Essay: Whose Country Is It Anyway?

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The Supreme Court last week reached a decision allowing cities to display Nativity scenes, after considering whether minority interests would be impaired. At the same time, the Senate began debate on a constitutional amendment to counteract the Supreme Court's 1962 decision on school prayer, which had come into being only because of a perceived infringement of minority rights. That these matters are hurled about the court would seem to suggest they are legal puzzles dealing with the First and 14th Amendments. But the issue also involves human feelings. When a member of a minority loses a sense of belonging to the country, the country deliberates, sometimes changes shape, and occasionally comes apart.

To anyone but an American this may seem preposterously unfair, not to say illogical. If most Americans, being Christian, want creches in the public squares and prayers in the public schools, why should they be forced to back down for a discomfited handful? Whose country is it anyway? And then there is the time-honored (and politically useful) association of the national identity with God. In spite of radicals like Jefferson and Madison, who erected the so-called wall of separation between church and state, the fact is that from the start the Government has been bound up with religion. In the majority's name are there Army chaplains, House and Senate chaplains, prayers for Congress. Not even the Supreme Court meets without calling for God's blessing.

Why, then, does the majority not have the right to establish, through its Government, a religious character for the country? In most cases no harm is intended. Read the tepid nonsectarian prayer that led to the 1962 decision, and you wonder what all the breast beating was about: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country." Similarly, how could plaster-of-paris figures in Pawtucket, R.I., have alarmed anybody but the A.C.L.U., which brought the suit?

The two issues are not the same size. Many who could not care less about the crèche in Pawtucket would go to the wall of separation on the school-prayer decision, but both issues derive from minority protests. Without malice or belligerence, a Christian could reasonably ask: Whose country is it anyway?

Nor is that a question to which minorities reply automatically, "As much mine as yours." No one really believes that, there being too much painful evidence to the contrary. Still, many members of minorities wholeheartedly enjoy then" status because it gives them a useful relationship to the mainstream. Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) remarked that a black writer has an advantage because, being black, he has been forced to live in an isolated room in the nation's house, thus when he emerges from that room into the rest of the house, he knows the entire structure. So too for any Irishman, Chinese, Puerto Rican, a member of a minority religion or of none at all. Without a sense of unbelonging, one might never cast a critical eye on the majority culture, which in a way minorities cherish for their difference from it.