Each year, the American Civil Liberties Union “sues Christmas.” It is not Christmas itself they find so offensive—or, as they argue, “unconstitutional”—just its public recognition. Christmas carols or manger scenes in public schools or on city property, they say, would violate “the separation of church and state.” It is the same with Christian student groups on public school campuses, “moments of silence” at the start of the school day, tuition tax credits, and countless other recent (and rather modest) efforts to accommodate the religious dimension of humankind.
An increasing number of Christians are able to rebut the ahistorical arguments of the “strict separationists”—but many still cannot. For them the mere mention of “pluralism” or “imposing our values” or “the separation of church and state” is enough to end any discussion on a whole range of subjects. What we must ultimately ask is, What is the source of values, religious or otherwise, in contemporary American life? Whose beliefs and values should be reflected in the law and public policy of our pluralistic society? Must their roots be wholly secular, or, indeed, can they be? The outcome of the debates on these issues has very practical implications for the kind of society we will become as we move into our third century as a nation.
America’S Public Religious Heritage
The view of those who advocate the “strict separation” of religious values from our public life and institutions have history against them. One would almost dare to call such a view “un-American” if the term were not so pejorative.
The Founding Fathers’ Intent
The Declaration of Independence proclaims it “self evident” that we “are endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” appealing to “the Supreme Judge of the world,” and executed by its own testimony “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.…” In a similar vein, the First Congress, the same Congress that drafted, debated, and proposed the First Amendment, not only initiated the practice of retaining legislative chaplains to offer public prayers, but the day after proposing the First Amendment called upon President Washington to proclaim “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many favors of Almighty God.”
Did the authors of the First Amendment violate their own standard of “separation of church and state”? One would certainly think so after reading many recent court opinions and much of the prominent mass media coverage. Those media seem to fear religious contact with public institutions only slightly less than the bubonic plague. This understanding of the Constitution was almost nonexistent for the first 150 years of our constitutional history. The fact is that it is antireligious prejudice, not any limitation of our Constitution, that animates much of the contemporary understanding of the relationship of church and state. In other words, as the American Bar Association editorialized against the Supreme Court’s 1948 McCollum decision, modern secularists continue to mistake “freedom of religion” for “freedom from religion.” Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union exacerbate the problem, breathing down the necks of school and other public officials across the country. They threaten to sue any time a prayer is offered at a public event, or any time school children are offered a glimpse of the Judeo-Christian alternative to the ethical relativism that has so captivated educational philosophy in recent years.
American Government Acknowledges God
Many instances of public religious expression could be cited in support of the proposition that our Constitution permits a healthy interaction between religion and public institutions, not a rigid separation. Our coins have borne “In God We Trust” since 1865, and this was made our national motto by act of Congress in 1956. As recently as 1952, none other than the iconoclastic Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in Zorach v. Clauson that “we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Indeed we are, and indeed they do—but something far different is in the air today.
Numerous other examples of public religious expression might be mentioned. The religious proclamations, prayers, and acts of our former Presidents provide a rich and interesting study. Since the days of Chief Justice John Marshall, the Supreme Court has opened each day’s business with the words “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.” Both the Senate and the House of Representatives continue to employ chaplains to open their daily sessions with prayer, and chaplains of many faiths serve all branches of our military. In 1952, Congress directed the President to proclaim a National Day of Prayer, most recently observed with considerable exuberance and faithfulness on May 5, 1983. In 1954, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, which, according to a House of Representatives Report, was intended to “recognize the guidance of God in our national affairs.” God is praised and declared trustworthy in our national anthem and is acknowledged in many other songs that might be called national songs. One prominent example is the fourth stanza of “America,” which is a prayer:
Our fathers’ God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing:
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light;
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King!
Can our undisputed public religious heritage, as symbolized by our national motto itself—In God We Trust—and those public religious practices that have been held “unconstitutional” in recent years, be legally or philosophically reconciled? No less an authority than Solicitor General Erwin Griswold did not think so while still dean of Harvard Law School. Following the school prayer and Bible-reading decisions of 1962 and 1963, Dean Griswold sharply criticized the Supreme Court for its transformation of the American tradition of “religious toleration” into one of “religious sterility.”
