Scott Kamps
* Conclusion of a 2-part column
School superintendent Ryan Walters defended his decision to incorporate the Bible and optional prayer into Oklahoma’s public school system by saying it’s an attack on religious liberty for the federal government to forbid them.
Conversely, many Americans think religious liberty means a “wall of separation between church and state”; i.e., the First Amendment obligates the federal government to require public schools to ban anything and everything that’s religious.
How can people have such contradictory interpretations of the same amendment?
It may be pertinent to ask who educates most Americans, but I digress.
The history of the matter is simple. The beginning of the amendment breaks down into two clauses: the establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”), and the free exercise clause (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”).
At issue is the establishment clause; it’s important to recognize the purpose of this clause when it was written: to prevent the inevitable conflict that would result from a national denomination and to maintain a free marketplace of ideas in religion. It applied the principles dealing with factions in Federalist 10 to religion/Christianity.
In other words, the amendment protected minority denominations from a majority denomination with compulsory (potentially persecuting) power of the federal government; it was never intended to separate religion from the government.
This is why the newly-formed federal government – including the main architect of the Constitution, James Madison – had no problem renewing the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 after ratifying our Constitution.
Article three of the ordinance begins “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
The federal government encouraged schools by giving and allocating land in each township for (locally controlled) public education: to teach “religion, morality and knowledge!”
The people who wrote and ratified the Constitution didn’t attempt to separate church and state in education at all; this is why former Chief Justice Rehnquist referred to the “wall of separation” as “a metaphor based on bad history.”
He further argued, “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 opposing first amendment interpretations emanate from the debate about whether we should strive for an “originalist” understanding of the Constitution or view it as a “living Constitution.”
Justice Clarence Thomas similarly wrote, “the text and history of the Establishment Clause strongly suggest that it is a federalism provision intended to prevent Congress from interfering with state establishments … the Constitution left religion to the States.”
But we now have a federal government discouraging the education our founders cherished and attacking the religious liberty the Constitution protects.
And most Americans don’t even know it.
Michael Badnarik’s words seem pertinent: “When the state or federal government control the education of all of our children, they have the dangerous and illegitimate monopoly to control and influence the thought process of our citizens.”
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.