first Catholic president. On the 1960 campaign trail, he had been hounded by so many accusations that he would impose his personal faith on the nation that he confronted the issue directly in an address to Protestant ministers in Houston. “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” he had claimed, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.” Once in office, Kennedy tried to walk that line by closely following the path forged by Eisenhower. He dutifully presided over the new, uncontroversial interfaith events, such as the National Prayer Breakfast. But when it came to more personal expressions of faith he usually demurred. Where Eisenhower had delivered his “little prayer” at his inauguration, for instance, Kennedy instead invited poet Robert Frost to provide a more secular sensibility to the proceedings. For a year and a half, Kennedy managed to avoid issues of church and state. But now the Warren Court had forced his hand.
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In a press conference two days after the decision, Kennedy finally addressed it. In measured remarks, he cautioned Americans to approach the issue calmly. Noting that it was important to “support the Supreme Court's decisions even when we may not agree with them,” the president reminded Americans that “we have in this case a very easy remedy, and that is to pray ourselves, and I would think that it would be a welcome
reminder to every American family that we can pray a good deal more at home, we can attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity, and we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of all our children.” As Kennedy called for calm, however, a few of his predecessors fueled the fires. Herbert Hoover denounced
Engel
as a “disintegration of a sacred American heritage,” while Eisenhower asserted that he “always thought this nation was an essentially religious one.” Truman pointed out that it was actually the Court's duty to interpret the Constitution, but he was largely ignored.
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Congressional leaders only ramped up their rhetoric. The ruling, Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia thundered, was “an outrageous edict” and “a blow to all believers in a Supreme Being.” His colleagues in the Senate largely agreed. Barry Goldwater of Arizona denounced the decision as a “blow to our spiritual strength,” while James Eastland of Mississippi likewise called it as a major step toward “the destruction of the religious and spiritual life of this country.” While the Senate fretted about the country's spiritual foundations, the House decided to act. Representative Fred Marshall of Minnesota proposed placing “In God We Trust” prominently above the Speaker's dais in the chamber. He had come up with the idea years before in conversation with his recently departed colleague Louis Rabaut, but the Court's decision finally prompted action. Democratic Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts soon gave his endorsement: “The words ‘In God We Trust' symbolize the path that our country has always taken since its origin and, pray God, will always take.” The proposal sped through the House, passing unanimously in September 1962. In case anyone missed the significance, Representative William Randolph of Missouri noted for the record that the House had given “in a not so subtle way our answer to the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court order banning the Regents' Prayer from the New York State schools.” Indeed, he added, after passing the proposal, “some Members were heard to say that we had just reversed the decision.” The Capitol architect began working on a golden engraving of “In God We Trust” to be placed above the speaker's chair. In the meantime, he painted the motto there in gilt letters as a temporary fix.
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Congress was far from alone in its opposition to
Engel.
As soon as the opinion went out over the wire services, Hugo Black found himself
inundated with telephone calls and, soon, more than a thousand letters. The vast majority of his correspondents were outraged by what the decision said (or, rather, what they misunderstood it to say). Notably, their letters repeatedly invoked the various manifestations of religion in public life to argue that the Supreme Court had erred. “Our country was founded on faith in God,” read a typical letter from a Pasadena woman. “Our Senate amended the Pledge of Allegiance to incorporate the words ‘under God' to establish and confirm that fact. An invocation and a benediction are a part of the inauguration of our President. Our Congress opens its sessions with a prayer. The Supreme Court acknowledges it by use of a crier at each convening of this venerable body. In recent years, it has become a practice to hold an annual prayer breakfast, attended by the President and his Cabinet.” The litany varied from letter to letter, but the sentiment remained the same. “Our nation has been greatly blessed ‘under God,'” read a petition from four dozen Charlotte residents, “and our motto ‘
IN GOD WE TRUST
' should be emphasized in every phase of our national life.” An angry mother from Phoenix wrote, “As for me and my family, we believe in the
Free
America, which was brought forth by our Founding Fathers—
under
God!”
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