Minister Battles to Maintain Separation of Church and State

Barry Lynn likes Nativity scenes.

“I like going by churches that have fancy Nativity scenes and live Nativity scenes,” Lynn said. “It’s a neat thing. I’ve been known to stop the car and say, ‘Whoa, let’s look at that Nativity scene.’ But I don’t want Nativity scenes on the courthouse lawn.”

As head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the strict separatist group, Lynn often finds himself at the forefront of the contemporary fights to define the proper role of religion in American public life, including the current controversy in Alabama pitting state officials against federal judges on the proper relationship between government and religion.

Along with the American Civil Liberties Union, Lynn’s group filed a lawsuit that resulted in rulings by U.S. District Judge Ira DeMent of the Middle District of Alabama on which religious practices can’t--and can--be allowed in state public schools.

Lynn’s organization also has submitted court briefs opposing Etowah County Judge Roy Moore in his effort to keep the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall in Gadsden, Ala., and to open sessions with prayers.

The DeMent ruling was criticized from many quarters. It prompted some schoolchildren to walk out of classes and hold prayer sessions, and to denounce those who brought the suit.

Behind the uproar, though, Lynn isn’t the sort of bogeyman some might expect.

He is a former ACLU lawyer--which won’t surprise his opponents--but he’s not an atheist or a heathen. In fact, he’s an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ. He has Bible verses on his walls at home. He believes in the resurrection of Jesus. And, as he said, he likes Nativity scenes.

“I live in one of the few ‘Leave It to Beaver’-esque families that I know of,” Lynn said. “I’ve been married to the same person for 27 years. I have a daughter, a son, a dog. I used to have a pickup truck, but I sold it.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State is the only civil rights group working full time on the kinds of issues its name implies. It operates from a nondescript gray townhouse in Washington, a few blocks from the White House.

The group was founded 50 years ago by Protestant religious leaders, and charges that it was an anti-Catholic group at its inception have dogged it ever since. Those charges weren’t helped by its original name, which until the early 1970s was Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Spokesman Joseph Conn said the group opposed Catholics then because the church was devoted to getting public funding for its parochial schools, among other things that he said stepped over the church-state separation line.

“We certainly wouldn’t characterize it as anti-Catholic,” Conn said. “But it’s certainly true that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they were our primary opponent in the public arena.”

Over the years, the group’s biggest foe has become the religious right, as the political movement of some conservative evangelicals is known.

“They are the principal instigators of so many of these problems,” Lynn said.

Lynn makes a voluble spokesman for Americans United and spars frequently with people such as Ollie North and Pat Buchanan--whom he respects, and even counts as friends, even though he thinks they’re wrong.

In one instance that got national attention, Lynn released a tape of a talk Pat Robertson gave to members of the Christian Coalition, where Robertson made fun of Vice President Al Gore. Robertson also told the coalition to tell members of the Republican Congress, “Look, we put you in power in 1994, and we want you to deliver.”

Lynn said he hopes the airing of the tape will convince the IRS the coalition is a partisan political organization that should be denied tax-exempt status.

On a smaller scale, the group is fighting to keep the Erie, Pa., City Council from opening its sessions with prayers.

Lynn said fights over church-state separation continue because of “this idea that things have gotten out of control in America, and that one of the reasons . . . is that people are trying to remove all religion from public life. I think that’s a ludicrous argument,” he said.

Some who have gone up against Americans United don’t think it’s so ludicrous.

Eric Johnston is an attorney with the Birmingham, Ala., firm of Johnston, Trippe & Brown, representing Gov. Fob James Jr. in the school prayer case on behalf of the Rutherford Institute, a conservative civil liberties organization.

“They want to completely sanitize the public square of religious speech and activity,” Johnston said.

Lynn said he wants to keep government separate from religion because one rarely helps the other. “To those of us for whom it is important to trust God, it’s kind of unfortunate it’s lost its meaning. . . . Government rarely in fact benefits religion, even when it intends to.”