One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (39 page)

In March 1966, Dirksen proposed yet another constitutional amendment to restore prayer to the public schools. The Dirksen Amendment refined previous versions into a short, sixty-five-word proposal:

Nothing contained in this Constitution shall prohibit the authority administering any school, school system, educational institution or other public building supported in whole or in part through the expenditure of public funds from providing for or permitting the voluntary participation by students or others in prayer. Nothing contained in this article shall authorize any such authority to prescribe the form or content of any prayer.

Dirksen warned colleagues that a “storm of protest” over the Supreme Court rulings against school prayer was “gathering again in all parts of the nation.” “I expect nation-wide support,” he announced with confidence. “Since these court decisions struck prayer from the schools, polls have been taken and more than 81 percent of the people appear to disagree with the courts. Prayer groups are organizing. One man dumped 52,000 letters of protest on my desk two weeks ago.”
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The Dirksen Amendment relit the political firestorm from two years earlier and set the Senate on edge. A reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
noted that liberal members were “uniformly resentful of Dirksen's fanning the flames of what they view as one of the ugliest controversies to sweep over the American political landscape in recent years.” Opponents quietly complained but were wary about making public statements in an election year. “It would be like denouncing motherhood,” one said. But they took comfort in the knowledge that hearings had effectively killed the Becker Amendment. “People calmed down,” a liberal senator noted, “when they saw the parade of horrible possibilities that had been forecast—such as deleting ‘In God We Trust' from our currency—never materialized.” They hoped a similar cooling off might happen now. Dirksen worried about the same thing, however, and sought to avoid hearings altogether, arguing that his proposal was similar enough to the Becker Amendment to make the matter moot. “Every shade of opinion and viewpoint was presented to the [House Judiciary] Committee,” Dirksen noted. “It involved Jews, Catholics, Protestants of all denominations, ministers, laymen, lawyers, professors and others. I can think of nothing that was left unsaid.” Repeated efforts to force his proposal to the floor failed, however, and Dirksen resigned himself to a longer path to passage that would begin with hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments.
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Dirksen strove to build support inside and outside Congress. First he lobbied his colleagues, to great success. Within a week of its introduction, twenty-five senators had signed on as cosponsors of the Dirksen Amendment; by midsummer, the number had nearly doubled to forty-seven. He kept at it even after he broke a thigh bone in May and wound up on crutches for the rest of the summer. Mail continued to pour in, with Dirksen's staff claiming more than seventy thousand letters of support by
June. Meanwhile, organizers circulated petitions at both the national and local levels demanding passage of a prayer amendment. A housewife from Kenosha, Wisconsin, for instance, stopped by Dirksen's office in Washington, D.C., to present roughly three thousand signatures gathered by her Mothers Crusade to Establish Prayers in Public Schools. Dirksen also counted on conservative stars such as Pat Boone, who revived his lobbying through the Project Prayer program.
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The Senate hearings on the Dirksen Amendment were ultimately a faint echo of the House hearings on the Becker Amendment. While the earlier amendment had brought together the full House Judiciary Committee for six weeks of well-publicized testimony from hundreds of witnesses, the Senate hearings took just six days before the much smaller Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments with only a few dozen testifying. The lack of interest was made clear by members themselves. On the first day, just four senators from the nine-man subcommittee were present. By the middle of the week, only the chairman was there: Birch Bayh, a thirty-eight-year-old Democratic freshman from Indiana. Dirksen himself only showed up for the first day, even though he was the ranking Republican on the subcommittee. All sides, it seemed, believed the sessions were simply a procedural step before the real action of a full Senate debate.
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The low stakes aside, the Dirksen hearings took the pulse of the nation on the school prayer issue. Key witnesses from the House hearings reprised their roles for the new round, but the Senate hearings did not simply rehash the earlier ones. They brought into focus much more directly the question of just who truly spoke for ordinary Americans in determining the proper place of faith in the nation—their religious representatives, who largely opposed the amendment drive, or their political representatives, who more often supported it. This tension was evident in the testimony of the very first witness, Father Robert Drinan, dean of Boston College Law School. The Jesuit priest, who would win election to the House four years later, bluntly condemned the opportunistic pandering of politicians on the issue. He produced one of the three thick volumes of testimony from the House hearings, noting that the “overwhelming majority of leaders” in the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faiths were “strongly opposed to any constitutional change.”

