"Up Against the Wall"

The Rev. Suzanne Meyer

I love poetry, and these last few days I've had a verse or two from Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" running through my mind. It is a familiar poem. I'm sure most of you know it.

"Mending Wall" by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down. I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down." Frost's Mending Wall is one of my favorite poems. The metaphor of a wall is so rich, so provocative. Is it a boundary, or a barrier? Is a wall a help, or a hindrance? Does it merely keep things apart, or does it in fact help hold them together? As much as I love the poetry of Robert Frost, what started me thinking about the relationship between good walls and good neighbors of late has more to do with politics than with poetry.

Many Americans just assume that the wall of separation between church and state is a fundamental principle deeply rooted in American constitutionalism. Many assume that the First Amendment ensures that government will not involve itself with religion.

However, there are also those for whom that wall is an illusion and anathema. These folk claim that the First Amendment was only intended to prohibit the establishment of a state-supported church and that it was never intended to be a wall of separation, nor was it intended to keep sectarian religion out of the affairs of state. They will tell you that religious symbols, practices, and values—meaning those of the Christian religion—have since the very beginning of this nation's inception been freely intermingled with government. They will remind you that the Founders of this nation were for the most part Christians who often quoted the Bible in their writings. Every president who has given an inaugural address has mentioned God in that speech, and public prayers have been offered at the swearing-in of every president. Our presidents are sworn in on the Holy Bible, repeating the words, "So help me God," as part of their oath of office. The Liberty Bell has a Bible verse engraved on it. And our nation's birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, mentions God four times. They also base their case on the fact that the phrase, "a wall of separation between church and state," exists nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

Of course, there are those who passionately believe that the First Amendment implies a wall of separation. But the arguments of these so-called 'separationists' are seemingly weakened by the fact that they themselves are sharply divided into two distinct camps.

One camp believes that the First Amendment exists to keep religion out of the public square. They advocate for absolute separation between church and state because they have no use for religion, and would just as soon have most, if not all, references to God or religion removed from public life. From Thomas de Torquemada to Osama Bin Laden, from witch burnings to the Taliban, they will tell you that throughout history religion has been at the heart of repression, persecution, and violence.

These men and women are the ones who say to remove "In God We Trust" from our money, take "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance, because even the most generic or non-sectarian references to God are coercive. They maintain that religious faith should remain quietly sequestered in the intimate reflections and private activities of citizens, and never should faith, and the institutions representing it, make claims on how public life should be ordered.

Members of the other camp believe that the First Amendment was designed only to keep the government from suppressing religious ideas in the public square. These individuals will remind you that virtually all of the progressive social causes and institutions in the history of our country were initiated by people of faith acting out of their religious values. The antislavery movement, the women's suffrage movement, the anti-child labor movement, as well as mental health reform, prison reform, family planning clinics, the modern Civil Rights Movement, were all initiated or supported by people of faith. The ACLU, The Red Cross, the Urban League, and the NAACP, even the ASPCA, while not explicitly religious in their purposes, were all founded by people whose values and actions were informed by faith.

Last October I placed the right to name a sermon topic on the auction block as part of our fall auction fund-raiser. Marianne Pinney won the bidding and the right to suggest the theme. She assured me that I had complete freedom to express my own thoughts in the matter, but that she felt it was important to get people thinking and talking about the issue of the relationship between church and state. Unless Marianne Pinney is psychic, she had no way of knowing last fall, when she bid on the right to name the sermon topic, that here in Missouri we would most definitely be talking about church/state separation.

The Missouri State Representative from Cassville, David Sater, proposed House Continuing Resolution No. 13, which would in effect make Christianity the official religion of Missouri. The Resolution reads in part: "Whereas, our forefathers of this great nation of the United States recognized a Christian God and used the principles afforded to us by Him as the founding principles of our nation. Now, therefore, be it resolved by the members of the House of Representatives that we stand with the majority of our constituents and exercise the common sense that voluntary prayer in public schools and religious displays on public property are not a coalition of church and state, but rather the justified recognition of the positive role that Christianity has played in this great nation of ours, the United States of America."

Not a coalition of church and state. . . . Representative Sater is by no means alone in his opinion that this does not violate the wall of separation because there is no wall, nor has there ever been. The Dallas Baptist minister who delivered the benediction at the 1984 Republican National Convention insisted that "there is no such thing as separation of church and state. It's merely a figment of the imagination of infidels." The founder and president of the Religious Right's Rutherford Institute writes that: "It's of little surprise then that the entire Constitution was written to promote a Christian order." One of the Christian Right's most visible spokesmen, the evangelist-psychologist James Dobson, distributes through his organization Focus on the Family a set of history lessons that seeks to show that the concept of a secular state was virtually nonexistent in 1776 as well as in 1787, when the Constitution was written. The Constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order. Presidential candidate Pat Robertson claimed in 1993 that the wall of separation between church and state is a lie of the left and there is no such thing in the Constitution." (Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness, 1996.)

We can easily dismiss the opinions of men such as James Dobson and Pat Robertson, but more recently some very impressive legal scholars have weighed in on this issue and have made a case for the fact that the Founders never intended to place an impenetrable wall between the affairs of church and state. Among those scholars are Philip Hamburger, John Wilson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and author of Separation of Church and State, 2002, Harvard University Press, and Daniel L. Dreisbach, Associate Professor of Justice, Law, and Society at American University and author of Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State, 2002, New York University Press.

These legal scholars are not crackpots, nor religious demagogues, and their writings and opinions can't be discounted. Pat Robertson is right, the Constitution mentions no wall of separation between church and state.

