Longtime CitizenLink readers have encountered the phrase “judicial tyranny” more than a time or two. You’ve seen stories – many of them quoting Focus on the Family’s founder, Dr. James Dobson – documenting the attempts of liberal special interests and activist courts to scrub the public square of all acknowledgement of our nation’s Christian heritage.
But you’ve probably never encountered an examination of the problem that’s as straightforward, authoritative and flat-out fun as Stephen Mansfield’s Ten Tortured Words: How the Founding Fathers Tried to Protect Religion in America … and What’s Happened Since. Examining exactly what those who built our country meant when they wrote “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” into the Constitution, Mansfield’s book shines revelatory light on why the faith of our forebears finds itself blackballed in modern society:
Among the discoveries you’ll make in its 210 pages:
• It was Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, writing the majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, who made fashionable – and legally enforceable – the phrase “wall of separation between church and state.” He took it not from one of America’s founding documents, but a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of appreciative Baptists – and, even worse, Black applied it out of context to suggest religion had no place in public life.
• Lyndon Johnson, while still a U.S. senator, was responsible for the free-speech-limiting restrictions placed on churches and nonprofit organizations like Focus on the Family when it comes to speaking out on political issues.
• And the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) champions the whitewashing of all religious symbols from government property not to protect the oppressed or easily offended – but to make money, via a law that earns it millions from taxpayers, a law designed to help impoverished blacks from being discriminated against.
CitizenLink spent some time on the phone with Mansfield recently – and emerged with a lot more than 10 words, none of them tortured, about his book and the important issues it addresses.
Q. What was it – was there a moment in the culture when you thought, “Aha! I have to write about this,” or has it been more of years of watching the trend of religion being scrubbed away from our day-to-day lives that got Ten Tortured Words to the shelves?
A. I was a pastor for 20 years and worked in politics, so I knew about these trends. But what really moved me to write it was that, as good as some of the books are out there on the subject, I couldn’t find any that tracked the story -- from the Founding Fathers to the 1947 (Everson) case into the modern chaos -- that was accessible to people, that was not intended to be written for lawyers.
I really feel like the average guy sitting in a pew, the average guy in our culture today, really doesn’t know much about this. I’m not any smarter than anybody else, I just maybe have an ability to tell it in an interesting and exciting way. So I’ve got 1,700-pound cheeses, I’ve got a murder mystery, I’ve got the KKK and wild orgies at Notre Dame. That’s where I kind of dressed it up and made it appeal to a wider audience.
You just referred to the ignorance of the people as it pertains to this subject – and I know you meant it with no denigration. Last November, when Dr. Dobson was on Larry King Live, Larry said something about, “Well, what about the separation of church and state?” And Dr. Dobson said, “It’s not in the Constitution.” And it just stopped Larry in his tracks; he said he had to go look it up. So as a friendly gift, Dr. Dobson mailed Larry a very nice bound copy of the Constitution so he could study further. King loved the gesture.
That’s a perfect example of the kind of people I’m trying to reach with this book. I don’t think Larry is an uninformed man, nor is he a rank anti-Christian by any stretch. But think about it. They’re not teaching this in the schools; the churches don’t have time to teach it or the pastors don’t have the expertise; and I just thought, “Look, I want to do a short, easy-to-read, accessible but solidly scholarly book that can tell the story and be a handbook and resource for folks.”
There are two central characters responsible for the negative place we are in today on this topic. One is Hugo Black and his “impregnable wall of separation” argument. You make a very clear case for how wrongheaded that ruling was. Did anybody point that out at the time?
The short answer to your question is: a very few people did. But the case itself was so confusing that most people living at the time would have read about the outcome, the ruling, and not paid attention to the reasoning.
The court upheld the New Jersey practice of reimbursing Catholic parents for transportation to their kids’ parochial schools, but the whole case reasons about the First Amendment in such a way that lays the foundation for all the disasters we’ve been dealing with ever since. Most Americans agreed with the outcome of the case, so there wasn’t much of an outcry because no one really looked into the groundwork Black laid in his opinion for the trouble we’ve seen since.
It wasn’t until later, when other cases were built on the reasoning of the court, when people began to wake up to what doctrine was prevailing. They saw prayer and the Bible being taken out of schools, and they realized how damaging the decision had been.
Then there’s Lyndon Johnson. We at Focus on the Family are limited in our ability to speak out on issues and candidates because of IRS codes for 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations. And I have to confess to you, I did not know till I read your book that it is all traceable back to Johnson.
