One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (34 page)

Clark emphasized this theme of religious liberty when he delivered the decisions in
Schempp
and
Murray
on June 17, 1963. With a delivery that one observer called “patient and persuasive,” Clark spoke slowly, hoping to make clear that the court was not ruling against religion. “The place of religion in our society is an exalted one, achieved through a long tradition of reliance on the home, the church and the inviolable citadel of the individual heart and mind,” he said. “We have come to recognize through bitter experience that it is not within the power of government to invade that citadel, whether its purpose or effect be to aid or oppose, to advance or retard. In the relationship between man and religion,” Clark stressed, “the State is firmly committed to a position of neutrality.” Without this “wholesome neutrality,” there was a real danger “that powerful sects or groups might bring about a fusion of governmental or religious functions or a concert or dependency of one upon the other to the end that official support of the State or Federal Government would be placed behind the tenets of one or of all orthodoxies. This the Establishment Clause prohibits.” At the same time, the First Amendment's free-exercise clause guaranteed the “right of every person to freely choose his own course” in terms of religious faith “free of any compulsion from the state.” Compulsory Bible reading, he concluded, violated both halves of the First Amendment.
⁶¹

Clark went to great lengths to assure Americans that the decision did not threaten all forms of public religion. While Black had buried his comments on religion and politics in a footnote of the
Engel
ruling, Clark addressed its constitutionality directly. “The fact that the Founding Fathers believed devotedly that there was a God and that the unalienable rights of man were rooted in Him is clearly evidenced in their writings, from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution itself,” he stated. “This background is evidenced today in our public life through the continuance in our oaths of office from the Presidency to the Alderman of the final supplication, ‘So help me God.' Likewise, each House of the Congress provides through its Chaplain an opening prayer, and the sessions of this Court are declared open by the crier in a short ceremony, the final phrase of which invokes the grace of God.” Clark even cited the US Census's
finding that “64% of our people have church membership.” He concluded that “today, as in the beginning, our national life reflects a religious people.” But that tradition emphasized the right of individuals to worship on their own, without direction or demands from secular authorities. “This freedom to worship was indispensable in a country whose people came from the four quarters of the earth and brought with them a diversity of religious opinion,” he noted. “Today authorities list eighty-three separate religious bodies, each with membership exceeding fifty thousand, existing among our people, as well as innumerable smaller groups.”
⁶²

Clark had hoped his opinion would let the eight-man majority on the court speak with one voice, but the justices offered four different opinions in total. Only Warren, Black, and White joined Clark's. In one concurrence, Douglas suggested that the court should have gone further and struck down all state support of religion; in a second, Goldberg and Harlan supported the majority's decision but cautioned that “an untutored devotion to the concept of neutrality” might lead to hostility against religion. These concurrences were just slight nudges to the majority ruling, each expressed in two pages. In contrast, Brennan's elaborate concurrence ran for seventy-four pages. Rather than address what was prohibited in the realm of government and religion, he tried to detail everything that was permitted. Point by point, he listed numerous forms of religious references that he deemed constitutional. “In God We Trust,” for instance, was “simply interwoven . . . so deeply into the fabric of our civil polity,” he said, that it “ceased to have religious meaning.” “The reference to divinity in the revised pledge of allegiance,” he reasoned, “may merely recognize the historical fact that our Nation was believed to have been founded ‘under God.' Thus, reciting the pledge may be no more of a religious exercise than the reading aloud of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which contains an allusion to the same historical fact.”
⁶³

The initial response to
Schempp
and
Murray
was surprisingly calm. Embarrassed by their overreaction to
Engel,
most major religious denominations had anticipated a new ruling against Bible reading and already made peace with it. Indeed, before the court even issued its opinion, the United Presbyterian Office of Information had already released a three-page comment supporting it, sight unseen. When the ruling in
Schempp
and
Murray
was released, the National Council of Churches and individual
Protestant denominations promptly announced their support. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church insisted the ruling was “not hostile to religion” in any way, while the president of the Lutheran Church claimed that the real threats to faith were the “common-denominator religious exercises” struck down by the court. Jewish organizations universally praised the decision. The president of the Synagogue Council of America even predicted that the court's ruling would result in “a more lasting union of America under God.”
⁶⁴