So where did that phrase about a wall of separation come from anyway? During the early days of his presidency, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from a group of ministers, the Danbury Baptist Association from Connecticut. They congratulated him on his election and requested that as President of the United States he declare a national day of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving. This was not an unusual request, as the first two Presidents, Washington and Adams, had declared such national days of prayer and fasting during their terms of office. Like the modern-day issue of a moment of silent prayer in schools, a national day of prayer and fasting seemed at worst innocuous and at best full of good intentions. In a letter to the Danbury Baptists dated January 1, 1802, Jefferson refused their request and coined a new phrase. He wrote: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith, or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature 'should make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and state."

But most Americans were not aware of that phrase until it was used again by Justice Hugo L. Black. Writing for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, he asserted that the justices had "agreed that the First Amendment's language, properly interpreted, had erected a wall of separation between Church and State."

But the high court was wrong, says Law Professor Phillip Hamburger: "Americans from Jefferson to the Ku Klux Klan have used separationist language for discriminatory, exclusionary, or narrowly partisan ends. For that reason," Hamburger suggests, "the idea of separation should, at best, be viewed with suspicion."

Professor Dreisbach agrees that "the religion provisions were added to the Constitution to protect religion and religious institutions from interference by the national government, not to protect the civil state from the influence of, or overreaching by, religion. As a bilateral barrier, however, the wall unavoidably restricts religion's ability to influence public life, and thus, it necessarily exceeds the limitations imposed by the Constitution. The 'high and impregnable' wall constructed by the modern Court has been used to inhibit religion's ability to inform the public ethic, deprive religious citizens of the civil liberty to participate in politics armed with ideas informed by their spiritual beliefs, and infringe the right of religious communities and institutions to extend their ministries into the public square."

The religious conservatives in this nation want us to believe that the Founding Fathers were fundamentalist Christians who were invested in creating a Christian nation and who just assumed that their religious orientation and intentions would be taken for granted by subsequent generations.

Liberals want us to believe that the Founders were deists, or secular humanists, whose religious beliefs and practices were minimal at best, and who wanted to keep religion at a distance from government. Neither side has it right.

In truth, the Founders, with the exception perhaps of Ben Franklin, were much more religiously active and conservative than we might prefer to believe—even Thomas Jefferson, who we like to claim as a fellow Unitarian. However, the Founders were also more intentional about creating a secular nation, contrary to what our conservative brothers and sisters would like to believe.

I think the words of James Madison sum up the intent of his peers when he called any political use of religion as "an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation" and argued that "religion flourishes in greater purity without, rather than with, the aid of government."

At the time the First Amendment was being proposed and debated, no less than eleven of the thirteen states had religious requirements for public office holders. Only Virginia and New York had constitutional guarantees that no religious test could be applied to the holding of public office. The religious requirements for office holders in the other states were designed to explicitly prohibit Roman Catholics, Jews, and Quakers from being elected to public office—"The principal framers of the American political system wanted no religious parties in national politics. They crafted a constitutional order that intended to make a person's religious convictions, or lack of religious convictions, irrelevant in judging the value of his political opinion or in assessing his qualifications to hold political office." (Kramnick and Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness, 1996.)

Culture wars are not new in this nation; we have had them from the beginning. The lack of religious language in the Constitution caused a firestorm of debate in the ratification conventions in each of the states. The debate raged across the new nation: "if Roman Catholics could hold office, before long the Pope would be president." And "if Quakers could be elected, they would free all of the slaves." In spite of these vigorous arguments in favor of adding religious language to the Constitution—if not specifically Protestant Christian language—the Constitution was ratified by all of the states, and gradually all of the states dropped their religious requirements for office holders.

The Constitution is godless, but not because its framers feared religion or wished to hinder it in any way, or wished to keep it out of public discourse. Many were devout men who believed that the separation between church and state was the best way to encourage and promote religion in a democracy and the best way to keep religious discourse above party politics. According to authors Kramnick and Moore: "The creation of a godless constitution was not an act of irreverence. Far from it, it was an act of confidence in religion. It intended to let religion do what it did best, to preserve the civil morality necessary to democracy, without laying on it the burden of being tied to this or that political faction." (Kramnick and Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness, 1996.)

The problem arises not when people express their religious convictions publicly, but when those convictions are incorporated into official or quasi-official documents and result in discrimination on religious grounds. A religious culture is arguably a good thing, a religious government is not.

If religious opinion in the public square makes you uncomfortable, if you don't like what the Religious Right is saying, the solution is not to try to get them to stand down, but to step up to the plate and speak your own truth informed by your liberal faith. The solution to bad religion is not no religion, but good religion well expressed.

There is one more reason to uphold the wall. What the Founding Fathers could not have known was that nearly two hundred years later our nation would be at war in the Middle East and that Americans would be accused of waging a new Christian Crusade against Islam. Regardless of your opinions about the legitimacy of the war with Iraq, our historic wall of separation between religion and the state is our best defense against those who would accuse our nation of waging holy war against Islam. The fact that the Bill of Rights guarantees that our government cannot inhibit open debate, or even suppress non-violent religious opposition to this war from churches, as well as mosques and synagogues here in this country, may in the end be our most effective form of homeland security. That wall of separation may be our best protection in the court of world opinion against those who would claim that our Christian government is at war with Islam. In the end, good fences do seem to make good neighbors. Let's defend the wall! Amen.

"Mending Wall" © 1916 Complete Poems of Robert Frost, Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc.