Father, God, Undefined - 1 September 2000

If you've seen much of American government over the long haul there's rarely anything really new that happens.

So much so that at the end of his career my old chief - I mentioned him recently, the grenadier who talked like an archbishop, my boss in Washington on the London Times - he said once, slowly but positively: "My dear boy, everything that happens today happened yesterday and will happen again tomorrow."

Well if he'd lived so long he would have been startled to see an absolutely new twist given to one of the oldest, the most persistent arguments in American politics.

I'm going to talk about the audacity or the sin or the brazen courage of Senator Lieberman of Connecticut - the Democrats', Mr Al Gore's, choice for the Vice Presidency.

He has suddenly emerged as the first Democrat, the first liberal for once, to exercise what the religious right, the evangelicals, have been execrated for doing all the time. That is, acting out the second part of the opening sentence of the Bill of Rights.

Let's approach that sentence gently and essentially from the perspective of the men who wrote it. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or of prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Some years ago I went over to London to settle a contract on a project which as the converts to a religion or a new miracle pill say, a project which was to change my life.

My splendid, alas late, lawyer's name was Irvine Cohen. We'd hardly settled in when the telephone rang and it was for him. Irvine went to the phone and his side of the dialogue went like this:

"Yes? Yes that's right. I beg your pardon?"

A puzzled, not to say distraught Irvine, turned my way and he said blankly: "She wants to know my Christian name. I don't have one."

"Your first name Irvine, given name," I said. He turned back: "Oh I'm sorry miss, Irvine, yes, yes that's right." He was a very shaken man.

I've often used this story to help visiting Britons not appear tactless or insensitive if they have to ask someone's name, especially in New York City, which in numbers anyway is the capital of Jewry.

I have one old friend here in whom the English usage is so instinctive that he cannot learn to ask for somebody's first or given name.

The main point of this simple story is not a question of manners but of stressing what is still a forgettable fact about the United States.

That it was in the beginning, in the very first article of the Bill of Rights, forbidden to have any state religion - there is no Church of America as there is a Church of England.

So that amendment, which went into effect in 1791, states simply and forcefully: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

I wonder if the authors - the Founding Fathers as they are called - knew what they were letting the country in for?

The question of how great or small a part religion should play in politics has been a bone of contention gnawed on ever since the first national election. Indeed before.

You may well wonder why the authors of the Constitution should have been so insistent and so prompt in writing in a prohibition against a state church. The answer is very simple - because they couldn't agree whose church it should be.

They were all religious men, all Christians but of different sects - S E C T S.

John Adams, one of the revolutionary leaders, claimed that the revolution was brewed by opponents of the people loyal not only to England but to the Anglican church.

Two famous loyalists blamed the revolution on the Congregationalists - the established church of the original Puritans.

In fact they were called Puritans because they left England - and what they considered a corrupt church - came to Massachusetts to form a sect that would purify the Church of England.

They were the most deeply and rigidly attached to their own church. They did not, as popular legend has it, come here to seek freedom of religion.

They sought freedom to impose Congregationalism on everybody, which they did, driving dissenters out of the state. They set up a religious state as dictatorial and inflexible as the Communist state.

In the summer I look across the wide Peconic Bay towards an island. It's called Shelter Island and it was not so named as a sailors' shelter from the stormy blasts but as a shelter for the Quakers, fleeing from persecution by the elders of the Massachusetts colony.

So far as I know there was not an atheist or irreligious, what we call a secular voice, in all the pamphleteering and the 17-week debate that produced the Constitution.

But even when the revolutionary war was over the prickly debate went on about which sect had done the great deed.

You can guess how weary they must have been of religious haggling by the difference between the opening sentence of the Constitution as we have it and its suggested original draft.

This is the plain majestic opening: "We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union ..." so and so, so and so.

And this was the first version proposed by a gentleman from Connecticut: "We the people of the United States in a firm belief of the beings and perfections of the one living and true God, the creator and supreme governor of the world, from whom all rightful powers among men are derived therefore in order to form a more perfect union ..." et cetera.

The citation or appeal to the one living and true God was not deleted by secular liberals - they didn't exist - or from a distrust of religion in government. It was excised after days of argument and bad temper because they couldn't agree on which Christian sect owned the one living and true God.

The Congregationalists weren't about to share the same God as the loyal Anglicans or - heaven forbid - the Catholics of Maryland.

So in the end they agreed on the weird and, at the time, astonishingly radical step of declaring there should be no state religion at all.

But - a but that is consistently overlooked or forgotten by people today who think the Constitution excludes religious faith or expression from all political activity - the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law "prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Like many another simple phrase that "free exercise" has caused in our time, since the 1960s, more writhing debate than the old theologians exercised in debating how many angels could dance on the point of a needle.

What does "free" mean? "Free" where and when? When the fathers agreed on the free exercise of religion I doubt they had a moment's misgiving about what it would be taken to mean.

If, at the end of those historic 17 weeks, you had put it to any one of those 55 men: "Don't you realise you're setting up a Christian state?" I think they'd have thought you mad if you thought they were setting up anything else.

But throughout the late 19th and into the 20th Century an immense number of Jews came into this country - 12 million in the first decade of the 20th Century.

Politicians tended to stop the mention of Jesus Christ and stay with the more comprehensive deity - Father, God, undefined - until with Franklin Roosevelt and throughout the middle of the last century it was the tactful fashion to appeal to the Judeo-Christian heritage.

Well now Senator Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, has, in his campaign speeches, appealed, called on, praised all the time, the God of his faith - and urged the rest of us to call on our Lord.

This has alarmed a lot of people, not least the Anti-Defamation League - a powerful lobby, highly staffed with prominent Jews, which usually protests against racial slurs, neo-Nazis and the like.

It has begged Senator Lieberman to stop invoking God. They evidently believe, with the liberals, that any hint of religion or of the conduct it inspires should be kept out of the process of governing. A plainly impossible prohibition for religious people.

The mistake of the religious conservatives, it seems to me, is that they're rooted in dogmatic political opinions which they refuse to debate.

And the fault of the liberals is to believe that the Constitution built an iron curtain between the state and the practice of any sort of religion.

Senator Lieberman sees no problem in freely exercising his constitutional right to express his faith, as most religious people do, in any part of life, including the very serious form of conduct known as politics. And it appears he means to go on doing it.

Meanwhile presidential candidates and many other public characters end their speeches with: "God Bless America".

Meanwhile all new presidents take the oath of office and end: "So help me God."

Meanwhile every daily session of the House of Representatives begins with a prayer to God to nurse and encourage their wisdom.

And meanwhile I must attend to the inner man. I must pat around the corner and pick up some milk, cereal and fat-free ice cream. I take out a sheaf of dollar bills and for once scrutinise one of them.

Hello - what is this? It says the United States of America. And in the middle a huge one - O N E - and above it "In God We Trust" and to the left of that something even more shocking: a most ancient biblical symbol or logo - the engraving of a pyramid with the eye of God peering from the top of it.

Yet every day Baptists and Catholics, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and atheists pass these bills across counters with scarcely a shiver. In God we trust.

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