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The folks who criticize both school vouchers and believing conservatives like William Bennett are laboring under a misconception about the constitutional relationship between church and state. At base, many of these secularists hate, fear, and misunderstand religion. All too often, their distorted readings of American political and constitutional history are tools of that animosity. This point has already been made by Peter Berkowitz, in a devastating critique of the minority opinions in the Supreme Court's school-voucher case. In his dissenting opinion in that case, for example, Justice Breyer relied for his understanding of the establishment clause upon Philip Hamburger's exhaustive and important new book, Separation of Church and State. Trouble is, as Berkowitz shows, Breyer got Hamburger's argument exactly wrong. Like the other dissenting justices, Breyer argued that the Framers erected a wall of separation between church and state, so as to prevent socially divisive religious conflict. It's true that the Framers strove to diffuse religious conflict by forbidding the establishment of any one religion. But what Hamburger actually shows is that, short of establishment of any single religion at the expense of all others, the Framers had no objection to many forms of cooperation and contact between church and state. Having made this point, Berkowitz goes on to show how the dissenting justices' several opinions betray a deep hostility to religion itself — a shared conviction that religious education is intrinsically doctrinaire, divisive, and incompatible with democracy. It is this secular prejudice against religion, rather than the principles of our Constitution, that is actually enshrined in the justices' dissenting opinions in the Supreme Court's voucher case. A look at Michael Lind's attack on William Bennett's, Why We Fight, reveals the very same blend of anti-religious prejudice and historical misapprehension that we found in the justices' dissents. For starters, the only grounds on which Lind can bring himself to complement Why We Fight is Bennett's criticism of Jerry Falwell. That gives you a sense of where Lind is coming from. For Lind, Bennett's ultimate sin is his unstinting support of Israel, and his belief that both Israel and the United States have been blessed and protected by God. Here is the affirmation by Bennett that most offended Lind: "I myself am one of tens of millions of Americans who have seen in the founding and flourishing of the Jewish state the hand of the same beneficent God who attended our own founding and has guided our fortunes until now." According to Lind, the problem with Bennett's religiously informed patriotism is that it blurs the distinction between the "nonsectarian republicanism of America's founding fathers" and the "ethnoreligious nationalism" of the Israeli right. On top of that, says Lind, Bennett has derived his sense of America's common destiny with Israel from "Protestant fundamentalist prophesy theories." (In other words, Bennett is back in bed with Falwell.) In rebuke of Bennett's alleged sins against the Founding Fathers, Lind quotes John Adams's influential defense of the American Constitution and its Framers:
At the end of his book review, Lind declares himself hopeful that a "secular understanding of America's role in the world" will prevail over Bennett's "religious triumphalism." Funny how, by the end of the review, Lind has moved from the Framers' "non-sectarian republicanism" to a preference for secularism. The Framers may have been nonsectarian, but for the most part, they were anything but secular. And how exactly has the Catholic William Bennett betrayed "non-sectarian republicanism" by drawing on Protestant theories to embrace the Jewishness of Israel? Nowadays, amidst the hostility to religion of the new radical secularists, religious folk have banded together. They may never have been less sectarian than they are today. But the deeper problem with Lind's review is his facile attempt to attribute to the Framers a secularist vision of church-state relations that they simply did not share. Just as Hamburger argues in Separation of Church and State, the Founders, while guarding against government favoritism for any one religion, did not object to a wide array of contacts between church and state. Take John Adams, whom Lind's carefully selected quote makes out to be a quasi-secular radical separationist. Doctrinally, Adams may not have been a conventional Christian, yet Adams was far from being a nonbeliever. Adams's views on the relation between church and state were also very different from Jefferson's strong separationism, and much closer to the views of the majority of the Framers. Of course, with David McCullough's best-selling biography, John Adams has recently been "rediscovered." But why was Adams "lost" in the first place. In, On Two Wings, his new book on the place of religion in the American Founding, Michael Novak suggests that Adams's religiosity and Jefferson's secularism help explain why modern historians have so consistently preferred