The First Amendment prohibits any “law respecting an establishment of religion,” and in recent years the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause cases have focused on religiously themed public displays. Yet the court has failed to develop clear rules for deciding such cases, ensuring further litigation. There is something picayune about these disputes, over courthouse Ten Commandments displays or school-yard crèches. In this term’s Establishment Clause case, Salazar v. Bruno, for instance, the justices will soon decide whether an eight-foot cruciform war memorial in a park in the Mojave Desert violates the Constitution.
All the while, the court has never come to grips with the existence of a literal established church on a hill just across town””the National Cathedral. Although the Cathedral helps put issues like those in Salazar in proper perspective, it seems the court can’t see the Cathedral for the crosses.
The Cathedral’s parent body, the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation, was “constituted” by an act of Congress in 1893, and the cornerstone was laid in the presence of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. The charter Congress issued on the Feast of the Epiphany called on the Foundation to “establish”¦within the District of Columbia a cathedral . . . for the promotion of religion” and other worthwhile causes.
Actually it reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” While the courts are keen to enforce the “establishment” clause they are equally keen to ignore the “free exercise” clause. Likewise the ACLU.
A judge in Madison recently ruled that the presidential proclamation for a National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. I am sure one can find a judge anywhere to rule in such a way.
I like the article by this law professor. As I take it, he’s cautioning that the current trend to trivialize religious symbols and treat them as acceptable as if they were empty symbols with primarily secular significance (like that obscure cross in the Mojave desert) is gravely mistaken. And of course, I agree.
The genius of the First Amendment, as Br. Michael reminds us in #1, is to balance the no establishment clause with the equally important free exercise clause. And there is absolutely no doubt but that the trend in recent years has been quite lopsided and emphasized the former at the expense of the latter. As many of us like to say, the freedom OF religion guaranteed in the Bill of Rights isn’t the same at all as the freedom FROM religion that it’s too often interpreted as meaning in a secular, pluralistic age.
But the real problem lies at a deeper level. The fundamental fact is that no society can tolerate a vacuum at its ideological center. And if orthodox Christianity is excluded from the public square or the institutions of public life, that gaping hole at the center, that vacuum will soon be filled by an alternative religion, even if it’s subtly disguised in secular form. And that’s in fact what has happened.
In our post-Constantinian, post-Christendom era, Christianity has indeed been banished more and more from the public square. And in its place has come, well, call it what you will: secular humanism, pluralism, civil religion, materialism, or a toxic brew made up of all those and more. But what they all amount to is idolatry, the substitution of a false god for the true one.
David Handy+
PS. This article doesn’t touch on a key issue symbolized by “the National Cathedral.” Namely, the long, ugly history of anti-Catholic bias in America. For of course, there are TWO great Christian cathedrals in Washington, DC, the other being the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. You might think that in the interests of fairness and impartiality, that the RC cathedral would be used for some grand national events, especially with 6 of the 9 Supreme Court justices actually being Catholics (and 2 Jewish, so that with the retirement of John Paul Stephens, there won’t a single Protestant on the high court).
Now, of course, I recognize that the Catholic cathedral isn’t so well situated. It doesn’t perch on the highest hill in Washington the way TEC’s Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul is gloriously placed on the top of St. Alban’s, etc. Certainly, there are logistical reasons for preferring the Protestant cathedral to the RC one, but the fact remains that with Catholics making up roughly a quarter of the US population, that implicit favoritism towards Protestants inevitably does seem a little unjust.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that TEC hardly seems very Christian anymore. Does “the National Cathedral” really represent the Protestant majority in this country? How many evangelicals would want to step inside the tainted cathedral of the now largely apostate TEC?? The cultural mainstream and the Christian mainstream have diverged and are moving farther and farther apart.
David Handy+
#4: The Catholic CATHEDRAL in Washington DC is St. Matthews. Although the National SHRINE of the Immaculate Conception is quite beautiful.