Home > Newsletter > April 2002

DOES THE SUPREME COURT RULE AMERICA?

I received a letter the other day from a dear friend of the ministry who attempted to get some school prayer petitions signed at her church. Her pastor actually discouraged the congregation from signing the petitions because he said the laws are made by the Supreme Court, not by Congress. Like many pastors in America he was just ignorant of how our laws are passed. While courts have curtailed the rights of Christians in the United States, change can be made if we work at it. Unless we band together for change, the arbitrary decisions of a handful of un-elected Justices will continue to overrule the Congress and our President.

For about the first one hundred and fifty years of our nation's existence, the Supreme Court was a force for good, protecting the rights of citizens and the States from encroachment by the federal government while defending our Christian heritage. For most of the Court's existence, until 1935, they operated out of a small courtroom in the Capitol Building, located between the two houses of Congress. The Justices would have had little use for the imposing Greek revival temple of today, with its hundreds of staff offices, because they only heard a few important cases each year. The Court did not presume to make judgments about all the minute details of American life, as it does today.

What did these earlier Supreme Court Justices have to say about Christianity in their official Court briefs? In 1824 Chief Justice Joseph Story wrote in a unanimous decision about public education, "Why may not laymen instruct in the general principles of Christianity as well as ecclesiastics.... we cannot overlook the blessings which such laymen by their conduct as well as their instructions, may, nay, must impart to their youthful pupils. Why may not the Bible, and especially the New Testament, without note or comment, be read and taught as a divine revelation...Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?"

As late as 1931, the Supreme Court had this to say: "We are a Christian people...according to one another the equal right of religious freedom and acknowledging with reverence the duty of obedience to the will of God."

But then in 1947, the Court took a disastrously wrong direction in a case called Everson v. Board of Education. Most Americans don't know the significance of that case, but it did two historic things: it introduced the phrase "separation of church and state" into law for the first time, and it used the Fourteenth Amendment to declare for the first time that federal courts were empowered to restrict not only the religious activities of the federal government but also those of States and individuals as well.

Since that watershed decision, the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have wandered further into the absurd every year, declaring the most innocent statements and actions to be unconstitutional just because they happen to have a religious character.

The issue is not even coercion or having citizens forced to participate in religious expressions against their will. No, the doctrine which originated with the Supreme Court and is spreading through society like cancer, is that no one at any time should be "offended" by happening to hear or see anything religious with which he or she disagrees (unless of course you happen to be a Christian.) When my mother, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, sued the Baltimore public schools on my behalf back in 1963, it was not because I was forced to pray or participate in any religious observance at school I wasn't even required to be in the same room where morning devotions were held. But the Supreme Court decided my rights as an atheist were being violated just because other people in the same building were praying or reading from the Bible.

A whole avalanche of bad decisions were to follow over the next thirty-some years. By 1965, the judicial reasoning was, "If a student prays over his lunch, it is unconstitutional for him to pray aloud." By 1981, they had progressed to, "It is unconstitutional for students to see the Ten Commandments since they might read, meditate upon, respect, or obey them." And by 1990, censorship was in full swing because "It is unconstitutional for a classroom library to contain books which deal with Christianity, or for a teacher to be seen with a personal copy of the Bible at school."

If you have ever wondered how the Supreme Court and other federal courts came to have such out-of-control power over our daily lives, David Barton's book Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution and Religion will be fascinating reading. I found the open praise of Christianity by earlier Supreme Court justices to be just amazing. Then, through case after unbelievable case, this book traces the way in which the original intent of the Constitution has been twisted almost beyond recognition.