The Roman Catholic hierarchy and some key fundamentalist and evangelical leaders lined up on the other side of the debate. Richard Cardinal Cushing, archbishop of Boston, sent word of his disapproval from Rome, where he had traveled to elect a successor to Pope John XXIII. “To me, it is a great tragedy that the greatest book ever published and a constant best seller cannot be read in the public school system,” the prelate said. James Francis Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, also in Rome, attacked the ruling as having rejected “our American heritage of philosophy, of religion and of freedom.” They suggested a constitutional amendment might be the only answer.
⁶⁵
These Catholic prelates found an unlikely ally in Protestant evangelical and fundamentalist organizations. For decades, the two faiths had been at odds on a variety of political, not to mention spiritual, issues, but here they made common cause. Dr. Robert A. Cook, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, denounced the decision as “sad departure from this nation's heritage under God” and called for a constitutional amendment to restore Bible reading and prayers to the public schools. Fundamentalist leaders agreed. “We understand that a greater issue is at stake than simply Bible reading in the schools,” Carl McIntire noted. “At stake is whether or not America may continue to honor and recognize God in the life of the nation.” He too called for a constitutional amendment to reverse the ruling.
⁶⁶

While the religious critics of the court's decisions remained in the minority, the rulings revealed a growing gap between the leaders of major denominations and the laypeople to whom they ministered. “Some observers predicted that practical effects of the latest ruling might be disillusioning for the laity and divisive for the church in general,” noted an astute editorial in
Christianity Today
in the summer of 1963. “Do rank and file laymen really understand why many ecclesiastical leaders countenance
and even support the suppression of prayer and Bible reading in public schools?” By all appearances, they did not. “Millions of U.S. Christians emotionally reject the Supreme Court's successive decisions against prayer in schools,”
Time
magazine reported. In spite of the assurances of their denominational leaders, “laymen have not been convinced of the court's wisdom to the degree that clergymen are.” As Reverend Shrum Burton, president of the Kansas City Council of Churches, said, “some laymen have a vague feeling that we are losing all religion in public life and that something ought to be done, but they don't know what.” One thing, though, seemed clear. If their religious representatives would not lead the way, laypeople would find new champions who would.
⁶⁷

CHAPTER 7

“Our So-Called Religious Leaders”

O
N
O
CTOBER
1, 1963,
A
grassroots organization called the Citizens Congressional Committee hand-delivered four “good and heavy” drums of paper to clerks at the House of Representatives. Once unrolled, they formed a massive petition that organizers said contained nearly a million signatures and stretched for over a mile in length. (Additional rolls, still on their way to Washington, would stretch it to three miles, they promised.) The petition called on Congress to do whatever was necessary to secure a constitutional amendment permitting “devotional exercises” in public schools. “Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States by its decisions has virtually outlawed the right to pray or read Scripture in public schools and other institutions,” the petition read, “we, the undersigned citizens, respectfully petition you to take the initial steps necessary to bring about an amendment to the Constitution which will forever guarantee the protection of our Christian traditions and the right of our people to pray and honor Holy Scripture in their institutions.”
¹

The executive secretary of the Citizens Congressional Committee was Charles W. Winegarner. A former advertising executive from Fort Wayne, Indiana, he now worked full-time promoting the cause. For five months, he told reporters, his colleagues had been gathering signatures from every state. At the same time, the group had been lobbying members of Congress, seeking not tacit support but active involvement. “Our Committee represents zealous, enthusiastic, and uncompromising individuals in every state and in every Congressional district in the Nation,”
Winegarner stated in January 1964. “We can no longer be satisfied with passive expressions favorable to the idea of a Constitutional amendment. We are now in a campaign to challenge every member of Congress to take a fighting stand in defense of the right of Christian devotions in our public institutions.” He closed with an unsubtle threat: “As the election day approaches, I could easily imagine citizens in Congressional districts where candidates for Congress would have to answer this question: ‘Has your attitude and activities in Congress been pro-prayer or anti-prayer, or have you been indifferent?'”
²

