Applying A False History Will Create A Deformed Future

Joe Bell

A combination of prejudice and paranoia – call it ‘prejunoia’ – has prompted a segment of American society to do everything possible to alienate the nation from its historical roots. The liberal caretakers of culture have created a society in which Andres Serrano’s photo of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine could be displayed in a public school as a work of ‘art’ before a crucifix could be placed on the wall.

God has been exorcised from public schools and now the effort is ongoing to expel the Almighty from America’s founding documents. In Cupertino, California, in a scenario that a generation ago would have been universally condemned as madness, fifth grade public school teacher Stephen Williams has been prohibited by his school principal from providing handouts to his students of the Declaration of Independence and other historical documents because they contain references to God.

The Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing Williams in the case of Stephen Williams v. Cupertino Union School District, said other material that was considered inappropriate for the students were the diaries of George Washington and John Adams and the writings of William Penn.

On November 24, the San Diego Union Tribune reported, “Williams asserts in the lawsuit that since May he has been required to submit all of his lesson plans and supplemental handouts to (the school principal) for approval, and that the principal will not permit him to use any that contain references to God or Christianity.”

America did not get to this deranged juncture overnight. For decades the left has been hard at work, with inestimable assistance from the U.S. Supreme Court, severing the nation from its history. In 1985, in Wallace v. Jaffree, the Court struck down an Alabama law that permitted students a one-minute period of silent reflection as unconstitutional.

In his dissent, Justice William Rehnquist explained how the concept of separation of church and state had been distorted by decades of misunderstanding. His words fell on deaf ears and today the left joyfully shrieks “separation of church and state” anytime God makes a public appearance.

Rehnquist wrote, “It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of constitutional history, but unfortunately the Establishment Clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson’s misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years.”

Rehnquist pointed out that Thomas Jefferson was in France when the Bill of Rights was passed by Congress and ratified by the states. Jefferson’s correspondence to the Danbury Baptist Association, which contained the phrase “separation of church and state,” was written 14 years after Congress passed the Bill of Rights.

James Madison, Father of the Constitution, played an indispensable role in drafting the Bill of Rights and was a member of the first Congress.

In his dissent, Rehnquist walks the reader through the debates that occurred between Members of Congress regarding the Bill of Rights and concluded, properly, “It seems indisputable from these glimpses of Madison’s thinking, as reflected by actions on the floor of the House in 1789, that he saw the Amendment as designed to prohibit the establishment of a national religion… He did not see it as requiring neutrality on the part of government between religion and irreligion. …It would seem from this evidence that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment had acquired a well-accepted meaning: it forbade establishment of a national religion, and forbade preference among religious sects or denominations.”

Rehnquist concluded that 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 ‘crucible of litigation’ … is well adapted to adjudicating factual disputes on the basis of testimony presented in court, but no amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. 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.”

Sadly, it was never discarded and now we are at the point where a school has prohibited a teacher from permitting students to study certain American founding documents. The courts dismissed the original meaning of the First Amendment and today we harvest the diseased crop of decades of erroneous legal precedent.

Chief Justice Warren Burger also dissented in the case and suggested that, given the Court’s decision, at some point the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance could be ruled unconstitutional. Decades later the Ninth Circuit proved him correct by making that exact ruling.

Animals survive by instinct but men cannot. In “The Roots of American Order,” Russell Kirk observed mankind cannot endure without strength and wisdom from an authority that is beyond human. America’s Founding Fathers understood that truth and it is essential to comprehending American history. Without knowing the thought process of America’s architects it is impossible to appreciate our freedom and even more hopeless to preserve it for future generations.

Theologian Robert B. Y. Scott, who taught at Princeton University from 1955 to 1968, said the 19th century fable of man’s perpetual progress was ruined by the reality that an autonomous mankind is unable to solve its social conflicts.

“He is overwhelmed by his own machinery and by social torrents set loose through his unwillingness to affirm his solidarity with his fellow man,” Scott wrote. “The judgments of God are manifest in the world of today. The time has come to bring home to men that these are right judgments on human sin; that men bear these consequences inevitably, because they are morally responsible beings who have denied their own nature in denying their responsibility to their neighbors.”

In Exodus, the dilemma of the Israelites was similar to the predicaments humanity faces today. They searched for a way that flawed men could control their sinful nature and had to determine whether they had the humility to turn to a power greater than themselves, admitting that they could not continue on their own.

Kirk wrote, “The revelation which came to Moses was an answer to perennial human longings. What is man doing in this hard world …How may a community live together in order and peace? Through Moses there came a response to these implicit questions and that response endures in the twentieth century after Christ.”

To deny that Washington and his colleagues embraced these principles is to reject the foundation upon which America was constructed.

It is conceivable that at some point, as America is forced to become increasingly detached from its history, the Declaration of Independence will be modified to conform with popular social norms. Conceivably the document might mutate into something like the following:

“We hold these possibilities to be fairly clear - that all creatures are endowed – somehow, by something or other - with a lot of rights, like absolute freedom and an entitlement to be extremely happy.”

America is closer to that day than many would like to believe. Those who successfully rearrange American history will have the opportunity to dictate the future. America cannot survive if its future is constructed on a phony past.

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Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.

jbellopedresponse@hotmail.com