The difference is a terribly important one; the former is characterized by benevolence toward religion and religious values while the latter is actively hostile, seeking to limit or even eliminate any religious influence on our law and public policy. The former is required by our pluralism, indeed, by our Constitution; the latter is an innovation, a graft upon the constitutional tree urged by those whose primary aim appears to be the complete secularization of our public life and institutions.
Pluralism Or Secularism?
There is a “values crisis” in late twentieth-century American society; unfortunately, we can no longer assume a consensus on basic beliefs and values, at least not among public policy makers, even as the need for such a consensus increases with every passing day. Whose beliefs and values—whose world view—should be reflected in the law and public policy of our pluralistic society?
The intelligentsia, the federal courts, and much of the major communications media assume that the source of our public values must be wholly secular, that this is required by “pluralism” and “values neutrality.” Let’s look at two situations in which these fundamentally different perspectives became public policy. We will see whose values are neutral.
Schools As Social Laboratories
The Judeo-Christian teaching unequivocally supports our right (and duty) as parents to guide the moral, religious, and character development of our children. Enter the secular social engineers with no commitment to the sacred character of the family, who seek to advance their world view through the public schools, and, as we say in the law, the issue is clearly drawn.
Even to one accustomed to confronting the many faces of secularism, the audacity of certain public school philosophies is simply breathtaking. Hear, for example, the role of teachers in our public schools, as described in the National Education Association’s report entitled “Education for the 70’s”:
“[S]chools will become clinics,” the report cheerfully predicted, “whose purpose is to provide individualized psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers will become psycho-social therapists.”
There you have “values neutrality,” secular style.
The great irony, of course, is that those in the vanguard of such an educational philosophy are the very ones who cry the loudest about how Christians and others holding traditional views want to “impose their beliefs.” To the contrary, let the obvious be unequivocally stated: “Values neutrality” is not some kind of moral high ground occupied only by those advocating wholly secular solutions to difficult social and political problems.
“Progressive” Education?
If one is troubled by the thought of public school teachers serving as “psycho-social therapists” to our children, the concern is multiplied a hundredfold when the “progressive” curriculum is examined.
“Progressive” sex education, for instance, is a particularly egregious example of libertine ideology masquerading as “values neutrality.” In The Great Orgasm Robbery, a Planned Parenthood publication, for example, we—and our teenage children who receive it in the public schools—are counselled: “Sex is fun, and joyful … and it comes in all types and styles, all of which are OK. Do what gives pleasure and enjoy what gives pleasure and ask for what gives pleasure. Don’t rob yourself of joy by focusing on old-fashioned ideas about what’s ‘normal’ or ‘nice.’ Just communicate and enjoy.”
As Prof. Jacqueline Kasun has written in her provocative study of sex education, “It may come as a surprise to … parents … that the contemporary sex-education movement does not focus on the biological aspects of sex.…” Rather than biology, these courses present what might be called a “genital-centered world view,” frequently making Freud look mild in comparison. The Burt and Meeks model sex education curriculum, for example, begins with “a mixed bathroom tour in the first grade” and proposes that sex education be mandatory through at least two years of high school. In each grade, students are to keep an elaborately organized “notebook on human sexuality,” to include information on such enlightening subjects as “the differences between human sexuality and the sexuality of lower animals,” and “pages of details regarding the male and female genital response during sex.” The latter are distributed by the National Sex Forum, an organization that pursues its mission to undermine traditional moral values with religious zeal.
Consider several of the recommended items for classroom discussion and activities. In one lesson plan, high school students, working in boy-girl pairs on “physiology definition sheets,” are asked to define terms such as “foreplay,” “erection,” and “ejaculation.” In another, small coed groups are to be employed to list all of the slang words in our rich American vocabulary for penis, vagina, homosexual, and intercourse. Elsewhere, recommended topics for classroom discussion include, in all seriousness, how students “feel” about drawing pictures of sex organs, and whether they are satisfied with the size of their own.