The political stakes surrounding the prayer amendment were certainly high, but Winegarner's role in the debate was short-lived. In May 1964, columnists Roland Evans and Robert Novak revealed that the Citizens Congressional Committee was “operated, financed, and directed by Gerald L. K. Smith, notorious promoter of right-wing causes,” and that Winegarner was Smith's nephew. A onetime ally of Senator Huey Long and an outspoken anti-Semite, Smith had made no secret of his involvement, bragging that the committee was “an auxiliary, financed and directed by
The Cross and the Flag,
” the far-right publication of his Christian Nationalist Crusade. In its pages, Smith attacked the “cabal of international Jews” in the Kennedy administration and the “nine-man oligarchy” they manipulated on the Supreme Court, before telling readers there was hope. With its “mammoth petition,” the Citizens Congressional Committee had demanded the restoration of “the right of Christian devotions in public schools” and sparked “a revolutionary spirit among members of Congress.” Following Evans and Novak's revelations, the
Washington Post
detailed the other extremist causes the Citizens Congressional Committee had supported, including abolition of the United Nations, invasion of Cuba, impeachment of Earl Warren, an end to the nuclear test ban “treason treaty,” and staunch opposition to voting rights for Washington, D.C., because it was a “community three-fourths Negro.”
³

While exposure of the committee's extremist roots was embarrassing to the larger cause, it was not surprising. Indeed, the campaign for a constitutional amendment to restore prayer to public schools had quickly attracted activists on the far right. Billy James Hargis of the archconservative Christian Crusade devoted himself to circulating petitions across the West, while Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist broadcaster with an
affinity for far-right politics, lobbied for it over his own network of 582 radio stations. The John Birch Society supported the amendment idea as part of its long-standing drive to impeach Earl Warren and generally discredit the Supreme Court. Similarly, segregationists who criticized the Court's rulings on civil rights latched on to the school prayer issue as a more popular and palatable way to condemn it again. Alabama governor George Wallace, generally remembered for his defiance of the Court's desegregation decisions, was equally opposed to its rulings on school prayer. Immediately before his infamous “Segregation forever!” inaugural address in 1963, for instance, Wallace was sworn in at a podium draped with a five-foot-long banner inspired by the
Engel
ruling: “
IN GOD WE TRUST
.” “I want the Supreme Court to know we are not going to conform to any such decision,” he announced after
Schempp.
Echoing his earlier promise to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to block integration, Wallace warned that if federal courts ordered “that we cannot read the Bible in some school, I'm going to that school and read it myself.”
⁴

The visibility of such supporters led some to dismiss the constitutional prayer amendment as a cause championed only by the far right or the Deep South, but in truth it had much broader backing. At the 1962 Governors' Conference, the leaders of forty-nine states called for a prayer amendment that “will make clear and beyond challenge the acknowledgment of our nation and people of their faith in God”; a year later, they renewed their call unanimously. The governors weren't alone. The Supreme Court's rulings against school prayer and Bible reading were deeply unpopular across the nation, and a solid majority of Americans seized on the amendment idea as a solution. In August 1963, shortly after the
Schempp
decision, Gallup asked Americans if they wanted prayer and Bible reading in public schools; 70 percent said yes. They flooded their political representatives with mail, with one study estimating that 50 percent of all correspondence to Congress in the 1963–1964 term focused on the proposal for a school prayer amendment. These letters, postcards, and petitions overwhelmingly supported the idea, with officials citing a margin of nearly twenty to one in favor. Congress leapt into action. Between the summer of 1962 and spring of 1964, 113 representatives and 27 senators introduced 146 different amendments to restore prayer and Bible reading to public schools.
⁵