One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (38 page)

Popular opinion shifted dramatically as the hearings wore on. By the third week, reporters around the Capitol noted that congressional mail, once “as high as 100 to 1, and in no case less than 10 to 1” in favor of the amendment, had swung the other way. The reasons were clear. “Mail opposing an amendment picked up noticeably after a series of eminent church leaders urged the committee not to tamper with the First Amendment,” the Associated Press related. Churches had not simply inspired their members but organized them. Initially, the AP noted, “opposition mail was almost entirely handwritten and on an individual basis,” in sharp contrast to the mass of preprinted postcards and petitions that supporters had used. “Now cards and form letters are appearing in large numbers” in opposition “as some churches belatedly organize drives to offset the pro-amendment efforts.”
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As the hearings entered their sixth and final week, Celler told reporters what they already understood. “The Becker Amendment will fail,” he told them. “The tide originally in favor of it has turned. The hearings have caused the public to have second thoughts. They do not now wish to tinker with the Bill of Rights.” The Judiciary Committee had second thoughts as well. While observers estimated in April that a large majority of committee members would vote for the Becker Amendment, an informal poll in June showed that at least twenty of the thirty-five would vote against it now. The mobilization of religious leaders seemed key. “The effect of the churches has been to reverse the tide,” Celler reflected, especially with members of the committee, who had received a hundred thousand letters between them. With his colleagues now behind him, Celler
concluded the hearings on June 3. Without any action or announcement, the Becker Amendment quietly died. “The only reason its obituary notice hasn't gone out already,” a committee member said a few weeks later, “is that we still don't know how to write it without risking another furor.” In mid-July, Dean Kelley noted that six weeks had gone by since the end of the hearings and the full committee had yet to meet. “When it does,” he predicted, “the prayer amendment issue will be superseded by other Committee business, and there will be no general urgency to get to it.”
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Becker refused to accept defeat. “I challenge Mr. Celler to bring an amendment to the floor of the House,” he said from the floor of the chamber. “I know he is afraid to do this, and it is a tragedy that one man in Congress can so block the will of the American people.” As it became clear that Celler would not release the amendment, Becker revived his plan to use a discharge petition. He announced he could easily secure the 218 signatures he needed. The discharge petition already had 167, Becker bragged, and the remainder would be easy to secure now that Celler's stalling tactics had ruled out regular action. Becker's opponents, however, were no longer worried. One of the anti-amendment members of the Judiciary Committee joked to a reporter off the record that “unleashing Frank Becker at this point is like unleashing Chiang Kai-Shek”—a bellicose threat that realists knew would never materialize. Indeed, to Becker's embarrassment, not only was he unable to secure more signatures for the discharge petition, but several of the signers withdrew their names. The Becker Amendment, columnist Drew Pearson wrote that summer, had proved to be the “biggest flop Congress has seen in years.” As a consolation prize, the Republican National Convention adopted a watered-down proposal for a prayer amendment in its party platform. But that measure died a quiet death too, going down to defeat with Barry Goldwater that fall. A few months later, Becker left office.
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T
HE DEFEAT OF THE
B
ECKER
Amendment led some observers to surmise that the issue had finally been laid to rest. In reality, the prolonged fight over the amendment marked not the end of a struggle but the beginning. The House hearings revealed how fault lines across the country were shifting on the issue of separation of church and state.
Clerical leaders had taken stands that were largely in line with their denominations' traditional perspectives on the matter, but conservative laymen recoiled from their arguments. They felt bewildered—and, in many instances, betrayed—by their leaders' objections to seemingly wholesome traditions such as school prayer and Bible reading. Their faiths' traditional stances on issues of church-state separation had always seemed academic. In the wake of Becker's failure, conservative laymen began to doubt the authority of their religious representatives and look for new leaders to replace them.

