In refusing to rule on the merits of Michael Newdow's challenge to the
Pledge of Allegiance, the Supreme Court attempted to stay out of the "culture war" between the (religious) Right and the Left. The American
public has no such luxury.
Michael Newdow, an atheist, argued that the Pledge's reference to America as "one nation under God," constitutes governmental establishment of
religion. The Bush administration countered that the pledge is "a
patriotic exercise, not a religious testimonial," and should be allowed.
This might seem to be a trivial case. But as part of a "culture war" between the Right and the Left, it has taken on an ominous significance.
Both sides have demonstrated naked hostility to the independent mind: the Right, by its desire to force school-aged children to profess
religious belief; the Left, by its demands for governmental support for secular ideas.
The First Amendment established what Thomas Jefferson termed a "wall of separation" between Church and State--a deliberate break with the
then-standard European practice of establishing an official church by governmental edict and supporting it by taxes.
The purpose of Church/State separation was to protect the right to disagree in matters of religion:
to ensure that the power of the government would never be used to force a person to profess or support a religious idea he does not agree with. Government officials may make whatever religious pronouncements they
wish, on their own--but they may not use the power of the government to promote their ideas.
On religion or any other topic, an individual's ideas are the matter of
his own mind, decided by the application (or misapplication) of his own rational faculty. To force a man to adhere to a particular doctrine is
to subvert the very faculty that makes real agreement possible and
meaningful, and thereby to paralyze his mechanism for recognizing truth.
The kind of forced "agreement" obtained by governmental edict is every
bit as meaningless as was the Iraqis' "love" for Saddam. Yet it is precisely this kind of forced agreement that the political
Right seeks, through its support of religion.
Next page in this article
1 | 2