For those recalcitrant youngsters who, in spite of all the aforementioned publicly funded assistance to the contrary, nevertheless have problems getting their adolescent juices flowing (always “responsibly,” of course), there is yet hope in the prescribed segment of the sex ed curriculum on masturbation, which, in Dr. Kasun’s home town of Arcata, California, includes a “pre-test” and a “posttest” on the subject. The goals for the seventh- and eighth-grade curriculum in Arcata specify, for example, that “ ‘the student will develop an understanding of masturbation,’ will view films of masturbation, [and] will ‘learn the four philosophies of masturbation.…’ ” (For the educationally underpriviledged, the four philosophies of masturbation, to be taught “by participating in a class debate,” are identified as “traditional, religious, neutral, and radical.”)
The Ethics Of “Anything Goes”
The most basic principle underlying these activities, courses, and discussion manuals—and they will be around in one form or another for the forseeable future—is that there is no right or wrong: there are no moral absolutes. The only rule appears to be that you must be “open minded” and therefore not “push your beliefs” on others. Traditional views of sexual and family relationships, views that continue to be held by a great majority of the public according to recent polls and surveys, are portrayed as outdated and really rather silly.
In place of traditional values, the progressive curriculum offers the model Planned Parenthood teenager an active and “responsible” sex life, made responsible through the use of the contraceptives that groups such as Planned Parenthood so generously supply to our children. Abortion is typically regarded and described as a back-up birth control technique, and—this is all so very sad—our children are shown where to go if they need or want one. The fact that we as parents need not be asked, or in many jurisdictions even told, about their decision is made very clear to the students, our children. (Recently two federal judges struck down a government regulation requiring that parents be notified—not asked, notified—within ten days after their minor daughters were given prescription contraceptives or devices [IUDS or diaphragms]. The regulation had been pejoratively labeled “the Squeal Rule” by the press.)
Judging The Value Of Life
A second issue, or rather category of issues, that likewise illustrates the values conflict in contemporary American society, is that of “bioethics.” For the uninitiated, bioethics is an interdisciplinary branch of ethics in which doctors, philosophers, lawyers, and theologians collaborate to resolve ethical, including moral, questions raised in modern health care. Ultimately the questions boil down to timeless ones: What is the nature and value of human life? How are we to understand and respond to human suffering and imperfection? Where there are differences of opinion—on abortion, or the extension of routine medical care to handicapped newborns (e.g., Baby Doe)—who decides? What about euthanasia, genetic engineering, and “test tube babies”? How should society handle more recent developments, such as “sperm banks,” mothers willing to “rent a womb” for nine months, or court-approved lawsuits claiming “wrongful life” and “wrongful birth”?
At the essence of the heated public debate of these and other bioethical issues is the question raised earlier: What world view—none being neutral in any meaningful sense—will be at the foundation of our public policy in this sensitive area? Historically, the answer has been found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. At its center is a view of God as the sole giver and taker of innocent human life as well as author of a specific moral order. With regard to the prohibition of the taking of innocent human life, our view has been termed the “sanctity of life ethic.”
It is a view, or an ethic, that harmonizes with statements made by President Reagan, who, in a recent article in the Human Life Review, reminds us that the heart of the abortion issue is nothing less than a profound value judgment. Said Reagan:
“The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question … is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law.…”
The Rise Of Infanticide
Recently, however, we have been urged by certain powerful voices to reject this sanctity-of-life ethic, with its inhibiting ties to Judeo-Christian morality, and accept in its stead a so-called quality-of-life ethic.
The quality-of-life ethic we are urged to accept is well illustrated by the Baby Doe case, which began with the birth of an anonymous baby in Bloomington, Indiana, about a year ago. The baby, who had Down’s syndrome (a condition that causes mental retardation of varying degrees), was denied a routine medical procedure necessary to enable the infant to eat and drink. Baby Doe died eight agonizing days later, a victim of the crudest form of child abuse: starvation.
The reason given for the medical inaction leading to Baby Doe’s death, which had the blessing of the doctor, the parents, and the Indiana Supreme Court, can be reduced to the view that the quality of life of a Down’s syndrome person is not worth living or legally protecting. Perhaps needless to say, the implications of allowing doctors, parents, and courts to make such decisions, formerly reserved to God alone, are indeed ominous.
