What do we really believe?

The ACLU thinks that putting "God bless America" on their marquees is an establishment of religion.  How so?

by Crystal Chapman

Indiana Jones.  Now there’s a name for you.  It calls to mind all the best attributes of what it means to be American.  He is brave and adventurous. He loves history, and has a sense of destiny about him.  And now that our country is fighting an adversary as sinister as those Nazis that menaced the fictional Jones, we long for such a hero to show up and punch the bad guy out.

We love Indiana Jones, not just for his brains and brawn, but for his spirit.  In The Last Crusade, the villain shoots Jones’ father and leaves him mortally wounded as an enticement for Jones to run the deadly gauntlet in pursuit of the grail with its mythical healing power.  The villain then turns to Jones and says, “It’s time to ask yourself what you believe.”

The events of the past month, with its specters of hijacked airplanes, burning buildings and post-marked anthrax, like that villain, have pressed us with the same pointed ultimatum.  We’ve responded with prayer vigils, patriotic songs, flags waving in every neighborhood, and marquees that read “God bless America.”  We’ve done these things, and discovered how good it feels to find again our heritage, and our spirituality.

Ah, but somebody doesn’t like it one little bit.  That somebody, the ACLU, is busy ferreting out violations of the so-called separation of church and state, and has seized upon Rocklin Elementary School in California, chastising them for having the audacity to put “God bless America” on its school marquee.

For the past several years, the ACLU has repeated the “separation of church and state” mantra, even employing it against several eastern Kentucky communities in its campaign to eliminate the Ten Commandments from public buildings.  The ACLU hopes that eventually people will accept their version of what it means instead of realizing that nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution was such a phrase ever penned.  There is convincing evidence that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the phrase in an 1802 letter to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptists, never meant for it to have morphed into the ACLU’s new and improved version either.

What the Constitution does say is that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise thereof.”  You might be able to argue that putting “God bless America” on a school marquee is somehow establishing religion, but first I suppose you’d have to figure out which religion it was establishing.  Most religions believe in God.  But there should be no question that to prohibit a group, even kids in a public school, from expressing a belief in God is “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  

But now that we have terrorist bullies breathing down our necks, upping the ante on freedom of worship, speech, or expression, now that human bombs, representing the most repressive and murderous people since the Nazis, have come knocking on the doors of our tall buildings and small mailboxes, perhaps it’s time that we the people ask ourselves the Indiana Jones question:  What do we really believe?

Maybe it’s time to tell the ACLU what we believe--that we’re tired of letting them steam roll over us by using the methodology of Hitler himself, who said that if a lie is repeated often enough, people will eventually accept it as the truth.  If the ACLU doesn’t want God’s blessing, they’re free to refuse it, but they shouldn’t be free to refuse our children the right to ask for it, sing about it, or print it in bold letters on the front of their schools.

Too often we have cowered before the ACLU with it’s bullying threats of lawsuits and its partnering relationship with activist judges.  What if school boards and administrators across America did what the principal of Rocklin School is doing—standing up to the ACLU, saying, we’ve asked ourselves what we really believe, and we’re standing by it, lawsuit or not?

Maybe the ACLU wouldn’t look so imposing in the shadow of thousands who espouse the words of Thomas Paine: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must…undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” 

God bless such people—and God bless America.

Richard Nelson is policy analyst for The Family Foundation of Kentucky is a nonprofit educational organization dealing with issues affecting Kentucky families.