Why is it then, I ask, that 40 Members of the U.S. Senate introduced in March 1966 a resolution seeking to do that which is directly opposed to the best judgment of virtually all of the religious leaders and denominational groups in the Nation? Why have these 40 Senators subscribed to a resolution seeking to accomplish an objective which the leading churches and synagogues of America have vehemently repudiated as unwise and unconstitutional? For what reasons do 40 Senators seek to appear more pious than the churches and more righteous than the Supreme Court?

In Drinan's view, Congress was tempting “a profound mistake” solely because its members were interested in political games.
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Dirksen, present in the room that day, rose to the challenge. He had the whole set of House testimony before him too, the minority leader mused, and he had been flipping through its pages taking note of the kind of witnesses heard there: priests, ministers, and rabbis; divinity school deans, professors, and theologians; leaders of church foundations and interfaith councils; and so on. “Somehow we had every sophisticated argument except an argument from the common man of this country, who was defined as one who works and prays and pays his bills and goes to church, rears a family in decency as law-abiding children,” Dirksen observed. “We are beginning to hear from him by the millions, and he is going to have his say.” Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, one of the forty-eight cosponsors of the amendment, seconded the claim that “sophisticated arguments” from experts were overrated. Drinan was taken aback. “Are you suggesting,” he asked, “that the National Council of Churches, which represents virtually all Protestant bodies, is not actually speaking for its constituency?” “They are speaking as well as they know,” Hruska allowed, but they could never truly speak for the people.
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The leaders of the NCC had a chance to speak later that same day. Dr. David Hunter, an Episcopal priest who served as NCC deputy general secretary, acknowledged that a few religious organizations favored the prayer amendment: the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches. “Without imputing these views to any but the leaders who expressed them,” Hunter continued,
“I find it significant to note that the three official national leaders cited above as favoring a prayer amendment direct a total constituency of not more than 3,700,000, whereas those opposing such an amendment are looked to for spiritual guidance by 56,794,674 Americans, or a ratio of 15 to 1.” There was some truth, Hunter admitted, in the charges that the churchmen who opposed the Becker Amendment had originally been “generals without armies,” but in the years since “they have been joined by the ‘armies' which caught up to them.” As proof, he cited resolutions against the prayer amendment passed at annual meetings of a half-dozen major denominations.
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As other witnesses made clear, however, the issue was still controversial at the grassroots. At the end of the first day, Bayh added to the official record a letter from a scattering of laymen's committees and congregations who were furious at the NCC leadership and wanted to “categorically repudiate” its statements on the matter. “The National Council of Churches has never been authorized by the millions of members it purports to ‘speak for' to appear before any Congressional, State, or local committees,” it read. In the same spirit, a Protestant minister testified that many clergymen had disagreed with NCC leaders. “We began to suspect that a false impression that ministers opposed prayers had been created artificially,” Reverend Gary Cohen said. “Many of us discussed the disturbing problem and felt that it was time to demonstrate that clergymen, at least a high percentage if not the overwhelming percentage, do in fact favor voluntary prayer and Bible reading in the schools.” As proof, he offered the names of thirty-nine hundred Protestant ministers from eighty-three denominations.
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The senators on the subcommittee were not impressed. Bayh pointed out that the number offered represented only about 5 percent of all clergymen in the country, hardly the “overwhelming percentage” Cohen claimed. Joe Tydings of Maryland went even further, doubting that the individuals listed were even ministers. He noted that the petition contained eighteen names from his hometown of Baltimore and, in a bit of courtroom drama, proceeded to pull out phone books to double-check the listings. “Five are not listed either under the list of ministers in the yellow pages or as ministers by name,” he concluded, “so I question the validity of the list.” At this, Carl McIntire Jr., the son of the American Council of Christian