The Baby Doe incident is not just an isolated case. As Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has tirelessly pointed out, this practice of “infanticide” is increasingly justified by medical ethicists and practitioners—a situation that would have been unthinkable even 15 years ago. A recent investigative report conducted by a CBS television station in Boston looked at the practice of infanticide in cities in over 30 states, for example, and found “evidence of over 100 … cases of withholding or withdrawing medical treatment [from handicapped newborns], including in some cases, food and water.”
As in a number of trends, at least a part of the infanticide problem is traceable to the courts. Recently, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., struck down a government effort to stop infanticide. Although the judge based his holding on narrower procedural grounds, he quite gratuitously suggested in his written opinion that the “right of privacy” might well make the decision of parents and doctors not to treat or feed a handicapped newborn a constitutional right. Some readers may recognize the judicially constructed “right of privacy” as the selfsame constitutional source of authority for the right of abortion, as first held by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973.
The Supreme Court And “Gut Reactions”
Increasing attention has been focused on the role of the Supreme Court as an arbiter of fundamental societal values, particularly since Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision. In the process, as Joseph Sobran has written, “[T]he court’s pretensions to be a panel of experts who merely ‘interpret’ the law with scrupulous objectivity have suffered.…” Sobran cites Woodward and Armstrong’s The Brethren, in which unseemly political infighting among the justices is chronicled and detailed, and Justice William O. Douglas’s posthumous memoirs, in which Douglas “cheerfully confesses that he … decided the Constitution’s meaning on the basis of his own ‘gut reactions’.” Sobran cites Prof. Raoul Berger, who until 1976 was the Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History at Harvard: “The people reluctantly accept [the Court’s rulings] because they are told that the Constitution requires it. Would they bow to judicial governance if they understood it merely represents the ‘gut’ reactions of the Justices?”
Freed from a Judeo-Christian foundation, it is difficult to predict how far the courts will go in their efforts to fashion the brave new world. Already we are experiencing the deaths of over 1.2 million unborn children each year as a direct cost of the more “enlightened” judicial philosophy.
Abortion And Brutal Truth
Make no mistake, we are talking about killing—killing that proceeds in the United States at the rate of over 4,000 unborn children a day. And killing that is cold, calculated, and often brutal, as is made so painfully clear in Magda Denes’s In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital. The author, a clinical psychoanalyst who herself had an abortion in the hospital to which she returned for her study, believes that those who perform abortions can better “deal with” their experiences psychologically and emotionally if all the messy details and feelings are brought out into the full light of day. It is to be hoped that her candid and graphic revelations would have the opposite effect, sweeping away the clichés and the rhetoric, and forcing the reader to face the hard reality of precisely what an abortion is.
A physician who performs saline abortions, for example, describes to Dr. Denes what happens when the salt is injected:
“All of a sudden one notice[s] that at the time of the saline infusion there [is] a lot of activity in the uterus. That’s not fluid currents. That’s obviously the fetus being distressed by swallowing the concentrated salt solution and kicking violently … the death trauma.”
Another physician who performs saline abortions at the hospital, apparently responding positively to Denes’s tell-it-all therapy, mentions “another little thing that I’ve never read about or mentioned to anyone else. But on a number of occasions,” the physician continues, “with the needle, I have harpooned the fetus. I can feel the fetus move at the end of the needle just like you have a fish hooked on the line.” This distresses the doctor, for whom rhetoric about pluralism, neutrality, or freedom of choice—or even the huge profits his specialty generates—is no comfort at the moment. “This gives me an unpleasant, unhappy feeling,” confesses the doctor, “because I know that the fetus is alive and responding to the needle stab.… You know there is something alive in there that you are killing.”
To write about surgical abortions, Denes went to the operating room to observe firsthand. (Holtzman is the doctor and Smith his assistant.)
“ ‘Forceps please.’ Mr. Smith slaps into his hand what look like oversized ice-cube tongs. Holtzman pushes it into the vagina and tugs. He pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table. ‘There,’ he says. ‘A leg. You can always tell fetal size best by the extremities; 15 weeks is right in this case.’