In select cases, the conflict over the Becker Amendment brought into the open ongoing struggles between ministers and laymen. The National Council of Churches, which played a prominent role in coordinating religious opposition to the school prayer amendments, had spent much of the previous decade embroiled in a bitter struggle between liberal clergymen and more conservative laymen. In the early 1950s, a group of businessmen took charge of a new National Lay Committee in an overt effort to curtail the NCC's involvement in political, social, and economic issues. Notably, the Lay Committee was led by many of the same businessmen—including DuPont's Jasper Crane, Chrysler's B. E. Hutchinson, and Sun Oil's J. Howard Pew Jr., who served as its chairman—who had helped promote Spiritual Mobilization and other Christian libertarian groups in the 1940s. “Our premise was that, instead of appealing to government, the church should devote its energies to the work of promoting the attributes of Christianity . . . in the hearts and minds of men,” Pew recalled. “We attempted to emphasize that Christ stressed not the expanded state but the dignity and responsibility of the individual.” Under his leadership, the Lay Committee regularly denounced the NCC for making broad proclamations on “secular affairs” that were at odds with the opinions of laymen. In response to the constant criticism, the NCC disbanded the committee in 1955. “Clergy and laity active in organized Protestantism seemed to have lost the capacity to understand each other,” Pew lamented. By the dawn of the 1960s, some conservatives in the NCC believed that clerical leaders were actively undermining their interests. “In sober truth,” said Reverend Edmund A. Opitz, a conservative Unitarian, “many of our most articulate religious leaders are part of the problem, not part of the remedy.”
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The battle over the Becker Amendment created many new rifts in religious bodies as well. Baptists, who had been committed to the complete separation of church and state for centuries, now had second thoughts about their stance. Next to the NCC's Dean Kelley, no religious figure had been more important in opposing Becker than Emanuel Carlson, director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs (BJC). At the House hearings, he had presented himself as the spokesmen for twenty million Baptists, “insofar as anyone can speak for them.” But his well-publicized opposition to the amendment there came as a shock to many rank-and-file Baptists, weakening his standing and that of the BJC. Though it represented eight different bodies, the BJC had its roots in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Even there, Carlson's outspoken resistance to the prayer amendment sparked a major backlash. “I am being besieged with a flood of letters and phone calls from Southern Baptists who are protesting the recently released statement of the Joint Committee,” convention president K. Owen White wrote Carlson in March 1964. “Having had opportunity during the past months to visit in many areas of our convention coast to coast, I am in a position to tell you that there is a wide difference of opinion among our people and at the grass roots level the overwhelming majority of our pastors and people are out of sympathy with the decision of the Supreme Court.” White counted himself among them. The
Engel
and
Schempp
rulings, he believed, would inevitably lead to the removal of all recognition of God from public life and government. In a letter to an old friend, the Houston minister confided that he had been asked to testify against the prayer amendment in the House hearings but had refused, “since I am in favor of such an amendment or something similar to it.”
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As the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention approached that summer, White braced for an open revolt. To avoid “a very heated controversy” over Carlson's opposition to the amendment, White penned an article for the Baptist press that distanced Carlson from the convention. “It seems very difficult for many people to realize that there is no such thing as ‘The
Southern Baptist Church
,'” he wrote. “No one speaks for Southern Baptists other than Southern Baptists themselves.” Yet White used the rest of the article, titled “Southern Baptists at the Crossroads,” to reckon with the political controversies that were dividing the
convention's ten million members, with “the question on Bible reading and prayer in the public schools” at the forefront. He made his dissatisfaction with the Court's rulings clear but warned like-minded conservatives that “it would be neither wise nor possible” to address the matter in length at the annual meeting in Atlantic City. But not every reader heeded him. At the convention, a Virginia delegate—a “messenger” in the SBC's language—proposed amending a traditional, broad statement on the First Amendment to affirm “the historic right of our schools to engage voluntarily, on a non-sectarian basis, in prayer, Bible reading, and other devotional exercises.” Without giving opponents a chance to speak, White pushed the matter to a vote, where it passed narrowly. At this, opponents called for reconsideration as supporters chanted, “No, no, no!” The tension was broken only a half hour later, when the same Virginia delegate changed the language of his motion to one that supported “the historic right of our schools for full academic freedom in pursuit of all knowledge, religious or otherwise.” The new language did not mention the Becker Amendment and instead affirmed SBC support for the First Amendment, opposing “any further amendment” in the realm of religion. Thus reworded, the measure passed nearly unanimously. Few reporters noted the short window during which the SBC formally stood in favor of school prayer. Most offered accounts as straightforward as their headlines: “Baptists Vote ‘No' on Prayer Amendments.”
