The godless heathen are spreading their message everywhere. I got an email from blog reader David about a billboard that he and fellow members of the NCW Freethinkers Meetup in eastern Washington state have put up.
David says that the region is very reactionary and religious and so this was quite a bold move on their part, even though the billboard does not directly undermine belief in god but only asks for the separation of church and state to be maintained. But I suspect that there are a lot of closet skeptics in that region as well, and this billboard will hearten them that they are not alone.
So well done David and the NCW Freethinkers!
Thanks for the mention Mano. One reason that my friend Kate liked this particular message was that she felt that this was a message that both atheists and reasonable theistic people could get behind. After all, it was the Baptists of Danbury that Jefferson was defending when he coined that famous phrase, “Wall of Separation” in his letter to them in 1802.
A humanist in our area attempted to prevent his town council from praying before meetings, arguing that the practice violated the separation of church and state. Predictably, he was forcefully rebuffed, with a legion of letters to the local newspaper proclaiming that the Bible was an even more fundamental document than the Constitution, and noting that the Constitution does not contain the actual phrase “separation of church and state.” Do they have a point?
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is a little tricky, for its original purpose was actually to prevent the new federal government from interfering with state established churches. The Bill of Rights as a whole, let us not forget, was Madison’s concession to the anti-federalists, who feared the emergence of a powerful, distant central authority reminiscent of the British monarchy that had just been overthrown. The Establishment Clause specifically applied to the new “Congress.”
Those state-established churches were all disestablished (by the states themselves) within the first couple of decades of the new republic. It was not until the latter half of the 20th Century that the Supreme Court, continuing its gradual process of incorporating the Bill of Rights into the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause, started to apply the Establishment Clause against the very states it was originally intended to shield from federal intervention. Perhaps the most famous of these cases involved the proscription of prayer in public schools, a decision which many religious conservatives still regard as the beginning of the end of America.
Jefferson’s concept of separation was formally enshrined in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, not the Federal Constitution of 1787, yet the Court came to see his concept as central to our constitutional scheme. While I personally agree wholeheartedly with that concept, I have to concede that the Court has (once again) played a little fast-and-loose with history. Including the Establishment Clause in the process of incorporation, however desirable on the merits, has turned the clause completely on its head.