Holiday Season Stirs Church-State Debate : Recognition of God Is Woven Into American Fabric Despite Rulings

U.S. public policy travels a turgid, sometimes wavering road between manifesting religious belief and silencing it. Several recent episodes demonstrate the ambiguities.

One was a poll indicating that Americans sharply disagree with U.S. Supreme Court rulings forbidding planned prayer in public schools. Another was a furor over calling the nation “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian.”

Such disputes have rumbled for years in this country, and related issues usually proliferate during religious holiday seasons.

Through it all, undeniable vestiges of religion persist in some public institutions--in military and other government chaplains, in opening prayers of legislatures and Congress, in the pledge of allegiance to a nation “under God.”

“In God We Trust” adorns our coins, and religious convictions throb through the national anthem. Symbols of the eye-of-God decorate dollar bills along with the Latin words Annuit Coeptis: “He has favored our undertaking.”

Court witnesses and presidents, hands on the Bible, seal their oaths, saying, “So help me God.” A wall inside the U.S. Supreme Court depicts Moses holding up the tablet of God’s law, and that high court opens its sessions with this supplication: “God save the United States and this honorable court.”

Although such history-rooted governmental earmarks of “civil religion” remain, they are occasionally attacked in lawsuits as unconstitutional by strict church-state “separationists,” based on the 1st Amendment, which is variously interpreted. It says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor abridging the free exercise thereof.”

High court decisions, beginning in the 1950s, have eliminated various religious expressions, such as in statues or displays on city or state property, in official seals and in public schools, banning arranged group prayer, Bible devotionals or display of the Ten Commandments.

According to a recent poll, most Americans sharply disagree with the Supreme Court’s rulings on school prayer. But a defender of church-state separation said results reflected phrasing of questions and misunderstanding of the court’s function.

It is not the court’s job to measure public opinion but interpret the Constitution, said J. Brent Walker, associate counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee, based in Washington.

Results of the poll of 1,057 adults, conducted by the Wirthlin Group, with a margin of error of three percentage points, were published in the November Reader’s Digest.

In the poll, when asked: “Do you personally favor or oppose prayer in public schools?” 75% said they favored it. Asked if they “approve or disapprove of the Supreme Court ruling that it is unconstitutional for a prayer to be offered at a high school graduation,” 80% disapproved.

Seventy-six percent say “it’s right for a school to put up a manger scene or menorah during the holiday season” and 53% say it’s right for schools to post copies of the Ten Commandments.

However, Walker says poll results were influenced by phrasing of some questions. He said “almost everyone favors allowing our kids to pray in school,” but if you ask whether the state should write the prayer or promote prayer, support drops sharply.

The stir over religious classifying of the country came after Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice recently maintained that the United States is a “Christian nation.” South Carolina Gov. Carroll Campbell said American values are based on “the Judeo-Christian heritage.”

Responding, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, based in Washington, issued a background paper on the subject, saying the idea of the United States having an official religion was explicitly rejected by framers of the Constitution.

Instead, they provided a system “that guarantees religious freedom for all individuals and groups,” the group’s paper says.

However, the notion of America as a Christian nation has been pushed from the start of the country and it sometimes has been so designated by various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court in 1892.

The most comprehensive survey ever made of religious adherence in this country, a 1991 survey of 113,000 adults, found that the population is about 90% Christian and Jewish.

Although pop references to pluralism persist, it isn’t measurable fact.

The late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a liberal with no religious axes to grind, summed up in 1952: “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. . . . We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man may deem necessary.”