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Yet across Christian denominations, the rising discontent of the laity was perhaps most evident in the lay organizations that continued to press for a prayer amendment on their own. Within months of the Becker Amendment's death in the House, the Constitutional Prayer Foundation began aggressively lobbying the Senate in hopes that the proposal might fare better there. Through late 1964 and early 1965, Francis Burch blanketed the upper chamber with letters urging senators to pass an amendment that would “restore the traditional meaning of the First Amendment and eliminate once and for all the chance of further judicial erosion of voluntary, non-denominational reverence from our national life.” The responses to his entreaties revealed a wide range of senatorial opinion on the subject, with large numbers expressing unqualified support.
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Senators who supported a prayer amendment believed, as Burch did, that the idea still had broad popular support. “Both this office and the
Senate Judiciary Committee have received so much mail on the ‘prayer' issue that with our present staffs it is physically impossible to answer all of it,” noted Democratic senator James Eastland of Mississippi. The Becker Amendment, in their view, had fallen short only because of the obstructionist tactics of its opponents. “The leisurely pace of those hearings,” complained Pennsylvania Republican Hugh Scott, “indicated the considerable opposition by the Democratic Chairman.” Though the senators believed the House had thwarted the will of the people, they worried that the testimony of religious leaders at the Becker hearings might be impossible to overcome, even if the Senate proved a more favorable setting.
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That said, there was no clear indication that the Senate would be more amenable to the prayer amendment cause. The Senate Judiciary Committee was in the hands of an ally, Jim Eastland, rather than an opponent like Celler, but the chamber as a whole seemed cooler to the idea of an amendment than the House had two years before. While representatives with reservations about the prayer amendment had answered inquiries like Burch's with broad statements of studious concern, the senators who opposed the idea were blunt. “I am afraid that I can't be of much help to you,” replied Robert F. Kennedy of New York, “as I support the Supreme Court's decision on school prayer.” “The Supreme Court has spoken,” Oregon's Wayne Morse replied. “Its decision is final.” For these opponents, the opposition of clergymen offered political cover. Vance Hartke of Indiana framed his opposition this way, saying he agreed “with most religious leaders of all faiths that the Court has strengthened, not weakened, religion in America.” Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, meanwhile, explained his opposition by quoting Carlson's Baptist Joint Committee: “Religion on a government platter has never provided much spiritual nurture for the people, nor has it given strength to the nation.”
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The Senate moved slowly on Burch's proposal. For much of 1965, the chamber was consumed by the ambitious legislative agenda of President Johnson's Great Society programs, devoting its energies to drafting, debating, and passing major pieces of legislation such as the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid. In 1966, however, the drive for a prayer amendment picked up with renewed energy, as it found the champion it needed: Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Recognizable
for his shock of white hair and thick black glasses, the seventy-two-year-old Dirksen was a political powerhouse. Despite an overwrought speech-making style that earned him the nickname “the Wizard of Ooze,” the gravel-voiced Republican was an effective legislator who had rallied liberals and moderates in his caucus to cross the aisle and support the Civil Rights Act. Still, on school prayer his leadership came as a surprise. In 1964, Dirksen had publicly dismissed the Becker Amendment's chances soon after its introduction in the House. A year later, he showed little interest in Burch's pleas to revive the idea, offering only bland assurances that he would give “my very careful attention” if someone else ever brought the matter before the Senate. Privately, though, Dirksen was a great believer in prayer. “Church was a large part of our early lives,” he stressed in his memoirs, recounting that his mother had helped construct the house of worship of his childhood Reformed Church congregation. As an adult, Dirksen believed that prayer had saved his career. He had served eight terms as a congressman before his badly deteriorating eyesight forced him to resign in 1949. When doctors recommended removal of one eye, Dirksen turned to prayer, dropping to his knees on the train home to Illinois to ask God if he should have the procedure. “He said, ‘No,'” Dirksen recalled. “Just as emphatic as it could be.” Refusing treatment, he relied on the power of prayer. Dirksen's eyesight soon recovered and, after a successful Senate run in 1950, so did his career. From then on, the Republican remained convinced that prayer was nothing less than “a pipeline to God Almighty.”
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