Divine Intervention

A BuzzFlash Interview. Posted February 17, 2005.

... liberals tend to be looking for common ground, but I don't believe the right wing in this country wants common ground. To liberals and people who believe in secular government – I say forget about the fundamentalists. Appeal to the 60 or 70 percent of the American people who aren't fundamentalists – who may have lots of religious beliefs, but who also believe in secular government. Don't waste time trying to persuade people who believe that the earth was created in seven days. You're not going to persuade those people of anything.

Susan Jacoby, a fervent believer in the separation of church and state, recently spoke with BuzzFlash about America's historical roots in secularism, or freedom of religion. Her latest book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, is an exploration of the rich history of our secular country, a nation conceived in the "Age of Reason," in response to European religious oppression. As she argues so persuasively, our American revolution, our heroic and enlightened founders, and our unique Constitution left behind the old European model of governments founded on a fixed religious hierarchy and belief in the divine rights of monarchs. America was founded to allow religious thought and practice, not to endorse a single form of it. Trouble is, some of our most powerful leaders today would have us march right back to that pre-revolutionary, "divinely inspired" model of governing.

Susan Jacoby is director of the Center for Inquiry, Metro New York, as well as an independent scholar, author of seven books, a respected journalist and a Guggenheim Fellow.

BuzzFlash: The chapter in your book entitled "Reason Embattled" is of special interest to BuzzFlash, because we've covered Antonin Scalia's religious outlook quite a bit. In that chapter, you refer to a speech Supreme Court Justice Scalia gave at the Chicago Divinity School, which went largely unnoticed by the media. More recently, he has been stampeding around the country, making speeches to synagogues, saying that Jews would be safer in a Christian nation. At a recent Knights of Columbus meeting, he proclaimed that no one should be afraid to be a fool for Christ. Amidst all his proselytizing, you bring up the point that he uses this rationale as an argument for capital punishment – that this is a Christian nation and the United States – as a Christian nation – shouldn't question the notion of capital punishment because it's really divine dictum, in a way.

Susan Jacoby: Well, actually he's more general than that. His argument is simply this: that capital punishment is lawful because all just governments derive their power from God.

That's number one, ignoring the fact that our Constitution says nothing about God, but ascribes powers to "we the people." And so the argument, by extension, for a death penalty is simply this: that because God has the power of life and death, and since all just governments derive their power not from the consent of the governed, but from God Himself – and I'm sure Scalia's God is a Himself, not a Herself – therefore, governments, too, should have power over life and death.

Scalia is a devout right-wing Catholic, and one of the things that's mildly interesting about this is the one problem he has with that is the fact that it's been denounced by the pope, who argues exactly the opposite – that only God should have the power of life and death. But I guess that makes Scalia more Catholic than the pope.

But in terms of American government, what is so disturbing is this argument in favor of a public policy – which one can certainly argue about on secular grounds – on the grounds that if God can do it, so too can we, because we get our power of the government from God, according to Scalia.

Your book, Freethinkers, of course, debunks the notion that the Constitution was a document that was written as, let's say, the Ten Commandments – something that was given from God to the founders of this country. They expressly wrote out that this was NOT a divine document, but it was a document of reason and of reasonable men at the time. BuzzFlash is also offering a book on the Founding Fathers and their opinions on the separation of church and state, where it is quite clear that they thought they should be separated. So how does Scalia get away with calling himself a strict constructionist of the Constitution when ...

Somehow that's very interesting, because, in fact, Scalia has often called the Constitution a dead document, meaning that it means exactly what it said when it was written at the time, but no more. And that's why he calls himself a strict constructionist.

But in fact, reading God into the Constitution is the exact opposite of strict constructionism. In fact, leaving God out of the Preamble to the Constitution – it was revolutionary. There had never been a government that legally separated church and state before, and it was very deliberate. The omission of God from the Constitution was debated at all of the state ratifying conventions about the Constitution before and when it was finally ratified.

And the Christian right at the time – the right-wing ministers – were very opposed and predicted that God would smash America for leaving Him out of the document. And by the way, this was a division then, too, between conservative and liberal religion, not only between conservative religious people and freethinkers, because religious dissidents also supported the separation of church and state strongly in the Constitution. And indeed, it was a coalition of freethinkers – of people like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine – and dissident Evangelicals – Baptists, for instance, who were then the minority religion in most states, who joined in this coalition to support the separation of church and state. How far we have come from that.

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