Churches' leader and himself the head of International Christian Youth, seemed taken aback: “You are not questioning our honesty?” “All I want to have,” Tydings replied, “are the facts.” “To the best of our sincere intentions,” McIntire replied, “we have done what we feel is right.”
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While the NCC had its authority publicly challenged, other religious organizations found themselves facing criticism in private. Emanuel Carlson, for instance, again presented himself as the spokesman for roughly twenty-two million Baptists. Bayh probed him on that point, asking if there had been any effort to “assess the way the lay members feel” about the issue at hand. It was complicated, Carlson admitted, in that individual congregations sent messengers to the various conventions and they, in turn, passed resolutions that were sent on to the BJC for coordinated action. But Carlson believed that his testimony still reflected the general will of Baptists. Once again, however, the Southern Baptist Convention found itself besieged by laymen who refused to believe that a Baptist spokesman had testified against the school prayer amendment. H. Franklin Paschall, the new SBC president, distanced the convention from Carlson even more than his predecessor had. “Dr. Carlson,” he wrote to critics, “certainly was not speaking for all Southern Baptists any more than I can speak for all Southern Baptists.” Still, Paschall volunteered an opinion all the same, one that contradicted not just the BJC lobbyists but his own convention's formal resolutions. “I am sure,” he stated, “that Southern Baptists in general favor voluntary prayer and Bible reading in the public schools.”
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After the hearings, the debate over who could speak for ordinary Americans on the prayer issue spilled over into the press. “It may seem an anomaly that the most concerted and vocal opposition to Sen. Dirksen's proposed constitutional amendment to permit voluntary prayer in the public schools should come from spokesmen for leading American churches,” observed the
Chicago Tribune.
Groups such as the NCC, its conservative editors noted, were not to be trusted. “These organizations, professing to speak for millions of communicants, indicate by their doctrinal positions that they are more concerned with social engineering, world politics, and the governmental panaceas of the moment than they are with their traditional province. It is little wonder,” the editors noted, “that we are presented with the spectacle of churchmen who journey
to Washington to speak against prayer.” A syndicated column by Roscoe Drummond of the
Christian Science Monitor
began with the same premise—“one of the most striking facts” of the hearings was that “most religious denominations in the United States are against any such amendment”—but reached a different conclusion. Drummond accepted without question the idea that Protestant and Jewish spokesmen who opposed the amendment were doing so on behalf of their communicants, but when it came to Catholic spokesmen who supported the proposal, he had his doubts. “Important Catholic churchmen strongly favor the Dirksen amendment,” he acknowledged, “but Catholic support of it is not monolithic.” But neither, of course, was the Protestant or Jewish opposition.
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As Dirksen worked to bring his amendment to a vote, he advanced some of the same arguments. The religious leaders who opposed his efforts, he claimed at a news conference in mid-September, were disconnected from the laymen. Their testimony had bothered him “not one bit,” Dirksen insisted. “I'm not interested in social engineers, but in soul-savers who live close to their flocks—that means the little preachers.” He would press on, he announced, because of “the ministers and the millions who have written me in support of school prayers.” A few days later, Dirksen pointedly dismissed the authority of religious leaders in a speech on the Senate floor. The chamber was virtually empty, except for a few tourists sleeping in the galleries, but Dirksen nevertheless made an impassioned final plea for his proposed amendment. (He became so animated that a colleague compared him to the overzealous Professor Henry Hill from
The Music Man.
Dirksen disagreed: “Hell, I sound like Billy Graham. I'm positively evangelical about this.”) Citing recent polls showing that roughly 80 percent of people supported the amendment, Dirksen lashed into the NCC. “They come down here and make it appear they speak for 40 million people,” he said. “They do nothing of the kind! They are out of touch with their people.” As an added insult, Dirksen placed a pair of hit pieces in the official record—an article from the conservative magazine
Human Events
that criticized the NCC for its “invariably liberal” politics and a right-wing piece from Louisiana charging that the NCC, “although not Communistic, has been an aid to the Communist conspiracy.” Outraged leaders of a dozen denominations demanded an apology from Dirksen. None came.
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