Only 21% of Americans think that rulings by judges in recent years regarding religion in public life have correctly interpreted the U.S. Constitution, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Sixty-four percent (64%) of adults believe the judges’ rulings have been more anti-religious than the Founding Fathers intended. Fifteen percent (15%) aren’t sure.
But only 46% say the U.S. Supreme Court has been too hostile towards religion, a view unchanged from a survey nearly five years ago. Thirteen percent (13%) say the high court has been too friendly towards religion, down 10 points from the earlier survey. Thirty-three percent (33%) feel neither characterization of the court is accurate.
I think it’s a no-brainer that federal judges have made rulings on separation of church and state issues that are more anti-religious “than the Founding Fathers intended.” There’s no real doubt about it; that’s true. But phrasing the question that way tends to beg the question of whether the Founders’ intentions remain normative today, i.e. the whole debate over a strict construction type approach to interpreting the Constitution and a more flexible, evolutionary one. I tend toward the first approach, but not in a rigid or simplistic way.
Unfortunately, federal judges are quite immune from public pressure, given their lifetime jobs that don’t require re-election like lesser judges. But there can be little doubt that many activist judges have emphasized the “no establishment” clause of the First Amendment much more than the equally important “free exercise” clause. And the Law of Unintended Consequences has borne bitter fruit in this area, as the nation has certainly become FAR more secularized than most (though not all) of the Founding Fathers could have ever imagined. Jefferson might applaud it, but most of them would’ve been appalled.
David Handy+
Homes once said that Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state was the serpentine wall at the University of Virginia.
Pb (#2),
Do you mean Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous jurist?
David Handy+
Just to prime the pump a bit for discussion here, on the many fascinating parallels between the challenges of interpreting the Bible and the US Constitution, I highly recommend Jaroslav Pelikan’s masterful comparion of the two fields in his set of speeches at the Library of Congress when he got the Kluge Award, [b]Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution,[/b] published by Yale U. Press in 2004. As always with Pelikan, it’s brilliant, profound, and very stimulating.
David Handy+
Well, I tend to cringe when people start referring to “What the Founding Fathers intended.” If you have ever read the entirety of the Federalist Papers or the minutes of Constitutional convention addresses and debate, I do not think the Founding Fathers were even clear in their own, individual minds what exactly they were putting in place and how it was going to work.
An experiment of a Republic in itself was completely novel, much less a system of government that somehow was birthed by a armed revolution but did not manage collapse in on itself once the Revolution was won was likewise novel (and remains somewhat novel to this day.)
That is not to say we do not ponder the Framers’ intent when adjudicating legislative and judicial cases. I think that is important, particularly to issues of States’ Rights and Federal balance of power issues. The fact remains, however, the Founding Fathers were not some monolithic unanimity of persons like the Trinity that we want to tritely presuppose.
#3 Yes, Holmes. I type too fast.
I suspect that the “secularization” of America (as mentioned in No. 1) has very little to do with court rulings, particularly at the Supreme Court level. In fact, while there have been decisions (some of them from lower courts are quite confused and confusing on this subject) that have crimped the instincts of legislators and others to advance religion in the governmental realm, the society as a whole exhibits a robust religious component that is independent of governmental activities. What happens at the government/church interface is not, under this Constitution, central to the degree of religious devotion in the society at large. I don’t think that would disturb the Founders.