Jefferson to Adams. In other words, in contrast to Lind's portrayal, Adams was anything but discouraging when it came to contacts between church and state. Adams, for example, authored the Massachusetts state constitution (a critically important document, since at the time of its adoption, there was no national constitution standing above those of the states). In that state constitution, Adams wrote that it is the duty of all people to worship "The Supreme Being, the great creator and preserver of the universe." Only after affirming this "duty" did Adams note that everyone ought to be free to worship God in his own way. (And note, the initial meeting of the Massachusetts state constitutional convention took place in a church.) Michael Novak points out that, during the Massachusetts constitutional convention, Adams successfully argued, against much opposition, for an article mandating the creation of religious schools in every district of the Commonwealth, and paid for by the state treasury if need be. Against the argument that payments infringed on religious liberty, Adams maintained that no one's faith was forced by the provision. And Adams went on to argue that since republics need virtue, and since virtue needs religion, religious schools are indispensable to democracy, and the public ought by rights to pay for the irreplaceable service such schools provide. But Lind's misrepresentations of Adams's views don't end there. In his inaugural address, for example, John Adams repeatedly invoked and proclaimed a connection between America and divine Providence — exactly the claim for which Lind calls William Bennett to task. According to President Adams, America's revolutionaries had relied upon, "the purity of their intentions, the justice of their cause, and the integrity and intelligence of the people, under an overruling Providence which had so signally protected this country from the first...." Ten years after the remarks quoted by Lind, in which Adams stressed that the Framers of the American Constitution claimed no divine inspiration, had Adams changed his mind? I doubt it, especially since Adams's draft of the Massachusetts constitution, with provision for religious schools, was drawn up years before his disavowal of divine constitutional inspiration. My guess is that Adams drew a distinction between claims of direct divine inspiration, such as were made, say, by the Roman founders, and the notion that the American Framers were, broadly speaking, under the protection of divine Providence. The Framers, as Adams pointed out, based their government upon the natural rights of mankind. But of course, the Framers also believed that those same rights ultimately derived from God, the author of Nature herself. This is the connection that Lind cannot acknowledge. Now I myself am a secular fellow. I would not be comfortable with John Adams's plan to directly fund religious schools throughout the land, just as many of Adams's compatriots were uncomfortable with that plan. (Although at the time, Adams prevailed.) Yet it seems to me that in its decision on school vouchers, the Supreme Court crafted a reasonable and neutral framework for allowing parental choice in the matter of education — a choice in which religious schools would not be unfairly excluded. In doing so, the Court's majority came far closer to the letter and the spirit of the establishment clause, and to the views of our Framers, than did the minority. And just as Peter Berkowitz has detected an outright hostility to religion beneath the Court's minority opinion, it seems to me that Michael Lind's attack on William Bennett, and Lind's distorted portrayal of John Adams's views on religion, are based on a like hostility. I may personally not see it the way Bennett does, but where is the harm in his affirming a belief in God's special solicitude for the fate of America and Israel (even as Bennett criticizes Jerry Falwell)? Oh, I know. According to the new, militant secularists, once we believe that God is on our side, the Holocaust (and/or the Taliban — take your pick) cannot be far behind. Tell it to John Adams. In fact, we'll let John Adams have the last word — and the best reply to Michael Lind. In response to the enlightenment secularist Condorcet's claim that genius had been suppressed by religious superstition, Adams replied: "But was there no genius among the Hebrews? None among the Christians, nor Mahometans? I understand you Condorcet. It is atheistic genius alone that you would honor or tolerate." — Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. |
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Pledge decision may have sent Democratic politicians scurrying for cover,
but the controversy seems only to have emboldened the liberals at the
New York Times. Deeply disturbed by the Supreme Court's school-voucher
ruling, the Times has run op-ed after op-ed attacking the voucher
decision, carping at critics of the Pledge ruling, and generally complaining
about the stance toward religion of conservatives on the Court. And this
past Sunday in the New York Times Book Review , ex-conservative
