This American Life: Godless America

I timed my trip home this evening to coincide with the broadcast of This American Life on WBEZ Chicago Public Radio. The theme of tonight's program was separation of church and state. How awesome was it? When I arrived home at 7:40, at the beginning of Julia Sweeney's segment, I sat in the car for the next twenty minutes until the program ended. If you missed it, WBEZ (91.5FM) will rebroadcast it on June 4 at 1:00.

The program mentions the Ohio Restoration Project, an effort by conservative Christians to recruit at least 2000 "Patriot Pastors" (more like partisan pastors) to help elect Republican Kenneth Blackwell governor of Ohio. (Many believe Blackwell helped elect Bush in the 2004 election by suppressing Democratic turnout.) And there was a segment by Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of my favorite civil liberties organizations.

In one segment, host Ira Glass interviewed Isaac Kramnick, author of The Godless Constitution. Kramnick made an interesting point. The Religious Right has this narrative in which our nation was founded as a Christian nation and that our laws were based on Biblical law. According to the narrative, things remained this way until the 1960s, that horrible, horrible decade, when suddenly the forces of secularism began to push Christianity out of public life. A compelling story... but false.

Says Kramnick, the U.S. Constitution was clearly intended from the start to define the state as being entirely secular. And back when the document was first ratified, it was over the objections of the Religious Right's 18th-century counterparts. There have been several attempts throughout U.S. history to amend the constitution to make Protestant Christianity the country's official religion. But the necessity of separating church and state was well understood by students of history, and these amendments always failed. Contrary to the Religious Right's narrative, it was in the middle of the 20th century, when we were fighting those "Godless Communists", that the wall between church and state began to erode and the idea of a secular government began to come under attack.