And he didn’t even intend to go after churches. He was trying to keep nonprofit organizations – primarily of an educational and political nature – from being involved in campaigns. He never mentions churches. But his reform was so sweeping that it includes churches.
That’s why current (U.S.) Rep. Walter Jones is proposing a piece of legislation that would exclude churches from that IRS code, that would allow churches to address political matters if they want to.
We’ve supported that bill. And other bills that would limit the federal courts from weighing in on these sorts of church/state matters. Is that the route to take to turn the tide back to what the Founders intended?
It’s a multi-pronged approach. First of all, Congress is going to be the fast track, no question about it. Congress has the right to restrict the kinds of cases the judiciary can hear, according to the Exceptions Clause of the Constitution, so these bills are our best hope. Now, with recent reverses in the number of conservatives in Congress, that will slow things down. But we can make more progress in Congress than we can by waiting for the judiciary to be transformed.
The second prong, of course, is having attorneys who are aware of the issues, judges who are aware of the issues, filing the right kind of lawsuits, countering the ravages of Everson.
And the third prong of our approach has got to be education. That’s why I wrote the book the way I did. I knew it was strong enough to impact congressmen and impact people in the judiciary and lawyers, but I also wanted something that the average soccer mom could read and understand. Then, she’ll vote, she’ll lobby, she’ll get active. And even the average pastor, I think, will get this book and – who knows? – might do a series on it, might recommend it to Sunday school.
Let’s talk Thomas Jefferson – the author of the phrase “wall of separation.” In CitizenLink, we publish historical quotes each day about something relevant to the pro-family cause. And every time we quote Jefferson, someone will write in – someone who agrees with us on the issues – and ask, “How can you do that? He wasn’t a believer.” Studying his life as extensively as you did, how would you sum up it up, cradle to grave, with regard to his religious beliefs?
Definitely not an orthodox believer. Almost certainly not born again. But definitely a man who believed in God, number one; in the value of the Bible and the ethics of Jesus; and in the importance of religion to a civil society. See, I don’t need to have a born-again Jefferson to recognize that Jefferson realized religion was important to America. That’s why he just didn’t just go toward a secular society and close the door on all influence of religion. He simply wanted there not to be a state church, a federally mandated religion.
There was a book out awhile back called What Would the Founders Do?, an attempt to take the big social issues of the day and run them through the prism of our Founders’ beliefs. Let me pose this to you: You’re a speechwriter who works for President George Washington. You’re doing a draft of his State of the Union address for January 2008. What do you write for him to say about our country as it stands right now with regard to these issues?
Washington’s easy. Washington was a believer. Washington preached to more churches than any other president in American history – while president. I write that he calls America to a deep faith and to the ethics of that faith. I repeat what he said in his farewell address, that we cannot expect societal ethics apart from religion. I write that he calls men very boldly to model themselves on Jesus Christ.
I’d love to write that speech where he stands up in front of the country, reconnects ethics to religion and commends Christianity to the nation – not only as a matter of history but as a manner of healing wounds.
We all know the wounds are out there -- fatherless families, God’s design for sexuality mocked and so on. The pathologies are easy to name. How different would our country look today, how many of those wounds could have been avoided, if we didn’t go off the rails from the Founders’ intent for religion’s place in society?
It’s a much, much better society. It’s less open to the cults. It’s less open to non-Christian religions; they’d certainly have a presence but the country would be less open to them. You’d have greater ethics invested in the hearts and the lives of children, as the Ten Commandments are held central and as some kind of a prayer is prayed daily in the schools. You’d have a greater knowledge of world religions, which would make us better able to compete and function in a global marketplace.
So I think you have a profoundly wiser, more ethical, more moral, safer country – and you also have a greater level of freedom, because you don’t have the level of judicial activism you do today, given that the courts would have respect for traditional religion, traditional values and traditional pillars.
Is that achievable? We at Focus believe it is – we couldn’t fight the battles we fight if we didn’t. But as a scholar, not an activist, do you think we can get to the scenario you describe?
I absolutely think it’s possible. I think the worldview that fueled the Everson case and the writings of Black and others is showing itself impoverished. I believe we have a society that is turning to faith, is hungry for God. People are turning to religion for solutions, conclusions – and while they are suspicious of politicians, obviously, I think it’s very possible to see the laws change, to see greater openness to religion, to see some of these ravages roll back.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
To learn more about Stephen Mansfield, visit his Web site.
(NOTE: Referral to Web sites not produced by Focus on the Family is for informational purposes only and does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the sites' content.)
