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The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars and the Separation of Church and State1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Tracy Fessenden
Affiliation:
An associate professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

Extract

In December 2004 the George W. Bush administration filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of two Kentucky counties barred by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from posting framed copies of the Ten Commandments in their courthouses, alongside a proclamation from President Ronald Reagan marking 1983 as the Year of the Bible. To those who would object that even a minimalist interpretation of the separation of church and state might preclude the prominent display of a religious text in just that place—the courthouse—where the principle of separation is normatively enforced, the White House offered assurance that “Official acknowledgement and recogntion of the Ten Commandments' influence on American legal history comport with the Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment].”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2005

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References

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63. New York Times, Dec. 3, 1869, 1.

64. The text accompanying these images describes morning exercises at the ideal public school: “a short passage of scripture is read, and with folded hands the little ones repeat the Lord's Prayer.” Public schools, the text continues, “constitute our chief safeguard against a relapse into the temporal and spiritual bondage which our fathers sought this country to avoid. … The dangers that threaten them in the way of unsecularization, and a diversion of the large portion of the common schools funds for the support of sectarian schools, are only too happily foreshadowed in Mr. Nast's admirable composition on page 140, which requires no comment to enforce its warning admonitions”: Harper's Weekly, February 26, 1870, 141–42.

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70. Emerson wrote in his journal in 1844, “the Catholic religion respects masses of men and ages. … The Catholic church is ethnical, and in every way superior. It is in harmony with Nature, which loves the race and ruins the individual. The Protestant has his pew, which of course is only the first step to a church for every individual citizen—a church apiece”: Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson, Edward W. and Forbes, Waldo E., 10 vols. (Boston 1911), 7:341–42Google Scholar, as quoted by Birdsell, Richard D., “Emerson and the Church of Rome,” American Literature 31 (11 1959): 273–81, 274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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75. In the words of Justice Rehnquist, “the greatest injury of the ‘wall’ notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights.… The ‘wall of separation between church and State’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned”: Wallace v. Jaffree; 472 U.S. 38, 107 (1984), Dissenting; National Alliance Against Christian Discrimination website, http://naacd.com/issues judicial.htm. Stephen F. Smith approvingly notes that “the most powerful voice in the recent assault on separation has been Justice Clarence Thomas. His plurality opinion in Mitchell [Mitchell v. Helms, 570 U.S. 793 (2000)] declared that, in the educational context, strict separation was ‘born of bigotry’ and thus ‘should be buried now.’ Incidentally, Thomas was educated by nuns in parochial schools and graduated from Holy Cross. Maybe the nativists were onto something about those Catholic schools after all”: Smith, Stephen F., “We the Protestants,” First Things 128 (12 2002): 4347, 4647.Google Scholar

76. Ibid., 43.