A couple of weeks ago I found myself engaged in what diplomats would probably describe as ‘full and frank discussions’ with a fellow who objected to my clerical collar. He contended that the ‘separation church and state’ made it unconstitutional to display Christian symbols in public.
‘That’s positively Orwellian,’ I told him, ‘The First Amendment guarantees me both freedom of religion and freedom of speech—and that’s the end of it.’
‘Don’t talk to me about Orwell,’ he countered, ‘Nothing he prophesied in Nineteen Eighty–Four has come to pass.’
‘Oh but it has,’ I replied, ‘What else do you call political correctness?’
Needless to say, it was a point he did not wish to concede, but, though I say it myself, I was right on the money. Grab Orwell’s terrifying novel from the bookshelf and a glance at it will show that political correctness plays a major role in it.
Winston, the central character in Nineteen Eighty Four, works in a civil service department called the Ministry of Truth. The bureaucrats, like Winston, who work there have the job of constantly rewriting history to conform with ever-changing political ideology.
In order to do so, they must restructure the English language so that it would be impossible to formulate—let alone, discuss—politically incorrect ideas.
It is a process chillingly reminiscent of the one under way in schools, universities, legislatures, and courtrooms through out the country. The implications are not reassuring.
The Federal Appeals Court decision not so long ago declaring the Pledge of Allegiance to be unconstitutional would have been be farcical, if it weren’t so insidious.
The contention that the phrase ‘one nation under God’ violates a ‘constitutional separation of church and state’ involves a rewriting of history of precisely the sort Orwell warned us about.
America’s Founding Fathers, in fact, did not erect ‘a wall of separation between Church and state’. You will not find these words or any thing like them anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
The phrase is taken—entirely out of context—from a private letter written by Thomas Jefferson to a Baptist inquirer. In it, he points out that the Founding Fathers deemed it inappropriate to establish a single Christian denomination as a federal state church.
Their purpose was to protect the Church from the federal government; not, as now seems to be asserted, to protect the government from the church. Even so, the anti-Christian lobby appears to have succeeded in persuading a sizeable minority of folks that the Founding Father opposed all public expression of Christianity.
And they believe this because history has been deliberately falsified: An instance of this is the promulgation of the notion that George Washington and many other Founding Fathers were ‘deists’—a religious concept that denied the validity of the Christian revelation.
The truth is that with the exception of Jefferson and possibly Franklin (neither of whom favoured the exclusion of Christian thought and, still less, or principles from national public life), the vast majority of the nation’s founders were not ‘deists’. They were, in fact, fervent Christians.
George Washington, a church warden and active Episcopal layman, asserted: ‘True religion offers to Government its surest support.’ (By ‘true religion’, he was referring to Christianity, not just to any religion.)
John Quincy Adams declared: ‘The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.’
Patrick Henry, a devout Presbyterian, stated in his will that the Christian faith was the most valuable legacy that he could bestow on his children: ‘If they had that and I had not given them one shilling, they would have been rich; and if they had not that and I had given them the world, they would have been poor,’ he wrote.
Far from erecting a ‘wall of separation’ between the Church and the nation’s public life, it seems clear the Founding Fathers expected—indeed, demanded—that the new nation be governed according to Christian principles. GPH✠
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