“I turn to Mr. Smith. ‘What did he say?’ ‘He pulled a leg off,’ Mr. Smith says. ‘Right here.’ He points to the instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long. It consists of a ripped thigh, a knee, a lower leg, a foot, and five toes. I start to shake badly, but otherwise I feel nothing. Total shock is passionless.
“ ‘I have the rib cage now,’ Holtzman says, as he slams down another piece of the fetus. ‘That’s one thing you don’t want to leave behind.…’ Raising his voice and looking at the nurse, who stands next to Dr. Berkowits, he says, ‘The table is a little bit too high. I am struggling.’ The nurse jumps to crank it lower. ‘That’s better,’ Holtzman says. ‘There, I’ve got the head out now.…’
“I look at the instrument table where next to the leg, and next to a mess he calls the rib cage … there lies a head. It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person.”
Sometimes in the day-to-day life of the abortion hospital, what has been referred to as “the dreaded complication” occurs, that is, the baby that the mother and her doctor have attempted to kill is born alive. A 22-year-old hospital “counselor” related one such account to Denes:
“The only time I thought about abortions in terms of religion was when I saw fetuses and one was born alive [sic]. I saw one of them, in fact, I even felt the heartbeat. I touched it. It looked like a baby, but it was very tiny. It was real cute. Very quiet. In fact, it was starting to die.”
Also on the subject of live births following an attempted abortion, Denes had this exchange with a 27-year-old hospital social worker.
Social Worker: “There was one week when there were two live births in the same week. And just, you know, there’s this baby crying on this floor while all these women are in the process of trying to deal with their feelings about aborting their babies.…”
Dr. Denes: “How did the mothers react who gave birth to live babies?”
Social Worker: “Well, this one, she didn’t talk much. The mother delivered when there was no one there and there was some period when the mother was holding the baby. And it was grabbing on to her.”
But back to the judiciary. Recent court recognition of “wrongful birth” and “wrongful life” lawsuits suggests that the radical social engineers among us might not be satisfied until abortion is not only a right but a duty. In one case a court actually recognized as legitimate a lawsuit brought by a third party against a mother in behalf of her handicapped newborn alleging that the mother had violated a legal duty to abort—this is the “wrongful life” theory. In any event, what is absolutely clear is that it is not a question of whether beliefs or values are being, and will be, imposed regarding these life-and-death issues, but whose beliefs and values will prevail in this essentially spiritual battle over our law and public policy.
Conclusion
At the risk of oversimplification, I have suggsted that there are two basic philosophies competing for the heart and soul of our law and public policy. Both have value-laden goals and assumptions; neither is neutral. On the one hand are those—including, but not limited to, Christians—who believe in God and accept as a given the moral order in which he has ordained that we live. We do not so much make the law in these controversial areas, we would argue, as we discover it. On the other hand are the high priests of secularism, true children of the Enlightenment, who long for a new order free of the artificial restraints of religion and morality, where man’s reason and individualism are the highest source of wisdom and value. The latter, I have argued here, often mistake pluralism, which is a fact of American life, for secularism, which they incorrectly believe to have the imprimatur of our Constitution.
Do me a favor: The next time you hear someone say that “pluralism” or “the separation of church and state” requires the exclusion of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs or ethics from our public life, tell them you know better. “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being” wrote Justice Douglas. From the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower to the Declaration of Independence to the most recent National Day of Prayer, radical secularism has not been the American way. Those who push secularism under the veneer of “values neutrality” are engaging in political advocacy, to which we must have the wisdom and courage to respond with equal conviction and sophistication.
Ultimately, whose beliefs and values—whose world view—will be reflected in the law and public policy of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond? What will the children who attend public schools be taught about themselves and their world? How will we decide who lives and who dies in the face of rationally plausible but morally contemptible arguments about “limited resources” and “quality of life”? How free will we be as believers to worship, to raise our children in the faith, and to preach the gospel?
The answers to these questions are truly open. The world we bequeath to our children and grandchildren largely depends on how they are resolved, and that in turn depends on what you and I do. We cannot just assume that “everything will work out.” We must pray, become informed, and then get involved at every level of public life. This is the only way the salt and light that we Christians are told in Scripture we are can have their intended preservative and illuminating effect.
Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).
