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I was pleased that the United States Supreme Court dismissed a suit brought by Michael Newdow, a Sacramento man who wanted to remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from the nation’s coins and paper currency, as well as from the fronts of our public buildings.
The argument that the gentleman brought forward was that this custom somehow violates the First Amendment guarantee that the government shall make no law either establishing an official religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religion in the United States.
Establishment of religion
As many have pointed out over the years, the invocation of God or the presence of religious symbols in the public space have nothing to do with what the founders meant by the establishment of an official religion — a practice whose dangerous consequences they knew only too well from relatively recent English history.
The affirmation that there should be no governmentally sanctioned religion in the United States by no means carries as an implication the elimination of religious language and values from the public square. I will argue that the eradication of religion from the public forum does serious damage to our democracy.
Jefferson’s arguments
To see the truth of this, it might be wise to journey in imagination to a stuffy boarding house in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, where a young Virginian lawyer is laboring over the opening lines to a significant document.
Providing the widest possible context for his argument that the American colonies ought to be free of British tyranny, Thomas Jefferson writes “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
If one puruses the history of political philosophy prior to the emergence of Christianity — consulting, say, the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero — one would be hard pressed indeed to find any ringing affirmations of equality and human rights.
For the classical thinkers, the deep and undeniable inequalities among us — differences in intelligence, courage, physical beauty, virtue — must be fully acknowledged if a just society is to emerge. The suggestion that the equality of all people is the foundation of the political order would have struck Plato as the height of folly and, practically speaking, a formula for chaos.
The God factor
How do we explain the transition from the classical idea to Jefferson’s notion that it is self-evidently true? The best clue is in Jefferson’s prologue in a word that we usually rush past without noticing: “All men are created equal.”
Jefferson knew something from his Christian heritage that Aristotle couldn’t have known, namely, that all people are indeed equally the children of God. Take God and creation out of the calculus, and Jefferson’s claim becomes anything but self-evident.
Another of Jefferson’s axioms is that all people, equal before God, have been endowed by that same God (“their Creator”) with certain rights which are inalienable, which can be neither granted nor rescinded by any human institution.
Once again, if we consult the classical political theorists, we find none of this. For Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and their colleagues, special privileges belonged to those who had earned them or had inherited them from aristocratic forebears.
That every person in the political order is the subject of rights to life and liberty would have struck them as a ridiculous. So we are compelled to ask what made the difference, and the answer, once again, is God.
Take out of consideration the Creator, who made every person in love and destined each for eternal life, and properly inalienable rights disappear. And individuals become the objects of political manipulation and domination.
Effects of denying God
To see the truth of this, all we have to do is look at the totalitarianisms of the last century, governments that were grounded in an explicit denial of God. The negation of equality and the suppression of fundamental human rights in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Castro’s Cuba followed directly from the systematic denial of the Creator God.
Democracies are founded in moral absolutes — among which are liberty, equality, the inviolability of life, and the right to pursue happiness; and these non-negotiable truths are in turn logically correlative belief in a Creator God.
This is why I would hold, precisely as an American, that it is dangerous to our democracy to eradicate references to God from our public space. As an adept of both Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Jefferson, I say “Bravo” to the Supreme Court for this decision.
Fr. Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and is the rector/president of Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. Learn more at www.WordOnFire.org